Frankenbass

My apologies for the string of "franken-" posts. I'm not sure what to call all these things, as they're all custom or cobbled together out of a bunch of parts. I built this fretless bass up from individual parts from a kit over the summer of 2012. I'm actually really happy with this, and found the process of putting it together to be really rewarding.

I'd always wanted a fretless, as I find "fretted" basses a little...well, boring. I don't like that there are only so many notes to play, and I find that so much of the way that I play bass is dependent on glissando, groove, and pulsating rhythmic figures that the frets slowed me down. As Jaco says, frets are speedbumps. With a fretless bass, I can do a couple things that were otherwise impossible:
1) I can treat strings (particularly the low E string) as these frequency machines rather than as a series of rigidly formulated note-steps. What I mean by this is that I like to hang out on one string often (the A string is so fun for this) and just chug along, quickly sliding to or from other notes. Fretless bass is like playing an electric rubber band whose tension you keep adjusting to change the pitch.
2) Pinch harmonics take on a whole new level of awesome. You can slide them like a crazy whistle, as there are no frets to interrupt string vibration when you move them around.
3) Playing out of tune. You can add so much menace by finishing a note in a riff by moving your finger down a half inch--like the bass is dying, or giving up the line altogether.Just slowly finishing a riff by detuning it or sliding down toward the nut just makes things feel a little more awesome.

I bought the tortoise shell pickguard and finished this with an almond-colored paint. I didn't have the patience to buff this out to a high gloss, or to load it up with tons of clear coats. So I decided--instead of going for a pro finish--that I'd rather weather this thing and not have to worry about every nick and ding. I took some sandpaper to it, knocked it into some solid objects, and said "there. Done." Now I have no worries--it's mine, I put it together, I like it, and it sounds pretty good.

The setup posed a problem. The action needs to be as low as possible on fretless basses or they're near impossible to play, so I had to stick 2 or 3 pieces of sandpaper between the neck and the body.to lower it down to playable levels. After much fiddling with allen wrenches, truss rods and bridge saddles, it plays nice and smooth.

Finally, I installed a thumb rest on the pickguard. I've always been curious about those things, and I really like it. I tend to play with one finger (the Jamerson "claw"), and I pretty much never play slap bass, as I'm tired of hearing it, so the thumb rest gives me a nice, solid place to hang out.

Frankenstrat

This has been my main guitar for a couple years now. I like the playability of strats--the contoured body, the fast necks, the relatively light weight. As far as build, this thing stays in tune and feel solid as a rock.

Having said all that, I have no idea where this thing comes from. I traded some guy in Detroit an old Peavey amp for this guitar. I believe it has a Fender tele neck, but the body is made from bits of a bunch of different guitars' parts. The guy who gave it to me had done some work as a luthier, so it's set up really well. The action is great, and he put the pickguard together himself. It has a knurled edge that he used some kind of router on, so there are pieces of this that are pretty unusual.

I'm pretty sure at this point that I prefer single coils. This can be a noisy guitar under the wrong circumstances, and a guitar with humbuckers would help, but I just feel like it sounds less guitar-y. I've had semi-hollow body humbucking guitars, Strats, Les Pauls, and a whole variety of other Frankensteinish things, but this one has proven to be the most versatile. When my wife and I moved from Detroit to Buffalo a few years ago and couldn't afford groceries, I had a fire sale for gear. This one survived.

Frankenkit

Ignore the dog.

I've had a half dozen drum kits. I've sold all of them off because they actually had resale value. Tama kits, Gretsch kits, Roland V drums, Pearl, even a really sweet TKO that got me off the ground. I've hung on to this one because it's the one that I've spent the most time putting together. As you can see, it isn't a kit for everyone. If I remember correctly, the dimensions are:

