Guitar
There's nothing quite like receiving a package that you've been waiting for, semi-patiently anticipating the joyous christmas-morning like rush of tearing open a parcel containing new stuff.
Friday morning was one of those lovely occasions. Joe Gore, the guitarist par excellence, writer, blogger, editor, pedal builder, etc.,(ad nauseum), was to send me a mystery pedal of his design for helping launch his new online forum; I simply over-posted like a mad bastard for a month or two, and wham, bam, thank you ma'am, Joe gifted me one of his DIY pedals. It's called the Codpiece. It's an apt name, because this well-loved, scuffed up little project box simply makes everything bigger.
I wasn't sure what it was exactly when I first plugged it in; it provides a walloping volume boost, but it's more than just a boost pedal. It provides some overdrive at higher settings, but it's clearly not intended to replace your overdrive pedal. It seems to enrich everything, boosting harmonics, as well as volume, and smacking the bejeezus out of the front end of your amp. Honestly, I'm not even sure what the bottom knob does (I suspect some bias controlled tone scheme, that doesn't act like a tone knob, particularly), but it doesn't matter; set both knobs at noon, and everything gets really pretty and hyper-focused, as though your guitar just dropped something elicit. Emailing back and forth with Joe, I was at first a little baffled by it, then, after taking it to a gig, amazed and enthralled. I ventured the guess that it was perhaps based on the Z. Vex SuperHard-on? Joe responded thusly:
"Same quadrant of the tone galaxy — but yours is JFET-based, and the SHO uses a MOSFET. To my ear, the SHO sounds a little juicier on its own, but your pedal blends a little nicer with other gain stages. It's really nice after a germanium distortion..."
Currently, I have no germanium fuzz in my life (honey...no, it's important, really...), but tonight I brought the old Jimi Hendrix fuzz to the gig; the Dunlop JH-2 is a difficult fuzz, really splattery and prone to collapsing in on itself. It needs outside help just to reach unity gain, despite having ridiculously high-gain transistors, and just generally does not play nice with others- amps, effects, guitars, you name it. Basically, if the Codpiece could do for this troublesome fuzz what it was doing for my "clean" tone, I would forever be in it's thrall. It did. I mean, I'm still futzing with precise balances, (and things got away from me here and there), but the Codpiece brought that crazy diamond into focus and projected the harmonic rainbow across the room like a fuzz planetarium. I was grinning like a fool tearing into a Magic-Sam-meets-Billy-Gibbons-meets-Jack-White take on Slim Harpo's "Hipshake", getting a fat'n'evil rasp with loads of low-end booty out of my usually rather staid rig. Blunderbuss, indeed!
Now, usually I'd do a demo and video to demonstrate the wonders of a piece of gear. Unfortunately, my home studio blows and I can pretty much only record direct without making my landlord's family and mine, insane. So no juicing up the Deluxe Reverb for the edification of the interweb. Without a real studio to record it, quality mics and good fidelity, there's no point. MP3's won't translate the nuance, and frankly, the Codpiece sounds kinda' weird in the digital realm. You'll have to trust me on this one.
Tremendously transparent, absolutely un-compressed, lending humbucking pickups a single-coil-like touch sensitivity, and just generally juicing the harmonic content of every note whilst slamming the front of your amp and upping sustain, the Codpiece is a Burroughs-ian "Steely Dan", indeed. It'll be taking the place of my Fulltone Plimsoul at pretty much any gig that doesn't require out-and-out distortion. There's long been the legend of the magic "black box" that makes bog-standard guitarists into instant rock gods; this box ain't quite that (no such thing exists), but it's as close as I've ever got. A sure-fire winner. Makes me wanna' go out and get a Super Hard-on to compare it to, but them things are rare and expensive, so that ain't likely to happen. In the meantime, I'll be pickin' and grinnin' like a fool through this amazing pedal, happily knowing that the former editor of Guitar Player magazine (early nineties), who wrote about all the things that mattered to me at the time, sweat over this thing in his San Francisco apartment, and, judging by the wear and tear, poked a whole lot of tone through it, too.
