My Recording Project

Hello there, it's been a while since last time I wrote a post in this blog. Anyway, I just want to share with you my recording project. Been busy learning how to record and mix a song with multiple instruments. I also learned how to use Hydrogen Drum Machine to make a drum track for my songs and I must say it's quite a powerful software and the best part is that it is free.

Enjoy these videos:

List of gears used to record:

1. Fender American Standard Stratocaster HSS with DiMarzio Air Zone on the bridge and DiMarzio Virtual Vintage Heavy Blues 2 on the neck.
2. Some pedals: Radial Tonebone Hot British, Xotic BB Preamp, Boss GE-7 Equalizer, Boss NS-2 Noise Suppressor.
3. Mesa Boogie Transatlantic TA-30 with Mini Recto 1x12 Cab, connected to Radial JDX Amp DI.
4. From the Radial JDX, it goes to the Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 USB Interface into my computer.
5. Ibanez BTB 775PB as my bass guitar.
6. Line 6 POD X3 Live for my bass guitar.
7. Yamaha PSR 710 keyboard direct to my Scarlett 2i2.
8. Hydrogen Drum Machine
9. Reaper x64 DAW as my DAW recording software.

Process

I recorded my drum track first on the Hydrogen, export individual tracks and import it to Reaper and then I EQ-ed the individual drum instruments and put compressor on some of them just to get the kick and snare to sound clicky and punchy.

Then I recorded my rhythm guitar tracks, I recorded the same track twice and then pan each one hard left and the other hard right. Then I proceed by recording bass track and then finish up by recording keyboard parts such as piano and strings. After I finished recording them all, I EQ-ed all of them to avoid the the tracks drowning each other.

I must say I learned a lot from recording and mixing songs. It really opened up my perspective about tone, it's not just about fantastic gear and everything, but really also about how you place your instrument in the mix to get it heard and get a good quality sound out of it.

I hope you guys enjoyed my recording videos! Cheers and God bless you!

IT'S BEEN A WHILE

Wow, I got really caught up with so many things happening in my life recently. Lots of things going on especially work related as well as some family things.

Anyway, I'm glad that now I have more than 15k visits on my page, thank you to you all who kept coming back to this blog. I haven't got any chance to acquire anything new for my pedalboard but I am currently tweaking on changing potentionmeters on my MIJ Stratocaster.

I'm also thinking about saving some money to buy a proper MIM Telecaster probably sometime early April. Been lusting for a real Fender Telecaster for quite some time, I hope I will get the right Telecaster!!

Anyway, I had this MC402 Overdrive Boost by MXR/CAE that I forgot to make a review of, I'm going to make some quick recording of it and post a review soon. I'm also going to post some new articles about basic things maybe more to the technical guitar playing stuffs just to add something different to this blog.

Okay, I will write more soon, so please stay tuned :)... Please help me recommend this blog to your friends so you can share more guitar-related information to them.

Peace and God Bless :)

It's That Time of the Year! Merry Christmas :)

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Sorry for the lack of update, here's a little classic "I'll Be Home For Christmas" that I re-arranged. Hopefuly you all have a wonderful Christmas either alone or with your loved ones. God bless you all and keep on checking this blog for more updates.

Stay tuned for more reviews :) Thank you for checking this blog out :)

RECORDING SOME STUFF

Hello people, I'm glad to announce that I will come up with something before Christmas this year. It's an amateur recording of popular Christmas songs that I cover using many different genres that are mainly guitar driven. It's gonna be an instrumental album and the title is going to be called "LAGU KRESMES". I will post more detail soon. It's gonna feature my Stratocasters and my new Ibanez AK95DVS.

Anyway, many of you might be wondering about my recording setup at home so I will explain how I do recording in my home. For the software, I use AUDACITY, it's a free recording software that you can download. It has tons of great features such as EQ, Noise Removal, Panning, Time Shift, Split Stereo, Leveller, Compressor, etc.

For the hardware, I am using a cheap but good USB Mixer called Yamaha MW10C. It's connected directly to the USB of my PC. It has 10 channels with adjustable knobs such as level, treble, mid, bass, compression, pan, gain, etc. I don't use studio monitor, but I got a free JBL standard PC speakers that I use to listen to the recorded tracks. It does its job properly so I don't use professional studio monitor.

