I have to start out by saying I don’t believe that pickups contribute to tone anywhere near as much as the amp does. As far as I’m concerned I can live with two types of humbuckers, a PAF style and a hot “distortion” pickup. I think it’s a little overkill that a company like Seymour Duncan sells so many different kinds of humbuckers. PAF’s, Seth Lover, Pearly Gates, Duncan Custom etc…they all sound the same to me when I listen to the sound samples at seymour duncans site.

I had an old kramer Striker layin around without a pickup in it. I figured I would just throw a GFS PAF pickup into it. I have a GFS Lil Killer in a Strat and I really like it.

I couldn’t make up my mind between the GFS crunchy paf or the fat paf. I noticed the Crunchy Rails on the site. It is described as “Our Hottest- Modern Metal Power- The GFS Crunchy Rails are wound the hottest of any GFS humbucker”. GFS describes the tone as “relaxed midrange but not quite scooped”.

I’m not normally one for wicked high output pickups. When manufacturers start to add extra windings to a pickup more inductance and capacitance is added which usually sacrifices highs.

On a whim I decided to purchase the GFS Crunchy Rails.

I bought the Crunchy Rails an installed it into the Kramer Striker. I can’t say I was in love with the pickup at first. To me it sounded more like a JB than a duncan distortion. It seems to have the bite of a JB but not quite the shrillness a JB can sometimes have. The GFS Crunchy Rails also seems to have a bit of a lower end than the JB.

After playing it for a few weeks the crunch rails has really grown on me. It really excels at metal tones. It has a much hotter output than a regular PAF. It’s a natural for a modern high gain tone like a recto or 5150 type amp.

To my surprise the pickup is also quite musical and has some depth to it’s personality. It sounds great playing singing sustain like a Gary Moore song or maybe Journey.

This pickup is highly recommended especially for the $33 price tag.

Here is a little video I did to compare the GFS Crunchy Rails to the Duncan JB. The recording was into my behringer v-amp on the modern high gain setting. Ignore the sloppy playing.

If your are in the market for a talk box you more than likely have heard of the Heil Talk Box. The Heil is the classic talkbox made famous by such guitarists such as Peter Framptom, Joe Walsh and others from the 70’s and 80’s including Bon Jovi’s “Living On Prayer” and “It’s My Life” tones.

Normally I am a stickler for sticking to the original. Not in this case.

The Rocktron Banshee Talkbox is equal or superior to the Heil in just about every way.

The biggest plus is the ease of use of the Banshee. In order to use a Heil Talk box you need to connect the speaker outs from your amp to the unit to drive the internal speaker. Most of us with combo amps do have have the luxury of speaker out jacks. Plus if you use your speaker out how are you supposed to play through the amp for normal tones ?

The Banshee has a built in preamp/amp to drive the speaker. The diagram below is a basic setup. You can use the footswitch to bypass the Banshee. There are three controls. Gain, tone and output level.

The unit is plenty loud to practice with without mounting the tube to a microphone.

The tone out of the Banshee is excellent. It totally nails the classic tones of the Heil Talk box.

If you are in the market for a talk box do not hesitate to buy the Rocktron Banshee over the Heil.

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All of the sudden I have GAS to get a Digitech Vocalist. I don’t have the greatest voice in the world and I can get a bit pitchy at times especially if the song is not in my range. I was always intrigued with the vocalist since the initial releases. It just didn’t seem worth the $300+ investment since I am just a studio hack. My own voice was usually good enough or I would have my wife sing.

Digitech is about to release new generation of Vocalists. The Vocalist Live 2 and Vocalist Live 4.
The Vocalist Live 2 can output your voice and two more harmonies. That is plenty for my needs. Also the Vocalist 2 will do one harmony above and one harmony below your voice. I kind of wish it had the option to do both harmonies higher. It seems like the Vocalist 2 does not have pitch correction, which is a bit of a bummer, but maybe it can. One of the harmony options is “Unison”. The manual states:

When Unison 1 is on (and Unison 2 is off), it doesnâ??t track notes in a chromatic scale, so it produces a tight double sound, even if youâ??re singing slightly out of pitch. When Unison 2 is on (and Unison 1 is off), it tracks chromatic notes. This can help you sing on pitch better.

So maybe it can do pitch correction. I emailed Digitech about this matter. There aren’t manuals available for the Vocalist Live 4 yet on the site.

These particular products are geared towards guitarists. Rather than create harmonies based on the key of the song or scales it actually tracks the chords you are playing on guitar and creates the harmonies based on what you are playing. It’s a pretty amazing concept and early reports are that it tracks well.

Being the “bang for the buck” guy that I am I am on the lookout for a used Digitech Vocalist Performer on Ebay. Another candidate may be the Vocalist Workstation EX will seems like it may have do pith correction capabilities.

I am also looking for Cakewalk/Sonar plugins that would be able to accomplish this same task.

The Ampeg vh-140c is a solid state amp with a reputation of having a pretty decent distortion. Apparently Ampeg owns Crate or vice versa and the sister amp to the Ampeg is the Crate gx-130c. These models are from the early 90’s.

