Let's see your guitar and bass gear!

In reply to jh36 :

Live at Pompei is by far my favorite Floyd work, this sounds like it'll be awesome!

In reply to barefootskater (Shaun) :

Oh man! Honestly not being a guitarist those are all 3 pretty sweet looking guitars(excluding the Epi LP lol).

In reply to Pete Gossett (Forum Supporter) :

The only important one is the white telecaster. Jerk at the store gave me a discount on strings and a killer price for the tele. I told him I get paid next week. Wife isn't thrilled though so...

In reply to barefootskater (Shaun) :

Oh I figured that was the one(and I love it in all white!), but I've never seen an Ibanez in that shade of blue(or with those pickups), and that Starcaster is just weird & ugly enough to be kinda cool. 

I'm 95% there on the ampeg purchase decision. My daughter came out and played through it and now understands why I keep getting sucked out to the shop to play through it. 
 

plus, not lugging this back to work is worth at least $100. 

Keith Tanner said:

I made the mistake of going to a Foreigner concert and that got me going on 80's synths and, well, this just showed up.

The mighty DX7! My justification is that it's actually a quality keyboard, built as a pro instrument instead of a toy so it should make a good MIDI controller to replace my old PC-200. And it's an icon.

Sharp eyes may notice that it's not actually a DX7, it's a DX7s. Slightly later version with buttons that are more reliable but more importantly, the DX7 was a really early MIDI implementation and has a number of limitations. The DX7s fixes those.

These are all coming out of Japan where they use a 100V power grid (I did not know this!) so there's concern about their ability to run on North American power, but since they are a Real Instrument and not a toy there are service manuals. Looking at the wiring diagram, the internal power supply is not really any different for North America so no worries there.

Unfortunately, the keyboard did not come with a cartridge so it has to rely on the internal sounds, and the internal battery is dead so it's forgotten all of those. I can load patches into it via sysex but my cheapo $8 USB-MIDI adapter sends garbage if it's doing anything other than just key on/key off messages. So I have a new battery and a new MIDI adapter both on the way. But I can use the DX-7s to run my Sound Canvas now, so hey! Welcome to the early 90s. Now I just have to find space for it.

I also picked up one of these for cheap. 

It's a Roland TB-303 clone, darling of the dance music scene. And I am a fan of terrible interfaces. This is an absolutely ATROCIOUS interface, I have decided that all of those classic bass lines were developed by accident. Which is a lot of fun.

I have managed to teach it the bass line for Chamelon with the 808 clone providing drums and featuring monophonic lead on the Minimoog clone. Let's just say it's a little different than the original but I'm having a very good time. Can't say the same about anyone in earshot.

I've got a DX-27 in storage that needs to go at some point. I'd sell it pretty cheap. I paid way too much for it in 98-ish and only used it a dozen or so times.

What's with all the synth stuff, I thought this was a *safe space* with only guitar and bass gear!!

In reply to Paul_VR6 (Forum Supporter) :

No safe spaces in rock-n-roll. Also,
Unpopular opinion:

I'll maintain that the best VanHalen stuff was where guitar-god-Eddie was on keys.  Just saying. 

barefootskater (Shaun) said:

In reply to Paul_VR6 (Forum Supporter) :

No safe spaces in rock-n-roll. Also,
Unpopular opinion:

I'll maintain that the best VanHalen stuff was where guitar-god-Eddie was on keys.  Just saying. 

More Unpopular Opinion: I don't like Van Halen and their 28 songs with the word Love in it.

I won't run screaming when it comes on the radio but I don't really care for anything even though Van Halen was a great guitarist.

I was given the okay to talk about non-guitar instruments in this thread way back. So pbbbbth.

Finally got the DX7s working yesterday so I can play danger zone. Well, six notes of it but they're the only six you need.

It's a really interesting beast. It comes from a time when electronics were able to digitally synthesize sounds and musical instruments had just learned how to talk to each other via MIDI. But computer interfaces weren't there yet, no pretty GUIs where you grab a point waveform and move it around. There's all this capability locked inside and it's very inaccessible, it feels like it's at least a decade ahead of the support ecosystem it needed for casual use. 

Here's how you turn off the local sounds so the keyboard can be used as a MIDI controller for something else without making noise itself:

Press the EDIT button which is also labelled CHARACTER and COMPARE
Then press button 32/64, labeled 2 and V, under a heading that says MIDI
Press repeatedly to flip through multiple screens of things like MIDI OUT Local: on
Use either the NO (aka +1/OFF) button to turn it off. Or take the data slider and run it all the way to the bottom. If the slider is already at the bottom, slide it up and down again
Then press EG COPY aka STORE aka Z

Trying to upload sounds is an exercise in menu navigation, you need to set the channel and set the bank to receive and also turn off the internal memory protection which is found under UTILITY/CARTRIDGE 15/47.

But once you get that, you upload something like rom_1a.sys and voila: BASS 1. We're in the danger zone, baby.

I am very much going to enjoy getting to know this.

I don't know about safe space but this is my happy place. And bonus points for the the saxophones! 

I may have mentioned my saxes in the past, they're the only musical instrument I ever actually got good at. My pride is a Selmer soprano that I bought from a guitar shop in the Pigalle district of Paris back in 1990. 

SaxyHero said:

I don't know about safe space but this is my happy place. And bonus points for the the saxophones! 

