© by Bernhard Wagner, 2006.
My first and dearest. Replaced the weak front pick-up by a fat one (Seymour Duncan single coil STL-2). Update: Replaced both pick-ups with Kinmans to avoid hum. Love them. Thanks, Bill, for recommending them!
Wanted a guitar with a whammy bar. This was the best I could afford at the time (80s). Versatile, but a little weak sustain. Serial No: F704270 (Apparently produced 1987 in Japan, at the Factory Fujigen (Fuji Gen Gakki), the 4270th guitar produced that year), I believe it's Model No: RG450BK Update: Replaced the center pick-up with Kinman to avoid hum. Love it.
Monophonic. I love it for single note riffs in conjunction with Compression Sustainer CS-2.
Unfortunately quite noisy. Especially in conjunction with the TS808. Which, at the same time, is its favourite companion.
Overdrive. The first pedal I ever had.
Another great recommendation by Bill. I couldn't describe it better than him: "buttery" and "the secret weapon of many Nashville, Austin and LA studio cats.". Bill recommended to hunt for the "old" pedal, made in the mid 90's. I was lucky to find one second hand in a German shop... Won't give it away, so don't ask! ;)
The newest toy in my stompbox zoo as a replacement for the old clunky Vesta DIG-410 which offers a max. 1 s delay time. The DD-5 has a cleaner sound and max. 2 s delay time.
BUT: The Vesta offers a nicer user interface. It has a hold function that can be activated any time, while the DD-5 has a special HOLD "mode". If you change to any mode on the Boss thingy, you lose what's currently in the delay buffer, which for me, is the foremost reason to press HOLD in the first place! To cover its weakness it supports a tapping input and allows to divide the tapped time into e.g. 3ds etc. I don't work this way. A nice feature is the additional output which allows to create a spreading of successive echos ("ping-pong").
The Vesta also features a modulation section with controls speed and depth. This taught me how chorus and flanger effects are done. It allows to create some atmospheric dynamic detuning, too.
What I dislike about the DD-5 is when you kick it into bypass mode, it continues echoing the old delay buffer content till it dies out. It doesn't stop immediately. The only situation I would like this kind of behaviour would be if I want my last lick to echo out while I continue playing something on top without that being echoed. This in turn is much better achieved by a special wiring of your effect gear...
Generally, the DD-5 reminds me a bit of convenience food: The developers studied what kind of things guitarists do with a digital delay and tried to offer that functionality in a "convenient" way. This makes me feel a bit like they're making up my mind for me.
Still have to learn how to use this beast. Battery operated: I plan to use it with the DL-4 for busking.
Great little loop box. I couldn't believe it when I found out that you can actually have a digital delay working pre-loop in addition to the loop function! I can go busking with a single stompbox! Battery operated.
Forget about the previous paragraph complaining about the DD-5. The Echoplex is what I'd been looking for!
Bought this off eBay and it came without the programmer. Thanks to the people on the pmc10 mailing list I managed to hook the PMC 10 up to the parallel port of the PC.
Love it for its Effects: "PitchCascade" and "ChaosDance". After stuffing it into a suitcase, it suffered, but could be fixed.
Battery operated and ready for busking!.
Transistor amp. I use it with two over-dimensioned no-name speakers. Nice stereo chorus. The built-in distortion produces a rough, edgy sound that, when preceded by the CS-2 and optionally the TS808, becomes a full phat sound. I get sort of close to the sound of Jesse Johnson (The Time, 1990) on "Pandemonium", Track 10 ("Skillet").
An "All-Tube". Very present and characteristic sound.
An "All-Tube". Very characteristic sound. Unfortunately I don't own any of the extra modules. The guy I bought it from exchanged the original setup resulting in a great sounding amp!
Great. Connecting my dusty 100MB ZIP drive to record some stuff worked well (even though the minimum partition size seems to be 500MB).
I was walking aimlessly in a flea market area of Kobe/Japan and stumbled upon this genius japanese guitar effect builder Hiroyuki Kondo. He had the first distortion pedal I ever knew: mxr distortion + which I bought off him. Then he showed me his handmade copy of it "Power-Rush" for 341.- USD. The reason for this price is that he uses among other expensive stuff which I don't remember, vintage solder!! I couldn't believe it. He showed me the solder and said that the vintage solder contains more silver than contemporary solder...
The first band I ever played in around 1980 was an AC/DC cover band. I wasn't a particular AC/DC fan, I wasn't a fan of any particular band since I didn't even own a stereo system, let alone a record collection... We were supposed to rehearse a few AC/DC tunes for a party of the local AC/DC fan club. They gave us CHF 100.- "to cover the expenses". Those expenses went in their entirety into renting a couple of distortion pedals. One was a green Ibanez thing with butterflies depicted on it, I don't recall the model's name. The other was this mustard yellow box, the mxr distortion+, which quickly became the favorite of the whole guitarist section and whoever arrived at the rehearsal room first was the lucky one. Unfortunately, the AC/DC cover gig never happened...
Got it because the Ibanez MC1 broke down. The Z3 has the nice side effect of being significantly faster than the MC1.
The Controller Rack broke down. But the guitar that came with it still works fine. It has a very sterile sound which works both clean and distorted over the Jazz Chorus but is faceless when played over the Studio 84. And luckily it is compatible to the Z3 so I can plug it in there and don't need to fuss with one of my other guitars when I use the guitar synth.
Battery replacement: There are sites on the internet actually asking money for the instructions how to do it.
Guitar wizard Bill Walker recommended to use this, because very often I misuse the Boss CS-2 just to temporarily amplify the guitar. And since it's a compressor, I also loose some dynamics.
Automatic wah effect. Hardly use it. Very distorted.
Don't remember what I bought it for. Probably a good sales person.
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