First I want to post a thank-you to Charles Johnson at lgf, whose recent entry introduced me to Tommy Emmanuel, C.G.P. – an absolutely amazing guitarist and performer who is just a supreme joy to listen to and watch. I’ve since picked up his new album The Mystery, which is stunning, and ordered a couple of his instructional DVDs, as I really must know how he does some of the magical things he does.

As I’ve been ramping up on the music thing, and replenishing my tools, the last major item on the list is a 6-string acoustic. A quality 6-string acoustic. I’ve been looking at Taylors. Yes, they’re expensive. Yes, they are worth it. I played a few at Guitar Center a couple weeks ago, comparing them to the Martins, Gibsons and others on hand. No contest. I’ve also done a considerable amount of ‘forum research’, reading numerous posts by serious players on the Acoustic Guitar Forum and elsewhere. I’d pretty much had my sights set on their acoustic-electric 614CE, but really wanted something like that in spruce/rosewood. GC had a 914CE, which strays beyond my budget, and some other more expensive ones when I was there.

Hoping Sam Ash might have some to try – plus I needed to pick up a wide strap for the B-Bender – I stopped in there. Didn’t see what I was looking for. So I tried a few Takamines, which were kinda O-K but not what I’m looking for. As I was getting up to leave I spotted this Larrivee on the counter. Never heard of ‘em. I noticed a very impressive-looking premium sibling inside the display case and thought, heck, I’d give the counter model a try. It was a D-03. Even though I wasn’t interested in a Dread’, I loved this guitar immediately. It played effortlessly and had an exceptionally bright-plus-deep sound (the one I miss from my Lyle 12-string) – easily on par in sound and playability with the Taylors. What’s more, they’re considerably less expensive. I started investigating these and have found that I can get their LV-09E from Trinity Guitars or Notable Guitars for about $1000 less than the best price I can find on a comparable Taylor. At this point it looks like the toughest part of the decision will be whether to go with Trinity or Notable.

In the tenacity department, the current score is: Patty – 1; Bureaucrats – 0. As of yesterday, the interminable controversy initiated by the ADS Coordinator at Patty’s school back in May (previously discussed here) has at least been temporarily resolved. It took getting a number of organizations involved and a lot of hours coming up with the documentation to make the school an offer they basically couldn’t refuse, but in the end they did a complete, 180-degree turnabout on their previous, “non-negotiable” positions. She WILL be allowed to continue her coursework there and she WILL be supported in pursuing this upcoming residency session remotely, which means she won’t have to deal with another Survivor experience (summer version). The executive director of the Vermont Human Rights Commission indicated that our long (but effective) proposal to the school included all the documentation needed to “state a prima facie complaint of disability based discrimination“. Apparently the school recognized this as well, as it took less than 24 hours for them to completely change their previously dissonant tune. A formal complaint to the State of Vermont is still an option, but to be honest, even after the incredible amount of emotional stress they put her through this past summer, neither of us is interested in pursuing legal avenues as long as Patty’s able to continue her academic progress unfettered by idiots who don’t know the law. As long as the stress doesn’t result in another MS exacerbation, we probably won’t take this further. Frankly, we’re both drained by the experience and don’t want to have to think about any of it ever again.

So – time to get back to doing some music!!

Almost exactly a month to the day from when I originally placed the order, this arrived via UPS – Fender’s American Nashville B-Bender Telecaster. This git is Sweet… and Heavy, on multiple levels.

I discovered, eventually, that the real reason for the shipping delay was that earlier this year Music123 was absorbed by the Borg of the retail music instrument industry – Guitar Center. Going all the way back to 1977 – I still recall the smug attitudes of the wannabe-guitar-hero salespeople in their Hollywood store when I was shopping for a new Bass – I’ve never liked Guitar Center. The fact that they’re in the process of gobbling up all competition makes me like them even less. Recently I went to their local brick-and-mortar outlet to play some Taylors and bought a guitar strap. The sales guy was nice enough, but it took him freaking 10 minutes and two different checkout computer stations to ring up that single $6 item. First he wanted a credit card. Then decided that wouldn’t work and asked if I had the exact cash. Luckily I did. Kind of the antithesis of those idiotic Visa commercials where we boobs with cash or a check bring the world to a grinding halt because we’re not falling into lockstep with the rest of the Cashless Society.