To record my guitar tracks, I use a Radial JDX direct amplifier box that's plugged in between my Mesa Transatlantic TA-30 and my Mesa Mini Recto Cab. It's not totally transparent but I'm able to EQ the tone to get it as similar as possible to the real sound that I'm getting from the cab using the Yamaha MW mixer's EQ knobs.

The bass tracks are coming from my Ibanez BTB775 bass that's plugged into my Line 6 POD X3. The keyboard tracks are from my Yamaha PSR keyboard plugged into my POD X3 as well. The drum tracks also come from the Yamaha keyboard. I can't afford buying real drum set at this time, I have to save some money first.

That's all for now, stay tuned for some audio clips, and thanks for checking this blog out, today we hit 12000 views! Cheers and God bless :)

KEEP PLAYING YOUR GUITAR

Hello everyone, I just want to share a little bit of reflection about what's on my mind for the last few days. First of all, thank you regular readers who kept coming back to this simple blog, I hope you gained a lot from this blog although most of the contents here came from my subjective experience as a guitar player.

These few days, I kept thinking, why did I keep playing guitar until today, knowing that I don't plan to pursue  music-related career? I know some people who stop playing guitar after they start to get busier in their lives and I thought I was about to stop playing as well but apparently I don't. Here are some of the few reasons that I think caused me to still play guitar until today:

It's fun
Of course it is, so obvious. Learning how to play a guitar when you have never played one before is always a pain in the neck, but once you get past learning different shapes of chords and actually start to play a song, you'll feel like you've achieved something very significant and it's quite thrilling. Nowadays, I'm always learning new techniques from songs that I like to hear and I can still feel the thrill every time I tried something new.

We're just talking about playing guitar, but actually what's even more fun is the level of tweak-ability that you can find when you're adjusting your guitar especially on electric guitars. I play mostly electric guitars, so I always have to tweak the sound on my amp, I have to get some effect pedals going here and there to catch the vibes of some certain songs and the guitars themselves don't always sound the same everyday. Even with the guitars, you can still experiment in terms of tone by changing the pickups, strings, bridge, tuner, pots, and so on.

Tone
Every human has 5 senses and one of them is hearing. We can entertain our sight by watching movies or looking at some pictures, we can entertain our taste buds by eating good food, we can entertain our smelling by wearing perfumes, and we can entertain our touch sense by using pillow and comfortable chairs. On the same line, we entertain our hearing by listening to good music, which is basically a carefully arranged noise with some tonal qualities that had been prepared in a certain way. Listening to good tone and playing my guitar is an additional and significant way to alternatively entertain my hearing. I don't like listening to mainstream songs, so the tone that comes out from my guitar is sort of like an escape for my hearing.

It's been almost 8 years since I start playing guitar, it's kind of like my habit
I always sit down and play at least for a few moment everyday. It always feels weird when I spent a whole day without playing my guitar even for just like a couple of minutes. When you do something you like routinely for a long period of time, you start to feel like it's your nature and playing guitar routinely for a long time has that same effect on me.

Emotional investment

Obviously, after you play your guitar for so long, you will start to develop a connection between you and your guitar. My modded PGM-30 has bonded so well that playing it becomes absolutely effortless and I can easily get good tones every time I play that guitar. I started playing that PGM 7 years ago and the guitar had captured every moment of my musical journey as it has been my main guitar until today; it had seen my low moments when I'm still learning to play guitar but it also had seen some glorious gigs when I was in Seattle. It has keep me pretty sane during stressful days of work and it has been a tool for me to pour out my unexpressed emotion; it helped me to keep my perspective of the world and my sanity as well. To put it in another words, it has sort of become like my best friend.

My only advice for you my lovely readers is to keep playing no matter what. Developing this kind of relationship with your instrument will take a lot of time and sacrifice, but the end result is very rewarding. Whenever I play my guitar, I always feel trouble-free in my mind no matter how good or bad my playing is and no matter how happy or sad I am. I hope your instrument can free your mind as well.