Thanks again, Joe, for this amazing device, for all the great advice and inspiration, for all the great music and your ability to articulate how its made in a way that educated fools like myself can digest, and for teaching me a lot about how to write this kind of jizz-jazz. Cheers. -clink-
- Pedal Time! 1967 Vox Tone Bender
guitarz.blogspot.com Another great vintage fuzz pedal (yes, I'm quite into pedals lately, and mostly in fuzz boxes), the Vox Tone Bender. Even more than in the field of early electric guitars, the dawn of effect pedal is both full of myths...
- Huge Lot Of Hand Wired Custom Guitar Pedals In Oshkosh Wi Area - At Good $
This seller has been building some nice pedals and he is offering them for a pretty good price. Note that he doesn't do any screening on the pedals so the knobs are not marked and there are no logos - still he's got some cool DIY pedals...
- Dunlop Jh-2 Jimi Hendrix Fuzz, Revisited.
Much maligned and misunderstood, the Dunlop JH-2 just needs a little patience and understanding.... The first gear review and video I ever put together was to do with the Dunlop JH-2 Jimi Hendrix fuzz, which you can read here. I pointed out...
- The Fulltone Plimsoul -from Subtlety To Saturation
I gave up using any kind of overdrive/distortion/fuzz unit back in 1994, immediately after I got my first really toneful guitar: my 1993 Gibson ES-335 (featured in many pictures and videos on this blog). At that time two significant things happened:...
- The Dunlop Jimi Hendrix Jh-2 Fuzz
The much maligned JH-2 fuzz Here's one for the fuzz-heads and guitar-geeks! I offer for your edification, the Dunlop JH-2 Jimi Hendrix Fuzz, considered by many to be the steaming doggie coil of the fuzziverse. I purchased this stunning...
Guitar
Joe Gore Pedals Codpiece: the embiggener
 |
| What's in a name? A hell of a lot, it would seem... |
There's nothing quite like receiving a package that you've been waiting for, semi-patiently anticipating the joyous christmas-morning like rush of tearing open a parcel containing new stuff.
Friday morning was one of those lovely occasions. Joe Gore, the guitarist par excellence, writer, blogger, editor, pedal builder, etc.,(ad nauseum), was to send me a mystery pedal of his design for helping launch his new online forum; I simply over-posted like a mad bastard for a month or two, and wham, bam, thank you ma'am, Joe gifted me one of his DIY pedals. It's called the Codpiece. It's an apt name, because this well-loved, scuffed up little project box simply makes everything bigger.
I wasn't sure what it was exactly when I first plugged it in; it provides a walloping volume boost, but it's more than just a boost pedal. It provides some overdrive at higher settings, but it's clearly not intended to replace your overdrive pedal. It seems to enrich everything, boosting harmonics, as well as volume, and smacking the bejeezus out of the front end of your amp. Honestly, I'm not even sure what the bottom knob does (I suspect some bias controlled tone scheme, that doesn't act like a tone knob, particularly), but it doesn't matter; set both knobs at noon, and everything gets really pretty and hyper-focused, as though your guitar just dropped something elicit. Emailing back and forth with Joe, I was at first a little baffled by it, then, after taking it to a gig, amazed and enthralled. I ventured the guess that it was perhaps based on the Z. Vex SuperHard-on? Joe responded thusly:
"Same quadrant of the tone galaxy — but yours is JFET-based, and the SHO uses a MOSFET. To my ear, the SHO sounds a little juicier on its own, but your pedal blends a little nicer with other gain stages. It's really nice after a germanium distortion..."
