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Feedback Is Still Holy

I've neglected Feedback is Holy for a while, mainly because I had to shut down my earthlink hosting which is where most of the images on this blog were hosted. I'm gradually going back now into the old blog posts to add the pics.

So much has happened since October 2012 in my little world of guitars that almost all of the old blog posts are now inaccurate. Oh well, if I meant it at the time then I guess it's still valid in some way. But let's cover a few quick updates to bring things current, shall we?

Epiphones Get Sold

I sold both the Epiphone Casino and the Explorer. I know, it's kinda sad. I ended up just totally changing my mind about the Casino. You know what changed it? When I brought Mike Margulies' Epiphone Casino ELITIST home with me, the comparison between it and my Casino was just too brutal. The main difference between the two is that the Elitist is made in Japan while my regular Casino is made in China. This translates into better materials, parts and build quality in the Elitist. Much better. It also costs twice as much money, and it's worth it. Qualitatively speaking I think I can still say that the Elitist is just a way more lively guitar. The wood is lighter, thinner and much more resonant. The whole guitar is just much more alive. Plus it sounds better, plays better, and even looks better. In five minutes that guitar spoiled everything for my Chinese Casino. Bye bye Chinese Casino.

Here are the Chinese (left) and Japanese (right) Casinos side by side.

I sold the "Coffee Table" Explorer more recently. I just wasn't ever playing it, mainly because of how big it is. But also because it has no whammy bar and because I am not really a Gibson guy - the short scale length, the thicker and less complex tones. But it's a sentimental favorite, so I do miss it. The talented kid I sold it to seemed completely stoked with it, so it'll see a lot more action now.

Here is John Parsons puzzling over the absurdity of the Explorer while simultaneously looking very cool.

Red Jazzmaster Gets Even Nicer

I made two key upgrades to the candy apple red Jazzmaster - new pickups and vibrato. Almost right away I decided that the pickups I had first installed (AVRI neck, Seymour Hot bridge) just weren't cutting it. The Jazzmaster's tone was being so heavily eclipsed by the superior tone of the Telemaster with the Fred Stuart blackguard pickup that I was just never recording with the Jazzmaster. I realized that one of the key reasons why the Fred Stuart pickup sounds so good is because it is not wax potted. This gives it a really open, harmonically complex sound. It just has way more depth, range and articulation than other pickups I've tried. I dug around and asked around to see what the options were. I ended up having a positive and informative exchange with Jason Lollar that pretty much convinced me to buy his regular "Jazzmaster Style" pickup. I was interested in getting someone to make me some Jazzmaster pickups without wax potting. Jason explained that Jazzmaster pickups actually need some light potting just to hold them together. They're different from Tele pickups, which are held together with that nice tight string that's wound around the coil. But he explained his potting process and how minimal it is. Anyway I got the pickups and they truly are all that. They are amazing. Just wonderful. They are way more open and broad sounding than the AVRI or Seymour Duncan pickups I've used. Now I use the Jazzmaster on recordings when I don't even have to. It has meatier, warmer sound than the Telemaster.

I also got a Mastery vibrato tailpiece for the Jazzmaster. Man, the original Jazzmaster design is so fraught - the stock JM bridge has always sucked. Thank God for Mastery's replacement bridge. Well, then I noticed that I'd always been wrestling with the vibrato tailpiece. The little screws that hold the baseplate and .. wiggle unit? together stick up in a screwey way, often causing the E string to unwind or snap down near the end. The AVRI vibrato I had was also binding up and not moving smoothly through its range of motion. I was just living with this stuff until I saw that Mastery had designed a re-thought-through, much improved replacement vibrato tailpiece. They were out of stock for a while, but then when they came up again I pounced and voila - another huge improvement over stock. Goddamn I love my Jazzmaster now!

I love it and I play it so much that it's taken a bit of a beating...

Mars Makes A Friend

I have always been amazed by and quite thoroughly proud of my 1969 Marshall Super Lead amplifier. So it was sorta unnerving whenever my neighbor Ric Wilson would acknowledge the greatness of my amp but then explain, in a patient smiling way, that he prefers Hiwatts. "It's like a Marshall, but with tone controls that work," he said. Eventually I had to try one. Then I had to have one.

Mine is a pretty damned minty 1978 DR103 Custom 100 watt built by Hylight Electronics (the original company). It differs from the original DR103 in that it has two inputs and a hotter setup of the V1 12AX7. That setup was a little hot for my tastes, actually, so Chris Barnett put a less gainy 12AT7 in the V1 position. Otherwise, it has 4 EL34s, big huge Partridge transformers and it's the same amp as the classics used by Townsend, Page, Gilmour, etc.

