Garth wrote: Thu May 02, 2024 7:59 am Tone-questing can be a terrible, terrible state to be in and very hard to break one's self out of.

This is something I've dealt with my whole musical life. I, of course, wanted a nice guitar and amp and some cool effects. I got all that. Then I started looking for nicer or different stuff to help with the creative process. I bought recording gear to create at home and embrace the creative recording process. But gear is cool, and gear soon became something that fit in between high performance cars and maybe baseball cards. I wanted cool nice things for the sake of having cool nice things, or I wanted to collect something for the chance of having something rare and coveted.

When it came time to create music, I ended up going back to my old guitar rigs. I find that I either make pretty guitar music or loud, noisy guitar music. When I do this today, my setup is eerily similar to what it was 30 years ago. I'm happy to explain it in more detail, but that's not the point here. I'd use my old gear, or stuff very similar to it, and all my cool, esoteric, or collectable gear would go unused. I even felt guilty about it. But I came to accept that the creative impulse and the technical gear impulse are actually two separate parts of me that just share the same physical tools and artifacts.

The best thing to happen to me was to get a job in the musical instrument industry. Overnight, I found myself surrounded with piles of cool, rare, and awesome sounding gear. I got to take it apart, go inside, analyze it, fix it, capture it, and so on. Doing this allowed me to experience the same thrill as buying and selling cool, sometimes vintage gear, but with out the personal expense. What I learned is that I tweak knobs on any piece of gear with the goal of getting it to sound good with my playing. When I find that setting, the performance is shockingly similar to the gear that I've owned and used for years. The old dudes at the guitar store were right; you always end up sounding like you.

Gear and interest in gear is not bad... it's just a different hobby. Don't conflate the gear hobby with creativity or productivity.

I find that it's the same with bicycles as well. When I'm lazy and the weather is band and I'm not riding, I dream of new and classic bikes, and new projects. When I'm out and about and riding a lot, I rarely think of bicycle gear; I just ride, feel the wind and the velocity, see new sights, get exercise, and have adventures.

I love all you PRF weirdos.

Daydreaming about the Gamechanger Plus pedal which is outside of my budget right now...
(It's kind of like adding a piano's sustain pedal to your guitar.)

But I DO have a Boss DD7 Delay and an expression pedal and I'm wondering if there's a way to frankenstein a fake, basic version of the Plus pedal.
I guess the ankle-rocking thing would be kind of backwards.
I have an extra Crybaby wah that could get cannibalized but the foot motion wouldn't really be the same.
You could perhaps fit a spring under the wah pedal that would return the pedal to the "back" position when you released it. If you wired the old wah like an expression pedal (in reverse?) you could add repeats/delay when you held it down. The spring mechanism would work kind of like the switch/battery compartment spring on Boss pedals.

A regular electric piano sustain pedal would only contain a switch, and not a potentiometer, right?

Just dreamin'....

Kniferide wrote: Sun Apr 21, 2024 9:41 pm

llllllllllllllllllll wrote: Sat Apr 20, 2024 5:53 pm Is there a reason not to do this, other than it being dangerous and inconvenient?

Dude I fight that shit so hard. That isn't even that bad. No matter how hard I try to bundle stuff and group stuff and use shortest runs ETC... It's always spaghetti when I'm done. Unsolvable problem for me. Heather is going out of town for a week and I intend to gut and rewire everything while she is gone. It will take the entire week, and a lot of late nights. Still gong to be a disaster in the end, but I have a bunch of dead stuff tangled up that needs to go.

Velcro and cotton tie line is your friend. No zip ties. Always use something you can easily undo and tidy back up.

I moved my recording stuff to another room last weekend.
I have 2 metal racks on wheels with my interfaces and outboard gear and moved them over with all the important cables
connected to the racks.
the whole mess on the floor are all cables once used for stuff that I got rid off.
it took hours to separate them.

bassdriver wrote: Thu May 02, 2024 12:28 pm

Kniferide wrote: Sun Apr 21, 2024 9:41 pm

llllllllllllllllllll wrote: Sat Apr 20, 2024 5:53 pm Is there a reason not to do this, other than it being dangerous and inconvenient?

