One Journey Ends, Another Begins

I've spent a couple of months thinking that I'd gone as far as I could with the Katana and the Les Paul, and needed some new gear to improve things. Who isn't tempted by a nice shiny white Jazzmaster with a red flecked pickguard? And of course, Valve Amps. And pedals. Lots of pedals.

A £3,500 Matchless combo with £1,500 of pedals on a board (more easily spent than you might think) would do the trick nicely. An £800 Tall Trees amp into a Celestion-equipped speaker cab, with the same £1,500 of pedals, would sound different-but-as-good, again, with the proviso about playing volumes. I heard a fabulous little vintage Fender amp in my last visit to Regent Sounds on Denmark Street, a snip at £4,999. They also have a nice 5W Cornell Traveller Combo for £695 (at time of writing). Lots of options, but do they sound convincing at 60-75 dB?. (Many of these amps have attenuators between the power amp and the speaker, but if it was easy, Ox Boxes would not sell for four figures.)

That's the key. if I want to hear what I'm playing through a loudspeaker, playing at bedroom volumes may compromise the amp's ability to produce the sounds I'm looking for, so that there's no significant improvement over the Katana (or any other modeller). Which means I might wind up testing the patience of guitar shops around London, while I don't find anything in their stock that sounds worth-the-money better than the Katana 50 II at 60 - 75dB.

(You Tube reviews are absolutely useless in this regard: the majority of them wind up playing distortion in the high 80's and low 90's, if not more, often displaying SPL meters proving how loud they are playing. I could stretch six rubber bands across a dustbin, mic it up, run it through a distortion pedal, and it would sound amazing at 95dB.)

If I'm content to listen over headphones (wired, too much latency with bluetooth) then I have options based on Multi-FX / Amp Sim kit, DAWs and plug-ins. This is what the professionals do when they are playing in venues with built-in PA systems or recording studios: these take output direct from the electronics, while the band will be listening through in-ears (live) or headphones (studio). Professionals only need an actual amplifier for venues without a PA.

Look at where a lot of those You Tube Guitar Gurus work: sitting on a computer chair, in front of an iMac running a DAW, surrounded by amps, cabs and other gear, with an extensive knowledge of how various computer programs - on the Mac or embedded in a piece of kit - work. Yep, in the digital world, everything becomes a computer, and everyone becomes a computer user.

No thank you. I already did that for a great many years. (What about the BOSS Tone Studio? To me it does not feel like 'using a computer'. It feels like 'twiddling a lot of dials', which is an analogue thing to do.)

So faced with the fact that spending money on gear might leave me right back where I started but a few quid shorter, I went home and had more serious attempts to get the two main tones - Marshall-ish and Fender-y - that I wanted at the volume levels I needed. (Yes, that amp is as good as everyone says it is. Somewhere in it is the tone you are looking for, though it may be the result of an odd combination of settings.) The details are in a previous post. Since then, that restless urge to upgrade or buy different gear has waned.

The final touch was setting the Neck pickup height by ear. This will cause Techs to roll their eyes, but if it's what it takes, it's what you have to do.

The Les Paul / Katana Journey is declared ended.

Now I’m starting to think about what I play, and that's really baking my noodle.

And In Other News... Society Has Collapsed

You are not crazy.

This is f*****d up.

Look at the idea of a society and somewhere near the centre is the idea of a bunch of people in the same geographical country, speaking dialects of the same language, using the same currency, paying taxes to the same Government, sharing often ineffable ‘values’, ‘attitudes’ or ‘behaviours’, and with some minimal idea of co-operating to make each others’ lives better. Add in some criminals, psychopaths, screw-ups, misfits, alienated souls, cheaters, grifters and shirkers, but not too many, and you have something we would recognise.

Societies have a background level of dysfunction and cacophony, because people have conflicting aims, different abilities, diverse work ethics, and odd ideas about how much they need to work to pull their own load. Plus there's the class / caste stuff and the whole Us and Them thing which people seem to like, as well as behaviours and attitudes from dark corners of the human soul. Add in changes in fashion, technology, prices, salaries, and the blizzard of sales pitches and uninformed BS masquerading as advice and education, and there's enough to make anyone older than about thirty-five feel like the-kids-these-days... Most of that does not count as dysfunction, unless it actually interferes with the smooth functioning of the economy, or starts producing too many people with justifiable reluctance to take part in the institutions of the society. Too many tax-paying non-participants can skew a society the wrong way.

How much dysfunction makes a breakdown?

Some of the many ways a society can screw up are:

Failing to provide jobs with a future for its young people 

Putting the way of living of ordinary parents beyond the means of their children An inadequate or overly ideological education system 

Having rules that hinder the development of a thriving economy Failing to take care of members of the Armed Forces (1) 

Failing to provide an efficient and effective Police force and justice system Allowing petty criminals to go un-punished (2) 

Failing to keep its borders secure (3) 

Having too much wealth accruing to too few people at the expense of the ordinary worker (4) 

Failing to re-train its workers to keep up with economic change, and especially hiring outsiders in favour of re-training (5) 

Allowing inflation to get too high for more than a year (6) 

Raising taxes that are wasted by inefficient management and poor policy-making (7) 

Being distracted by activists agitating for extreme policies that affect small proportions of the population (8) 

A Civil Service that forgets it works for the taxpayer, rather than for another Civil Service (9) 

Class warfare (10)

And of course, the Big Three... Attempting to invade Russia, occupy Afghanistan, or stem the spread of a virus by Lockdowns.

