Before the days of the Internet, the world of “known” guitarists was limited to what you heard on the radio or saw on MTV or by word of mouth. But today, we’ve got all sorts of sources for discovering great musicians. The Dawg often trolls the Internet in search of guitarists, and he’s found some great talent. In an effort to help spread the word about these guys and gals, I’ve decided to create a new section on the site to showcase some of the incredible guitar work that I’ve discovered.
The first guitarist I want to showcase is a guy from Mexico, named Cesar Huesca. I found him on YouTube when I was looking for Steve Vai videos, and this guy covered one of Vai’s songs. His technique is nothing short of incredible, and he’s got great expressiveness on the fretboard. I would call his style “melodic shred,” similar to Vai and Satch and Vinnie Moore. This dude absolutely ROCKS!!! Here are a couple of videos:
Cover of Steve Vai’s Tender Surrender
One of Cesar’s Own Songs – Rockin’ Red Carpet (This Totally Rocks!)
Posted in guitarists, Guitars | 1 Comment »
Okay, yet another product review on a fairly mundane piece of gear, but hey, sometimes you have to be practical!
A few years ago, I was pretty spoiled when it came toting guitar gear around. I was using a Line 6 Flextone III as my amp, and as a modeling amp with all sorts of effects built in, the only thing I needed to hook up to my amp was my floorboard and guitar. That all changed when I moved to a tube amp for performance. All the things that I used to do to tweak my sound were no longer built into the amp! I had to get effect pedals to get the types of sounds I wanted.
At first, I only had a couple of pedals, so just putting them into my guitar’s gig bag wasn’t a problem. Then I got a couple of more pedals, so I started carrying my pedals and cables in an unused large camera bag. Still, it wasn’t a problem. Once I got to seven pedals, it became a problem. At every gig, I’d have to hook up the pedals to each other, not to mention having to hook up my 1 Spot power cable. What once was a five minute affair was now taking up to 20 minutes to get everything set up and dailed in. So I broke down and bought a pedal board.
There are lots of boards on the market. You can get them custom made, or go with fully powered units. For me, my needs were simple. I wanted a board that could carry up to 8 pedals, and I didn’t want a powered board. The reason was that most powered boards only provide 9V power for all the connections, and I have a couple of pedals that can take18V. Also, powered boards run pretty expensive (for an 8 to 10 pedal board, expect to pay close to $200). There are other powered boards that take 6 pedals, but that wasn’t a real option for me. Enter the Gator Pedal Tote.
The Pedal Tote is a non-powered, inclined pedal board made of 8-ply plywood. It’s covered in black tolex, and topped with small loop carpet. It comes with two 1-inch strips of velcro (about 2 1/2 feet all in all) to stick to the bottom of your pedals. I love the sturdiness of this board. The only beef I have with it is that Gator doesn’t come enough velcro for eight pedals. I had to go down to an arts and crafts store to buy more sticky-back velcro in order to attach all my pedals to the board. Not a big deal, just a minor inconvenience.
So how do I like it? I love it! It’s built like a tank, and has made my life a lot easier. Set up and strike are simple, five-minute affairs now.
Posted in Effects, gear, gear reviews, guitar, guitar gear | 2 Comments »
Talk about putting a product through its paces! My Mac fatally crashed yet again! Yikes! When that happened, I didn’t panic because based upon Boyd Jarvis’ input in my previous article on my Mac crashing, I went down to my local Apple store, and purchased a copy of Disk Warrior. I also talked to a few of the folks about Disk Warrior, and they said that’s the utility to get, so I also wasn’t bothered by spending the $99 I spent on it (it would also come in handy as I have another Mac at home that I purchased used with a corrupted drive).
Anyway, I got home all excited to repair my disk and be up and running. I opened up the box, inserted the disk in the drive, and patiently watched it do its thing. I watched in horror as Disk Warrior report that my drive was so messed up, it couldn’t be fully recovered. Looks like I have a real bad sector on my disk. So with a shrug, I opened up disk utility, re-partitioned my drive; this time making two: One really small one to isolate the bad sectors at the beginning of the drive, and another large partition. But I still wasn’t too worried because I had my data backed up with Time Machine.
To make a long story short, near the end of the installation, Installer asked me if I wanted to transfer information from a variety of sources. One source was Time Machine. Cool! I though to myself, I’ll have my data ready to go and not have to worry about finding it in the vault! That was a plus, though I was dreading having to install my applications again. Was I in for a surprise!
