Millennium Bridge

I'm not sure why I like this. Maybe because the perspective feels wonky? What with Blackfriars Bridge seeming underneath the Millennium Bridge. And all those people standing on something that looks unsupported?

Upgrading the Paranormal Telecaster With Creamery Pickups

Okay. I have the valve amp. I have the fancy wah-wah pedal and the Helix FX. I have double-humbuckers (McCarty 594 SE). I have the Paranormal Telecaster, which ticks so many boxes (Tele bridge pickup, Jazzmaster neck pickup, Tele controls, offset body, out-of-phase and in-phase series and parallel). What next? According to the Guitar Nerd Scorecard, at some point I have to change the pickups on one or more of my guitars. Not going to be the PRS, so it had to be the Paranormal. The stock pickups were a tad fragile and rough round the edges unless the treble was turned down, and if the treble was turned up, the sound was spikey and thin. There was a general lack of finesse about the sound.

The standard upgrade for pickups is Seymour Duncan. There are others, which are mostly about getting a more "high-performance" sound, and are American. As is Seymour Duncan. Dylan Talks Tone - who is an American pickup maker - said we should a) buy his, or b) support our local pickup maker. So off to Google I went, looking for UK pickup makers. There are more than I thought there would be. They have well put-together websites and descriptions of their products. Also very similar prices, none of which are too far from Seymour Duncan's. Guitar reddit had no firm views, so I went someone from the top of the search list who offered some "vintage" voiced pickups.

This was Jamie at Creamery Pickups. I sent him a mail with a photo of the Paranormal and an explanation of what I wanted, and my guess that what I needed was his Classic 58 Jazzmaster neck and the Vintage Nocaster bridge pickups. A couple of mails later, I put in an order on his website, sent the money and sat back for the four-five weeks it takes. (All of them gave that kind of lead time.) Right on time Jamie sent them by mail, and I hustled them and the Paranormal into the guys at Richmond Guitar Workshop (no website, only Facebook page). They fitted the pickups and gave the Paranormal, a clean-up, re-string and fitted a better selector switch and cable socket.

Did it make a difference? Oh hell yeah. Jamie's pickups are rich and full, as in... oh so that's what a Jazzmaster neck pickup is supposed to sound like and ah, a Tele bridge that sounds clear but not twangy. Turn up the treble on the Jazzmaster neck and it reveals a complicated sound, put the treble near the middle and it's clear and full. I can crank the volume up and run it into the Princeton at about 3.5 and get a satisfying bedroom-volume sound. It's now a "proper-sounding" instrument, rather than a cheap (it is a Squier) curiosity.

London Bridge Concourse

So this week's sunny day was Monday, and on my way to lunch, I went to London Bridge and then down and across Tower Bridge. Nice walk, even if the wind was chilly halfway across Tower Bridge. Anyway... London Bridge has a new clock for people to meet under, there's an obligatory Passenger Asleep On A Bench, and the People On The Escalator shot may be one of my favourites from this year already. The last two are the kind of architectural angle-y shots I like. Despite its heavy use over quite a few years, the concourse is still clean and shiny. Somebody cares, or maybe somebody else wrote it into the contract.

Autumn

 

Fujinon XF 18-135 - If I Get A Zoom

So I went back over what I had taken in Photos. Because Photos has the Get Info panel, and that tells you the lens details - at least if the data was available.

Sometime in 2009 I started using the Canon Powershot A590 IS. The lens is said to be 5.8 - 23.2mm, and the Canon specs say that the 35mm equivalent is 35-140mm. I seemed to have stopped using it towards the end of 2011, which is when I stopped going on holidays, and switched to using a C510 phone camera and then the iPhone 4S, sometime in 2012.

In 2013 I started using a Canon EOS1100D, which was an APS-C camera with a 35mm equivalent of 24-80mm. It's a chunky bit of kit.

Sometime in 2014 until sometime in 2018 I started using a Panasonic DMS TZ-40, with a 35mm equivalent of 24-480mm, some of which may be digital zoom. I used the iPhone SE camera for a while between 2019 and 2021.

At the end of 2021 started using the Fujifilm X-E4, with the 50mm-equivalent lens, which I swapped in late 2024 for the 40mm-equivalent pancake lens. Because it's easier to carry and made a change.

None of those cameras were expensive by the standards of the time. The EOS110D was about half the price of the X-E4, which shows in the quality of the Fuji kit. I still have the EOS1100D and the DMS TZ-40.

That Get Info panel also tells you the focal length of the zoom lens. Which is super-useful.

(All sizes are now 35mm-equivalent unless otherwise mentioned.)

The majority of the shots I have kept are taken at one end of the range or the other of the lens. The more zoom it offered, the more I seemed to look for shots that would use that much zoom. A lot of the landscape / cityscape shots I liked enough to keep were either around 35mm or 120mm. Some went the full 480mm the TZ-40 would allow. I feel that 82mm is really just cropping the picture in camera, whereas 100-120mm is a different picture. The silly focal lengths of the TZ-40 were a bit of a spoiler. The shots that have intermediate focal lengths are really me cropping in camera. (Cropping in camera is not a Bad Thing: the picture quality is higher than a cropped picture would be.) All the people shots I like were 120mm or more. Do that with a small camera and no-one will notice. Try to get a 120mm zoom shot of someone sitting a few feet away with an APS-C lens and they will notice. That takes a certain amount of social skills I might not have.

