1993/94 - Sovtek Big Muff Pi

Long long ago in a land far far away (660km if you want this definition of far.) I learned to play guitar.
Most of what I knew of FX was what my friends had or was built into school amps.
The guitar store in town had a couple of cheap Arion pedals, but they were just overdrive and distortions.
I think I owned the overdrive for a while, but it was pretty tame so I just relied on the sound of whatever amp I was using at the time.

I was about 14 or 15 when I got into the Smashing Pumpkins (Siamese Dream) and was an avid reader of guitar magazines. In one, I think it was Guitar Player, there was an interview with Billy Corgan where he talked about an EBow(what they hell was an ebow?) and his distortion sound.

The distortion was the Big Muff. What a funny name I thought. I was interested right away. I had to have one. The only problem is that they'd been out of production for years and weren't easy to find. (Remember this was pre-internet and no ebay). Around this time I'd become a regular at a music shop in the larger neighboring city.
When I had nothing better to do I'd just hang out there and more than likely was considered a bit of a pest. In their front counter they had these big army green boxes that looked like they belonged in a cold war bomb shelter. These boxes turned out to be the first incarnation of the rebirth of the Electro Harmonix line (I had no idea at the time). They shipped in wood containers labeled in Cyrillic letters and just oozed cool.

If I remember correctly I purchased the Big Muff at the same time as I bought the JCM800. It took some months to pay off but when I got it home, I played all the time. This was my main distortion for years. Big and fat and dirty. It was all I knew of distortion for a very long time. And it was awesome!

I ended up parting ways with this pedal at the same time as my Classic 50. It was lost to me for all intents and purposes. But.... around 2005 I got it back! My friend that I'd sold them to when I left town, just gave this and the Small Stone phaser back to me.

At the time I was playing synth and a bit of guitar in a band and the return came when I was broke and in need of some FX. Unfortunately the reunion wasn't all that happy. They were a bit broken. As a teenager I thought it was indestructible. This pedal took an absolute battering between shows and rehearsals. We'd all thought we were punk rock and beat the stuffing out of our gear, I was probably the worst though. I managed to shatter the plastic input on the board. This was something I'd forgotten about until the return. Upon opening it up to fix the battery lead, I re-discovered some of my earliest solder work. It wasn't pretty! It was functional though and I vaguely recall fixing it with whatever the local Tandy had in stock, which was a chassis mount open stereo socket. I ended up re-repairing it with something closer to original spec and it works just fine.

Since getting it back I have struggled with the tone. It's a finnicky pedal in regard to the load that it needs to sound good. Humbuckers and high impedance pickups are a no-no. It just doesn't sound any good with it.
My only guitar that sounded ok with it was the Teisco. The Surfcaster and Les Paul just don't sound any good. So the Big Muff has lived in a drawer more often than it has on my pedal board. I pulled it out again the other day to play with my new amp and guitar. Guess what? It sounds great with the Mosrite and the Peavey Delta Blues!

The guitar has the right electrical characteristics and the amp can handle the low end hump!

So there's another pedal dusted off and ready to play

Now there's not much I recall about the purchase of the small stone, I suspect I bought it at the same time as the BMP, or at least so close together as makes no difference.

The Small Stone is pretty famous, makes a nice swoosh and I like it for the very slow LFO. It does have a bit of an issue with a volume drop when engaged. I modded it to stop this, but the mod changed the tonal characteristics, so one day I'll just change it back.

I've actually built one of each of these pedals for friends.

They were both tricky builds in a way, it took a while to get them working well.
The Small stone clone also had the "univibe" mod, nothing at all like the univibe, but allows the shifting of the phase degree by switching some capacitors. It was a bit quiet, so I added a small preamp booster to the input which overdrives the phaser circuit and creates a small stone phase tone with a twist.

I liked the sound quite a bit, and the last I heard, the guy I built it for was pretty happy with it too!



.

2000 - Jackson Surfcaster (1996 Made in Japan)

Ever since I saw a 12 string version in a music shop back in 95 I wanted one of these guitars. Later on I discovered a photo in a magazine with Scott Ian playing one (I think it was the Charvel model). The guitar looked out of place, but right at home with that metal guitarist. For some reason I didn't buy it. Can't remember why.

Soon after I'd finished school and I was broke for 4 years pretty much. At 19 I had an accident that rendered my left hand useless for music for over a year, I'd cut the membrane to a tendon while cutting a cardboard tube with a stanley knife. It's been 13 years and still not quite right. I forgot about guitars for a couple of years and just got on with working for peanuts.

It wasn't til I moved to a city in the south that my interest picked up again. I lived near a cool guitar store and there was the Surfcaster hanging on the wall all cool and black with the cream coloured binding. It had to be mine. I was broke, but I had to have it. I picked it up on a loan with some financier. 50% in 6 months the remaining 50% 6 months after that.


While I loved it, I really didn't play it that much again til about 2004 when I joined a local band... to play keyboards! (another story for another post).

Over time I realised the stock duncan designed bridge pickup was really microphonic.

I mounted the pickup upside down intentionally,
because I wanted more bass on the P90 coil.

Sounded terrible and the wrong kind of honk. I swapped it for a Paf Pro as that pickup had proven a good choice on Mahogany guitars. Not for this one. It sounded wrong, can't describe it well, but the tone was just not right and it didn't mix well with the Kent Armstrong lipstick pickup in the neck.
I let it stay that way for a while. A couple of years later I bought a Guyatone guitar which had the most amazing pickups. Not quite P90'sbut kind of close. That Was the sound I wanted from the Surfcaster.

I tried a GFS Mean 90 in it, but the tone didn't work well. Not enough bottom and a little too hot.
After that disappointment I nearly sold the guitar. In an idle google hit I stumbled upon the Seymour Duncan P-Rails. The Aussie-US dollar exchange was favourable so I took the plunge and bought the P-Rail bridge pickup.

The P-Rail is an unusual pickup with a p90 voiced coil on one side and a Strat voiced Rail pickup on the other side. It looks weird, but works!  I did the recommended wiring setup and used push/pull pots to swtich between P-90, Strat, Series Humbucker and Parallel Humbucker. The neck pickup even rejects hum in the middle position if the P-90 is selected.


This made the guitar tone improve beyond belief and got back on the rotation of favoured instruments.

Keep you safe from the cold by TheAwesomePowerOfRockets