I let out a huge WHOOP when the restoration process not only restored my data, but also restored all my applications!!! I just simply had to let it do its thing! Now I’m back in business. No smell. No mess. No spending hours installing, and I didn’t lose any of the latest songs I recently recorded in GarageBand! YIPEE!!!
Now that I think about it, it’s a bit creepy that my last article turned out to be self-fulfilling prophecy… Well, at least I know now that with Time Machine, I can replace my drive and get everything back. Talk about being stoked!!!
Posted in GarageBand, gear, Guitars, iMac, mac, recording | Leave a Comment »
Actually, this goes for any Mac user: BACK UP YOUR MACHINE!!! Spend $100 on a decent FireWire drive, and save your life!
I was going to go into the horror story first, but I decided to just come out with the point of this article instead. About a month ago, my iMac started acting up, running real slow. So I closed all my running programs, and shut down and restarted my machine. To my horror, when the machine tried to boot up, I just got a folder icon with a flashing “?” onscreen. I didn’t panic. I opened my software file cabinet, got my install disks, and ran the disk utility, only to find that my disk was unrepairable. My only option was to reformat the drive and re-install the operating system.
What was the result? Though I had backups of completed GarageBand songs made, I lost ALL my GarageBand project files! That’s hours and hours of work that is simply gone. While I’m happy with the quality of the finished stuff (for demo purposes), I’m in no way happy with the fact that I don’t have the source files in order to make tweaks. After that experience, I saved a bit of money to buy a backup drive, and upgrade OSX to Leopard.
Among Leopards fine virtues is a no-brainer backup utility called “Time Machine.” Just plug in an external drive. Finder will pop-up a Time Machine dialog box asking you if you’d like to use the new drive as a backup. Select “Yes,” and that’s all you have to do! No thinking, no complex setup. Time Machine does it all for you. I won’t go into a lot of technical or usage details about it, though I did learn that you should let Time Machine run its initial imaging overnight. It takes several hours, and if you’re using your machine while it’s running, it’ll take longer. But once it’s done, Time Machine works automagically, continuously checking for changes to existing files and backing up new files – all in the background! With this ease-of-use, you’d be a fool to not go out right away and get a decent drive.
Myself, I got a Maxtor One-Touch III 320GB FireWire drive at my local electronics store for $99.00. It’s a decent drive with middle of the road performance. I didn’t need a 10K rpm drive. I just needed something that would back up my files – especially my GarageBand files! To test this, I created a new GB project and saved it immediately. After that, I opened up Time Machine and was pleasantly relieved to see that the file got backed up immediately! What a wonderful utility.
Even if you don’t have Leopard – get a backup drive anyway. Most drives, like my One-Touch, come with backup management software. They’re not as easy to use as Time Machine as they require a bit of configuration, but doing regular backups can save you hours or days of work!
Posted in GarageBand, recording, songs | 6 Comments »
A power supply? I know, kind of mundane, but if you’re still using 9V batteries, you might want to rethink your power supply needs. Here’s a common situation: You’re in the middle of a set, and your beautifully clean tone starts getting kind of fuzzy. It’s not too bad at first, but worsens as the gig progresses. You look down at your effect pedals, and one pedal’s light seems to be a bit dimmer than it normally is. You realize the battery is going dead. So after the song, you go back to your gig bag to get another 9V. You’re shocked to find that you don’t have a spare!
That situation happened to me this past weekend. I recently added a couple of pedals to my chain, but because my 1-Spot only had 5 connectors, I had to use batteries in my new pedals. The batteries were only a couple of weeks old, so I thought I was safe. Was I ever wrong. I had to rewire my signal chain to bypass those pedals. It wasn’t so bad, but it was a pain in the ass because I was in the middle of a set. After this experience, I decided to look into getting a more robust power supply that could power all my pedals.
So why the DCB10? Simply because as far as power supplies are concerned, I think it’s the best one I’ve ever had! It has 7 9V connections, and 3 18V connections – plenty to power up most boards. What really excites me about this pedal are the 18V connections. I have a Fulltone OCD that can take 9V or 18V power. At 18V, the headroom on the pedal just soars! But I digress… In addition to all the connections, the unit doesn’t introduce any hum. My 1 Spot could get a little noisy, and was a bit of frustration point for me. But the brick makes my chain as quiet as can be. A lot of this has to do with the fact that in addition to being a power supply, the Brick is also a power regulator/conditioner, so you get a consistent current going to your pedals at all times. This also means that you have built-in surge protection, which could be fatal to your pedals.
The Brick is also built like a tank, with a heavy-duty metal casing, so it is definitely a road-worthy power supply. Finally, the Brick can be used with any power source, from 110 to 240 (you’ll have to get an adapter for 240), which means you could gig anywhere in the world and not have to worry about swapping out your pedal board’s power supply.
