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If you are a regular reader of this blog you have probably realised that I have a bit of a weak spot for music technology. If you are like me and have limited musical talent and ability, I cannot emphasise enough how important it is for you to scout around and find new ways of making your playing appear more interesting. This can be done by a multitude of ways; some practise, some have lessons, but I just hide behind a vast array of electronics in a pathethic attempt to add colour to my guitar playing.

Where is this going? Well, I am always on the look-out for new gizmos to either bring a new sonic array to my arsenal of sounds or to inspire new tunes. Last year, it was the Boss SL-20 that really floated my boat. The idea behind that pedal was to bring the "slicer" effect to the guitar, an effect that has existed for a while in synthesisers and been used predominantly in the dance music genre. It takes the sound source and cuts it into pieces and broadcasts it rhythmically, slicing it up and broadcasting a pulsing cut-up sound. It's hard to explain further than that really. Anyway, the SL-20 was interesting to me because it also brought a level of harmonic delay to the proceedings.

Harmonic delay is something that has interested me for a while. The concept is that you strike a note and the equipment is programmed to play the harmonic variations of that note. So you can instantly create a backing track for a song with just a handful of notes. This is what attracted me to the SL-20 and then the Digitech Timebender which was advertised earlier in the year at the 2009 Winter NAMM.

I've been waiting a couple of months for the units to hit the UK and was lucky to spot them arrived at Absolute Music Solutions last weekend, so I put my order in. Absolute Music Solutions are a preferred music sales team of mine, so I wholeheartedly recommend them. When they have the gear in stock, they have it in stock (unlike many other musical instrument webstores) and their delivery is lightning fast. Prices are good too!

Anyway, the Timebender is a standard twin pedal configuration that has been championed by Boss et al. The delay side of the pedal is impecable and if you are looking for the ultimate delay pedal, it certainly gives the Boss DD-20 a run for its money. Something I noticed about the DD-20 is that it does "colour" your sound and you seem to lose some dynamic range. You don't have this with the Timebender and everything sounds sparky and clean.

There are ten delay varieties and a 20 second looper. The range of delays are great, but to my cloth-ears, I can't always hear a difference, but you get 5 seconds max of stereo delay. The interesting part of the pedal is how you present the delay in the mix. You can have it bouncing all over the shop with a panner effect, or you can select one of the 9 auto-rhythms.

Where the pedal comes into its own is with the "Strum" function. This allows you to hold down the right pedal and pick a dampened note in the rhythm you want your delay to repeat. It is frightningly accurate and you can create some great varieties of delay repeat. In fact, if you think about it, I guess it is only limited by your imagination.

This Strum feature can be combined with the harmonic delay feature, which gives you 100 intelligent harmony settings to pay with. Using the MusIQ technology, you press down the right pedal again and play the fundamental note (or chord) to figure out what key you are playing in and the harmonics are generated from that. It is a great feature, but it is a bit picky. During my tests, it would throw out many wobbly notes and I am thinking that it isn't particularly fond of the output from the Roland VG-99. Funnily enough, the Timebender harmonic function tracked more accurately with my bass and VB-99 setup. I have a feeling that the pedal likes really clean, direct output from the guitar for it to operate with optimum accuracy. I will try this later and report back here.

If you don't have a "do-it-all" delay pedal and are looking to buy into that market, then the Timebender is a must-have. However, it is limited by its five second delay and the mono 20 second looper. The Boss DD-20 has a 20-second max delay and stereo looper and its really still king of the castle when it comes to delay. But if you are intrigued by the idea of harmonic delay and can find a use for it in your recording setup, then gives this pedal a spin.

The following two tracks are recorded with just a guitar and bass and the Timebender harmonic delay function.

Direct download: CLICK HERE

Direct download: CLICK HERE

The next track is called "March of the Numpties" and ended up sounding like something off Robert Fripp's "Leage of Crafty Guitarists" albums. It is a single nylon guitar with the harmonic delay panned left and right. I quite like it because it sounds ridiculous!

