You are allowed to enjoy this…

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.

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… 🙂