Baritone neck

Unrelated: guinea pigs perfecting hover technology.

DC Kunkle has advise for attaching guitar necks. This is specifically the instructions for his baritone neck:

Long scale conversion neck for the Tele style body with no modification necessary for intonation, I start with the 25.5" scale and moved it out two more frets to achieve the 28.629" scale. There's a 10-15 business day build/handling time on these. I try to keep it to 10 but when it gets real busy, it can sometimes take a little longer.

My standard Specs for this neck are as follows:

·        28.629" scale.

·        one  piece Eastern Hard Rock Maple (a standard for bolt on necks)

·        single action truss rod

·        black walnut skunk stripe

·          T  style peg head with stepped tuner holes to accommodate the die cast Schaller/Gotoh style tuners. The big hole diameter is 13/32" =.404" =10.26mm The upper small hole diameter is 21/64" = .325" = 8.28mm

·        T style heel

·         1 & 11/16^th  ” at Nut

·        2 3/16^th  ” at Heel

·        14" radius Hard Maple fret board

·        1/8^th “ flat bottom nut slot, (nut not included)  if you would like a nut, see extras

·        23 frets

     Comes with no mounting holes (see extras)

11  .110" wide, .053" tall frets installed,     I spray two coats of lacquer on the fret board. If you plan to add more lacquer I will sand with 320 dry then buff slightly with fine scotch guard then install the frets. This makes it easy to add more lacquer if you choose to do so. Let me know at time of purchase if you would like me to do that. When I do add more lacquer after the frets are installed, I take and cut masking tape into thin strips by laying it on a peace of glass and using a straight edge and utility knife blade. ( I usually use 12" to 16" strips) You can tailor the width of the strips to best cover the tops of the frets but letting the lacquer bridge the fret board and bottom edge of the frets.   - no fret work. (see extras)

·        7/32" black position marker dots

·        3/32" black side dots

·        standard back cut is vintage U, similar to a 54 T/S round back or a 59 L/P round back, .875" at the first fret, .975" at the twelfth fret.

      EXTRAS    If you choose to have any extras  done you can commit to buy but don't pay, send a message with which extras you would like and I will send an invoice  for the correct amount.

     Fret work.     I can do a fret mill (level) crown and polish the frets for you as an option for an extra $25, if you do not have the experience to do this yourself, this option comes highly recommended. 

     Bone nut.      For an extra $25. I can rough in a bone nut cut in with nut files and left a little high (factory) left loose so you or your tech can tailor it to your own taste. To secure when your ready just put a dab of wood glue on the outside bottom  two edges, install on neck and tighten the strings, the outside two strings is all you need to tighten, let sit for a hour or so and your good to go. You can put all the glue you want to glue this on, but the more you put on the harder it is to replace later on.

      Drill mounting holes.    For an extra $5. I can drill those for you.

     The neck comes with two coats of nitrocellulose lacquer, not meant to be perfect, but it's a good hard finish that will let you put your project together with out the hassle of doing finish work yourself.

The Epiphone Allen Woody

I test a couple different kinds of strings on the Ephiphone Allen Woody.

EQ's and guitar making

I made a quick and dirty tutorial on using a parametric EQ in Samplitude. This is the first episode of the second season of Sound Design Tips and Tricks for Stage and Screen.

The economics of guitar making. Takeaways:

• All mass produced guitars really are of about the same quality: they're all made by the same machines no matter what country they're produced in
• Cheaper guitars have to go cheaper on components for the manufacturer to have a prayer at netting a profit -- making it vastly more economical for the end-user to simply drop in new pickups and the like on inexpensive instruments

Open Air is a library of open source impulse responses.  Because. Well, yeah.

EB-0 review

So I got an EB-0 bass. Here's my Conversation with Ethan about it. Well, it's what Ethan has to say about it at least.

§

EB-0, huh? Never been a big fan, but I suppose Jack Bruce's opinion ought to be worth something and he certainly seemed to like them. Or, at least, he did until he got a deal with Warwick....

Mike Watt likes 'em, too, but he modifies them, like, a LOT*, and only likes the ones from around 1963 to 1967. To me, they always balanced funny, the pickup placement made for a muddy tone and the necks were usually too skinny for me. On the other hand, Gibson's been making them, in some variant or other, since 1962 or so which means there's somebody out there who likes them enough to buy them.