• 28x14 bass drum. I picked this up at a yard sale for $20. I had to do a bunch of work on it to get the hardware set up on it; it was missing a bunch of tension rods, and they need to be about a foot long, so they're really hard to find. It's an ancient marching band bass drum with a bunch of students' names carved into it. "T-Bone" was apparently a pretty big deal at Some Local Detroit High. This drum sounds as big as you'd think, especially with an Aquarian super kick II on it. 
• 5.5x14 Pacific hand-hammered brass snare drum. 
• 13x9 rack tom. This drum is from a Pearl kit from the late 80s.
• 16x16 Tama floor tom.
• 12" hi-hats. The bottom is an A series Zildjian splash; the top is a K splash. I know that's weird, but I like small hats. 
• 16" AAXplosion crash.
• 21" Zildjian sweet ride. The best cymbal I've ever owned--this thing is so loud, so washy, so fun to bash on. It's also a pretty good ride in terms of stick definition.
• Pang cymbal (not pictured). It's a whole bunch of cymbals that I've cracked and ruined over the last decade. For some reason, I keep them around and put them on a stand. It's a more popular idea these days, but it's kind of like a china sound with a really fast attack. 
• I also swear by the Iron Cobra pedals. I don't care about any of the other hardware, so long as it's sturdy enough to hold gear up (which is actually not an easy thing to assume--there's some junk out there). The Cobra always comes with me. 
• Also, a quick note on the wrap: since every one of these drums comes from a different place, they all looked terrible together. I kind of wanted drums that looked like momma dressed 'em all at the same time, so I came up with this idea. I grew up reading my Dad's Marvel Comics and fell in love with Jack Kirby's pencil work. I printed these images on some high quality paper, pulled the wraps off the shells, and used double sided tape to secure the sheets to the shells. I picked up a cheap sheet of mylar adhesive from the craft store and put it on nice and tight. I've had them like this for a couple years, and I'm starting to think of something else. We'll see.

Rocktron Hush

Doesn't get much simpler than this pedal--step on it, one knob, an LED, and that's about it. It worked just fine, but it turns out I didn't have the noise problems I imagined I would. As often as I run multiple fuzzes or overdrives, I don't leave them going carelessly.

I found someone looking to trade a TR-2 for a noise gate, and this puppy was gone.

Behringer DD400

My first delay pedal. Not proud of that. Unfortunately, this pedal has a major problem: it doesn't sound good. It does, in fact, to all the things a delay pedal might do--produces digital repeats, has knobs, possesses a switch that you step on to turn it on and off, &c. The trick is, with this pedal, all of those things kind of suck.

I don't know why I still give Behringer a shot. This pedal is housed in a crappy, thin plastic enclosure, and it sounds like what it is--a digitally modeled knockoff delay pedal. I thought maybe I'd found a diamond in the rough, but instead I found a pedal suitable only for bedroom players who tip-toe on pedals. I'm a big boy, and I tend to leave marks in flimsier metal enclosures, much less molded plastic. I kept this one long enough to not be able to return it. So I sold it. It will find a good home, but not with someone who cares very much about delay.

Dunlop Crybaby Wah

The Crybaby is the standard wah seemingly everyone uses. I found it to be a huge tone-sucker, scratchy, and requiring a super sensitive/heavy-footed touch to get those stupid mash-down switches to work. I can just never get them to do what I want, so I like the optical kind.

Seems like everyone needs a wah pedal, as there are some phrases that just ask for it. I tend to use my Morley bass wah as more of a filter; I give it a real slow sweep over a measure or so before starting it up again. Sounds cooler that way that with the widdly-diddly minor pentatonic stuff that everyone seems to gravitate toward when they step into a wah pedal. I'm not trying to disparage that kind of playing, but...oh, who am I kidding? If the world never heard another blues lick, it'd be a better place. Enough, already. Most kids music uses pentatonic scales, too.

Despite my experience, I can see how everyone finds this to be a fine sounding wah with a good throw, an easy sweep. I can see why people like it, but it just sounded so tame, and so typical for a wah. I'm trying to come up with my own stuff, my own sound, and this pedal wasn't helping me get there.

Boss CS-3

I thought I liked compression--until I bought this pedal. I'm still curious about MXR's Dyna Comp, but, for now, I think I like having a little more control over my dynamics. I can definitely see the value of squishing your signal and getting "the Nashville sound" with compression, and I do think it works well in solos.

