music: Bootsy Collins- Back in the Day…Best of Bootsy
Acoustic guitar players have it easy. Their instrument is, well, their insturment. The piece of wood and steel that they hold in their hands is the beginning and the end of their technical quest for perfect tone and feel. How nice it must be.
Electric guitar players have a little more to consider. There is the instrument, which is undoubtedly a very important piece of the puzzle, but when you go electric you have a rig, a chain of boxes and cables and vacuum tubes that end in an amplifier of some kind and a speaker or two. There are a dizzying amount of options to consider. but if you somehow manage to own the right guitar, put the right boxes in the right order, and run them all into the right amplifier, life is sweet.
My rig has been developing over the past year or so. The big steps up have been purchasing the Gibson ES-335, and the Fender Super 210 amp. I’ve thrown a series of stompboxes in between the two, and more or less settled on a crybaby, two tubescreamers (one with extra boost on the low end, the other with gain and tone max’ed out), a flanger, and a compression sustainer. Until today. Today, as Peet said, is a special day, for the Q-Tron arrived in the mail. I’m now the funkiest one in town.
I can only describe this one as the box that makes the bubble sound. There are a host of other things it can do, but i’ve got it set to bubble, somewhere in between late ‘70’s Jerry Garcia, Bootsy, and that opening bass line to Chameleon (and not unlike a certain bass player on songs like Down with Disease and the breakdown to Free, although we are told he used the vintage mu-tron III). It’s the first box in the series right now, even before the crybaby, but I’m thinking of trying it in between the wah and the tubescreamers. Either way there are some interesting combinations to be had. Q-Tron + Flanger make for a cool sound, add distortion and things feed back in an unsatisfactory way until I step away from the amp a little. Semi-hollow guitars are a pain sometimes. I’m working on it.
For now I’m content with just the Q-tron. That bubble sound is the coolest.
So my rig is coming into its own, and my instrument in the larger sense is being revised and honed. A big piece will come next week when I take my guitar to a guy I jammed with a couple times, and we tinker with the electronics. Want more sweep in the mid-section? More headroom on the lead channel? A brighter clean tone? It’s all possible. Plus I can get the tubes checked; there’s been a rattling that indicates something is up. Then what? Replace the cheap tubescreamer with an original model, update the cables and connections, and mount all on a homemade pedal board. Maybe, just maybe a delay pedal.
Fine. Biosphere be rockin’. We’ve done some cleaning and rearranging down there, installed new christmas lights, and turned a section of wall into a chalkboard (aw naw, missa…). We’re playing with a sax and potentially a new keyboardist in the coming weeks. And now with the Q-tron, I get to make that funky bubble sound whenever I want. Acoustic will always have its place for me — it’s how I started playing — but now that I’ve gone electric and have built a halfway decent rig there is no going back.
Posted by davidtaus at September 15, 2005 11:46 PM | TrackBack