I hope you enjoy this post, keep on playing guitar! Cheers and God Bless :)

CAE MC404 Wah

Hello everyone, I'm going to review a very cool wah pedal called CAE MC404 by MXR. As some of you might already know, this is one of those wah pedal that has tons of features that mostly are only available on boutique high end wah pedals but with friendlier price. Also, this one is built with the highest standard and could survive Armageddon without a scratch on it. Read on :)

CAE
In case you don't know, CAE or Custom Audio Electronics is a very famous rig builder that designed many high profile artists' rigs with ultra custom solutions that will maintain good tone, ease of use and durability. Besides building rigs, CAE also starts to build effects pedal as well. So far, they come with MC401 Boost, MC402 Overdrive/Boost and MC404 Wah.

Features
This wah pedal features so many stuffs!! First of all, it features two separate inductors, one called yellow and the other one called red; the red one has tons of low end deep sound while the other one focuses more on the high end treble, the two can be switched back and forth using a side switch on the right. It also has a built in MC401 Boost circuit, also with a side switch that can be easily engaged; the boost is very useful when you need to add more low end while keeping the top end loud and clear or as an extra dirt to kick the front of the amp.

However, the most important feature for me is the TRUE BYPASS. This pedal has been confirmed as a true bypass as it does not suck any of your tone at all. This is very important as I mentioned on a past post that wah pedals don't usually have the luxury of true bypass. Wah pedals like this usually comes in the boutique range but now we can have it for a more reasonable price.

Sound
Super nice!! One of the nicest sounding wah pedal that I ever heard. The yellow inductor works very well for clean funky tunes as well on some overdrive parts. The red inductor shines very well on lead playing. I don't really use the boost but it's very useful if you have some volume balance issue with the amp. The MC401 boost can really hit the front of your amp with more volume and with as little dirt as possible.

Still remember my old post about Weeping Demon Wah? This one totally kicks that wah out of the food chain haha! Although I don't use wah as much as some of my friends, this one really deserves a special place on my pedalboard.

Worth the price?
It comes for around USD $150 on the market, maybe higher than that sometimes. It's not cheap for sure, but  you get two inductors and a boost that comes around $90.00 alone, that's like three pedals in one form factor. What more can you ask? It's totally worth it!!! I wouldn't even mind paying a bit more.

From 0 to 10
11. Never been this happy with a wah pedal. I tried every wah that I found on guitar stores, this one wins the competition significantly in terms of price, reliability and tone.

CLICK HERE FOR YELLOW CLEAN AUDIO SAMPLE
CLICK HERE FOR RED LEAD GAIN AUDIO SAMPLE

I hope you enjoy the post, cheers and God bless :)

ELECTRO HARMONIX MICRO POG

Hello everyone, today I'm going to talk about Micro POG. It's a very unique pedal that can generates octave up and octave down sound and mix it the way you want. It's made by Electro Harmonix and it stands for Polyphonic Octave Generator.

Electro Harmonix
As you already know, EHX created tons of innovations that revolutionize the way guitar pedal sounds. Micro POG is one of the evidence of that. Although the basic idea that it enables you to play your guitar with added octave up and down sounds pretty dull, the reality is very far from dull because you can replicate some interesting tones that sound un-guitar-like. This pedal can make you sound like you play through a 12 string guitar and even like a Hammond organ.

This pedal features a true bypass switch, a dry knob,  an octave down knob, an octave up knob and a stereo output. The way you get the sound is by mixing the knobs until you get the desired tone that you are looking for. It's powered by a 9v adapter and that's already included in the box.

The sound
As I mentioned before, it sounds pretty un-guitar but it's quite fun actually. This is not the type of pedal that you turn on all the time all day long on any song; this is the one that requires the perfect timing to turn it on. Try to turn it on when you play harmonics with all knobs cranked, and you'll get a pretty sweet sounding harmonics. Turn it on with a Tube Screamer during a very mellow slow rhythm part with octave up and dry knobs cranked, you'll get a very cool and rich tone that'll add a certain air to the overall song.

Is it worth the price? 
Comes pretty expensive at around $200, the chip inside is pretty pricey. I don't say it's not worth it because it is worth the price, but I don't say that it truly is. Whatever type of music that you play, this pedal will not be used more than 40% of the time. For me, although it sounds good, it doesn't justify the price vs amount of time spent with this pedal. But hey, this pedal makes playing guitar more fun.