(So-called 'Advanced Economies' can add: failing to get food on the shelves, petrol in the pumps, water from taps, gas from the Mains, electricity from the Grid, buses at the stops, trains in the stations, phone signals from towers, data down the Internet, GPs in the surgeries, doctors and surgeons in the hospitals, money from one person to another...)

I'd say... four or more and your society has collapsed in a heap on the floor, and someone needs to call an ambulance.

Was there ever a time the UK dodged most of these screw-ups? It wasn't bad between 1954 (when rationing ended!) to 1990, even if there was double-figure inflation in the 1970’s and million-plus unemployment ever since, but after the Maastricht and Lisbon Treaties, it starts to roll downhill slowly. After about 2010 the speed picks up, and by 2016 the cracks are spreading as the media / academic / activist / Human Rights Industrial Complex declared class war, in retaliation for the Brexit vote, on the ordinary taxpayers who paid their salaries.

Four years of that, and faced with a bad case of the flu in February 2020, British society started to crack, and in March 2020 collapsed in clouds of dust. What we’re seeing now are people wandering around in the rubble, pretending that everything is OK because, well, they're still getting paid. And they have Mondays and Fridays off working from home.

This is the aftershock of the collapse. Most of the same things are still wrong. Nothing much has changed.

It is not some short-term temporary aberration. It was a long time coming, and it will be a longer time leaving.

(1) The treatment of discharged soldiers with disabilities is a scandal. As is the accommodation they have while serving. 

(2) Pretty much like a large Democrat-run city in the USA from 2019 onwards. 

(3) Looking at you, Angela Merkel. Also the UK Home Office. 

(4) This is a serious problem in the USA. Less so in the UK. 

(5) Every company and government ever. On the other hand, workers need to be prepared to accept re-training. 

(6) Weimar Germany and Zimbabwe at the top of the league, with the UK in the 1970's at the bottom. 

(7) 40% of UK taxes goes to the NHS. We can't see our GP for four weeks, and unless you are actually bleeding out in front of the staff, the operation will be a year hence, and postponed twice. 

(8) How the exact **** did Stonewall get to pronounce on the suitability of anyone for anything? 

(9) For about thirty years, the British Civil Service thought it worked for the EU. It still wishes it did.

(10) This is a thesis in itself I will sketch in another post.

The London Sinfonietta / Mixing Desk

The London Sinfonietta with the Marius Nieset quintet. One honk from a tenor sax can be heard at the back of the Queen Elizabeth Hall no problem. Ditto any of the instruments. But they have a house PA there (two sets of speakers hanging from the ceiling each side of the stage, very black so they fade into the background) and everyone plugs in. So we're not really hearing the sound of the band on the stage. We're hearing the sound of the band picked up by mics, processed and amplified. 

My hi-fi has a clearer sound and better soundstaging than the QEH's PA. Maybe than the QEH acoustically. Though we would never know.

The Les Paul / Katana Tone Journey - Continued

(Updated at publication date)

The Guitar

Flat-wound 10's and liking it. 

The base setting for the dials is "all the 7's", and the pickup selector default position is in the middle.

I experimented with pickup height, and in the end did what would make a well-bred tech shudder, set the heights by tone. The neck is practically flush with the surround, and the bridge is about where a good tech would put it. Switching from neck to bridge does not lose or gain volume - the SPL meter on my iDevice confirms it. All the problems I have had with the characteristic Epiphone Pro-Bucker tone have vanished. 

The Amp

I was determined to get that Marshall-ish sound. These are the Panel settings

and this is the all-important EQ setting

The power setting is 0.5W. This is not optional. Neither is the 12dB attenuation. I have no attenuation on the 4kHz and 2kHz bands, because that's where a lot of the distortion comes from.

Use the Neck pickup, turn the tone dial to 0 and the volume to 8/9, play above the eighth fret and you will get that creamy 1960's distortion sound. There's a reason no-one needed pedals back in the 60's. Turn the tone dial back to 7 or 8, and all that crunchy Marshall-ish goodness comes back. 

This tone does not play well with anything except the Limiter. But then, if you're using it, you won't want any other effects.

Having done that, I went for the Fender-y sound. These are the Panel settings

And these are the all-important EQ settings.

There's a trick. Just a little touch, the lightest sprinkle, of the distortion effect, to put a bit of bite into the sound and stop it sounding like a sodding jazz guitar. 

The power setting is 25W. This is not optional either. 

This sound is a base for putting the modulation and time effects over: it isn't really a tone in its own right.

Neither of these sounds are the "dials at 12:00" type, and in fact are quite extreme. If they weren't, they wouldn't be iconic. There's a lesson in there somewhere.

I have simplified the options, the idea being to approximate a pedals - amp - speaker set-up. The Chain has all the effects (except Reverb) are before the Pre-Amp.

Recording via USB

I've tried. Lost cause. Too much faffing around. If I want to record, I'll get the specialist gear.

Moleskin, Covent Garden

This starts with the weird Saturday morning train times. I can get into Waterloo way-too-early or just a little bit too late, for a 10:00 AM appointment. So I get in way-too-early and to pass the time, take photographs of the shops in the area around Covent Garden.

(I know. Who lives at number 40?)

He Shot, She Shot

On our recent walk round Hampstead Heath, Sis suggested I take a photograph of this pond. So I took...

Sis took a look via the screen and asked if she could borrow the camera. She took...

Sis is, as you will realise, a Proper Artist, while I am a mere snap-shooter.

Hampstead Heath (The Red Coat)

 I loved the way those Victorian and Edwardian painters would name a picture after some tiny detail off to one side. The modern version used to be calling everything "Untitled (Mary in her Boudoir)" or somesuch. Do painters still do that?