Anyway, in this particular case, apparently, part of the reorg process involved moving Music123′s inventory from one state to another. This of course is simple economics and logistics, and perfectly reasonable. What was upsetting was the fact that the customer service organization danced around this fact from the time I began inquiring about the delay. And of course they never mentioned anything about the merger with Guitar Center. I got no less than four different stories “explaining” the delay and shipment, which was very frustrating.

To boot, before I discovered that they’d snorted Music123, I had an online chat support session with one of Guitar Center’s reps while looking for an alternate source. I was told by him that Fender’s Nashville B-Bender had been discontinued (a lie, as it turned out, since there’s no reflection of this on Fender’s site, and it’s still in their 2007 price list), and that they didn’t carry them. At that point, though, this new information made it look like Music123 simply didn’t have the item in stock, was trying to get one, and simply wasn’t telling me. That surmise was supported by experience with Music123 the month before, when I’d ordered a supposedly in-stock American Series Telecaster (before I learned about the Nashville), only to be emailed a week or so later with a notice that the item really wasn’t in stock, and that they wouldn’t get any for weeks – so I canceled. In the long run, I’d have probably been better off ordering from some anonymous piker on EBay. Maybe next time. The way my luck works, zZounds will be carrying them next month.

All’s well that ends well, though, as the guitar is just awesome, and if it really is discontinued I’ll consider myself lucky to have picked up one of the last few. It plays like a dream and has an almost infinite range of sounds due to its added Strat-style center pickup and 5-position pickup switch. And I LOVE having only ONE volume and ONE tone knob – I’ll never understand why this didn’t remain the standard for all electric guitars (the Tele’ – at that time called the “Esquire” – was one of, if not the first). The classic ‘twangy’, Luther Perkins Esquire sound is there, but with the right amp setup, it also has balls to spare. This is all before we even talk about the bender mechanism, which gives it a whole other dimension. The thing was shipped, this time, in a not-very-pretty, but very functional molded case, which prevented a repeat of the shipping damage I experienced with the Vintage ’52 Telecaster, which Fender sends out in a stunning, but not-at-all-appropriate-for-shipping tweed ‘suitcase’ case (full disclosure: I may still buy this case for the Nash’, just ‘cuz they’re so damn cool… .

So color me happy, but a little bit sore. The only drawback (well, there are two, but one is due to my own playing habits) is the guitar’s weight. I haven’t actually weighed it, but this puppy is easily the heaviest thing I’ve had hanging around my neck in a long time, maybe ever – including all the basses I’ve played. Not a surprise, really, since the body is almost 2” thick solid hardwood. Some of that hardwood is routed out where the bender mechanism is installed, but that doesn’t make it any lighter. In fact, possibly adding to the weight is the heavy chrome steel plate Fender uses to close up the back. The Parsons/White version uses plexiglass, which I’m sure is considerably lighter. Either way, this thing definitely needs a wide, padded strap, as it’s pretty heavy just for normal playing, plus the bender mechanism is actuated by pulling down on the guitar neck. The other minor nit is a characteristic of the Tele’ shape itself – the cutaway is a little small for my big hands, so if and when I get ripping into any extremely high-end solos, I’ll need to work on hand position up there to squeeze my hand between the ‘horn’ and the neck.

Anyway, let’s contrast this Music123-cum-Guitar Center experience with the superhuman response one gets from zZounds.