Direct download: CLICK HERE

Direct download: CLICK HERE

She really is a "Black Beauty"

I hadn't played a Gibson Les Paul style guitar since I sold my Columbus copy back in 1996, so when I saw one of these come up on eBay for £330 I thought it was a bargain. So I purchased the guitar and an internal MIDI pickup kit from Roland to do a DIY install so I could use it with my Roland GR-33 and VG-99 pedal boards.

The guitar was really well made for a copy and I was very surprised by the finish and most importantly the variety of tones you could coax from the instrument with the three humbucker pickups without any fancy effects. The instrument had a good weight and the setup was low, with minimal fretbuzz.

Here is the body of the guitar complete with MIDI pickup

Converting the instrument into a GK-2A midi guitar was trickier than installing it into a standard Fender shape body because you don't have the routing beneath the scratchplate to play with. Instead, you have to fit the circuit board in the existing cavity where the tone-pots are housed, which is a bit of a squeeze and fitting the control buttons were also a problem, unless I wanted to drill holes in the front of the guitar and ruin the finish.

Here you can see how I mounted the controls in the plastic pickup housing

I didn't want to do this, so I came up with a novel way of housing the control buttons, pickup switch and activity LED light. Using a very small hand-drill, I made holes in the plastic pickup housing closest the bridge and housed these controls there. I needed a steady hand with the soldering because there wasn't much space to move and I purchased some small switches from Maplin for the job. It was a first class job and I really impressed myself.

The only other fly in the ointment was fitting the separate volume pot for the MIDI output, and I could either drill a hole in the body or fit it into the scratchplate. I did the latter, even though it was a tight squeeze.

The Epiphone was a great MIDI guitar like this and I really regret selling it on, because my GK-2A installation was a thing of beauty, even if I do say so myself. The main reason for me selling it was that the brass fittings gradually lost their lustre over time and I read elsewhere cases that they actually started to go green, so I decided to sell while the guitar was still in good cosmetic condition.

The golden GP-100 sitting magnificently at the centre of my old rack

This is part of the "gear that I have owned" thread. I bought a second-hand Roland GP-100 guitar effects processor from a seller on eBay back in 2003 in a whim. I didn't really need it as I was using a Roland VG-8 guitar system, but I'd read in the past that Robert Fripp of King Crimson had used them and in a supreme case of "monkey-see, monkey-do" I bought this unit in an attempt to search for the "new sound".

The GP-100 is austentatious in its gold casing and fits in a 1U rack. In terms of sound, I was quite impressed by the COSM effects inside the unit considering it was quite an old piece of kit at that time and had been superseded by other effects units in the Roland range. I used it for parts of my Textures, Without Words and Empty Spaces albums. I tended to use the more unearthly effects that unit could produce and I must admit that I've found it hard to reproduce these sounds on my current rig.

While I was impressed with the sounds, I wasn't so impressed with the editing functionality. The unit came without instructions, so I had to bluff my way through using it and I found the editing side of the GP-100 rather user-unfriendly. But then I had been spoilt by the VG range of units from Roland and their slightly easier to use interface.

I eventually sold the unit after a short period because it had developed a fault that meant it used to freeze up and stop working. The only way of fixing this fault would mean me taking a screwdriver to the unit, opening it up and removing/replacing the battery inside, which would somehow reset the unit back to normal. This took time, and was frankly a pain, so it had to go.

If another one of these came up on eBay for the right price, I'd probably grab it just for the heck of it - though I am wary about the condition of these units now as they are rather old, they do go wrong and the front panel control are a little prone to wear.

My latest waste of cash is a Godin Multiac nylon guitar I purchased for a good price on eBay. After being impressed with the XTsa guitar, I was eager to try another of their instruments and have always had an ear for nylon instruments, though cannot profess to have any proficiency on such an instrument in the classical context. For me, I play the Multiac the same way I play the electric, with a pick and as a lead instrument in the genre of "rock" or whatever they call it.

The guitar itself is a wonderful piece of craftmanship and feels solid and expensive. The electronics means I can connect it to all my GK-enabled Roland gear and get any sound from it. Its MIDI tracking is second-to-none and this is what turns me onto the Godin guitar range. If you want a guitar that can solidly track MIDI data, the RMC piezo pickups in Godin guitars are THE BEST. THE BEST. THE BEST. I said that so it goes in. Roland might have the market with the GK range of MIDI pickups, but the RMC piezos have the best all-round use.