From 0 to 10
I'll give this pedal 9. If it comes cheaper, I'll give 10 for sure.

CLICK HERE FOR AUDIO CLIP

I hope you found this post useful, thanks for reading. Cheers and God Bless :)

RADIAL TONEBONE HOT BRITISH

Hello, today I want to talk about the Radial Tonebone Hot British tube overdrive pedal. While there are so many tube overdrive pedals out there in the market, apparently there are only a few that sound really good. This pedal happens to be one of them. Let's check it out.

The Spec
It contains a 12AX7 tube inside that produces most of the overdrive sound. There are so many knobs; a knob to control the output level, treble knob, bass knob, contour knob, drive and three voicing switches that controls the top end, the overall voicing and mid boost. Each of the switches had three different options, so you pretty much get wide variety of overdrive tone.

It comes with 15V adapter with more than enough power to accommodate the 12AX7 tube. It's also true bypass so if you turn it off it won't suck some power from your tone. The manual provides some helpful example settings that you can use as a starting point before you tweak the pedals.

The Sound
Extremely killer, life changer!!! This pedal can be used as your dedicated lead/crunch channel without changing your amp's channel. I used this pedal only on the clean channel of my amp and it does a wonderful job of providing high amount of gain to the amp. The knobs are extremely sensitive and they do provide so many options of tone that you can use to create whatever overdrive sound you have in your mind.

Turn the drive knob all the way down, the pedal will deliver you a hot Tube Screamer-ish kind of overdrive level, while turning it all the way up will deliver a super high gain Mesa Boogie lead distortion sound. It takes other overdrive pedals pretty well in front of it such as Tube Screamer or BB Preamp to add extra grit to your sound.

The Application
I highly recommend this pedal to those who only had single channel tube amplifier or an amp with bad sounding overdrive channel and needs to have a natural sounding amp-like overdrive that comes in a form of a pedal.

You can also use this on an overdrive amp that doesn't have an effects loop for your delay pedals. Set the amp clean, put the pedal in front of your delay pedal and you can have a natural sounding delays without the need of having FX loop.

I, however, do not recommend this pedal if you are going to use this on a solid state amp, I tried it with an Ibanez 5 Watt amp and it sounds like a total piece of garbage. Also, if you want to use it to boost a tube amp with a great overdrive channel, this might not going to impress you that much(although it can and it sounds good) because you can get a very decent overdrive pedal that sounds as good for cheaper price.

The Maintenance
Tube needs to be replaced once every few years depending on how often it's being used. Also, you have to let the tube warm up before you can switch it on, meaning that it has to be off when the power supply is connected and you have to wait for like 3 minutes or so to prolong the tube life.

Is it worth the money?
$230 is the normal price on the market, you can get it very close to $200 on some stores. I say this is worth it if it's applied the right way(see "The Application" above).

From 0 to 10
Obviously 10.

Sound Clips
Andy Timmons Tube Driver style overdrive
John Petrucci Mesa Boogie Mark style distortion
Warm Tube Screamer-ish overdrive

Hope you enjoy the post, cheers and God bless :)

MY CURRENT PEDALBOARD

Hello everyone, I want to share my current pedalboard that I use for practicing, recording and experimenting. It's actually a bit too big for me to carry during a gig, so I mainly use it only at home and I connect it with my Mesa Transatlantic TA-30 amplifier.

Signal Path
From guitar to Mesa TA-30 amp:
Boss GE-7 Equalizer, CAE MC404 Wah, EHX Micro POG, TC Polytune, EHX Doctor Q Envelope Filter, MXR Dyna Comp, EHX Worm, Ibanez AF-2 Airplane Flanger, Maxon OD9 Silvermod, Radial Tonebone Hot British, RC Booster, Morley Volume Plus.

On the FX Loop:
Boss DD-3, EHX Deluxe Memory Man.

Most of the pedals are powered by the 9V Visual Sound One Spot with the exceptions of Radial Tonebone, Deluxe Memory Man and EHX Worm.

