the road to success is always under construction

when will it ever end?

the quest for the ultimate guitar tone (either that, or the futile hope of attaining it someday) is never-ending.  i shit you not.  so i was well on my way having put together a ‘board i am truly proud of.  it took me around 3 years to complete it and i dare say, short of going ‘full vintage’, i pulled out all the stops with that one.  good man, or so it may seem.

minutes after connecting the aforementioned ‘board with Lava ELCs, i laid in bed wide awake despite having survived the whole night and early morning on Red Bull and cigarettes.  it just didn’t make sense – how come my favourite local blues rock guitarists get their tone without using any of the stuff from Analog Man, or Theo Hartman, or Kevin Randall?!  how come they can just come on-stage with the shittiest guitar that’s been burned, soiled and modded to death, in front of the shittiest of solid-state amps and going through nothing else but a  stock Boss OD-3, and still produce that sweet, full-bodied, meaty tone every guitar hobbyist just dream of?  how come?

so it was on to the next project.  it was easy to justify – main ‘board will be reserved for the more elaborate stuff when i need the vibe, and modulated delay, and flange, and (specifically) Ge fuzz tones.  second ‘board will be the ‘grab-and-go’ ‘board.  It’s for those ‘Dude, wanna hang out and jam for a bit?’ -’Sure, let me just pack my stuff and I’ll be off in 8 minutes’ kinda situations.

to make it interesting, i wanted it to be cheap!  the philosophy behind the second ‘board is to repel as many cork-sniffers as possible.  all pedals should be BOSS/Ibanez/DOD/Arion/home-made/cheap-ish pedals.  heck, i actually thought of going all BOSS, and naming it The SpringBoard (y’know?  Bruce Springsteen = The Boss, etc?).

as a ‘grab-and-go’ ‘board, it has to be small-ish, hence limiting the number of pedals on it is essential.  so the plan was to have the guitar going into a compressor, into an overdrive, into a heavier overdrive / distortion, into a chorus and lastly into a short delay.

guitar -> compressor -> overdrive -> distortion -> chorus -> delay -> amp

so far, i’ve sorted the compressor and chorus conundrum.  sold off my RMC Wheels of Fire wah and used the proceeds to get a BOSS CS-2 and CE-5.  I made sure the CE-5, though made in Taiwan, had the 1024-stage Panasonic MN3007 BBD chip in it.  why?  because most people think BOSS only used this chip in the made in Japan CE-2 (considered as one of the better chorus pedals).  and buying a Taiwan CE-5 with the same chip will get me in the same ballpark as a Japan CE-2, at a fraction of the price.  smart, eh? 

i’m currently finishing up on the clone of the Klon, i.e. actually prepping the enclosure and attempting to make it look good and interesting.  so that cost right there is already sunk, no capital outlay required.  the distortion is going to be a bit of a bicth because i haven’t decided on either a BOSS DS-1 or the Catalinbread Dirty Little Secret.  However, i’m pretty sure that it’s going to be a home-made build.

but the biggest bicth of them all – the delay.  it should be nothing extravagant, i.e. i’ll get by with 300ms for slapback and for the purpose of beefing up the guitar sound a bit.  here’s the catch – the BOSS DM-2 is way overpriced, the BOSS DM-3 is ‘alright’ in terms of price, but mass opinion dictates that one should just save up for a DM-2 and get it over with.  the Arion SAD-1 is reportedly good, but then the buffer is nowhere near the BOSS standard.

all of the above forced me to dig deeper into  a lot of the more obscure ones, just so it will fit the ‘cheap’ criteria.  there’s the First Act Delay, which was sold at Toys ‘R Us in the US but has since been discontinued.  then there’s the Biyangs and the Daphons etc which are ‘alright’ but not quite ‘there’.  one particular pedal that interests me is the made in America vintage DOD FX-90.  the pedal uses the coveted Panasonic MN3005 BBD chip, which is identical to the ones used by BOSS in their early DM-2.  prices are still cheap, and though i haven’t heard it in person, it’s one of those sleeper pedals you might want to check out.  obviously by publishing this, it’ll just negate the purpose of keeping it asleep (as if this site gets 2 million hits per day), but heck, let’s share the info, shall we?

i’m currently negotiating with a seller on an Analog Man AR20DL, which is in the vein of the DM-2/3.  Analog Mike took a standard Daphon delay and performed some of his magic mods on it and it is supposedly a good, solid, basic delay.  if the price is right, i might just get this one and be done with it, even though it won’t fall strictly under the ‘cheap’ criteria.

there’s also this one other effect i’m seriously looking into, mainly for the purpose of playing stuff from The Police.  but that one’s just for me for the time being.    will divulge the info when the time is right.  feel free to hazard a guess, though.

good night!

~ by thehindsight on July 9, 2009.