guitar - music gear

The Quest for Tone – My Thoughts on Gear & Skill

I’m not sure if this is going to be a rant…or a guitar sermon…or just a little sharing of where I’m at. But here I go… As a guitarist who is also very much into gear, I too have been on this “quest for tone.” It sounds dumb, but I’d say every musician probably holds this facet of their sound to a very high regard.

electronics - guitar - music gear - pedals

Malekko Echo 600 Dark & Ekko 616 Dark

Snagged this bad boy on Reverb this week. The Malekko Echo 600 Dark is the warmer version of the regular Echo 600 (bright??).  A little while ago – maybe 6 years ago – I had come across this pedal on YouTube, but I don’t think I had developed my own uses for delay with respect to analog vs. digital. So while I stuck around ’cause the pedal looked cool and the playing was good, I didn’t really add it to my list of pedals to consider buying (it was also really expensive).

diy - electronics - guitar - music gear - pedals

Maxon OD-820 Clone: Aion Electronics “Nimbus”

Pictured here is my newest completed pedal project.  It’s the Aion Electronics Nimbus Overdrive.  Recently I had built myself a Klon clone and found it useful enough to include in my rig. If you didn’t know, the Klon is kind of known for it’s prominent mid-hump EQ. At first, I wasn’t really too crazy about this, but ultimately I decided that the contrasting nature of the Klon to my other OD tones was a good thing and this secured it a space on my board. While browsing the Aion Electronics shop, I came across the Nimbus. The one thing I really like about this site […]

diy - guitar - music gear - pedals

Klon Centaur Clone: Aion Electronics “Refractor”

Shortly after sharing about my new mini-board (here), I acquired a Pluetoneum Chi-Wah-Wah V2 (careful…oddly nsfw) to complete and maximize the usefulness of my new mini setup. I didn’t really feel like posting about it, although I may do a more lengthy demo in the future. Other than that acquisition, it’s all been Boss mods and new complete builds. This one pictured above is one of my proudest completed projects.

diy - guitar - music gear - new - pedals - tech

Pedaltrain Metro-16

Here’s my mini pedalboard mounted on a Pedaltrain Metro-16, one of their new offerings for 2015. Previously, I had the old Pedaltrain Mini. Apparently, my model had gone through a couple of revisions. One of them is publicly known and visually obvious. The other, more or less nobody knows about and you really can’t tell just by looking at it. What it comes down to is that my Mini doesn’t accept any non-daisychain power supplies.

diy - guitar - music gear

First Upgrades

I really like that the Mexican Strat maintains such modest prestige, yet it’s my favorite guitar to play at the moment. Over the weekend, I did my first modification(s) to it. Keeping the upgrades modest for the most part, this is what I installed: