| My Instruments, |
| being |
| An Enumeration |
| of |
| Implements Of A Musical Nature |
| (in the proud possession of) |
| THEE AUTHOR, |
| -- or: -- |
| What, no Vox?! |
In which the Author frivolously expands on all Sorts of Objects of an electro-acoustic Ability in his personal Possession, ordered per category in approximate order of acquisition. With Pictures for the Elucidation of the Esteemed Reader!
Actually my current collection is a lot smaller than it would seem from this page. I lost a couple of guitars when my home got burgled in 2006. Lots of the effects here are gone, sold, give away, swapped, broken and thrown out or simply gone missing in action. I've put daggers up here and there where applicable, but haven't got round to adapting the descriptions accordingly.
All I'm using regularly right now are the Rickenbacker 330, Big Muff and London City Hornet.
The Electric Guitars: Aria Pro II TA-30, Rickenbacker 381V69, Danelectro 59-DC, Rickenbacker 330, Dray Special Phantom Mk VI Semi Acoustic, Stagg Jaguar, Italia Modena, Squier Vista Venus XII, Squier Telecaster, Kramer Focus VT111S. The Acoustic Guitars: Epi D-16, Ibanez PF-10-12, Oscar Schmidt OG-2. Other Stringed Instruments: Collins CB-4T Tenor Banjo, Harley Benton 50E Mandolin, Apple Creek Mountain Dulcimer. The Amplifiers: London City Bulldog, Danelectro Honeytone, Electar Tube 10, EKO Viscount, Selmer Truvoice Bassmaster Fifty, Yamaha JX-25, Vox AC1. The Organs: Farfisa Organ, Viscount Intercontinental. The Pedals: Big Muff, George Dennis Wah-Wah, Ibanez CP9, Ibanez BN5, Kampo Tube Pedal 901, Danelectro DJ-5 Tuna Melt, George Dennis 135 Tube Pedal, Schaller Stomp Box, Suicidal Power Supply, DIY Wah, George Dennis 125 Tremolo Ping Pong.
The Original Sander van Malssen Guitar. Bought it in 1985 at Servaas in The Hague (it's now a pub/micro brewery with English style ales, so I've had no reason to stop going there) and used it as my main guitar (alright, mostly as my only guitar) ever since. Had it painted black because I didn't like the original colour (which was a different kind of black), got rid of the pickguard and replaced the original let's-pretend-we're-humbucker pickups with honest-to-god Schaller humbuckies. Still doing quite well after two decades!
In the late nineties I was looking for a guitar which was a) a Rickenbacker model three-something, and b) black. It just happened that there was this guitar shop in Amsterdam that was selling this second-hand ricky 381V69. I had never heard of the model before, and evidently neither had the shop, because they sold it to me for what turned out to be quite a lot less than what it should actually be worth. Lucky me! Plays beautifully. It's too heavy though - wouldn't want to have this baby hanging on my shoulder for a whole night. I'm probably going to sell it sometime, and use the money to buy a garden variety 330 and a new car or something.
Although these guitars are made of cheap materials (like plastic and hardboard), they're actually very well constructed. Only trouble I've had (as any Dano owner will be able to tell you) is that the strap pin tends to fall out when the guitar is played too vigorously, as I found out on stage during the Dragnet 3's 2001 tour of England. Winding a scrap of paper around it and banging it home with my wah-wah pedal solved the problem.
It had to happen, I suppose... Pief wanted his Rickenbacker 330 back, so I had to go out and buy one of my own. Which I did (I mean, it's been months since I last bought a guitar).
This guitar is my current 1-2-5 guitar.
Just picked up from a friend of mine in Toronto who built this guitar for me: a hand crafted Vox Phantom Mk VI clone, except that this is a semi-acoustic version, with a Rickenbacker style sound hole. Unique in the whole world!
The only control knob is a volume control - I never use the tone controls on my other guitars anyway, and besides, the pickup selector is effectively a tone control, right? Aditionally it has a little "Pete Townshend" switch, another first on a guitar as far as I know.
(A "Pete Townshend" switch is an on/off switch for recreating Mr Townshend's "manual tremolo" as can be heard on many an early Who performance.)
I wanted a bass. So I got this Jaguar-type Stagg one.
I always liked the look of the Italia retro guitars, and was planning to buy one some time. Just recently I moved to Rotterdam, and guess what, about a 30 seconds' walk from my new place there's a huge music store having a clearout sale (because they're moving away to new premises, alas), and guess what, they're the only shop I've ever been in that had Italia guitars in store. So I walked out with this Modena!
[NOTE: This item recently disappeared when my place was burgled, dammit!]
A rather nice sounding 12-string guitar with a rather gorgeous retro look that was built by Squier for a short while around 1997-1998 or so. I went into a guitar shop one day and it just called out to me.
[NOTE: This item recently disappeared when my place was burgled, dammit!]
Bought this one for no particular reason at all, really. It's just getting to be a habit now, buying a new guitar every now and then. Just a standard Fender Telecaster. Well, Squier I mean. Affinity, really. Sounds like a tele!
[NOTE: This item recently disappeared when my place was burgled, dammit!]
And in the early 2000's I was looking for a guitar which was a) cheap and b) black, as a backup guitar for gigs for my then new band, the late, lamented Dragnet 3. I ended up with this little baby. Though not actually black amazingly enough, it's really a pretty good Stratocaster clone for a seriously cheap price. I'd never thought that Gibson (who own the Kramer label these days) would sink so low as to build Fender copies though! What's next, a Squier Les Paul clone?! You can actually buy these by the sixpack or something. Now even the budding guitarist on a budget can afford to put My Generation on their setlist!
Old hand-me-down acoustic dreadnought guitar. Hand-me-sideways actually, it belonged to my brother before. An Epiphone guitar, as confirmed to me by a Canadian reader of these pages.
Newer acoustic 12-string dreadnought guitar. Bought for an aborted attempt to start a folkrock duo with jazz singer Noortje Kruijk in the early 1990's, the idea being that by removing the six extra strings I'd have a six-string with the strings a bit wider apart than normal, thus to facilitate playing actual individually articulated notes as is usually required for this kind of music. Didn't help, it still did sound awful. Noortje and I knew the end was neigh when we started spending our rehearsal afternoons watching old movies on TV instead.
In an act of pure reprocibility this one's been handed sideways to my brother for his folkrock endeavours.
The Epi is a little fragile (it had a broken neck in the distant past), so I thought I'd rather not start mucking around with alternate tunings on it to keep string tension a bit stable. So I walked into the local music shop the other day and asked for the cheapest acoustic they had, and this is what I walked out with!
It's a tenor banjo! Hey, these things are actually rather easy to play, it's amazing how much easier it is to play riffs if you only have four strings to worry about.
Sort of the same thing regarding playability as what I said about the banjo above, but in addition it's very cute and small and light to boot! Trying to play chords on it is going to be out of the question I think, comparing the size of my fingers to the size of the fretboard.
Nice little Rumanian built mountain (or Appalachian) dulcimer, like the two instruments mentioned above meant for folk and folk-rock purposes. Very light and it looks very easy to play. Working out arrangements for it is going to be a bit more complicated though, what with all the semi-tones missing from the fretboard.
Using my EKO and Selmer in parallel was getting a little cumbersome after a while, and their health was starting to get a little wobbly, so I thought I'd better replace them with a new tube amp, and this is it. Actually I was aiming for its little 50W brother, the Hornet, but they didn't have that one at the music shop, so I ended up with this thing, which is still rather cumbersome, but at least the sound guys won't have to scratch their heads so much miking it out.
My bedroom amp. Doesn't sound as good as the AC1, but it does run from an unregulated wallwart without too much hum, which the AC1 doesn't.
The main Guitar Room amp. Yup, it's that notorious cheapo, Internet mailorder-only tube amp that used to be available from eu.musicyo.com (they've since retreated from the European theatre of operations). Electar is a cheap label of Epiphone's, which is a cheap label of Gibson's, or something like that. It's a fun little amp, and evidently rather amenable to home modification. Perfectly fine litte valve amp. Having only one power tube it must be a Class A amp, and it seems to produce about 6 Watts RMS, so if you stack four or five of them on top of each other, well, then you'll have a really silly looking poor man's AC30!
The former 1-2-5 and Pete and Tommy's Day Out touring amp. Eko didn't just make guitars apparently, they also made organs and amps, like this one, clearly inspired by the Vox AC30 with its "vibrato" and 4 EL84 tubes producing an estimated 30 Watts. See right below for how I had it rigged up.
The other former 1-2-5 and Pete and Tommy's Day Out touring amp.
These amps were originally built between 1963 and 1965, for use both as a guitar and as a bass amp. It's the early version of the Treble and Bass 50, which was more or less the standard Selmer guitar amp head for many years from the early sixties till the late seventies.
I'm using it now in combo with my EKO, with the EKO taking care of the highs and the Selmer taking care of the lows. Sweet!
I have it stacked on top of a Laney cabinet (the local music store was having a blow-out) sitting op top of a Roland cabinet (the other music store was having a blow-out too), with the EKO standing next to it on its side. The EKO plugs into the Laney, the Selmer into the Roland.
For Pete and Tommy's Day Out purposes the lot was embellished with a UK flag, as sort of can be seen on the right-hand side of the EKO photograph, except of course that this picture doesn't show the Selmer yet.
Formerly the Guest Amp in the Guitar Room. So so amp for home use. Well, it does have that nasty tinny tran-sis-tuh distortion that we sixties snobs love to hate.
Actually I couldn't really use it on the road even if I wanted to, because the power transformer broke and I replaced it with a different one I had lying around, which was a lot bigger that the original and wouldn't fit, so it's just lying loose around there in the bottom of the enclosure and if you took this amp with you on tour it would probably fall out and rip loose the wiring the first time the van hits the cobblestones that Dutch road workers are so fond of laying down on our fair roads and byways.