Price: $190 retail / $99 – $109 street
A note about pricing: If you look for this on EBay, make sure you figure the shipping costs into the total price you pay. A lot of EBay vendors list the Brick for $99, but charge $19.95 for shipping. I bought mine from a local shop for $109 flat. Caveat Emptor!
Posted in Effects, gear, gear reviews, guitar, guitar gear, Guitars, pedals | 3 Comments »
A few years ago, I was going through a very hard time: Couldn’t find a job, and financially, I was flat broke with six kids and a huge mortgage. I hocked practically everything I had to just stay afloat. But to make a long story short, at what was probably my lowest point, I suddenly got the resolve to fight, to ignore the advice of close friends on selling my house and leaving the area my wife and I both grew up in. Thus this song was born, inspired by something I said to a friend, “Look, it’s my struggle to face, for wrong or for right…”
I know my friend meant well, but the point of my reply to her several suggestions was that she was simply a spectator to what I was going through at the time. I have to live wit the choices I make. This song is about self-awareness and integrity, and knowing what’s important in life. I hope you enjoy it!
For Wrong Or For Right (http://www.icompositions.com/music/song.php?sid=76544)
Posted in Music, musicians, songs | Leave a Comment »
Ig wrote a great article last week, and challenged his readers to write letters to themselves that they’d read some time in the future; a lot like Marty did for Doc in “Back to the Future.” So I’m going to take a crack at this.
Hey!
Looks like you’ve come a long way. I know you were thinking about giving up playing, but knowing you, you just couldn’t keep away from your passion. Hopefully, you’ve kept driving towards incorporating different kinds of styles into your playing. I know you started a bit late with improvisation on the guitar, but I’m hopeful that you are now a master of it; or short of that, can work your way around the fretboard instinctively, switching modes to suit the musical phrasing.
Speaking of musical phrasing, you must have written a few hundred songs by now. I wonder what style of music you’re writing? It’s a good bet that rock and roll is still your staple, but I hope you haven’t given up your dream of finishing your concerto. I can only imaging what it would be like to combine a full orchestra with a rock band, and a huge choir. While I know that you originally thought that you’d hire a big name to play lead guitar, at the rate you’re going, I hope you decided to play that role yourself.
You’re probably not a shredder – that’s not something that you ever aspired to being. Though I know that learning various techniques to incorporate into your playing have always been one of the earmarks of your learning experience on the guitar. Never forget though, you always need to sound like yourself, be it on guitar, or vocally.
I know it has been a rough road to get to where you are. But what’s life without struggle? How can you learn without making mistakes? But just keep doing what you’re doing. Keep pushing the envelope with your skills. Be happy with all you’ve accomplished, but don’t settle with where you are. Complacency leads to boredom, both inside and out; and you are far from being boring.
Cheers!
Posted in guitar, guitarists, Guitars, Music, musicians | 2 Comments »
When it comes to chorus sounds, Roland/BOSS is pretty much the standard for the last twenty or so years. The CE-2 has especially been very sought-after used pedal 1) for its simplicity and; 2) for it’s analog design. I owned a CE-2 back in the 80’s, and have since kicked myself since I traded it for other hardware – that I don’t use at all anymore! Since then, BOSS has gone through a couple of renditions with the Chorus Ensemble line, and now offers the CE-5 Chorus Ensemble. A pedal that even though digital, sounds pretty darn good.
The CE-2 was a simple affair: Just two knobs for rate and depth, and a single output. With the CE-3, Boss introduced a “stereo-like” affair with two outputs, and three knobs, introducing a “Stereo Mode” knob to control how the outputs generated their sound. The CE-5 does away with the Stereo Mode knob and replaces it with an Effect Level knob, and a dual knob used for Hi- and Lo-cut filters.
In my opinion, the Hi/Lo Cut knob is what makes this pedal special. With it you can really shape your chorus sound from bright and smooth to dripping wet. All in all, you can’t go wrong with this pedal; and for less than $80, it’s a deal.
Starting with this review, I’m going to start giving summary ratings at the bottom of each review, similar to what you’d see in one of the trade rags.
BOSS CE-5 Chorus
- Price: $129 (<$80 street)
- Pros: Very versatile. Can produce a wide range of sounds
- Cons: Can take awhile to dial in the sound you want
- Summary: Great sounding chorus at a great price
Posted in Effects, gear, gear reviews, guitar, guitar gear, Guitars, pedals, Tone | 9 Comments »
Guitar Gear 