Ceci n'est pas un blog

I'm looking for a good lead tone and I'm not sure if it should come through pedals before my Studio preamp, or if I should just get a different preamp and sell the Boogie. There's lots of good preamps to be had, both new and used, some of them for cheap too.

The case is that I like my clean sound very much. It has the right balance of brightness and midrange punch and the singing high-end harmonics that I love. Combined with a BJF Baby Blue OD I get a good, slighty overdriven tone too.

With those tones as my base I've decided to go looking for a distortion pedal that'll hopefully give me a lead sound I like. I've started out testing tube-based pedals. First out was the BadCat 2-tone, which I tested and then posted some comments about on the Huge Racks Inc. message board. As my comments show I didn't fancy it in the kind of setup I have, while it might sound great with a darker amp, and perhaps a guitar different from mine.

So my search continues. I've made contacts about testing the Soldano G.T.O. The Budda Zenman (or Phatman) are also interesting pedals. I've given the Zenman a short test with the same Carvin Legacy, and there's one on its way to me that I'll test more thoroughly. Once tested I'll post part II. Lastly there's the Tonebone pedals, of which the Hot British might be the thing to have. I'm on the lookout and will update the site should I find one.

I wrote this article several years ago and put it up on my old site. I've rewritten it and post it here since I'm moving stuff. It tries to explain the Replifex' delay system in detail and also how to set it up for ping-pong delay.

I'm not really good at practising licks and technique, it bores me a bit and I lose interest. There's four DVDs I own that tell me to pick up my guitar and keep on working 'till I make it. In no specific order they are:

• Toto - Greatest Hits Live and More
• Eric Johnson's performance on G3 - Live in Concert[1]
• U2 - Elevation Tour 2001 - Live from Boston
• Steve Lukather & Los Lobotomys - In Concert

If you don't already own or have watched them, make sure you do.

1: Steve Vai's "For the Love of God" is also well worth watching.

This a repost of an article I earlier had posted on my website.

Look what the mailman brought today:

I'll do the first test of it on Tuesday and then give it more thorough testing during the easter holiday. It'll be tested both before my preamp and also as its own preamp going directly into my mixer. When they say it's designed for usage with a solid-state amp that's at least what I'll test it with.

The mailman timed delivery well, just in time for my birthday. On Saturday he delivered again:

Now I'll be able to connect my rack with dual stage mixing, so I can do chorus, pitch shift and things like that in stage 1 and then add delays in stage 2, like described in one of the articles over on Huge Racks Inc's "The Bin".

In my ever-continuing search for great tone I've come to the Budda Zenman. I haven't had any experience with Budda amps or pedals before, so I didn't know what kind of tone to expect.

I brought the pedal with me to rehearsal and used it more or less the whole time. Instead of using the lead channel on my Studio preamp I'd switch in the Zenman, and I also used it on some parts where I'd usually play clean. Combined with some testing when I brought my rig back home I'd say I'd given it a pretty thorough workout.

What do I think of it then? I think it's a really great pedal! Unfortunately for me it doesn't go really well together with my Studio preamp's clean settings, it becomes too bright, but apart from that I dig how it sounds. The Zenman has bass and treble controls, but they do not really roll off the low/high end like I'm used too. Instead they work on a much narrower band, limiting the amount of high/low end you can remove. Since I have my Studio preamp set brightly to sound like a Fender amp this ends up as being too far on the bright side for my taste. On the other side it seemed to add a bit of real bass, while staying away from the low mids. Added a nice touch in my case.

The thing I really dig about the Zenman is the way it lets the tone of the strings shine through. I found it to be more of a clean sound with overdrive than a normal distortion, and then you can adjust the amount of overdrive you want with the gain control. At max you'll be around where you have only distortion, but there's lot to be had in between there and the lowest setting. The tone reminds me a lot about Lukather's crunch sound, except that I use a lot less gain. Chords never sounded muddy, and it's got the right oomph with muted strings (listen to "Freedom" on Lukather's "Candyman" and you get the idea).

Due to its tone I found it to work particularly well for chords and things needing a bluesy kind of overdrive (on the bright side of that), while I didn't like it at all for power chord stuff. Turn the gain up and it might work well for grunge and punk, but you still need to stay off the power chords. It lusts for complexity, so play regular chords.

The Zenman runs on 12V AC (1A) using a wall wart. As usual there's pros and cons about that, con is that it gives you another wall wart to bring around, pro is that you can get the pedal overseas without any hassle. It's got two 12ax7 tubes protected by a cover, so they won't break if anyone steps on the pedal too hard. Getting the cover off is easy, just unscrew the two thumb screws, so swapping the tubes shouldn't be difficult. It's still solidly built though, steel all around, it should take a beating without a problem. And it's got the usual silent switching and true bypass everyone wants.

Bottom line: rocks as a crunch channel, but too bright in my setup.