Ah. Look, a real Vox at last. It is nominally my living room amp. Sound's not bad at all for a piece of plastic!
It's an organ! From Farfisa! That's all I can tell you about it at the moment, since I haven't seen the thing for years (some 'Net research seems to indicate it's a Compact Professional I though). First it sat at my brother's place for a couple of years ever since the end of The 1-2-5 World Tour of 1998 (ahem), then I lent it to Massimo (of The Others fame) for use in his new band, The Hangmen. Now why am I up here freezing my bum off in chilly Netherlands while my Farfisa is down in sunny Rome? I'm too good for my babies, that's it!
Big beast. Heavy luggage. Theoretically portable. Lots of knobs to twist and buttons to press. I'm sure the perfect sound is out there hiding between all the endless combinations, but never completely got there throughout all the years I've used it.
Big Muff. Finally broke down and got me a fuzz that doesn't have any fancy stuff that breaks all the time.
Also purchased in 1998. Perfect pedal. Another pavement cracking quality case. Plug guitar in one end. Plug amplifier in other end. Apply foot and go wah-wah! No knobs, nothing. Perfect. Whatever it is that the BN5 symbolically says about the times we're living in, it is appearantly not as bad as it suggests. Whatever it is. It's also useful as a hammer (see above). And to wedge the drummer's bass drum in place (its current occupation).
A Compressor/Limiter! Whoa! Must have used it a lot in the past, because it looked as good as new when I bought it second-hand in 1986 and it doesn't now, but I can't really remember whatever I used it for.
By the way, compare its physique to that of the:
Some sort of distortion pedal, which I bought for The 1-2-5 World Tour of 1998. Actually sounds quite well with the distortion level all the way down.
Look at that dinky plastic box it's in though! If you throw this thing out of a second floor window, you've got a cracked pedal. If you throw the CP9 out of the same window, you've got a cracked pavement. This is probably highly symbolic of the times we live in, or something.
Mr George Dennis also made a distortion pedal that tries to recreate the sound of an overloaded tube amplifier by putting an actual tube inside the pedal, which is exactly the sort of joke I like. It was rather expensive though, and it wasn't as if I was actually playing regularly at the time, so I didn't buy it. But now we lucky Europeans can go and mail order this little thing from Conrad Electronics - looks like it's a clone of the US made Tube Works 901 or something (it says concopt and doslgn in USA in happy yellow letters on the front), and it's a lot cheaper than either the George Dennis pedal or the real Tube Works thing.
Nice distortion, and if you turn the gain almost all the way down it makes a fine pre-amp to give that little Yamaha amp a pretty good tubey sound. I have this one earmarked for some home tinkering, once I've got the schematics worked out. (Or at least for some tube swapping. You're not a proper guitar geek until you've swapped your tubes.)
Awwwwww, coooooochiecoochiecoochiecoo! Very nice tremolo, surprisingly good sound, good range. The boys and girls at Danelectro certainly know how to boogie! True, another dinky little plastic box, but its small size makes it rather sturdy anyway. If you twist both knobs to max it's also good for faking surf guitar playing without the need for all that frantic right-hand action you'd otherwise have to engage in.
Remember what I said a few paragraphs above about the George Dennis Tube pedal and why I didn't buy it? Well, keep a keen eye on the Internet and you're bound to bump into an online music shop having a sale on whatever it is you heart desires.
The rocker pedal on top doubles as an on/off switch and to control volume, though the apparently linear taper makes it rather useless as a volume pedal. But that's not what I bought it for anyway. Since the stomp switch of the Kampo pedal has been acting up a little (or a lot rather) of late I'm employing the GD135 as my current working fuzz.
And this box puts even the CP9 to shame when it comes to sturdiness. It's not just as solid as a brick, it even looks like one. Because you can't quickly replace the battery I used to have it screwed onto its own private home-built power supply, fitted in a wobbly plastic box with lots of big holes in it (leftovers from previous "experiments"). Scary, especially when playing through it during an outdoor gig in the pouring rain. Since I'm a bit older and wiser now (and I actually know now what 220 Volts feel like - previous "experiments" again) I've removed the power supply, which I've pictured separately below for your amusement.
The piece of gaffer tape is probably early nineties vintage.
Here's a piece of home improvement that I can actually be proud of. I used to occasionally build my own effects in former days, but even when the electronics actually worked finding a good case for it was always a bit of a problem (especially because the whole goal of the exercise was to save money, which is a common mistake that young musicians with a soldering iron often make). This one worked though: take an existing volume pedal and stuff some wah-wah circuitry inside. Got me George Dennis now so it's not in use, but I'm still proud of it. Hums a bit because the circuitry's not shielded, but hey, the point was cheapness, not quality.
Not really useful to use a stereo effect if the two amps you use are
stacked on top of each other, but the idea is that this way I have
separate outputs to feed into my amps.
@