Ralford.net

  [Guitar]

I was dating my Stratocaster ('90-91 Mexican Strat) and discovered that Fender supplies schematics for their amplifiers. That's damn cool, especially for amp repairs, but also for the curious hardware engineer. My Ultimate Chorus is loaded with electronic gizmos!

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  [Guitar]

In my last guitar post, I mentioned that I've been playing for about 8 years - not a very long time considering I hope to play for another 40+ years. Until this weekend, I didn't have any effects pedals. No fuzz boxes, no wah pedal, no crazy effects - just the chorus, reverb, and distortion built into my Fender Ultimate Chorus amp.

People who've known me for years will say I've been talking about wah pedals as far back as they can remember. I've been thinking more about them and other effects pedals recently, but just haven't been able to get past shelling out $100-$150 per single effect for the few tunes that I'd use them.

Then some friends I've been jamming with pointed out the Boss GT-8 Effects Processor. After some thinking (didn't take much), I broke down and bought one. At the price of about four stomp boxes, it was damn expensive, but it is fully loaded.

The list of supported effects is too long to mention. It holds about 340 different programmed effects chains, with 144 of those being user programmable. The wah pedal can be programmed to do almost anything including wah, volume, and pitch bending to name a few. It simulates a ton of different pre-amps and amplifier models, and is also capable of simulating two sets of effects using different pre-amp settings.

This was definitely a good purchase. This thing will do a ton more than I'll ever need it to, but is completely worth the cost compared to getting a wah-pedal and 2-3 separate stomp boxes for the same price. Of course there's a learning curve, but thankfully there's an unofficial website for users to help each other out: Boss GT Central. Anyone know where I can find a Trey patch?



I found an article on the Roland website that does a much better job summarizing the GT-8's bells and whistles.

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  [Guitar]

Despite all of the computer crap I ramble about, I'm also a musician. I've been a guitar player since the later half of '97, so it's been roughly 8 years since I started. I don't mean dabbling for a month or two here and there. Guitar playing has been a pretty serious hobby of mine since I started. In fact, I can say that I'm obsessed with it.

Let me tell you about my musical background. I played piano for about a half year when I was a wee tot, but not enough to know what playing piano meant. Similarly, I tried out drums for a few months sometime back in middle school, but I never got past the smacking on a drum-pad stage. The musical transition period for me was the viola. I played viola from about fourth grade till my senior year - a whopping eight or nine years. I never was really excited about it, but could always handle what was thrown at me in orchestra. I guess this is where I learned when music works and when it doesn't. I owe more thanks to my viola than it'll ever know. It was certainly a big boost in my guitar playing, and gave me pretty quick up time. After all, guitars and violas don't differ much past the number of strings and the position that you hold the instrument.

Back during college I always said I want really want to get into guitar after graduation. I surely have. For the past few months I've been jumping around looking for where I fit. To be specific, I've been looking for the unique experience of spontaneous communication through music. There's a ton of factors in whether this will actually work with a group of individuals or not. A friend recently referred to it as a game of catch. Someone has the ball, and the others are waiting for it. When the ball is passed, someone catches it.

But what makes it fun? I don't know. I suppose that I couldn't have really felt the whole improv thing a few years ago. But now, it feels so natural. I'm hoping that this is a path that will always grow with me. I would really hate to reach the end of my life, look back, and only have lots of angry hours of engineering. It would be fun though to sit down and play a funky guitar groove over some drums, a bass, piano, and maybe some horns.

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