*Watt typically removes the original pickup and covers the hole, then routs a new hole and mounts a humbucker right at the midpoint between the bridge and neck (like a P-bass). Sometimes he also adds a preamp, sometimes not. He only uses them live, preferring a long-scale bass for recording. Says he likes gigging the EB basses because of their light weight and short scale - easier on his hands and back now that he's "less young". It makes sense: he plays very long sets, still tours incessantly and is now, I believe, over 60. He's also a very physical player.
Normally, he records with a Moon J-Bass. I'm sure the vintage police would cringe at what he's doing to mid-'60s EB-0s and EB-3s, but he's making his living with these things and has no concern whatsoever about their vintage status. One of his faves during his fIREHOSE days was a '50s P-bass routed for Gibson Thunderbird pickups.

§

After all is said and done I think I don't even care either way about the DiMarzio pickups. The Epiphone EB-0 is just a very nice instrument out of the box. Update: Short version: I like the Thomastik-Infeld JF324 strings, the Hipshot bridge just doesn't work for me.

Broke Bass

So, I went out on a limb and a bought an Epiphone EB-0 even though I haven't sold my Squire 5-string Jazz bass yet.
I ordered it from Sweetwater but unfortunately it arrived with a gouge in it.

Now, the fact is that I'm likely to put some sort of nick or dent in the guitar within the first 20 hours or so of my owning it. But at least if that happens I'm the one who did it. Not a person at Gibson or Sweetwater or whatever (the packaging didn't look damaged, I suspect it was damaged while being placed in its box.)
So presumably I'm getting a new bass tomorrow via FedEx, along with a shipping label to send the broken one back.
Then I'll make a couple videos -- one with the bass stock, one with a new pickup, new bridge, new strings. I guess that's one video multiple scenes or something.

Thinking about basses

My Squire 5-string Jazz bass just isn't speaking to me the way I wish it would. I'm thinking it may be time to replace it. I'm interested in a short-scale bass.

The Epiphone EB-0 is cool. The Interwebs says it has a terrible stock pickup though. People seem to like the DiMarzio Model One as a replacement pickup for it. And, honestly, one might want to replace both the tuners and the bridge. So a $230 guitar becomes a $425 guitar. But still, short scale, and very nice looking (I have a bit of a "thing" for Gibson style rather than Fender).

What's likely even cooler is the Epiphone Allen Woody Wildcat bass.

People seem to like the pickups. And quite honestly they're in a more reasonable position than the pickups in many Gibson/Epiphone basses. People still like to replace the bridge, maybe the tuners. But they seem to dig the pickups. This is a $450 bass.

Pedal put together

Now, what I really wanted to do was to have a pedal board which was small and that I didn't have to gunk up my pedals with Velcro. That didn't really happen. The first thing I did was find the Pedal-links System. Basically they're bicycle chains which have been broken apart. And I figured that I could just use machine screws and attach them to a Temple Audio Designs pedalboard. Their boards are light, made of metal, and have pre-existing holes in them (which are actually designed for attaching their proprietary mounting system, we'll get to that in a minute).
But the first thing I wanted to try was Pedal-links.

A single Pedal-link. Quarter for scale.

My problems with them is they're brittle and require very small machine screws (for most pedal boards you'd use wood screws which would be easier to "drill into" the pedal-links.) But they also have a tendency to "kick up" and I found it hard to get a pedal to sit flush with the board using the pedal-links.
So the next option for a velcro-free existence is the Pedalock.  They're reasonably priced, pedals just sit cleanly inside them without interference with their controls or jacks. Ah. A dream!
But... what's that you say? Oh, they're only available for MXR and BOSS pedals (and a wah pedal). So no unusual sizes, no Electro Harmonix, no nuthin' else. Boo.

The Pedalock with a couple machine screws goes right into the Temple pedalboard. Super sweet.

It locks in nicely, no interfering with the operation of the pedal, and you can remove the pedal any time you like. Note that the Temple's handles preclude using a straight cable to take the output (the Carbon Copy is at the end of my chain). That would be true with or without the Pedalock. Just note that the Pedalock does raise the pedal a bit.

 The last thing which is nice about the Pedalocks is that they even have cutouts for the pedal's feet. So you seriously don't have to make any modification of your pedals at all with the Pedalock.

"Look Ma! I still have my feet!" The underside of the Pedalock with the MXR Carbon Copy inside.