Currently, I have no germanium fuzz in my life (honey...no, it's important, really...), but tonight I brought the old Jimi Hendrix fuzz to the gig; the Dunlop JH-2 is a difficult fuzz, really splattery and prone to collapsing in on itself. It needs outside help just to reach unity gain, despite having ridiculously high-gain transistors, and just generally does not play nice with others- amps, effects, guitars, you name it. Basically, if the Codpiece could do for this troublesome fuzz what it was doing for my "clean" tone, I would forever be in it's thrall. It did. I mean, I'm still futzing with precise balances, (and things got away from me here and there), but the Codpiece brought that crazy diamond into focus and projected the harmonic rainbow across the room like a fuzz planetarium. I was grinning like a fool tearing into a Magic-Sam-meets-Billy-Gibbons-meets-Jack-White take on Slim Harpo's "Hipshake", getting a fat'n'evil rasp with loads of low-end booty out of my usually rather staid rig. Blunderbuss, indeed!
 |
| Ah, true love at last! (Only took twenty-two years...) |
Now, usually I'd do a demo and video to demonstrate the wonders of a piece of gear. Unfortunately, my home studio blows and I can pretty much only record direct without making my landlord's family and mine, insane. So no juicing up the Deluxe Reverb for the edification of the interweb. Without a real studio to record it, quality mics and good fidelity, there's no point. MP3's won't translate the nuance, and frankly, the Codpiece sounds kinda' weird in the digital realm. You'll have to trust me on this one.
Tremendously transparent, absolutely un-compressed, lending humbucking pickups a single-coil-like touch sensitivity, and just generally juicing the harmonic content of every note whilst slamming the front of your amp and upping sustain, the Codpiece is a Burroughs-ian "Steely Dan", indeed. It'll be taking the place of my Fulltone Plimsoul at pretty much any gig that doesn't require out-and-out distortion. There's long been the legend of the magic "black box" that makes bog-standard guitarists into instant rock gods; this box ain't quite that (no such thing exists), but it's as close as I've ever got. A sure-fire winner. Makes me wanna' go out and get a Super Hard-on to compare it to, but them things are rare and expensive, so that ain't likely to happen. In the meantime, I'll be pickin' and grinnin' like a fool through this amazing pedal, happily knowing that the former editor of Guitar Player magazine (early nineties), who wrote about all the things that mattered to me at the time, sweat over this thing in his San Francisco apartment, and, judging by the wear and tear, poked a whole lot of tone through it, too.
Thanks again, Joe, for this amazing device, for all the great advice and inspiration, for all the great music and your ability to articulate how its made in a way that educated fools like myself can digest, and for teaching me a lot about how to write this kind of jizz-jazz. Cheers. -clink-
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| Check out the ingenious tilt on the input/output jacks. DIY at it's finest. |
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| One transistor, on JFET, all kinds of magic. |
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| It's Gore-ific!! |
- Pedal Time! 1967 Vox Tone Bender
guitarz.blogspot.com Another great vintage fuzz pedal (yes, I'm quite into pedals lately, and mostly in fuzz boxes), the Vox Tone Bender. Even more than in the field of early electric guitars, the dawn of effect pedal is both full of myths...
- Huge Lot Of Hand Wired Custom Guitar Pedals In Oshkosh Wi Area - At Good $
This seller has been building some nice pedals and he is offering them for a pretty good price. Note that he doesn't do any screening on the pedals so the knobs are not marked and there are no logos - still he's got some cool DIY pedals...
- Dunlop Jh-2 Jimi Hendrix Fuzz, Revisited.
Much maligned and misunderstood, the Dunlop JH-2 just needs a little patience and understanding.... The first gear review and video I ever put together was to do with the Dunlop JH-2 Jimi Hendrix fuzz, which you can read here. I pointed out...
- The Fulltone Plimsoul -from Subtlety To Saturation
I gave up using any kind of overdrive/distortion/fuzz unit back in 1994, immediately after I got my first really toneful guitar: my 1993 Gibson ES-335 (featured in many pictures and videos on this blog). At that time two significant things happened:...
- The Dunlop Jimi Hendrix Jh-2 Fuzz
The much maligned JH-2 fuzz Here's one for the fuzz-heads and guitar-geeks! I offer for your edification, the Dunlop JH-2 Jimi Hendrix Fuzz, considered by many to be the steaming doggie coil of the fuzziverse. I purchased this stunning...