Well, I’m quite pleased with myself.
Ever since I was about 17 or 18 I’ve always wanted a couple of guitars in particular. A decent quality Les Paul and a Telecaster. Plus a great sounding amp. On Sunday I went to Birmingham to buy a new VCR (my old one is dead and I have some stuff on VHS which I’d like to save digitally). You’d be surprised how hard it is to get a reasonably priced one these days, nobody wants them and they’re legacy equipment so the prices are higher than for a DVD player. Anyway, so I shopped around and I could get a good VCR for 20 GBP less from Birmingham than anywhere else so I hopped on the train as they won’t deliver to anywhere other than the card billing address.
I was on my way out of Birmingham New Street station, walking down Queensway towards Richer Sounds when I saw a guitar shop over the road. I decided to have a look around and took a fancy to 2 guitars. I mooched around for a few mins, bought some strings for my appalling, lowest common denominator, won’t stay in tune Squier Strat that I bought a few years back and headed off to get my VCR.
On the way back to the station, it occured to me that I could afford, on an impulse buy, to get one of the guitars I wanted, a red sunburst Squier Telecaster Custom with a neck humbucker. I went back into the shop, had another look around and asked if I could try the Squier Tele and an Epiphone Les Paul Custom Black Beauty through a Fender amp and a Marshall.
While Marshall is the king of rock amps, I really like The Sex Pistols guitar sound, raw, raunchy and tangy and so I was interested to hear a Fender amp. I also thought the Tele might sound nice through it. I tried the Tele and liked the feel of it, solid and workman like, which is what I wanted it for. For those that don’t know, guitars sound different to each other. It’s in the wood, the components, the circuitry and the the pickups. A Fender Stratocaster sounds warm, clean and pingy, a Telecaster sounds cold, thin and scratchy. A Gibson Les Paul sounds warm, thick, powerful and bluesy – the archetypal rock lead guitar. A Gibson SG sounds thick and tangy (think AC/DC). Each guitar has it’s own sound and they are useful for different things. Telecasters, despite my description are great for rhythm or backing guitars, while Les Pauls are great for lead and the two sound particularly good when complementing each other. Due to the high cost of Fender and Gibson guitars, many companies have made their own copies, including Fender and Gibson themselves, branding their own copies as Squier and Epiphone respectively, which would rank as semi-pro standard.
Anyway, back to the plot. So I played this Tele and I probably would have bought it anyway. It felt good but sounded a bit shit through the Fender amp. So the shop guy recommended I forget the Fender and try it through a Marshall. Amps again have different sounds, depending on the circuitry of the pre-amp, the speaker quality and whether it uses valves or transistors. Valves sound way better (to me at least) but sometimes blow and aren’t cheap to replace.
I noticed an immediate difference through the Marshall and was set on buying the Tele when the guy came over and passed me the Les Paul Custom. The cool thing about Les Pauls through a good amp is that you can just give it a kind of deadened chug and you get this heavy purring hum come back from the speakers that hits your stomach. I did just that and I started to shake with the sensation. Fucking hell. I played some riffs and some lead parts and the shaking didn’t go away. I was blown to pieces by the sound. I stopped playing and thought for a second. I looked at the guy and told him to price the lot up for me, with guitar bags, spare strings, a couple of guitar stands and plectrums. I’m not going to say how much it was in public, but it was more than a quite a lot. I weighed it up and bought the lot. Plus a Shure SM58 microphone for recording. SM58s are best for vocals and I wanted an SM57 also for miking up the amp, but they didn’t have any, so the guy showed me a trick for turning an SM58 into an SM57. Very useful that and saved me 80 GBP.
The only problem was getting it all home. I’d left my car at Wolves train station and so had to carry everything. After much deliberation and exploration of options I decided that I would have to collect the amp next weekend by car and carried the rest by hand. It was a near nightmare carrying 2 guitars, 4 guitar stands, a microphone box and a VCR but I made it to the car shortly before I breathed my last breath and quietly expired.
So why am I doing all this? Well, I’ve wanted to get into home music recording for years. I was a professional musician for 5 years and have barely played since. I’ve wanted those 2 guitars and that kind of amp since my late teens and now I can just about afford them. With Jokosher getting ready to rock the world, I have the software to do it at no financial cost. I’ve been readying myself to do this for years but have never really gotten to grips with my old tape based 4 track recorder. I already have a bass guitar and a drum machine and I came to the decision that my old strat is just not up to anything useful. I’ve decided to do another jingle for LUG Radio and that was all the excuse I needed to go out and get some gear and be serious about setting up a home studio. Also it might be said that perhaps I’ve missed my chance to make another attempt at a serious recording career by feeling burnt by the last time and hiding under a stone ever since and now I’m deciding to resurrect my musical interest now I’m nearly 30 and having an early mid-life crisis. I’ve already damaged the speaker on my crappy little Fender practice amp that came with my Strat by playing too loud.
I’m not going to try to conquer the world. I can sing in tune, but don’t have an interesting voice and I can’t write songs for shit, but it will be fun just playing around and recording stuff. When I try to write, it either sounds like someone else or I try to overload it with depth of meaning and get lost. I can’t remember the last time anybody said anything useful in a song, not since The Clash and Pistols anyway and I always try to say too much before losing the original point.
After taking a recommendation from Jono and some of the other #Jokosher guys on IRC, I bought an M-Audio Delta 44 sound card for recording. It arrived yesterday and I had a play with it briefly but I will have to read the manual as there are too many capabilities, inputs and outputs from a software point of view to understand before I am able to use it properly. I also took great joy in getting my old guitar effects pedal board and drum machine out for the first time in maybe 6 or 7 years. My drum machine still holds a set of patterns stored as a song for a song I tried to write 8 or 9 years ago, I may have to finish it.
While avoiding going back to the shop and buying a Squier Precision bass and Epiphone SG, I need some good recording headphones and a set of proper studio speakers. A decent bass amp and a midi synth would be nice too, but will have to go on the wanted list with the Precision and the SG, speakers and phones come first. I could also do with sorting out my mess of an office into a PC area and a recording area, only then will the world be mine aaaahahahahahahahahahahaaaaaa.
So, I’m pretty fucking chipper at the mo. Photos of the guitars will follow when I have my amp at home. It will be time for some cheesy ‘gear’ photos 🙂