So. The Pedal-Links are being a tad wonkity, I can only put one pedal of mine in the Pedalock. Foof. What's next?
Aah, right. The actual mounting system from Temple.
They have big, medium, and small plates. They attach to the bottom of your effects with adhesive (which I was trying to avoid for a variety of reasons including not wanting to obscure important information printed on the bottom of the effect and also just not wanting to deal with sticky yukky glue.)
Using Temple Audio's pedal mounting system:

• Thing number one I advise is to really really make sure you attach the plate evenly. so that it isn't crooked at all. Because you will soooo notice it when you have the pedal mounted on the board.
• Thing number two I advise is to attach the plate to the pedalboard first and line up your pedal so that the plate ends up going in a reasonable place in regards to cable runs and other pedals (remember the plate has to fit in the already existing holes in the pedalboard).
• The third thing is to remove the feet from your pedals. The feet are going to be taller than the plates and will end up pulling the plate off the pedal. 

So yeah, you end up putting sticky stuff on the backs of your pedals and you end up with a pile of little feet (insert band name joke here.)

Here you can see the feet being taller than the plate.

 So I'm gonna end up sticking things to a bunch of pedals. And removing those pedals little feet.
I don't even know what I was trying to demonstrate with the next image. Who knows?

There are nicely machined holes in the Temple. With bigger holes for cables to find their way neatly and cleanly to where they need to go.

The Joyo power supply goes on the bottom, attached with two of the small Temple pads. That means the little thumb screws for the power are actually on top. I have moved the power supply around so that it would be in a reasonable place.

Top view of mess with missing pedals. And yes I tried to cram way too many on one little board I know this.

Pedal Party

See the thing is I rather like playing without pedals -- through a long guitar cable -- directly into an amplifier. Typically this feels to me like I have more of an intimate control of the way the amplifier speaks back to me as a guitarist. This may be completely psychosomatic and without regard to reality. But it does feel that way.
But even with the Kemper it's somewhat impractical to be completely pedal free. Huh. Now I say that but thinking about it all my recordings are guitar-cable-amplifier. Hmm...
But in any case for live work things are different. And the big difference is that the guitar hits a buffer. Now thesedays having a hard-wire-bypass in all pedals is very popular. But as soon as one pedal kicks in, the game is all over, you're buffered.
Which typically is a goode thinge. The buffering keeps the signal from being dragged down by each effect. And the fact is I'm not sure you can hear the thing I was complaining about there at the top of this post. It may just be that one can feel it. And maybe it's all psychological anyway.

And the fact is that sometimes one really wants some effects. Especially in a live situation. I find that with the City Samanas and Diatomaceous Earth I want to have my very sweet MXR Carbon Copy analog delay. I feel I might find that I want to use an Electro Harmonix C9† (and by extension a Strymon Lex Leslie emulator*). The other thing I find critical to playing live with a mostly clean sound (especially when I'm playing with Greg Bartus) is an attenuator so I can "turn down" while playing rhythm parts.**
But what else? I'll tell you what else. I don't want to deal with Velcro. It's icky and yukky. So what does one do? Most pedalboards are all about Velcro. But there are some non-Velcro options.
One can use Bicycle chain links in order to screw the pedals down into or onto your board. This dude has a post all about that.

• Now you can also buy special links specifically for this purpose.
• Pedalboots is an Austrian company that makes boots for a variety of pedals. I'm not 100% sure if one can actually buy them in the US.
• Pedalock makes special "boots" for MXR, Boss, and Wah-Wah pedals.

But as far as I can tell there's only one manufactured pedal board which is made for machine screws. Those are the Temple Audio boards. The irony is that they have their own mounting system -- which looks pretty cool (even if it does involve putting sticky stuff on the back of your pedals) but it would seem would also work with the above boots and links.

†A B9 is shown here because the site I put this together with did not have a C9 picture. Also note that a compressor before the C9/B9 is something you want -- even if you end up not wanting to have a compressor in the rest of your guitar sound.
*And optionally a mixer so that I can choose how much of the Lex I want in the signal because sometimes, you know, you just want a little bit of Leslie in your sound and not have the whole signal go through the Leslie. You know you want this.
**Fun fact, the Morley optical volume control has a "minimum volume" knob which does exactly that. And here I was thinking I was the only one who needed this control.

Longer Kemper Profiler video

Here I talk more about the Kemper Profiler.