Overall, this this just made my playing sound kind of...bad. With some overdrive, even some fuzz, the compression killed all of the fun bits--the spikes in volume the harmonics, the string-to-string interaction.

I bought this because Juan Alderete calls it his #1 pedal, and I love Juan. Between the problems I described above and the unbearable hiss this pedal caused (easily the noisiest thing I've ever owned--not to say that all CS-3s are, but mine was horrible), the CS-3 went back faster than any pedal I've ever had.

Behringer US600

I really love pitch shifting pedals. I've always wanted a Whammy pedal, and I've tried a number of different stompboxes that met my needs in different ways. Ultimately, I wanted a pedal that could double my lines while keeping the original signal intact. I prefer true bypass when I can get it, and I wanted something that wouldn't eat up half my board (goodbye Whammy IV--the only affordable one).

So I figured I'd try out a recent Behringer offering, as they design knock-offs of better known and received products. It has some unusual features, like a "flutter" setting that has almost no use, as well as a difficult-to-master harmonizer setting that wasn't half bad. Mostly, I was interested in getting octave up/octave down sounds out of it, but would up being a little more digitally aliased than I was hoping for. The enclosures are pretty much garbage, too, as they're so chintzy as to require a metal plate in the backplate to keep their pedals weighed down.

I found a good deal on a POG 2 and rendered this pedal unnecessary. I think I'm ready to give up on Behringer, as I've owned a handful of their pedals and I never end up finding much use for them. Electronics are perhaps not something to skimp on.

Electro Harmonix Bassballs

I remember jamming out to the Red Hot Chili Peppers' One Hot Minute album when I was in high school. I would always sit in my 40-year-old VW and listen to "Aeroplane" before strolling into first period a couple minutes late. You know, just to show everyone that I was awesome.

One of the non-standout tracks on that sub-par album as called "Falling into Grace." Flea is using the unmistakable EH Bassballs pedal on that intro--one of those moments you hear and go "whoa. I need that thing."

I picked one up for my brother, who is a superior bass player, and he never really got into it. I really liked the things it could do, particularly when paired up with the Morley wah pedal, but, at some point, it revealed itself as too limited a pedal. Auto wahs, envelope filters and followers and other pedals just aren't really my thing. I'd keep it around if I had one now, but I'm pretty sure I got my money back with this one.

Boss DS-1

Yeah, you've probably owned this one, too. I liked this pedal alright, but, as I've said in other posts, distortion isn't really my thing. I like overdrives and fuzzes, and this pedal, despite being a pretty standard inclusion on a number of pro boards as well as tons of non-pro boards, just wasn't something I was going to use often at all.

I picked one up for $15 and thought I'd drill the enclosure, practice some circuit bends on it--that kind of thing. Turns out I never really had it set up in my signal chain, so I got rid of it. If I start building pedals (!), I'll probably get another one and see now I can mangle it up.

Behringer V-Amp

Yeah...this guy was fun when I was first figuring out how to play guitar. My introduction to effects, different kinds of amps, and digital modeling. Made some cheesy recordings with this thing. It's essentially the Line 6 Pod without any of the good parts. I don't even remember where I unloaded this thing. Maybe...maybe I still have it?

Line 6 Pod 2.0

I've been playing guitar and basses for over a decade. I spent the first 4 years or so with a Behringer V-Amp--the reverse engineered Pod. It was okay when I was shredding away on a Squier Affinity strat and the crappy little amp that comes in a box with the guitar, but eventually I outgrew the limited digital modeling and went for...more digital modeling. I traded in a bunch of PA equipment from a band I was playing drums in to pay for a move to a new state, and the store had a dusty little Pod 2.0 for a couple bucks.