Don't think I've been lazy with the lack of music output on this site. The way things are at the moment, my studio isn't exactly how it was and I'm doing little bits of recording as my bass is packed away. For your consideration is the next piece which is a demo track that I recorded a few weeks back. It showcases the Multiac and will form the basis of a "proper" song once I've thrown some bass and electric guitar at it. For now, you just have drums and acoustic guitar. It's fairly loose and is more of a framework to hang other elements on. It's how I record, from the bottom-up I think it is described in music circles. At the moment, I've got loads of little bits of music on the hard drive recorded like this. Fragments of songs to be, little riffs that have been committed to a stream of zeros and ones, bits that will one day be recombined to form something more solid. A digital musical pot noodle - just add water - or in this case magical musical glue.

Anyway, enough of the preamble: this is a demo track using the Multiac and I really like the tone it has.

Direct download: CLICK HERE

After the clunking great Vestax MR44, I progressed to the Yamaha MT4X four-track. The MT4X is a great recorder and to me felt like the Starship Enterprise back in the mid-1990s when I purchased the unit. However, I grew disatisfied with four-track recording and started to record and bounce down in stereo pairs, in order to achieve a more professional sound.

The MT4X was retired and sold when I move over to digital recording via the home PC around 1998. Though with our recent move, I discovered a case full of my old 4-track master recordings made during this period and thought it was a shame that I could no longer access these tapes.

A quick scout on eBay brought up the MT4X and I purchased a unit for just over £60, including its original box and manual. The unit itself appeared as new and worked great on the old tapes. It was strange to hear old stuff and to find tunes that you had completely forgotten about. I am presenting two such tunes today.

The first I have called "Future Echoes" and I have no idea when or how it was recorded. It sounds to me as if it was recorded completely using a MIDI unit and I suspect it might have been during my dalliance with the Yamaha QY10, which would place this around 96/97 though I can't be completely sure. It might be from earlier using a Roland MC-500 hardware sequencer I purchased in 1994. Who knows? It sounds a bit Krautrock and I like it.

Direct download: CLICK HERE

The second piece called "Afex" is a bit more abstract and completely unlike anything I've ever done before or since. Again, not sure of how I did it or why I did it or when I did it, but it is a slab of amateur dance electronica. Like the previous piece, no guitars were used in the recording.

Direct download: CLICK HERE

My first bass guitar was an Encore Coaster bass, which I still have. I bought it when I was seventeen from Allan Marshall Guitars in Markhouse Road, Walthamstow and learnt the rudiments on this instrument. I didn't have a bass amp, so I just played "acoustically" until I got a guitar amp for Xmas, buy my folks had forgotten to buy me an instrument cable so I could connect my guitar to my amp, so I sat there over the Christmas holidays just staring at this silent amplifier. Ho, ho, ho!

My first electric guitar was a second hand Columbus Les Paul Studio copy which I also bought from Allan Marshall Guitars for about £50 in 1990. This guitar weighed a tonne, but had some great sustain. Not sure if I ever recorded with this guitar - I might have used it on my early recordings, but I upgraded that guitar to a Yamaha in 1992. The Columbus eventually got sold at a car boot sale for about £80, so I ended with a profit. Hurrah!

The Yahama guitar I used right up until 1997 was an RGX model, but it was unique in the fact that it had a removable clear PVC pickguard that covered the whole face of the guitar, the intention of which was that you could mount your own custom graphics under said pickguard. So I cut up some pages from a Roger Dean "Views" book that I had and mounted those making it a suitably "Prog" custom guitar. Eventually, I got bored with this and during my "hippy-punk" phase I remember making a montage from loads of small pictures of naked ladies snipped from appropriate magazines in an ill thought-out homage to Jimi Hendrix's "Electric Ladyland" LP - it was meant to be shocking, but probably looked more sleazy than anything. So after one outing to a band audition, it got trashed. Oh, the folly of youth! I cringe with embarrassment now, but heck, this is the Internet - no-one is reading this, are they?