I wanted a practice amp. The BXR is just too heavy to lug up and down stairs and I don’t have room for it in my little music studio / computer office anyway. I started scoping a small guitar-only amp and eventually settled on the Roland Cube 60 after some research on the Telecaster Forum and few other places. I placed the order at 3:35pm this last Wednesday afternoon. The amp and some ancillary junk arrived at about 1:30pm – the next day! Less than 24 hours’ from form submission to delivery to my front door! It’s just a mystery to me how they do this. I’ve received pretty much the same response with other stuff I’ve ordered from them. Basically, the item arrives before you even get the tracking information for shipment. And I haven’t found better prices. Needless to say, I highly, highly recommend them and pray to all that is good and holy that Guitar Center never sets their sights on acquiring them.

The Cube, by the way, is mightily impressive – again, on several levels. First, it’s LOUD! I could easily use this thing for a small outdoor gig. THAT kind of loud. Inside gig – no question. You’d never guess this by looking at its size, which is roughly twice as big as the old 5-watt “Pignose” amp I had years ago (which ran on batteries). The design is apparently very efficient with the 60 watts it sports. But that’s not the half of it. Like the Nashville, this thing has personality to spare. Rather than go into all the details here, you can hear the various things this amp can do at zZounds’ listing (click the “Docs, Multimedia” tab). There are also two video demos at Same Day Music that are pretty entertaining – just scroll down and click on “Cube 60 Interactive Demo” under “Multimedia”. Very cool.

Some folks apparently dislike the idea (and sound) of amp emulators (aka “modelers”), where digital signal processing in the amp modifies the output to sound like, oh, maybe an old Fender Princeton, a Marshall Stack, etc. Me, I’m happy to have an amp that’ll do what this baby does, and it’s my firm belief that only a very few purists are going to be able to tell the difference between the sound of this amp’s emulated configurations and the real thing. Unless one is in a really intimate setting, the acoustics are never, ever that good. And given the difference in price and physical logistics, the Cube is a steal, IMHO. With its tuner, line and recording outputs, multiple footswitch controls, the almost infinite number of amp/effects combinations, the “JC Clean” mode, tiny footprint, light weight (not much heavier than the new Tele’, in its hardshell case) and obvious reserve of sheer volume, this piece of gear rocks, both literally and figuratively. I can’t wait to play out somewhere with it.

Speaking of playing out, Patty and I went to see Taylor Hicks at the Warner Theater in Torrington, CT on Aug. 10th. It was a great show! That boy can jam on the harmonica, let me tell you! The high point for me was their encore: Supertramp’s Take the Long Way Home – one of my very favorites. Haunting, the way they sidled into it and the way Hicks and his sax player pulled off their parts. I appreciate cover tunes when they basically emulate the original -OR- essentially create a whole new version of the tune. Bad-imitation covers bore me. This one was great. More on the rest of the show later, maybe – this is getting a bit long as it is.

I started this some days back but got distracted with the return on the ’52 Telecaster and then other stuff that’s come up since (still waiting for the B-Bender, by the way – that’s fodder for another post, once I actually have it in my hot little paws). Unfortunately, because it’s now all set up and I really don’t want to go back and start over, this follow-up is going to be somewhat abbreviated from what I had in mind, which was a step-by-step on getting from installation to a clean, direct-input guitar recording. Hopefully this will be helpful to some, though.

SONAR – even my old 2.2 version – was pretty smart about connecting to this unit. Once the drivers were installed, everything just kind of appeared where it needed to be, as I would have hoped. Of course that didn’t mean I could get the thing to record without some work. Here’s what I ended up with. It will at least get you on the air, but I make no claims that this is optimized – or even ultimately correct for all purposes.

SONAR Settings

Power up the 1804 and then start SONAR. The order is important because SONAR detects what’s available when it starts up. Confused hardware drivers can cause BSODs and I prefer not to see those any more than necessary. So if I start SONAR and realize I forgot to kick on the 1804, I’ll shut SONAR down first, then turn on the AI. Call me a namby-pamby. It’s just how I roll.

