Keep Your Hands Off My Stack

I seem to be hemorrhaging money lately - Besides all the usual bills this month, I was hit with a $200 assessment from the condo association for a new roof, my books for next quarter cost me $198, $158 went to the BMV for new tags, my notary commission needs to be renewed at $65, and, for the first time in my life, I had to pay money to the IRS. This was mostly due to a small inheritance from my father that bumped me up into a new tax bracket - an inheritance that was just enough to bury him and pay for the central air system that crapped out two days after I got the check. All of this is even after I had them withhold 10% of the inheritance money towards taxes, plus I usually take zero deductions and have an extra $10 taken out of my check every week so I get a healthy refund. All in all I managed to blow through over a grand in unexpected expenses in about a week. Ah well.

I haven't had much time to devote to guitar lately, what with finals and all, but since I know some of you guys are interested in various ways to make noise, I thought I'd showcase some of my gear. I think I've mentioned all the guitars, so here are the amps and what has made its way onto my pedalboard, with my thoughts:

The Pedals:

1.) Rocktron Hush - Simple but effective noise gate.

2.) Johnson Switch - controls the clean/dirty channel on my Fender Champion 110.

3.) Boss FZ-2 Hyper Fuzz - The guy at the pawn shop threw it in cheap when I bought my amp. I've really only found it useful when teamed with a more conventional fuzz pedal like the Big Muff - together they can create a cool sludge-rock sound. otherwise it just sounds like static from a transistor radio added to the signal.

4.) Dod FX-30B Gate/Loop - I'm not using the gate side, I mainly intend to use this as an effects loop for all the dirt boxes, but I haven't gotten around to rewiring the board for it yet.

5.) Electro Harmonix Big Muff Pi (Russian) - One of my favorites. I had a Russian-made model from the 80's a long time ago, I'm glad to say this one sounds even better. You can get everything from Hendrix to Brit-pop to metal with one of these.

6.) Guyatone MD-3 Digital Delay - actually sent to me by accident by an eBay seller that I bought another (much cheaper) item from, he decided to let me keep it rather than mess with shipping it back. Delays aren't real high up on my personal "useful" list of effects. but for free it's fun to play around with and get space-rock noises out of.

7.) Expression pedal for my Zoom 505.

8.) Danelectro DJ-14 Fish & Chips Equalizer - One of the cheapest pedals on my board, and probably the most useful. Nice for tweaking or as a clean boost pedal. These little Danelectro boxes are around $20 and are a great deal, just don't stomp on 'em too hard.

9.)Danelectro DJ-9 Surf & Turf Compressor - Picked it up on eBay for $10. Nice for stuff with a lot switching between clean and dirty sounds.

10.) Rocktron Silver Dragon - My latest addition, and one of my favorites. Actually two pedals in one case - a tube-preamp on the left and a solid-state distortion on the right. most opinions on low-voltage tube preamps seem to either be "complete & utter snake-oil" or "best thing since sliced bread" - I'm probably somewhere in between, but it definitely seems to add a nice warm tone to my solid-state amps. When teamed with the distortion, it can produce the sound of a hundred cats being set on fire in a steel dumpster - which is to say, I like it. The only drawback is it has a huge 14-volt wall wart adapter, so I can't use my 1-spot.

11.) Control switch for Behringer V-Amp2 - see below.

12.) Zoom 505II Multi-Effects - The first effect I bought, with the idea "If I buy this, I won't need to spend money on separate effects pedals". Yeah, right. Still nice to have to play around with effects that I haven't yet been able to talk myself into, like ring mods and envelope followers. Also nice since it fits in a gig bag, keeping me from hauling around the whole pedalboard if I want to go to a friend's house.

The Amps:

1.) Danelectro Honeytone - I remember when these came out and I wanted one but couldn't convince myself to drop $40 on it. I wound up finding this one on eBay for $10, and it would have been a bargain at the original price - gives really cool vintage overdriven tube sounds (well, as close as you're likely get for $10) at volumes that won't have the police at my door.

2.) Behringer V-Amp2 - I just got this, and honestly haven't had much time to play with it yet, but from what I've seen it's really cool. The V-Amp2 is an amp modeller, allowing you to get the sound of everything from a Marshall stack to a vintage Vox in a tiny digital package. The V-Amp is akin to the wildly popular Line6 Pod series, at a much lower price. The biggest gripe people seem to have with Behringer is hit-or-miss quality control, so time will tell.

3.) Fender Champion 110 - I've talked about this amp here before, basically it's your standard small practice amp, but it does a nice job with that legendary clean "Fender sound". Sometime when I get brave enough I plan to replace the speaker with one of the specialty models from Eminence, but that's a way down the road...