In terms of electric guitar FX, the very first pedal I got was a Zoom 9000 multi-effects unit. The remarkable thing about this little gadget was that it was about the size of two packets of cigarettes, yet it was a formidable FX unit. It featured digital effects and all manner of settings to tweak and this was my first introduction to digital stereo delay: an effect that I swear by and rely on to thicken up my overall guitar sound and to hide my dodgy playing. Remembering back, I marvel at what Zoom were able to do with such a small device back in the early 1990s. I remember showing it to a fellow guitarist who came over to play once and he was completely blown away by the device. This is when I realised that guitarists aren't that technologically savvy and tend to rely on huge racks of amps to get their sound. While I prefer to use electronic FX to get the same result.

Zoom 9000

Of course, if you are going to record by yourselves in the early 1990s, a drum machine was par for the course. I settled on an Alesis HR-16B, which to this day is one of the best drum machines I've used, mainly for the simplicity of programming. I'm not the greatest drum programmer, so if I can't pick up the unit and get a rhythm going immediately, I will give up quickly. I remember everyone raving about the Alesis SR-16 has being superior, and it was in terms of sounds, but when it comes to programming the HR-16 was pure gold. I got rid of that piece of kit when I traded in a load of stuff to get a Digitech multi-FX pedal from Hertford Music in Hertfordshire. The HR-16B had some cool sounds of its own and was quite expressive for a drum machine.

Alesis HR-16B

That's the problem with the whole recording bug, you tend to end up buying new equipment and constantly trading up. Nasty business... :-)

As it is coming to the end of the year, there is a tendancy for you to get a little reflective and nostalgic for times passed. I realised that I created a section of my blog to look at the various equipment I've used and I've ignored this section completely. So this is my attempt at redressing the balance.

My dubious recording career began around 1990 when I went to college and spunked a percentage of my grant cheque on my first piece of serious recording gear. It was a Vestax MR-44 four-track tape recorder. In those days, I used to read Sound on Sound magazine religiously (and I still do) and I can say that I've learnt all I know about sound recording from that publication. Anyway, I remember seeing a review for the MR44 and deciding that this was the recorder for me for reasons long forgotten. The thing was that multi-track recorders cost a fortune back then and I needed something that was within my budget.

The Monster MR44

Again, I can't remember who I ordered the unit from, but this was before the Internet and I sent a cheque and my order via the Royal Mail. And then I waited and waited and waited and waited. There was no "next-day" delivery in those days - people had to wait for cheques to clear and the statement "Please allow 28 days for delivery" was the watchword. So the rule of thumb was to leave it a month before complaining because invariably the assistant on the end of the phone would always snide at you: "Well you haven't left it 28 days yet..."

So after about six weeks I walked to the phonebox and gave them a call. Again, in those days mobile phones were the size of a small child and only Yuppies could afford to own and run them, and we didn't have a telephone. I called the shop and my MR44 had been sitting there for six weeks for some unknown reason - the cheque had been cashed, but the recorder hadn't been sent to me. So I politely complained and it arrived two days later. Internet shoppers today don't know they're born! :-)

My immediate memory of the Vestax MR44 was that it felt as if it had been salvaged from a Russian submarine. It's design had what only could be described as a Soviet aesthetic and it had the same solid reliability of a breeze block. The buttons were small and there was an equally small LED tape counter - no fancy display screens or touch sensitive panels. The buttons clunked and clattered when you engaged the unit to record as if a series of pulleys and gurneys were being rattled into place.

There were four sturdy volume sliders and EQ knobs to play with. In terms of sound quality, the unit was pretty neat and I spent much time bouncing down rhythm tracks and putting together silly little songs. In total, I think I recorded four CDs worth of material with this four-track, reasoning that The Beatles had recorded "Sgt Peppers" with just four tracks of recording power. What I forgot was that they were consumate musicians, they had the facilities of Abbey Road at their disposal and talent of George Martin behind the desk.

Ahhh, the foolishness of youth!