That done, select Options / Audio… from the main menu. On the Advanced tab, locate the Driver/Mode drop-down list and select WDM/KS to use the WDM drivers you installed with the FW-1804. SONAR may tell you you’ll have to restart the program when you do this. If so, do it, then get back to the Audio Options dialog. Note – you may run into an issue here if your sound card doesn’t support WDM. Most newer ones do. This is just a heads up. I’m not sure of the implications if you have an older card but want to use WDM.

Next, go to the General tab (Advanced in SONAR 2, IIRC) and locate the Wave Profiler button. Click that to profile the new hardware and verify all goes well, meaning no errors. The profiler will assess the AI and any soundcard(s) you have installed.

Going through the tabs on the Audio Options dialog, here’s the settings I’m currently using (these are working).

General Tab – I changed the Audio Driver Bit Depth from 16 to 24, on Rich the Tweak’s recommendation that this increases dynamic range and eliminates the need for compression during recording. I don’t have a standalone compressor, so this seemed like a good idea. I set the Sampling Rate to 44100 (this has to match the FW-1804 Control Panel setting – see below). I also had to spend quite a bit of time getting the Mixing Latency settings correct, and it’s something you’ll probably have to experiment with because the settings will interact with those on the 1804′s Control Panel (again, see below). With these settings, you’ll definitely experience a bit of a delay if you’re monitoring using your computer’s sound card output, so monitor using the output(s) provided on the 1804. I found the headphone output on the unit’s front panel to work just fine for this, and the ability to switch between monitoring the unit’s Inputs, the Computer or Both was definitely a boon.

Advanced Tab – Don’t think I changed anything on this one, other than the Driver Mode setting. If your settings are still at the default, you can check me on this below.

Drivers Tab – Enable what you need, disable what you don’t. They’re in pairs, so my settings are shown below, since I’m going to be recording from the audio interface’s inputs 1, 4, 5/6 and 8, as follows:

• 1 -Microphone: vocals, cello, acoustic guitars, amps, etc.
• 4 – Guitar direct-in: for use with Effects Inserts
• 5/6 – JV-1080: left/right Mix Output, respectively
• 8 – Guitar direct-in: this is the one on the front of the unit, designed for Guitars but with no Effect Insert jack

Driver Profiles – these are as set by the Wave Profiler, and I haven’t changed them, so no screenshot for these. Tweak at your own risk here. Get familiar with the manual(s) first though.

FW-1804 Control Panel

When you install the Tascam software, it places a TASCAM FW-1804 applet in your list of XP control panel widgets. I copied this to the desktop as a standard shortcut for easy access. When you run (double-click) this, you see the AI’s control panel application. The screenshot below shows my current settings, not the defaults.

When you check Compensate for Converter Delays (WDM), you get the following pop-up message:

At this point I of course went back to SONAR and set the Buffers in Playback Queue (General Tab) to 3. Aside from this, as I mentioned previously, the Sample Rate naturally has to match what you’ve set in SONAR. Beyond this, the most time-consuming effort was getting the Audio Latency setting correct. The optimum setting here changes depending on a combination of the Sample Rate (in both SONAR and the FW) and the Buffer Size setting (General Tab) in SONAR, which I currently have set to 90mS. I adjusted this by monitoring SONAR‘s output and/or playing back recordings and trying different settings each time. This was the first setting that worked. I tried a few others unsuccessfully, and went back to this (128). Don’t know what units this setting is in, but since it’s labeled “latency” I’m guessing milliseconds.

The other optional step you can take is to enable “Quick Start” for the FW inputs and outputs you plan to use. I’ll be using input 4 rarely, so I enabled the others to match the list above.

Recording and Monitoring

With these basic settings, I’m able to set a SONAR track’s Input to a given FW input and monitor with no latency through the Headphones jack on the FW’s front panel while recording. To monitor tracks I’ve already recorded I set the track’s output to “FW1804 Analog 1:2″ or to a bus that’s going out to same (set the FW Monitor button to Computer or Both for this). During recording, the JV-1080 synth output is monitored directly through the FW via the Headphones (set the Monitor button to Inputs or Both for this).