Dude I fight that shit so hard. That isn't even that bad. No matter how hard I try to bundle stuff and group stuff and use shortest runs ETC... It's always spaghetti when I'm done. Unsolvable problem for me. Heather is going out of town for a week and I intend to gut and rewire everything while she is gone. It will take the entire week, and a lot of late nights. Still gong to be a disaster in the end, but I have a bunch of dead stuff tangled up that needs to go.

Velcro and cotton tie line is your friend. No zip ties. Always use something you can easily undo and tidy back up.

I moved my recording stuff to another room last weekend.
I have 2 metal racks on wheels with my interfaces and outboard gear and moved them over with all the important cables
connected to the racks.
the whole mess on the floor are all cables once used for stuff that I got rid off.
it took hours to separate them.

It feels so good when you are done.
Wife is going out of town next week and my project is a total scorched earth rebuild of my entire rack and mixer.

Anybody here have a tweed Bassman reissue, either the LTD or the one from the 90s with the blue alnico speakers?

Guitarist in my band recently picked up one of the 90s ones and it's so bright that I thought something was wrong with it. However, I can't find anything wrong with it and it seems to be how it's voiced. Borderline unusable with a tele bridge pickup. 335 sounds way better with it, but we've got the treble, bass, and presence nearly all the way down, and are doing all of the tone shaping with the mid control. Plugging into Normal 2 also seems to help a bit.

For reference, the PO swapped in 5881 output tubes and a 5R4GYB rectifier tube. Preamp tubes are all 12AX7s, whereas an original 5F6-A would have had a 12AY7 in the V1 position. It's also biased super cold, at about 40% plate dissipation. There's no bias adjustment in this amp.

The biggest complaint is that there's so much plinky pick noise. This is a stock MIA tele from the mid 2000s, I think, and I'm starting to wonder if the bridge P/U is going microphonic. It's still kinda there when running the tele through my Hiwatt Custom 20, but not nearly as bad.

As an experiment, I swapped V1 with a 12AU7 that I had in the drawer and it was way more usable, just too quiet, so he's going to get a 5751, 12AT7, and 12AY7 to mess around with to see if that helps.

A band mate of mine had one of those about 20 ish years ago. I do remember it being bright, so he just used the normal channel with a strat and it wasn't TOO crazy.

The 12AY7 is a must. I hear rumors that fender always ships with their bias intentionally cold so that modern power tubes outlast the warranty period. Change some resistors or put in a pot.

Also, why the hell are they using Linear taper volume pots?
https://www.thetubestore.com/lib/thetub ... ematic.pdf

Has anyone made a 5F6A preamp into a cathode biased 6V6 power section in a 1x12" combo? I bet that would be a Fun little amp. I kinda think that might have been the original idea of the Blues Jr, but it got a little too tweaked along the way.

I'd like to add a bias pot, but getting the PCB out of this thing is a nightmare. I'd have to desolder the wires from every tube socket.

Nate Dort wrote: Fri May 03, 2024 3:28 pm I'd like to add a bias pot, but getting the PCB out of this thing is a nightmare. I'd have to desolder the wires from every tube socket.

Holy mother of turds, that looks like a VCR inside.

What's that blue potentiometer-looking-thing in there?

benadrian wrote: Fri May 03, 2024 3:39 pm

Nate Dort wrote: Fri May 03, 2024 3:28 pm I'd like to add a bias pot, but getting the PCB out of this thing is a nightmare. I'd have to desolder the wires from every tube socket.

Holy mother of turds, that looks like a VCR inside.

What's that blue potentiometer-looking-thing in there?

That's actually not my picture, and I just noticed it's one of the LTD versions that actually has a bias trimpot. Board is mounted the same way though.

I don’t have a tweed Bassman (Jury definitely did at some point), but I do have an early 90s reissue JTM45 and yeah, the first channel (High Treble) is very, very bright. I usually go into the Normal channel and jump them and add a little more high end/bite as needed with the first channel volume.