I feel like this setup is arranged like a trap, once you get in, you can't get back out.

In reply to Paul_VR6 (Forum Supporter) :

The trick is surviving the thousand or so cords, guitar pedals, guitars and various other real traps Antihero has left about. Lol Once you're in though that really is a safe place. Sometimes you have to do a jumping forward roll over the piano to get out. 

In reply to Keith Tanner :

Wow, getting a Selmer from Paris is actually pretty cool! 

My alto is a Buffet Crampon and my tenor is, believe it or not, a saxophone.com sax that I got from a pawn shop for $100 because they said it was unplayable.... It didn't have a reed. I took it to my college band where everyone stuck their nose up to it until I played it. Then they were all jealous. Lol  

My alto is a Buffet that I bought off the contemporary equivalent of Craigslist in the French Alps in 1990 :)

Shopping for that soprano was fun, I looked up music stores in the Parisian yellow pages and spent the day in the Metro. It's a Super Action 80 Series II, I think. Saxophones are either sold in high-end places with violins or pawn/rock shops in the skeezy parts of town, so I had no idea what the neighborhood was going to look like when I came up from underground. I think the shop was a pawn shop, there was a live sex show going on in one of the venues just down the street. Pigalle was a little rough in those days.

The tenor is just a YTS-23 student model that I've owned for 35 years. But I played it on stage with Alanis Morisette, so there's that.

In reply to Keith Tanner :

Oh yeah, so there's that! 

Your stories are definitely better then mine but I'll never forget the look on those pawn shop workers when I magically made the unplayable, tarnished saxophone make beautiful sounds from their booth. Then the humor when the cashier is telling me how it's sold as is.. and I'm like yeah yeah just give it to me. 

I played my alto Bundy II in a college band for years and you could never tell the difference between me playing and the girl next to me who had a Yamaha custom. 

Saturday she saw an acoustic on fb she thought she could flip for a couple hundo and asked me to pick it up, thinking I know what to look for. It looked alright in the fading light, worth $80 anyway, and the guy seemed in a hurry to have it gone. After looking a bit closer and trying to find similar models, I'm not exactly sure that it's worth much more than she paid. Herman is the brand and the label says "hand built in Canada". It appears to be all solid wood, maybe cedar on the back and sides, not sure on the top. Grain looks like spruce but the finish seems too dark. Fretboard was DRY. Beyond dry.  But the frets show no signs of wear and the neck is remarkably straight. So I took off the rusty strings and gave it a decent cleaning and oiling and new strings. It's honestly amazing. 

it has a few blemishes and a couple chips and scratches, but it sounds and plays so well. I told her a may have to claim it and pay her $80 back. I seem to be picking these things up at an alarming rate lately. Another new one comes home tomorrow. 

barefootskater (Shaun) said:

Saturday she saw an acoustic on fb she thought she could flip for a couple hundo and asked me to pick it up, thinking I know what to look for. It looked alright in the fading light, worth $80 anyway, and the guy seemed in a hurry to have it gone. After looking a bit closer and trying to find similar models, I'm not exactly sure that it's worth much more than she paid. Herman is the brand and the label says "hand built in Canada". It appears to be all solid wood, maybe cedar on the back and sides, not sure on the top. Grain looks like spruce but the finish seems too dark. Fretboard was DRY. Beyond dry.  But the frets show no signs of wear and the neck is remarkably straight. So I took off the rusty strings and gave it a decent cleaning and oiling and new strings. It's honestly amazing. 

it has a few blemishes and a couple chips and scratches, but it sounds and plays so well. I told her a may have to claim it and pay her $80 back. I seem to be picking these things up at an alarming rate lately. Another new one comes home tomorrow. 

That very much looks like cedar. Since it's Canadian, wonder if they are connected to Garrison? I'm a huge fan of their acoustics

In reply to barefootskater (Shaun) :

Norman guitars are under the umbrella of Godin  along with the Seagull brand.  They've been around since the early 70's...nice catch!

Looks like that's a B-18, so that's a parlor guitar (which I've had a fascination with for a while) ...cherry back and sides, Sitka top, maple neck/rosewood board. 
I would fork over the $80 and enjoy. 

In reply to jh36 :

Sitka. Every time I hear that word all I can think about is Chris Farley. 

And a hurricane called "hurricane Ditka"

I always thought parlor guitars were a bit smaller bodied. This is dreadnought size. Eh. Something new every day. It surely worth $80, even came with a decent stand.
My sisters boy says he wants to learn and she's planning to get him a guitar for Christmas. He's 7 but quite tall, and maybe could handle a full scale guitar. Maybe we sell it to her. I strung it really light so it's very easy to play (and the neck is amazing) but I have a couple months to decide. 

SaxyHero said:

In reply to Paul_VR6 (Forum Supporter) :

The trick is surviving the thousand or so cords, guitar pedals, guitars and various other real traps Antihero has left about. Lol Once you're in though that really is a safe place. Sometimes you have to do a jumping forward roll over the piano to get out. 

In my defense it's only like.....40, maybe 45 guitars, several dozen fuzz pedals and 5 or 6 reaaaaalllyy long cords tangled into everything lol

In reply to Antihero (Forum Supporter) :

Check out Gabriel Marin's pedalboard setup. :)

^ makes my head hurt and makes me thing "where is that hum coming from"