I go on a bit compared to the last video and show you some different sounds. Here's some links to the profiles for the two amps: The Celtic Edana (JTM-45 clone) with some distortion. The "Mutt" distorted. And the clean sound I've been grooving to, the "Mutt" set to what I call "Dog II".
One interesting difference between using the Kemper and using a real amp which I noticed after playing back this video is that many of the very loud sounds (mostly distorted ones) would be at such high volumes that if one were in the room there'd be no way to hear the bit of string "singing" (the acoustical sound of the strings on the electric guitar) through the lavalier mic clipped onto me.

Setting Up the Electric Guitar

Ethan on setting up a guitar:

I believe Stewart Macdonald has a basic set up kit that probably has everything you'd need at some slightly marked-up price. Truthfully, all you really need is a machinist's rule, metric and English Allen wrenches, a standard truss rod wrench and decent 1/8" flat-blade and #1 Phillips screwdrivers. You may own some of that already, but make sure the Allen wrenches go down to .050" and 1mm, respectively. Little by little you'll end up adding a few tools for specific jobs, but not many or often.
You could get everything I just listed at Sears, I bet, except for the truss rod wrench. I would also suggest you pick up a copy of the book Electric Guitar Setups by Hideo Kamimoto.
His is not the only approach, but it's a very good approach. Also, many guitar manufacturers have setup guides on their websites (I know Fender does, and I believe G&L and Ernie Ball/Musicman do too. Not sure about Gibson). You'll find that none of them are quite the same. Find the method you like. You could always look on the web for other sources, provided you can quickly filter who's a nincompoop and who's not. Good luck with that.

So I checked the Internet. Here's a post on setting up a Gibson Les Paul.

Sequis Motherload Elemental

The Sequis Motherload is a possible answer to my volume problems. The newest version of it is about five hundred US dollars.


Another option is just to build an isolation cabinet. It has occurred to me that actually building the box is not something I'm either terribly good at or have room to do. It might be cheaper and simpler to start with a shipping crate.
If I did start with a shipping crate I'd still have to punch holes in it for the 1/4" speaker jack and the XLR cable for a microphone. Then I'd have to silicone the joints and then figure out a way to make the top come on and off yet still create an air seal when closed. The inside would need to be lined with some sort of noise-dampening foam.
Oof. The Elemental looks better and better from that standpoint.
But I would be able to record my very nice Celestion Alnico Blues if I had an isolation cabinet. Or I could just do those recordings at my studio.

Quiet That Guitar

The Jet City JetStream ISO is presumably only $300 (if you can find it). It's an isolation cabinet.
This video demonstrates about a 15dB SPL difference.



This video claims a 40dB SPL isolation.



I suppose my biggest concern is making a fairly "boxy" sound with it. Also the Eminence speaker is just never going to be quite as cool as my Celestion Alnico Blues.
But the price sure is right, isn't it? And if you need to rock out at home (I do) it could make a big difference.  (And again, the second video didn't post the first time. It just got deleted from the html when I pressed "publish". Sigh.)

Tuning, Gluing

I'm a tad sick and tired of my Les Paul sounding out of tune. I know I seem like an infomercial but honestly, why doesn't everyone use the Earvana compensated nut system?
Confusingly there's a couple different kinds of nuts they have for the Les Paul. But I think that for all practical purposes the drop-in shelf nut is the one you want.
I mean good grief. That G# on the 3rd string always sounds terrible on a regular guitar. And if that doesn't suck the D chord (you know, that first D chord you learn) sounds like an out-of-tune mess. But with the Earvana I'm not cringing all the time.
Last time I brought in my Les Paul to Matt at 30th Street Guitars he didn't want to put the Earvana nut on. Instead he put a tiny sliver of bone on the nut where the G string touches. And yeah, that cleans up the intonation on that string a bit. But the problem is that B string also has issues. So this time I'm just gonna insist. I know it will decrease the value of the instrument. But I don't care. I don't have the guitar as an investment. I have it because I want to play it. Loud. And, hopefully, in-tune.

 Cytomic makes a well-reviewed SSL-style limiter called The Glue.