Things got rough after that. I kind of fell out of love with the guitar and focused on drums. I blame the Pod a little for this, as it kind of takes the joy out of playing. For me, at least, playing guitar had much more to do with finding settings that sounded good through headphones. I imagine this thing is super handy when you're on the road, writing new stuff, or stuck in a tiny apartment where you can't play through an amp. I spent all of my time on trying to get my sound out of the mic simulators, cab emulators, amp modelers, effects and other stuff, and no time on just enjoying being a guitar player

I didn't even really have an amp (just that same 15 watt Squier that I kept around because it had a speaker that could produce sound). Eventually, you just have to say: enough! This is not what guitar is about! It's about raw noise. I like making noise! Not trying to get a kidney bean to sound like a Marshall or an AC30. I traded this thing in for a little 5 watt Class A tube amp, a 2x12 speaker cab and started getting some pedals together. This is so much fun.

I shouldn't speak badly of the Pod. A lot of people use them, like them, and record with them. For me, it divorced playing guitar from making sound. Guitar playing became a grid, a rigid formula, a scale. It should be making music; moving air, and having some kind of fun or reaction to noise. I'm not going back.

Boss SD-1

The Boss SD-1 is on a lot of people's boards, and with good reason. It's a pretty decent overdrive pedal with simple controls, quality build, and the Boss name backing it up. They're incredibly cheap, and you can pick a used one up at pretty much any shop for around $30. I'd probably have hung on to mine, but I ran into some forgotten crisis and had to sell a couple of the easier-to-find pedals off in a hurry to pay some bill or another. Oh well. I know I can pick another one up tomorrow if I need it. And I'm pretty sure I don't.

Behringer VT-999

There was a time when I thought I could get away with playing cheap pedals. I bought this thing early on in my obsession. It's actually a pretty decent overdrive, and I like that it has the 3 band EQ. I enjoyed it for a bit, but it is enormous--bigger than a Big Muff--and...we'll...it's a Behringer. I get the exact same thing out of the Pigtronix Polysaturator, which is about 5 times smaller, better built, better sounding, and I paid less for it. So this puppy went back.

I don't have anything too bad to say about this pedal in particular. It was a little thin on character for me, as are most pedals that fall into the "distortion" category. I like overdrives, which are an odd type, as they have to be pretty quality to make a real impression on most people, and fuzzes which are just tons of fun. Distortion is, for me, kind of lame.

Boss TU-2

Solid pedal. Um...it works. One thing I have noticed is that in "bass" mode the E string is called "4;" the G string becomes "1." There's a bass player joke hiding in there somewhere.

One of the uses I only stumbled upon after playing with a bigger board is that this is useful as a killswitch. If I'm running a fuzz, a delay, and an overdrive, it's too difficult to tap-dance them all into submission so I don't have an insane hissy-fit at the exact moment a song ends. I can just hit the tuner and then switch everything else off in a leisurely manner before the next tune begins.

It also has a decent buffer, which is nice to have at the beginning and end of signal chains.

Electro Harmonix Stereo Memory Man with Hazarai

Good grief, I love this pedal. Somehow I found a used one for $100 and snapped it up. If GAS (gear acquisition syndrome) is a legitimate addiction, Guitar Center's Used Gear page might be my dealer.

This is probably my favorite pedal. It can do everything I'd ask of a delay, and nothing more. It's no Line 6 DL4, which has over a dozen "types"--those types are modeled on delays like the Memory Man. I'm fed up with modeling. Just get the real thing and play with it. You can date a dozen people or you can marry one and have a life together. Line 6 is the "speed dating" of the gear world. Tube amps and stompboxes are holy matrimony.

This pedal has a dedicated tap tempo switch, which gets used all the time. It has 8 modes including reverse delay, a modulation section that can emulate ring mods, flangers, chorusing and a mutant slapback depending on the settings of the other knobs, some regular, good old delays (multiple modes allows you to save a couple different settings)--all of which are split up into 3 sections--Echo, Multi Tap, and Deja Vu. All of this is in stereo, too!

There is also a dedicated looper, which gets the job done, but if you're looking for looping and layering as a significant part of your setup (and I am! I am!), look elsewhere. It won't start/stop loops, they're just always running underneath everything you're playing, so that when you bring it back in, you'll never know what part of the loop you'll be starting from. It's cool for pads, atmospherics, and textural stuff, but if you need to bring back, say, a riff, you're out of luck. The looper's essentially a bonus feature.