Philosophy of my pedalboard
The general idea of this pedalboard is to be able to cover all kinds of popular effects that you usually hear on any guitar oriented music. Doctor Q can do some envelope filter funk songs, while Worm can deliver phaser,  trem and vibrato. On the other hand, OD9 can deliver some bluesy low gain overdrive tone while the Hot British can be cranked up to a very high gain John Petrucci crunch tone. The RC Booster acts as a transparent volume boost, more like a master volume rather than a gain box. MC404 wah can give you either a bright funky wah tone or a warm lead waht tone with a flick of a switch. Deluxe Memory Man will give you a rich dark analog delay tone while the DD-3 can cover more straight forward digital delay tone. AF-2 can act as either flanger or, with the right setting, an analog chorus from the '80s.

Do I need all of those 14 pedals to sound good?
This pedalboard grows from a simple idea that I talked about in a past post about signal path. Essentially, it can be reduced to four aspects with one pedal for each "tone aspect": EQ, Modulation, Overdrive and Delay. However, as we grow in terms of musical taste and tone consciousness, we usually want more choices for each aspect that I mentioned before. I've been very fortunate and blessed to have all these pedals but if the pedalboard is reduced to only 4 pedals to represent each tone aspect, I can still survive.

If you are a beginner in the world of effects, I wouldn't suggest you to get 14 pedals at once; buy just one or two pedals for each of the tone aspects I previously mentioned and then slowly upgrade in the future. Don't buy the cheapest you can get, buy the ones that sound good; buying cheap low quality pedals will give you hard time in the future, trust me.

What pedalboard to choose?
I'm using Gator GPT-Pro 16" x 30" but to be honest it's better if you can build your own simple board because you can save a lot of money unless you want to buy something more fancy like Pedaltrain or other high end pedalboards.

Thanks for reading this post, I hope you enjoy it. Cheers and God bless :)

BOSS DIGITAL DELAY DD-3

UPDATED, WITH SOUND CLIPS
Behold, one of the most popular Digital Delay Pedal you've ever come across, it's the Boss Digital Delay DD-3. It's one of the most used digital delay pedal on the world. Popular artists such as Eric Johnson, Joe Satriani, Steve Vai, and many others use this pedal to get that crystal clear delay sound with no added anything. This pedal does not belong to me but I'm going to have it on my pedalboard for some time.

Digital vs Analog
As we all know, there's a significant difference between a digital delay and analog delay. Apart from the circuitry, the tone between the two delays is quite different. Analog delay is known for its lush, warm, wobbly, saturated lo-fi repeats that sometimes resemble an old tape echo delay. On the other hand, digital delay provides clean, pristine clear, hi-fi repeats that really aims for simply clearer repeats. Both have totally different feeling although they can be used on same situation. I still prefer analog delay for its wobbly-ness but this DD-3 provides an extra range that can further enhance your sonic projection.

What's so special about it?
You can read all the technical details on the website, I'm not going to include them in here. Anyway, there are many ways to use this delay pedal; it's quite flexible, unlike my analog delay pedals. Paul Gilbert used to store some lick in it and call it down using the "Hold" mode, while Eric Johnson replaces his Echoplex tape echo with this pedal just to simply get that 300-500ms repeats. Some people set the delay time very short and get that slap-back reverb-kind-of repeats; some others set the time very long and get that glorious long delay lead tone which everyone loves to hear. Very versatile indeed!!

Anything bad?
It's not true bypass if that's your main concern, but it doesn't suck too much bypass tone so if you only have one of these on your pedalboard, you should be fine. When engaged, your real tone will get darken a little bit; while this will make your guitar sound fatter, actually some people hate it because their high end got lost and they cannot get that clicky pick attack sound when this pedal is engaged. Other concern includes automatic turn on every time I power it up using my One Spot 9V pedal power. I never tried the using it with battery so I can't tell you if there's any battery concern.

Is it worth the price?
This one comes at around $110.00, quite expensive but sounds pretty good. I say it's worth it and I may even say this one is a "must-have" on your pedalboard.

From 0 to 10?
I can say 10, but remember to try it first and see if it matches your tone. A great pedal to experiment with.

CLICK HERE FOR SOUND CLIP. I hope you enjoy this post, cheers and God bless :)