Tag: guitar

Electric Guitar Building Workshop

class photo

Last weekend I took a 3-day electric guitar building workshop at the Nazareth Guitar Institute. I learned a lot about fretwork and setting up a guitar, stuff I didn’t know before. Also, I need to get a lot of very specialized tools if I want to work on my own guitars. I guess Stew-Mac should expect an order soon.

The guitar sounds great, I wasn’t expecting such a quality build. The neck seems to be settled in mostly. I’ll give it a final set-up soon. I want to finish it a nice butterscotch blonde, with an amber neck – just like a classic vintage Tele.

Here are some more pictures:

wired up
learning to cut a nut
assembled
electronics
must have been important
in the case
strung up
class clowns
attaching the output jack
finished frets
with the neck
soldering tips

Sovtek Mig100

 

Remember how I played a Sovtek Mig100 in Berlin over the summer? I’ve been on the hunt for one at a good price ever since. I finally tracked one down.

Though I haven’t had a chance to really crank it, it’s extremely loud, clean, and warm sounding. Not brittle at all. It’s missing the back grate that protects the tubes, but I think I can make one fairly easily. The plastic jacks and switches are still there, so maybe soon I’ll get Matt Weed to replace them with metal ones. Or maybe I’ll wait until something breaks…

Now I have to decide which amp to sell – my Laney GH100L or two-channel Dual Rectifier.

Gear for Catharsis shows

Last weekend Catharsis played a few shows in Europe. We made arrangements to borrow amps, so here’s a rundown of what I used. Originally I was planning to bring a small pedalboard with a tuner, overdrive, and distortion pedal, but that was too much to fit in my backpack. I took my distortion pedal and a Snark clip-on tuner instead.

BLITZ – Oslo, Norway: Sunn Model T reissue

sunn model-t

I was excited to see this on stage when we got to the venue. I used the clean channel (channel 1) and it didn’t sound so good. The distortion was a little too gritty. Thinking back, I should have tried cleaning up the dirty channel and using my distortion pedal as a boost. Lesson learned.

 

LUTAKKO Fest – Jyväskylä, Finland: Engle E656

engle e656

I was intimidated by this amp. Too many knobs, switches, and options for my liking. But we had almost an hour to set up and line-check so I took my time and explored the amp. I ended up using channel 3, which is a high-gain channel, but I turned the gain as low as possible, using my pedal as a boost. The cleans weren’t very clean, but it was okay. This amp sounded way better than the Sunn.

 

Cyklopen – Stockholm, Sweden: Marshall JMP 100

Would you believe I forgot take a picture of this classic amp? Sound-wise, meh… It wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t what I expected. It sounded good, but I think my issues were with the room; concrete floor, metal walls and ceiling. There was a weird boomy mid-range to everything, and I had trouble controlling feedback.

EDIT: Someone posted surprisingly good video footage so you can hear (and see) it in action.

 

Köpi – Berlin, Germany: Sovtek Mig 100

sovtek mig 100

This amp ruled! It sounded great, and was plenty loud. No uncontrollable squeally feedback. I was so impressed, I’m seriously considering buying one (after selling one of my current amps, of course).