There's also a high/low pass filter to get this thing to sound more like a bucket-brigade delay with lower fidelity repeats. This thing is digital, but sounds closer to analog to me. It is much harder to get pristine repeats than to get swirly, modulated repeats with lots of...character.

This is a pedal you can get lost in for a long time. There have been a couple days where I decided to play a little guitar before getting down to work grading papers or something, only to find that three hours had passed.

Boss TR-2 Tremolo

Not a bad little trem pedal. I traded a guy on CL for this pedal--I gave up a Rocktron Hush noise reduction pedal that I wasn't going to use. Traded a pedal I bought for $35 for this guy--I'd chalk that one up in the "win" column.

I'm not a fan of modulation pedals for the most part--flangers tend to be one trick ponies for me, and phasers tend to be only slightly better. Chorus is interesting, as Andy Summers figured out a way to make it less cheesy, and Kurt Cobain somehow made it sound menacing (while also helping revive the Electro Harmonix name in the early 90s), but I just don't really like it. I have delay pedals that can do a more interesting effect, I think, and I'd rather reserve the space on the board for more fun stuff.

Having said that, tremolo is a not-quite modulation pedal in that it just adjusts volume levels according to a spectrum of waveforms. I like the hard square-wave chop style trem that turns out more like a "stutter" effect, but most often use this as a more subtle triangle wave effect with the depth at about noon and the rate at about ten o'clock. That tends to give my playing an illusion of movement when I'm playing drone passages, pedal tones, or volume swells.

It's a Boss pedal, so it's built like a tank. I have no special love for Boss, having owned a handful of them, but there's something to be said for having a solid, small, inexpensive and easily replaced pedal on my board. I'm no true bypass geek, and this thing doesn't cause the volume drop older TR-2s are famous for, so I'm happy. Eventually I'm going to pick up a Boss SL-20 slicer pedal, which is a mutant tremolo that sounds like you're playing guitar through a drum machine, and then I'll evaluate the TR-2. I'll probably keep it, as the subtler settings are nice to have around.

Morley Optical Volume

This is nearly the same enclosure as that of the Morley Dual Bass Wah. This is the slightly newer version with the uniformly textured rocker pedal. Again, it is a total beast, but after hearing all that stuff about Ernie Ball volume pedals, scratchy pots, maintenance, &c, I figured I'll spend the $30 on an optical pedal that's built like a tank and save myself the headache.

I'm playing a lot of worship music, and volume swells figure pretty heavily into the texture-based stuff I'm doing. This pedals needs to work every time, and to stay put. Also, I'm 6'4", and wear a size 14-15 shoe. My feet have a lot of trouble nimbly stepping on all these little switches already, and little expression pedals don't seem to last a long time with me. Durability is at least as important as tone for me, so gigantic Morley pedals it is.

ELectro Harmonix Big Muff Pi

Not a ton to say here. Most people have tried this, or at least heard the Big Muff, but I still really love this pedal. This is the big enclosure version, which takes up way too much of my board. Most of what's inside is empty space. The board itself is really small, and the 3PDT switch could easily be moved up, but I'm afraid to rehouse it, or to pick up a Little Big Muff. I don't want to lose the magic. Like taking apart a great guitar one too many times, I'm afraid that I'll just lose this pedal's mojo if I do anything drastic. So it's staying. (Edit: Re-housed. Pretty simple project, and it works well for pedal board space. Total cost: $3 and about half an hour. Look into it!)

One of my favorite things to do with box is to cascade fuzzes into one another. If I run the Fuzz Factory into the Pigtronix Polysaturator into the Muff, I get all kinds of weird harmonics that can't really be replicated by other combinations. Yeah, it gets weird, and it's noisy as hell, but it's not like I'm playing arpeggios here--I'm cranking everything up to 11.

Electro Harmonix POG 2

Like a lot of guitar players, I love Tom Morello. I love how he's invented new uses for a pretty small pedal board and come up with weird ways to make non-guitar noises with guitars.

