Here’s Reggie Watts, who I guess you could call a comedian — although I think of him as ” funny, smart, interesting guy ” — using a Line 6 Echo Modeler to create a whole, multi-layered song. This is a very cool pedal, and I remember that when it came out, a couple of militantly anti-digital guitar players I knew started using them. I did too, although nowadays I’m more likely to be using the Echo Pro, which is the rackmount version. If you like this, check out Watts’ Fuck Shit Stack .
I’ve been an enthusiastic user of Electro Harmonix pedals for years, so it was with great excitement that last month I got to take a tour of the Queens, NY facility where they’re designed and manufactured. Thanks to former EH head design engineer, hi-fi sound designer, guitarist, trapeze artist (!) and all-around thinker JC Morrison for making it possible.
Electro Harmonix Factory floor
Making Big Muffs! I have 3 or 4 well-used ones, so it was cool to see where they’re born
Custom tube tester, hand built by JC
A stack of NY-2A compressors
Engineer John Pisani explaining some of the new pedals he’s working on, including the V256 Vocoder and the 22 Caliber Power Amp
I’m pretty sure this is the last pawn shop deal I’ll ever get, now that ” old ” means ” expensive ” and every junk dealer in the world is positive that their crappy vintage trash is worth a fortune. This is probably a Silvertone S1429 or S1454, a model made in the 1960s by the Harmony guitar company for Sears & Roebuck, but it might have been sold under any number of brand names. I have a real soft spot for Harmony instruments because the very first guitar I ever bought ( 12 years old, south side of Chicago ) was a Harmony Stratotone, very much like this one – a real piece of junk with a big crack in the side and moth eggs in the tone knob, but your first love is your first love. Here’s a photo of Brian Jones playing a Stratotone in the Rolling Stones.
I got this guitar at a Mexican pawn shop ( many beautiful accordions in there, one of about 200 instruments I wish I could play ) in Echo Park, Los Angeles in 2002. It cost me $60, but for another 10 bucks they threw in an original Vox case, which is probably worth more than the guitar is. Back in the 1950s and 60s, ” deluxe ” often meant cramming as many pickups and as much wiring into a guitar as could fit ( I still don’t understand what’s up with all those switches and knobs on Fender Jaguars and certain Gretsch models ), and this was a 3-pickup model, with an on-off switch and volume and tone pots for each pickup.
Whoever owned this thing before me did a lot of modifications to it. The neck is non-original – I don’t know where it’s from, but it’s actually much nicer than the one the guitar would have come with, with a good ebony fingerboard and very pretty abalone inlays, although the tuners were the plastic kind you find on cheap nylon-string classical guitars. The knobs were from Radio Shack. The kicker was that the entire body had been coated with glue and glitter — red on the front and back, and green on the sides, giving the guitar a sort of festive Christmas look. I found the idea of ” La guitarra de Navidad ” to be hilarious, so I added a couple of sparkly stickers of candy canes, Santas, and Christmas trees.
The guitar sounds great, thanks to the original DeArmond pickups, but the middle pickup, which was located exactly where you would strum the guitar, really impeded comfortably playing it without adding much in the way of tonal variety. There’s millions of these things out there and this guitar certainly doesn’t have any collector value, so I decided to get rid of all the unnecessary stuff and make a basic, playable instrument out of it. I enlisted the help of my friend Johnny Hotwheels, who plays guitar in Rock City Morgue and restores classic cars by day. I thought about stripping the body down to bare wood, and Johnny is a wizard with a spraygun and a pinstripe brush so I considered those options as well, but in the end I asked him to just get the glue off. The result is a kind of ” stripped car ” look, showing some of the original ” redburst ” finish and some surprisingly nice flamed wood. This was not an expensive guitar and probably wasn’t built by who you’d call master luthiers, but the revealed made-in-the-U.S.A. quality in the the cutting, joining, and inlay work really surprised us.
In reassembling the guitar, I decided to go as simple as possible – I ditched the middle pickup, on-off switches, multiple knobs, and a good couple of feet of wiring in favor of a 2-pickup, 1 volume pot, 1 tone pot setup, which I put together with a new pickup selector switch, 250k pots, and wire that I ordered from Stewart-MacDonald ( hint : this is the same place instrument repair shops get their parts, so the next time you’re getting a guitar fixed you can save some money by ordering parts yourself and bringing them with you ).
The tuners I installed are vintage Klusons that came from a Magnatone lap steel I got as part of a pretty grey ” mother of toilet seat ” set similar to this one – I sold the amp after severely shocking myself with it twice, and I don’t know anyone, not even super hot-shit guitar players, who can play lap steel well ( I certainly can’t ), so I stole the tuners and the pickup off of mine. An interesting thing came to light when I opened the lap steel up : there’s a label inside that says ” Made In American Sector – Occupied Berlin ” and it turns out that the thing is made of walnut, which is not usually a material associated with musical instruments. I can’t find much on the internet about the Magnatone company right after World War II, but in asking myself about what the Nazis used walnut for, and so much of it that there might be a large surplus — plus a dormant factory that an enterprising American might repurpose to make musical equipment, the answer that comes to me is this. The knobs are Gibson ” witch hats “, which came from a 1962 Les Paul Jr.
What’s that? Using a microphone you found in the trash to record guitars? Well, why not? Back when Sean and I ran The Saint, I found an Electro-Voice 635A in the giant ( I mean giant, all the way up to the ceiling ) mound of trash we cleared out of the back room. Turns out that this mic was considered a kind of secret weapon on guitar amps in the 70s and 80s. This particular one sounds sort of okay, and it doesn’t really do anything that standard mic choices ( Shure SM57, Sennheiser MD421 ) don’t do. Who knows how much liquor has been spilled on it through the ages, though.
Pretty much done with overdubs for the Black Rose Band LP. Edited and fake-mastered a record for Bloater, who are some old friends of mine… in fact, one of them was the very first person I ever tried to start a band with. The Odoms album is at the manufacturers now, should be back and available in a week or two, and he’s getting ready for his first-ever solo show, June 6th at One Eyed Jacks. This week Odoms, Ballzack, and I were interviewed this week by the noted hip hop producer Diplo for an upcoming film about New Orleans bounce rap.
That’s all I got. NOLA’s extended cool spring is finally over, it’s hot as f*ck and it’s only going to get worse. Hooray!
Speaking of phones, a couple of months ago I was messing around in an abandoned factory and found this old ( I’m guessing 1940s or 50s ) intercom handset. Earlier, inspired by the cool microphones Placid Audio makes out of telephone parts, I got some broken mics from the New Orleans Music Exchange and a couple of junk telephones from a thrift store and I built two usable tele-mic hybrids. When I got this thing, though, I realized that it IS a microphone — it’s got a chunky little transformer built into it .. and it was made by Electro-Voice, an old-time manufacturer of mics like the RE20, which you still see in almost every radio station and recording studio. All I had to do was clip the female end off of a mic cable and solder the wires to the wires of corresponding color inside the phone. Presto! It sounds like ……. a telephone, but when used in conjunction with other mics it produces a distinctive tinny, warbly sound that can be really atmospheric ( I hate using words like ” vibey “, but that’s exactly what it does ) . The first time I tried recording with it was as one of the piano mics for Rock City Morgue’s ” The Cat’s Meow ” EP ( you can get it on itunes, or vinyl 10″ record direct from the band ). It’s also on Rik Slave & The Phantoms‘ forthcoming album ( on tack piano ) and on some vocals on Odoms‘ album. Both should be out in a few months.
