Well it seems I am off to a reasonably slow start with my blog. I think it has been a week since I made an entry, but no bother. I imagine it takes time and effort to establish a rhythm for effectively reporting the everyday.
I went to Dublin at the weekend for my Great-Aunty Mary's 80th birthday, it was quite a bash so I won't try to list all the family I saw! Mary lives in Kilbarrak, a suburb in Ireland where they filmed Roddy Doyle's, 'The Commitments' and 'The Van'. In fact the pub we had the function in, colloquially known as the foxhole but actually called something like the Fox and Hare, was the very same pub they used in both films (I am told, although it has been years since I saw the Commitments and I don't think I've ever seen The Van but apparently Doyle had a good rapport with a lot of the folks in the area during filming and even apparently stopped into Mary's for tea a couple of times during filming. Barrytown in the books is meant to be modelled on Kilbarrak). It was good to go back to the motherland and reconnect with family and it was lovely to have made it on a happy occasion and not a funeral (my last visit was to bury my Great-Uncle Paddy, a great man). Apparently Mary wasn't too keen on having a fuss over herself initially, but when my cousin Cyril told her it would either be the party or her funeral she acquiesced!
I took Heather with me, which, as we were shown around town on Saturday by my cousin Pardraic who kindly put us up for the weekend, resulted in a lot of 'put a ring on her finger' related teasing. We saw some great stuff from the Book of Kells in Trinity College to parts of Chester Beatty's incredible collection in Dublin Castle. They were displaying bits of the Shahnama, which is a fascinating collection of early Persian/Iranian tales. I'd love to read a translation some day, I'm a keen aficionado of tales of kings and heroes. At the end of the weekend I am pleased to say that Heather has acquired a taste for Guinness... which has long been my favourite tipple. I think I may have tried a bit of my first pint in Ireland when I was about 12; and can quite clearly remember it being the first pint I bought myself in a pub back home in Brighton, aged 15. It's become a lot harder to buy a pint when you're young nowadays, I often find myself asked for ID and I'm not far off thirty!
We returned to Brighton leaving me just an hour to set up my newest toy before rehearsal. I am now the proud owner of a Pog2, which is an incredible pedal from Electroharmonix (EHX). The Pog2 is a pitch pedal, which reproduces the sound you are playing in two octaves below the original signal and two octaves above, making 5 octaves in total... so when you play a chord it has the potential to be huge! To control this mass of frequency there is an attack filter (which smooths off the front of the sound, sort of fading in the note) a low pass filter (allowing you to control how soft or sharp the end tone is) and a detune filter (sort of like the pitch equivalent of chorus, I guess). All of these options can be used alone or in combination and you can save 8 presets! It's qualified for far more than I currently use it for, with particular strengths in creating a 12 string guitar sound or a fairly passable hammond organ tone, which is great as it'll keep on giving me new tones to try out on songs and get excited about!
Not one to be outdone I found when I got home that Tom has also been shopping for floor candy. He picked himself up a pre-'81 Boss Chorus pedal, which creates an excellent chorus tone. Tom took great pleasure in showing us all how perfectly he could recreate the guitar sound from Sweet Home Alabama. He's also picked up a 'Double Muff' pedal by EHX, which he's using for a fatter distortion sound than his Maxon OD-9 (an excellent updated version from the original manufacturers of the Ibanez Tube Screamer).
My band are currently rehearsing twice a week to super-polish some songs for recording and in the sessions we're working with Sweeval, our sound-engineer and noise-guru. He's been encouraging Tom and I to complete a mission I had already begun: removing the multi-effects unit from my effects chain. With the addition of the Pog2 I was able to try this for the first time and it was amazing what a difference it made. I've been using an old Boss Me-33 for some time, which is great in many ways, but the quality of tone is just not quite professional standard. As soon as you remove one of these digital multiple processors from the chain you get a completely different sort of response from the guitar. There is so much more detail of tone and the guitar so much more responsive to your playing dynamics. I also found the multi effects gave a split second delay between pressing the switch and the effect coming on, which is totally unacceptable really!
Currently I have the following set up on the floor:
EHX Pog2 ->
Boss DD-20 Gigadelay (for most of my delay sounds: has 4 save-able prests which is dead handy) ->
Boss TU-2 (tuner) ->
Boss DD-3 delay (set up for a subtle slap-back delay) ->
Boss BD-2 blues driver (distortion, although I use very little of it nowadays).
So I'm nearly complete and almost ready to build myself a proper fixed-position pedal board. Next I'd like to get a Maxon AF-9, which is an auto-filter that they modelled for the Guitar Rig VST I've used with cubase. I want to use the effect to replace phaser sounds I've used in the past, an auto or envelope filter is kind of like an auto-wah, but with the AF-9 they've made a much smoother, subtler sound than those sort of effects usually deliver. Whenever I've used it as a VST I've found it can make a great 70's reggae tone which is what I hope to get out of it. Aside from that I could probably squeeze in one more box, and that would have to be some sort of crunchy-distortion pedal that compliments the blues driver. I can't wait!
Adam.x
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