2010 - Tokai Hummingbird

Recently I picked up one of the coolest shaped guitars on the planet.
It's like an evil Mosrite. German carved and all pointy horned. I first became aware of this guitar via Guitar Nerd

The guitar came in the original brown leather/vinyl gig bag from the late 1960's.
As far as I can tell, the guitar dates back to 1968. Unfortunately there's no serial number on it as back then, they were just stickers on the back of the headstock.

The guitar is in ok condition for its years, but far from perfect.
Fortunately the neck is nice and straight, only one minor ding on it near the headstock, which is barely noticeable. At some stage the original vibrato has been removed and three of the holes have been filled with dowel, but not painted over. The original tuning machines are long gone and the nut seems to have been replaced as the current nut needs some filing down to get the strings sitting on the zero fret.

The neck is made from five or six pieces of timber laminated together. It looks like the neck has been refinished as the joins in the timber seem to be rather dirty, it looks well used.

The pickups appear to be of the same vintage and measure approx 6k. They have a nice meaty p90esque sound. But I don't think they're original. Looking at the pick guard, it looks like someone has done a real hatchet job getting the pickups in there. Under the pickup rings, the plastic is very rough and the pickups themselves are misaligned when compared to the routing. Screws to hold the rings down are too long and appear to have come from a hardware store bulk pack. The body has had some wood removed where the screws protude under the scratch guard.

I suspect that the pickups which were originally installed were more like the typical Teisco variety.
There's also extra routing under the scratchplate where a switch is likley to have been placed, I might add one back in there as a matter of course, either a kill switch or a low cut.

The vibrato assembly is kind of weird. It's like a half Bigsby with provision to accept a stat style bar.
Where the bar is attached, the metal is cracked, but I suspect that it will be strong enough to handle any of my whammy antics. The unit does look the part of a vintage guitar so I'll probably leave it as is. A full bigsby just wouldn't do the guitar justtice, however a Gibson Maestro might!

So the guitar needs quite a bit of T.L.C.

My plan is to replace the scratch guard with something of my own design. it's something I'd prefer to have done with a CNC Mill, but I'm sure with a few practice runs on thin MDF it's not too far outside of my skill level. Maybe some tortoiseshell or a dark pearl. The plan is to try to cover up the holes from the previous vibrato.

The pickups are nice sounding, but don't really suit the look of the guitar, so I'm toying with the idea of installing jazzmaster pickups with cream covers to match the body.

The Hummingbird has promise to be a  unique beauty once it's restored, even if it's not restored to it's original glory. I'll be taking my sweet time with this one and update whenever I get a chance.

Photoshopped overlay of pickguard and routing.

2009 - Zoom H4n

The name of the device sounds somewhat like a disease doesn't it?
 
Well I did buy it around swine flu panic season.

This unit is pretty much the single most handy bit of kit I've ever owned.
The mics are pretty good, it's battery powered, takes line and guitar level plus has phantom power(don't expect your batteries to last if you're running a Rode Nt2a).

I use it all the time from recording my daughter's growls in the bath to (you guessed it) recording instruments.
Instead of going through the process of booting my PC and loading plugins, with the H4n I'm off and taking musical notes in seconds. Half the time I just sit it on my lap and record the unplugged guitar sound.
Nice and easy for the times when you've got your groove on, but probably not going to remember every little riff.

That's me pretty much every time I play... Well the times my mojo is in gear anyway.

The H4n doubles as an FX unit and Triples as a USB interface.
Zoom is known for it's long history of effects units, I think the first one I played with was a 9001 back when I was in highschool(wasn't mine). The effects models in this unit are ok. Nothing amazing, but they will get you some amp models and phase effects with a minimum of wires. Think of the fx as a bonus chocolate served with your latte.

The USB interface was touted as USB2, but it really is not any better than a usb1.1 device.
On all three of my computers(all quite powerful windows machines FYI), the latency is so bad that you can't monitor your playing in real time. It's ok if you plan to monitor off your input, but forget about enjoying any onboard effects or using guitar rig in real time. Latency aside, it is a great feature to have if you're wanting to play along to more than four tracks.

I got my unit from USA when our currency was strong and the locals were selling it for double the price, and that includes shipping from the USA. I'd like to see the USB section updated for a future release. It's not essential, but if I was to purchase the unit for playing real time, I would be disappointed. As it is I have an excellent MAudio delta1010lt PCI card that has near zero lag.

Another thing to be aware of is the power supply. It's switchmode and on Australian power points, it generates a bit of a high pitched whine. This could be taken care of with a little filtering and it's not that big of a deal since the unit runs for ages on batteries if you don't plan on using phantom power.

2010 - Boss BD-2

This was one of those pedals I picked up on a whim, it was at the right price and I'd been curious.

The BD-2 is a decent sort of overdrive fuzz. It's really dependent on the gain settings.
Mine is currently unmodded.