So...I've always wanted a Digitech Whammy pedal. I think they're great, and love that aliased octave-up sound with all the "digital artifacts." I never had much use for the harmony settings, as they're more of a novelty than a useful thing for me.

Most of what I would use a Whammy pedal for are the octave up sounds. The POG 2 is awesome because it does that plus whole bunch of other stuff. You essentially get a 5 octave range, and you can fade in (with the attack fader) a volume swell, get a fixed-wah tone with the low pass filter, and even get a mild chorus with the detune function. This also eliminates the need for all of those sub-octave fuzz pedals that sound so cool--you can just dial in a -1 or -2 octave with the POG and throw some fuzz on it, and it sounds awesome.

Between the sub octave solos, the octave up riffs for bass guitar, the organ sounds that are so easy to get, and all the combinations thereof, this pedal is...expensive. And also worth it. I don't ever anticipate needing another octave pedal. It does it all. Also, the Micro POG is cool, but for a little more cash, you can pick one of these up used for less than the price of a new Micro POG.

Morley Dual Bass Wah

I've wrestled with wah pedals for a long time. I've owned Dunlop crybabys, tried some of the other offerings (Vox, Digitech), but they don't give me what I'm looking for. Had this thing forever, and never found another pedal I like better.

The cool thing about this pedal is that it is...a bass wah! That seems a little strange, and yes, it doesn't really respond to higher frequency sweeps, but it does give me this synth filter sweep that eats up my whole signal. It isn't good for Voodoo Chile, in other words, or typical guitar sounds. If you're looking to have a giant phaser with an expression pedal that sounds a kinda like a wah pedal, this might be your ticket.

The drawback is that this pedal weighs about 5 pounds and eats up a ton of pedal board real estate.The plus is that it is optical, so there are no pots to get scratchy or wear out, and has a quality buffer near the start of my signal chain. My main requirement, though, is that there's no mash-down switch like in all the crybabys. I hate that switch, as you're never sure whether or not you've actually turned the thing off until you start to play again and hear that nasally fixed-wah sound still going. With the Morley, it has a spring under the treadle, so you just step on it, and it's on. You step off, it's disengaged. Lovely.

Z Vex Fat Fuzz Factory

I know this thing is a legendary fuzz pedal...which is why I bought it. This is yet another of the spoils of my hours spent combing the internet for deals on pedals. Most of them come from Guitar Center's (say what you will about them--they're big, but it is hard to beat their prices) Used Gear section. This particular pedal was $100.

Many of its best qualities are well documented: its craziness, its unpredictability, its ability to make synth-y oscillation and tone generator sounds. You can--using the "stab" (short for "stability") knob to dial in precise feedback tones, so that the gaps in your playing become this bizarre kind of in-tune feedback. You can also dial this in as a bitcrusher and get Nintendo sounds out of it pretty easily. It's the kind of pedal that you'll probably never figure out entirely. I'm never entirely sure what's going to happen when I step on this thing, which is why I pretty rarely use it the stuff I play live--worship music. Self-oscillating fuzz pedals don't come in that handy for that, but, at home...oh man.

It's abrasive, creamy, fizzy, incredibly loud, horrible sounding, shrill, and totally awesome. This is one of those "desert island" pedals. If the island had 9v power supplies.

Pigtronix Polysaturator

I picked this pedal up from a local store's blowout sale for $45--they go for over $150 on a typical day.

This is my go-to OD pedal, as it is really transparent and has a lot of tweakability. My guitar sounds like my guitar; my amp sounds like my amp. This pedal feels pretty close to that unattainable pedal--the concept of "straight wire with gain"--and it is almost always on for the kind of stuff I'm playing. I like that it has a 3 band EQ, as my amp has...one knob, and, while I like its sound, I also like to be able to control a whole bunch of other things with my feet.

Being able to give myself a treble boost as well as pushing the gain a little harder going into a fuzz pedal is really useful. This thing can be really noisy, however. I play a strat-style guitar, so I can usually combat hiss and buzz by switching to a dual pickup setting. That usually cancels out phase and hum.

This guy is also really, really small! It's the same size as a Fuzz Factory (or similar pedal).