This is where I want to be all day every day.

Apart from being British and using 4 EL34 power tubes, the Hiwatt is actually very different from the Marshall. It has a lot more gain from a mathematical perspective (if not from a sonic one) because it has several more preamp tube gain stages than the Marshall does. But those stages are set up in a very clean and stable way, so it doesn't end up sounding like a foamy, mushy preamp-focused "modern" or metal amp, a la Mesa Boogie or whatever. Also, the way the tone section is set up, the tone controls act almost like volume controls .. they use gain in frequency-bounded silos to add or subtract a whole lot of tone color and gain at the same time. Evidently the phase inverter (PI) that drives the power stage is set up differently as well. I don't know enough to go into it, but the net effect is that through much of its volume range, the power stage of the Hiwatt is more stable and less distorted than the Marshall. I say "through much of its volume range.." because the amp definitely does crush out, roar and scream at the top of its range. People (who probably don't live with Hiwatts) like to say that Hiwatts are super clean or are cleaner than Marshalls. I've found that that's partly true, in that the Hiwatt has much more headroom, or loud clean volume, than the Marshall. But it's absolutely not true that you can't get great big saturated distortion and feedback from a Hiwatt. Just like I do with the Marshall, I leave this amp wide open and use my volume pedal to wield the whole continuum of gain and distortion, from clean to completely hairy. That usable range is a lot wider on the Hiwatt. But just like with the Marshall, when my foot is all the way down, all Hell is breaking loose.

The Hiwatt can also get brighter and has more low end girth than the Marshall. The brightness is not Fendery. It's more crispy than that. It's almost like the sound of an amp with an EF86 in the preamp, where the tone of guitar is being inhaled and then given a truer rendering. So most of the time I'm getting a sound that is more clear and the component notes of chords are easier to hear as distinct from one another even when the amp is heavily distorted. And I know this sounds hokey, but with this amp I can fucking hear the wood of the guitar.

One thing the Hiwatt lacks, and the reason I do go back to the Marshall for certain parts, is the mystical smokey low and middle mids that only a Marshall has. The Marshall cathode follower tone section may not be very versatile but it does something that no other amp can do.. it creates that gloriously warm luminous holographic harmonic feedback thing. The Don't Fear The Reaper thing. The Eric Clapton on the Beano album thing. The Hiwatt gets close enough, but it's not quite the same.

Aww, look at the buddies.

It's just super lovely to have both. I've been using mainly the Hiwatt for rehearsal and live playing, but some day I'll hook them both up.

Enter Lurch

Damn it's been so long since I've updated this blog that I haven't even introduced Lurch. Lurch is a 1973 Marshall 2034 8x10" cabinet for guitar. I found it at Bananas At Large in San Rafael and just fell in love with it. It is in beautiful shape and cost me kind of a lot. But I offset much of that cost by selling off the original Celestion 7332 speakers individually and replacing them with Eminence Ramrods. Heresy, some may say, but I say fuck you! It sounds incredible, and way better than it did before. Plus some beard-stroking vintage enthusiasts now own some near-pristine 7332s.

I've thought about pimping it all the way out with some Celestion golds or some Webers. But at this point my own experimental foray into the low-watt Alnico realm can only be described as inconclusive. That's a future blog post in the making, so let's shelve the Celestion vs. The Rest Of The World and Alnico vs. Ceramic subjects for now.

Here is Lurch during initial test drive at Bananas.

I had no small amount of trouble rewiring it, figuring out whether it should be 16 ohms or 4 ohms. I tried 16 ohms, but the Marshall did not like that for some reason. And honestly, something about running two 32 ohm loads per side in parallel (to get 16 ohms) freaked me out too. When I say the Marshall didn't like it, I mean there was a strangely damped, flat dynamic feel and there may have been a couple screeching incidents. No cabinet is worth risking Mars' output transformer, so I quickly rewired to 4 ohms, which has always had a bit more thump anyway.

Before^

After^

Jim Marshall's signature!

So the sound is fucking huge. Despite the fact that the speakers are just 10 inches, there are so many of them and the cabinet is so large that there is quite enough low end, especially now with the Hiwatt. There's not toooo much high end when the presence and treble are dialed down, but it's certainly there if you want it. And then there's so much rich and crispy midrange that you just don't know what to do. God, it's nice. And I think I'm sold on 10 inch speakers. They're just so quick and detailed. They're bristly in a finer way than 12 inch speakers. I actually compared it with a few different choices on hand (10 and 12) when tracking the Verst album, and it won hands down for the kind of richness and detail I was going for.