I went to Guitar Center to see if they had any Squire ’51’s in stock that I could try. I also wanted to try out the Roland Micro-Cube. I tried out a few other cool amps including the Vox DA5 and Vox Valvetronix AD15VT, The Epiphone Valve Junior and a few others.

I was totally impressed by the Microcube and scored a mint condition used one for $69.

This little amp totally rocks. Everyone that hears it is impressed. It’s tiny but rugged.

The Micro-cube is a solid state amp modelerwith 7 amp simulations. The models include an Acoustic Sim, a Roland JC-120 Jazz Chorus, Fender Blackface, Vox AC30, A Marshall Stack JMP1987, Mesa Rectifier and a setting for a microphone input.

There are also 7 built in effects including chorus, flanger, phaser, tremelo, delay and reverb. The modulation effects and the ambient effects are on separate knobs as seen below.

The amp is 2watts with a 5 inch speaker. It looks like cabinet has a tuned port to enhance bass response. The amp is powerful enough to drown out a conversation with other people in the room.

My favorite amp sim is the Marshall Stack. The JC-120 is also very good.

The effects are designed in a smart way. For example as you increase the setting of the delay multiple parameters in the delay precessing are also changef. For example instead of just increasing the delay time it also increase the feedback rate as you rotate the dial. This is pretty much how I would adjust a normal delay. For shorter delay times I really don’t want multiple echos. For longer delays I like to have about 4 echos.

There is also a Jack for plugging in a MP3 player for practicing along to songs and a headphone jack. The headphone jack also doubles as an output jack for recording. The direct sound out of course sounds better that the amp.

No other amp in the sub $200 price range I tried was as versatile or better sounding. It really is an amazing amp that is in the same price range as some single effect pedals.

The hype is real. Look no further for a beginner or a practice amp.

Here is a video of me playing through some of the presets. The amp sounds better in real life with more bass and body.

Rocktron Chameleon

The Rocktron Chameleon is a single space guitar pre-amp that was released in the mid to late 80’s during the heyday of the rack era. At the time it was often overlooked in favor of the ADA MP-1 or units by Digitech. However the Chameleon is an excellent guitar pre-amp that can still be purchased for a pretty good price on the secondary market. You can build pro quality guitar rack system around the Rocktron Chameleon for a fraction of what it would have cost 15 years ago.

The Chameleon was one of the first units to offer amp modeling with speaker emulation built in. The unit also featured built in guitar effects. In one of the early ads Rocktron would show a comparison of an output waveform of the Chameleon compared to the output waveform of a Marshall amp.

Although the Chameleon included speaker emulation most people ran the unit into a power amp which then was usually plugged into a 4×12 guitar cabinet.

The unit featured pre and post distortion EQ’s. The pre distortion EQ is especially critical for shaping the fundamental tone of the distortion. On board “Hush” noise reduction rounds out the features and eliminates excess noise caused by high gain.

There were 127 factory presets which were repeated with speaker emulation turned on. There was a knob on the front of the unit to cycle through the presets for instant gratification. Like many rack units of the time it took a little effort to scroll through the various parameters to customize the presets.

There are other versions of the Chameleon, The Chameleon On-line and the Chameleon 2000.

The Chameleon On-line is pretty much the same unit as the original except it comes loaded with user created presets trhat can be updated for the Rocktron web site. You will need to install the Rocktron sysex editor to load the presets onto your Chameleon

There was a later version of the unit called the Chameleon 2000. Many people feel it is a different unit rather than an upgrade to the original series. Some people like it better and some don’t. The 2000 unit simplified the EQ and some users feel this took away some flexibility. Some people consider the Chameleon 2000 a stripped down version of the Rocktron Prophesy.

Personally I would try to find a Chameleon On-line before the other versions. I think being able to share presets is a cool idea.

I bought this 1974 50W Marshall head for $350 in the late 80’s. I bought it thinking it was a 73, which was the last of the hand wired Marshalls. I later found out it was a 74 due to a date code of “F” on the serial number.

The problem with a master volume amp is that you really need to crank it to really get the tone it was built for. I bought a Rockman Power Soak so I could crank the amp with waking the neighbors. A the time the SR&D Power Soak was the only attenuator available. The Marshall Power brake may have been out but it was expensive.

The Marshall only had one tone in it but it it was perfect. My Marshall had plenty of grind to it but I liked to place my Ibanez TS10 tube screamer in front of it for lead tones.

I eventually sold the amp. It was way more amp than I needed and it was not that versatile for my particular needs.

This a a short clip of me and my 1964 Fender Princeton Reverb. I bought this amp in the late 80’s for $350 or so. At the time the vintage amp market was exploding and Deluxe Reverbs were really going up in price. This amp is very similar to the Deluxe Reverb only it has a 10 inch speaker. It’s almost in mint condition except for the fact that one of the previous owners decided to install tilt back legs on it. It is actually nice to have the tilt back legs but it wasn’t a factory option for this model.

The purpose of this video was to demo how much distortion this amp can push on 10. The video really doesn’t do it justice. It sounds great in person and is almost better with a tube screamer in front of it.

I buy and sell a lot of gear but when I bought this amp I swore I would never sell it. It’s pretty much the same story for my Les Paul, Strat and Tele.