Talent = Pedals

Today I picked up my J200 from the luthier. I haven’t tried it yet. I bought a new PEDAL on the way home! Every electric guitarist knows practice and talent mean nothing; it’s all in the pedals. So I buy a new one about every ten minutes. Today I chose a Fulltone Plimsoul.

This thing is amazing. I wanted to get a tone that sounded hot, without losing all the treble grit. I tried a Way Huge Fat Sandwich, and it’s great, but the distortion is so powerful you can’t always get it to work with your guitars. I tried a Way Huge Pork Loin, and it has some nice sounds, but it tends to kill the treble. Today I’m trying a Fulltone Plimsoul, and it does EVERYTHING well.

This is supposedly an improvement on the Fulltone OCD, which is a respected overdrive pedal. The neat thing about the Plimsoul is that it has two independently adjustable overdrive stages. One is fairly soft (no treble edge), and the other is harder. You can get a nice warm sound using the first stage, and then you can sharpen up the edge with the second. When I do this, I can play slow blues with my neck pickup, and I get a big, fat, round sound that’s still so hot it makes you feel like you just opened the oven door.

I’m also using a “new” guitar: my old American Roadhouse Strat. I love this thing, but it’s been put away, because I put elevens on it, and I wasn’t ready for them. Changing string gauges on a Strat is a pain, because you have to adjust the springs on the trem bar. Lighter strings lower the bridge, and you have to bring it back up.

The Roadhouse Strat is not all that popular. I don’t know why. I love it. It has three Texas Special pickups, which are hot-sounding single-coils. They used to make a Texas something or other Strat that had a humbucker at the bridge, and I think that was more popular, but I think the Roadhouse is fantastic. It has tremendous clarity, heat, and responsiveness, and you can hear it through a brick wall, so it would probably sound good right through a band.

I thought the Strat might be what made the pedal sound good, so I plugged in my magical Chinese Epiphone Riviera, and it sounded exactly the way I’ve been wanting it to for weeks. I can actually hear the individual notes on “Sweet Home Chicago.”

One thing I didn’t expect: I can get even more tones by using the Plimsoul and my Way Huge Pork Loin and Fat Sandwich, in various combinations. I feel like I finally have a little control over my sound.

I showed the Chinese Epiphone to my luthier, and he admitted the neck was a thing of wonder. Are they all this good? He had a Chinese Les Paul on his lap when I came in, and he didn’t seem too excited about it. He seemed to think the Riviera (and presumably other 335 clones) were designed better. If that’s true, it’s time for people to run out and get Epiphone 335 clones before the Chinese screw them up. You may hate the pickups, but for $200, you can have any pickups you want.

Here’s something funny: he plays an Eastman. This is a Chinese guitar made by a company known for violins. Obviously, a luthier sees a lot of instruments, and he knows what’s good. When he played the Epiphone, he said for a minute, he almost felt like he was playing the Eastman. That was his way of saying it had a great action.

I no longer have any excuse for buying electric guitars. I have seven now, and they’re all at least very good, and four are wonderful. I’d love to have an Epiphone Casino, but they’re fully hollow, so I would expect a lot of feedback. The Riviera is great, but I think the third pickup is pointless. I guess I could rewire it with the middle pickup cut out of the system.

I talked to the lead guitarist from my church, and here is what I gathered: the CAGED system I have been busting my rear end studying is pretty useless unless you know theory first. Great news. There has to be a way to “get inside” the guitar without selling your soul to the devil, but I have not found it yet. My technique is getting better, but technique is useless if you can’t sight-read, improvise, and write music. I may have to break down and take lessons. Maybe I should find a jazz instructor. I am not really interested in jazz, but I figure a jazz player can handle anything the blues has to offer.

I finally have equipment good enough to not drive me insane, so I guess I can think more about woodshedding and study. It’s hard to think about those things when your tone or the bad actions on your instruments are making you climb the walls. I know I’m picky, because I can’t make myself leave the truss rod covers on any of my guitars except my Taylor, my Fenders, and my Epiphone. Those guitars always seem ready to go, but when the others move a couple of thousandths one way or the other, I notice it right away, and it’s very distracting. I think the Historys and the Burny will be okay as I home in on the right setups, but the Gibson Blueshawk will probably always be a little crazy, because it wasn’t made all that well.

You can’t blame Gibson for making guitars with wavy necks. After all, they don’t have the advantages of half-trained Chinese labor and a $500 price point.

Back to practicing.