Earvana

All my life I've been unhappy with the D chord on a guitar. I'm talking about the chord that's the first one you learn, the one that's a triangle of fingers with an open D string. You know the one.
Thing is, that chord is always out of tune.
Enough so that on recordings sometimes I'll tune the guitar just for the D chord and then punch in on the chord where I need it. Which is, you know, not optimal. I just want the chord to sound in tune. (The other chord which consistently bugs me is an Eb major as a double-barre.)
The problem is that guitars have frets. And the frets are all an equal distance from the nut and the bridge. But the strings are different sizes. And therefore the neck of the guitar is just an average of in-tune-ness. [And that's in relationship even-temperment, which is as good as we could ever pray to get on a guitar.]
So I got my Gibson SG and it sounds great but I didn't like the intonation and I decided it was time to put an Earvana compensated nut on it. I'm too much a fraidy cat to pop the nut off my own guitar so I took it to Matt at 30th Street Guitars here in NYC and had him install the nut and set up the guitar. As always, Matt did an amazing job of setup. (As a side note, he did a different thing to the nut of my Les Paul -- putting a little piece of bone on the G string, which sounds really dirty but really helps with the intonation.)
The installation and setup was $110, more than worth it. The guitar came new with a pretty darn good setup but it's even better now.

A note on the recording: the SG was plugged directly into my Lil' Dawg Amp "Mutt", which then fed a 12" Celestion Alnico Blue. The microphone was an AKG C12a (backed off a couple feet because it really couldn't take the guitar amp levels and I wouldn't have used it except that all my other mics are away right now because of the session we did the other night) into a Neve 1272 preamp and an Apogee Mini-me converter. There is only the slightest bit of compression on the 2-mix buss and other than that there are no effects.
My conclusion?
I've been waiting for this freaking thing my entire life. Yes, it sounds vastly better. The nuts are only $35 for crying out loud.
This is not entirely a proper A/B test (because I was not as careful about the tuning as I was with the Earvana test and there is some delay on the guitar so it's an unfair test) but here's the same guitar from before the installation of the Earvana:

Yeah, this makes a big difference. I don't really know why there's such a prejudice against these nuts. I mean, everybody should use them. That's my take away.
Will I replace the nut on my Les Paul (even though it's been specially modified?) Yes, eventually. Will I replace the nut on my Blattocaster which has the specially made bone nut that Ethan made? Um. Yy... yes. Eventually. (I mean, it's really cool that Ethan cut that himself and installed it and it sounds great it's just that... yeah...)
So that's where I'm at with the Earvana nut.

Testing the SG

Playing my SG today. The pickups are freaking loud. They're about as hot as the humbuckers in my Les Paul. I recorded a bit of things to be able to hear the difference between the neck and bridge pickup. I started out more happy with the bridge but eventually I learned a bit about rolling back the neck to make it sweeter. Yeah, the guitar goes wildly out of tune there in the middle.

The instrument plays really well. The amps I have respond very differently from the way they respond to other guitars. And that's just the truth of it.
I think it's interesting the way a particular instrument will lead you to play it in a particular way. Your feel and technique will change and adapt to (say) this particular guitar.
The clean stuff has a very nice chime to it. And it can certainly go into that hairy distortion of complete freak out.
I recorded into my Mutt with the 12" Celestion Alnico Blue. An AKG 460 microphone was a couple feet from the cabinet. I added some delay (you know, to be more like Live at Leeds) and some compression (but not much, most of that is just the sound of the whole thing). The volume pots are rolled back on the guitar (except for that one obvious place). And the Mutt was far from dimed -- it's at about 2 o'clock. Channels jumped.

Mousalicious Notions

I'm struggling with the notion that I could put all the Prague Spring CDs on CDBaby. That would cost a couple hundred bucks.
Of course, all Prague Spring is up at Bandcamp.
CDBaby has a very thorough FAQ. It's pretty useful for all the details surrounding a record release.
I'm getting a bit chompy at the bit to play my new SG with a band.

Are we allowed to talk about the electric guitar sound at the end of Solsbury Hill? According to Wikipedia both Robert Fripp and Steve Hunter played guitar on that track. Now look. The acoustic guitar sound fantastic, and that electric is just added at the end to lift up the hook.
But that sound is one of the most amazing hard-rock guitar sounds ever made. I mean it's just a Townshend-esque slide down to an open... er.. D?
It's tougher than the darkest Jethro Tull. It's got more testosterone than War Pigs. It does a third, unnamable thing, to your soul. And it's just at the end of this Peter Gabriel song.
+++++
I'm a tad afrighted to put humbucking P90's in my SG though, because the routing might not be deep enough. And there's only a 5mm distance between the bottoms of the screws and the back of the guitar. Apparently. As far as I can tell.

My Gibson SG

I got the SG. I have to wait 4 more hours to really be able to crank it up (there are other people in my office after all.)
It's light. The setup on it is excellent. Yup, it's a bit neck-heavy but honestly the way the guitar is made is that it's "center" is more toward the neck which makes it easier to play up high and also to avoid hitting the switch or volume pots with your right hand.