The Fujinon zooms that are not too large, too heavy or too silly, are the XF 16-80, the XF 18-135, the XF 18-120, the XF 16-55, and the XF 18-55. The 18-120 has internal zoom (which is cool), but Fuji says that it is really for videographers. Shame. The x-55's are not zoomy enough: 55mm feels like cutting-out-clutter-around-the-subject. I can see why portrait snappers use it. That leaves the 16-80 and the 18-135. Both are about the same (second-hand) price, size and weight. Both lenses extend during zoom, which is a little... naff, but unavoidable.

Looking at my pictures, the more zoom I have, the more zoomy pictures I can see and will take. On that basis, the answer is the 16-135.

So why am I not rushing onto the Interwebz to buy one?

Zooming is a little like photography candy: it's sweet and addictive. It's one reason I deliberately bought a prime when I got the X-E4. Taking shots with a prime between 35mm and 50mm is a discipline. Anyone can zoom in on a neat detail, and I have enough shots to prove I can do it well, but composing a whole shot is much more of a challenge. So there's that. You know, suffering for my art. And this whole exercise is assuming I am buying second-hand. New prices for these lenses are... I mean, you can a Player Series Strat for that kind of money. It's outside my costs-as-much-as-a-256GB-iPad (£429) rule.

Fender Princeton '65 Reverb Re-Issue

For at least two decades, the pros in Nashville played through Deluxe Reverbs and the pros on the West Coast played through Princetons. It has been said, probably by Fender's PR department, that sixty per cent of all the guitar parts recorded in the 1960's and '70's were played on a Strat through a Princeton.

Every now and then Fender changed the exact features, look and sound of their amps, kinda like Ford changed the look of its car models each year. The current line-up has the '62, '64, '65, and '68 versions. This is a darn good comparison

   

of all of them. Listen through headphones.

I did, and in the end I went for the '65 Reissue https://uk.fender.com/products/65-princeton-reverb the '62 and '64 are £2,000+ hand-wired, so out of my self-imposed budget. The '65 had the sound I wanted. It has a 10-inch Jensen speaker, a 15W amp (the manual says 15W, the marketing says 12W), an actual analog spring reverb unit, and vibrato. There are two inputs: on the left for single-coils, on the right for humbuckers. The one on the right takes out 6dB, which may not sound like a lot, but it reduce the input signal strength to a quarter of what comes from the guitar. I'm plugged into the right-hand side. Flip the switch on the back and give the valves a minute to warm up.

The usual remark about valve amps is that 1 is silent, 2 is not-quite-there, 3 is too loud, and after that it just gets more saturated and distorted. I can play the Princeton at 4-5 with the guitar at 6-8 and it's on song and bedroom-level. Which is what I was looking for, and tested for when I tried it out at GuitarGuitar in Epsom.

If you have ever tried more than two perfumes from Guerlain you will know their perfumes have a very similar base they refer to as 'guerlainade', which is a secret like the recipe for Coca-Cola. On top of that they put this or that scent to get Habit Rouge, or Jicky, or L'Heure Bleu, or whatever else. But all their perfumes are instantly recognisable as Guerlain.

That's what happens when twiddling the dials on the Princeton, or indeed, putting pedals in front of it. Changing the bass and treble does not change the underlying sound, it just makes it more or less bass-y and more or less treble-y. Turn the guitar volume pots to 10 and turn the amp down to 2.5 to keep the volume polite, and it sounds more or less the same as turning the amp up to 10 and the pots to 2. High guitar and low amp is a little finer-edged and high amp and low guitar is a little rounder. It's still the same underlying sound. As it is when using the reverb or the vibrato.

The '65 starts clean and stays clean. Feed it some pedal distortion, turn the volume up and the distortion cleans up. Turn the volume down and there's this nasty fizzing that happens with all amps. It took a little experiment to get a good setting for some of the distortion effects in the Helix: guitar around 7-8, amp at 4. That also sounds good clean. Those pedal distortion sounds are quite liveable at bedroom volumes. Same trick as before: turn up the distortion effect to get the sound, feed it into a compressor - I've used the Deluxe Compressor effect - to attenuate it to bedroom volumes. I have very high thresholds so the compression is barely noticeable.

It makes my PRS McCarty 549 SE sound like an electric guitar. Which the Katana never quite managed. I always wanted to tweak the sound from the Katana, but I plugged in to the Princeton and that was it. That was the sound. It's like my 594 and the Paranormal finally met the Right Amp. Even the bridge pickups sound good through it. It is "next-level hi-fi" compared to the Katana's "superior transistor radio", and so it should be for the price difference.

Getting a valve amp is definitely part of the electric guitar experience. You may prefer the sound of a Marshall, or a Vox, or a Soldano, or whatever else. Test it at the seller's palce to make sure that it comes on song at a level your neighbours will tolerate.

South Bank Sunny Monday Autumn Morning

 

The title speaks for the photos. One day I will take black-and-white photos in the rain under a dark grey sky and then I will be a real photographer.