While I like a lot of Boss's pedals, what strikes me time and again is that they filter the low frequencies too severely. This one suffers the same problem as the SD-1. Nice dirt but no rumble.
I'm sure it's a simple mod, but since I have the SD-1 the way I like it, I can't really be bothered.

I'm told it's better on humbuckers, but I only have single coil pickups on my guitars.

With a few tweaks, I'm sure this pedal would come up smelling roses.

2010 - Boss DS-1

This is one of those pedals that has loads of mods for it.
I picked mine up 2nd hand and broken.

The pedal did light up but made no sound, when I opnened it up there was one thing glaringly obvious that the pedal had been electrically abused. The polarity protection diode was cracked in two and a little burn on the board. What wasn't visible was that the SIP opamp was dead.
Since SIP chips aren't readily available at the local electronics store, I decided to make a little mod board to wire in a high quality op amp(opa2134).

Once the pedal was working, I finally got to hear the infamous DS-1.
Not my cup of tea honestly. Very fizzy sound.

Next I did the All seeing eye mod. Not bad, the distortion improved a bit.
The pedal had too much gain for me so I went and added the Fat Mod.
Additionally to the fat mod I went and installed a couple of switches to get the pedal back to the stock gain and EQ setting. Overall the pedal is fairly flexible, but a little too gainy for me. Actually even the humble SD-1 has too much gain, I like a little break up when i hit hard, but clean when I play more sedately.

Thwe DS-1 is a modders delight, I'm sure there are a bunch of other things you could try, but I kinda ran out of room in the little box.

2004 - Vox Pathfinder 15r

Cool little amp this.
It was my first amp when I returned to frequent playing, also when I was working a bit more over the holidays.
Student budgets aren't exactly going to get me a Fender Twin.

The pathfinder is a great little amp, wish I still had one(heard that before?).
Simple solid state affair with an 8" speaker. nothing amazing there but it had a nice clean tone.
What was really impressive about this amp was the fact that for $200 I had spring reverb and tremolo.
Not many amps do real reverb in the lower range any more.


The tremolo was a great tool. It throbbed in that classic vox way. Sure it was in a cut down amp, but Vox engineers got this right! The reverb was nice and splashy too. This was before I got into my surf period. But I liked it enough and it was loud enough to be heard with a band, if placed at ear height. It meant my back wasn't breaking when doing shows and I was carrying, guitar, banjo and keyboard to shows at the time too.
I ended up selling it to get a powered foldback speaker. I really should've just kept it and not gone with the old back as it was impossible to hear myself even though that's what the thing was meant to do.

Ah well, live and regret.

If you can pick one up for cheap, then don't hesitate.
Nice wee faux retro amp.

Just because it ain't valve, doesn't mean it can't rock!

1996 - Marshall Lead 12

The other day I was back home in capital city, well it's where I grew up though not quite home.
I met up with an old buddy, you know the one I sold all my gear to when I left town.
It turns out I sold him more than I can recall even owning.

After a bit of discussion he was telling me that he still owned my old small Marshall amp.
"you know, the one you modified to add an extension cab"

I scratched my head and couldn't figure out what he was talking about.

A few days later I realised it must have been the "lead 12".
25 watts, solid state, brown face.

Not a bad little amp from memory. Had a certain punk vibe.
I doubt it'd have got me much cash, but I guess I must've needed it. Just like the JCM800 I had, this had the brown grille cloth.

That's my favourite look for the Marshall amps.

None of this black or fancy silver thread for me.

2010 - Boss SD-1

This one came to me nice n' cheap. I bought it at a 2nd hand dealer in the city. $65 and practically brand new.
What do you do with cheap pedals? Mod them of course!

I'd read that this is basically a tube screamer with some parts changes.

Stock this pedal is pretty decent sounding, a moderate overdrive on full and a nice clean boost on minimum.
Unfortunately the filter caps on the input remove a lot of bottom end. So rather than add some punch, it cuts some of the guts out of it.

The first thing I did was to do the SD808 mod and turn it into a tube screamer.
Basically it's just changing one cap, removing another as well as a diode in the clipping stage.
What this does is make the clipping asymmetrical and alter the tone control.
To my ears and playing style, it wasn't much of an improvement. It still lacked the bottom end.

The next mod I did was the bass mod.
This is done by simply bridging two components, a capacitor and a resistor.
It was three weeks before I got around to testing it out, but when I did, the pedal was a whole new beast.
The gain still isn't much really, but that's OK I like it like that. The bottom end is nice and big, though a little muddy as there's a slight octave effect on some notes. But for the tone I'm after, this is almost perfect.

Placed in the FX loop of the Delta Blues, the pedal is responsive to dynamics and has the added bonus of acting as a master volume, though the extra gain from the preamp means that the pedal never completely cleans up.

I may end up doing some further mods to the clipping section and maybe change out the opamp for something else. But for now I'm pretty happy with this cheap pedal that cost about $1 and 15 minutes of my time to get close to what I want out of an overdrive.

Not too smooth, and just a little raspy.