Cool.

Yes. The guitar rocks. It's probably the loudest electric I have (when played acoustically).

More the actual, goofy, me.

My man Josh Dillon at Sweetwater really set me up. This is the best guitar/money I've ever bought. I can't wait to play it with the band.

So This Is Happening

For $830 including free shipping and no interest for 18 months this is pretty much the best new guitar deal I've ever seen.

Josh Dillon is my sales guy at Sweetwater. Over the years I've bought lots of stuff from him. I do kind of appreciate having a person to take care of me sales-wise.

Every once in a while they get sales-happy and they do something like drop the price of new stuff down to ridiculous levels. Truthfully a thousand bucks was a reasonable price for this guitar. And with the free shipping and the interest-free financing (just make sure you pay it off by the end or you get zonked with 30% interest) it works out for me.
Is there anything I would change about this guitar? I can fathom changing the tuners and putting Lindy Fralin pickups in it, but I'm willing to bet that the tuners and pickups will rock just fine.
I do have an interest in replacing the nut with my Earvana nut. And that's all because of my life-long frustration with D chords.
The "value" part of these guitars is funny to me. The fact is that the price of them tends to not go down. Which ironically makes buying them new "cheaper" than buying them used.
I have always wanted an SG. I had a "Curley" guitar for a while which was... awful. Why P90's? Mostly because Chance Shirley insisted that was the coolest way to go.
Trapezoids. I know, there's a working-class "coolness" to just the simple dot inlays but I get my panties all in a twist over trapezoidal inlays. It's just the fey and aristocratic part of me.
I plan to play an open D chord all up and down the neck with my guitar amps wide open...

These Are the Important Things

You know what I want? I want an SG — either a Gibson or an Epiphone or some sort of knock-off — that's so beat up that it would be fine for me to put my Earvana nut on it.
And, as Chance Shirley pointed out on Twitter, it should maybe have P90 pickups in it.
I want this guitar to cost less than $200.

I'm not 100% sold on the P-90's. I know I want covered pickups.

Guitar Recording

So my new thing is to use really lousy microphone technique when recording guitar in my studio. I have a choice between SM57s and a nice pair of AKG 460's. Heck, I could also use some Rode NT1a's or my AKG C12a (which is a large-diaphragm tube mic older than me.) And I could have them actually face the speaker, or the cabinet, or something other than the floor.

But I don't.
I have a new way of recording which so far is my favorite. And it's the cheapest and dirtiest way to record I know of (well, considering that the signal is going through Neve preamps and an Apogee converter it's "cheap").
All this came about because I was having some trouble with some unpleasant - sounding breakup in my recording system. So dutifully I was tracing the problem -- first by using different mics, then different mic cable, etc. etc. -- (it turned out to be my lovely Brent Averil Neve 1202 preamps twisting the knobs back-and-forth to get the carbon off of them seemed to clear it up.)

I just have raw jacks hanging off the speaker.

A detail of wrong.

But when I was experimenting with microphones (hoping I wasn't having a problem with my 460s) I realized I didn't have a good shock mount for my SM57's.

I remembered a sound guy at a bar (who was actually a pretty good and experienced sound guy) when I was playing with the incredibly loud KGBeats just draping a 57 over a guitar cabinet with the cable looped through the handle.
That's a low-down cheap, dirty, sleazy, trick.* But you know what? It works sometimes. And since on-axis mics on guitar amps frequently don't sound great anyway, it's a reasonable way to go.
So that's what I did.
Right this minute it's my favorite electric guitar sound (that I can make here in my studio.) If you're so inclined or are really really bored, click on the Bandcamp link above to listen to the mellophonic sounds of the off-axis microphone for a minute and-a-half.

Note that this is an odd speaker cabinet with one 10" and one 12" driver inside the enclosure (making the microphone not only not pointing at either speaker but also... well... not pointing at either speaker.)

I'm playing my Les Paul through my Lil' Dawg Mutt (high gain channel 1, EQ slightly rolled back, volume 1 at about 2:30, volume 2 dimed) into my Weber 10". The Apogee Mini-Me A/D converter has a bit of analog compression on it. The pedal is my MXR Carbon Copy analog delay and that's it baby. All I did was trim the top and fade out the end.

Note too that this is a mono recording.

*Sounds like my dates.