For playback monitoring, right now I don’t have standalone monitor speakers, so I simply have the FW’s monitor output connected to the Line In on my soundcard. It’s functional, but I wouldn’t use that for a professional mix. (UPDATE: since modified – I now take the 1804′s outputs and patch them directly to the input on my self-powered computer speaker system. No studio-quality monitors yet, but at least now I have the soundcard out of the loop. It does sound noticeably better, even with this older speaker system, as I’m using the 1804′s D/A converters, not the soundcard’s.)

For direct-input guitar recording, I got a pretty decent sound with the following settings:

• Input 4 – FW Trim @ 4:00; SONAR Trim @ +9dB / Volume @ -9dB
• Input 8 – FW Trim @ 12:05 (just before jump in gain); SONAR Trim @ +9dB, Volume @ -9dB

Initial recordings I did were with the ’52 Telecaster, with its single-wound (noisy) coils. I was able to get the hum level down to where I could easily strip it off later with compression / gating. The hum was more noticeable on input 8 than input 4, which I’m sure is due to the differences in impedance. Later recordings with my Paul II (dual humbuckers) were almost completely hum-free, as one might expect.

Next experiments will be mic’ing the 12-string and cello. Right now I only have the one low-rent dynamic mic to work with, so it’ll probably take some ingenuity to get a clear sound on those. At some point we’ll get a condenser, so this is just learning at this point.

Hope this is helpful.

Something I’ve been attracted to, but like so many things haven’t taken time to really pursue, is fingerpicking. Travis Picking, in particular, I find quite fun-sounding, and after trying just a little bit of it, I find that it’s reminiscent of playing bass and singing lead vocals – simultaneously – Back in The Day.

If you’ve never tried it, I highly recommend it (the bass/vocal thing). There’s not much like the feeling of accomplishment you get from playing one melody and singing another with a completely different rhythm. It’s a weird balance of split-personality and a kind of synergistic, whole-is-greater-than-the-sum-of-parts thing – the parts being hands, fingers, brain, bass, voice, two melodies, two rhythms, two musical components… and the whole being, well, actually producing all that sound at once. The first time you get it all correct is pretty magical. And being able to repeat the feat is about what it must feel like to put on the Bat Suit. You really are doing two completely different things at once, but they become one thing.

I don’t have an acoustic 6-string, only the 12-, which doesn’t respond well to bare-fingertip-style picking. I’ve pretty much used a Herco (or whatever I can find that’s close) as long as I can remember. So I’ve been letting my nails grow just to see what that does. I’ve never tried it. About a week ago they got long enough to try playing a bit. Actually, I probably would have just kept waiting and eventually chewed them off the first time I came close to putting an eye out, but I caught this video and was instantly inspired. It’s a little repetitive, but you almost need to hear some of what he does a few times to appreciate what he’s doing here (and here, here and here).

So I sat down with the 12-, assuming it would be a painful reminder of how long it’s been since I played seriously at all. Three hours later the fingertips on my left hand were aching and I was grinning from ear to ear. I told Patty it was like someone else was playing. Magical.

Not sure about a 6-, but on a 12-string it’s difficult to imagine fingerpicking without nails. And what an amazing difference it is to be able to hit both strings in each pair instead of just one! It’s an entirely new style (of course) but when you hear it coming out of the guitar in your own lap it’s a little eerie. The somewhat bastardized version of Blackbird I try to play was next to effortless but, more importantly, sounded much better.  But the best part was just fiddling around and eventually trailing into this progression/rhythm that has grown over the past week (in my head, so far) into a pretty serious rock anthem (from fingerpicking on a 12-string… go figger). I think it’ll be pretty fun and powerful – kind of Bon Jovi meets Rick Springfield – and I think you’ll like it. In the meantime, I’ll try to get the basics recorded this weekend and put something up here.

Work on the other tunes continues apace, as well as intermittent guitar practice, which is why I haven’t been posting much here. It’s kind of an explosion in super slo-motion.

We’ll see where the pieces land.