Ah, the rock and roll life. The girls, the money, the glamour. The world tours, the cars, the record deals. None of which you will ever have. Nor me, of course. Us mere mortals have to make do with the usual toilet circuit, with appropriate toilet musicians.
So, if you want to play derivative pub rock in front of exactly nobody while you lose your job, your social life, relationship (if any) and your ability to tell left from right in less than three tries, you're going to need someone to do it with you. That's where (urgh) other musicians come in. Musicians are much like orcs (go with me on this one). They're ugly, often violent, associated with axes (see!) and you wouldn't want to leave one alone in a room with a small child. And, finally, of course, they form into tribes. I've played with a lot of musicians and auditioned even more, and I think I have identified these groupings.
1 – The Unreliable.
"Don't worry, I'll be there. Maybe."
Gender: Either
Instrument: Any, though this tribe contains more drummers than you would expect statistically...
Members of the Unreliable tribe operate on a different space-time continuum to the rest of reality. Time and space have no meaning, and deadlines and soundcheck times are regarded as interesting suggestions that would be worth looking at if there weren't so many other important things to do. There are a great many variations to their M.O., ranging from turning up late every time by a predictable margin (easily counteracted, as we did with one drummer, by lying to him about what time practices were), to those who (presumably) consult their horoscope before a gig, and if Saturn is just the wrong side of Capricorn, emigrate to Ghana.
I have heard all the following explanations for lateness or no-shows at practices, or even gigs. I am not making any of these up.
"Yeah, but Arsenal were on the TV so I watched that instead."
"I thought Dover was 20 minutes from Birmingham by train. Turns out it isn't."
"I snorted some tainted cocaine and couldn't remember who I was."
"Oh yeah, I moved to Devon. I was going to tell you but my phone didn't have any credit."
"I drank two litres of vodka, crashed my car, broke my thumb, but then met a mysterious Rastafarian who healed me with his touch. Then I got arrested."
2 – The Bitter Failed Pros
"Haha, I'll laugh when you fail."
Gender: Usually male.
Instument: Any
The music business can be a cruel mistress. For every man who makes it big, a hundred will be left by the wayside, bitter hollow shells. And for some reason they will audition for your band. And only audition. They will never join your band, or any band. In fact most of the time they won't even unpack their instrument. They will just sit in the corner, drink beer, and mock the feeble, pathetic attempts of the naïve young things in front of them to conquer the music business with their out-of-tune caterwauling. They will recount (usually fictitious) anecdotes of the bands they toured with and the groupies they shagged, none of which you will ever come close to. Of course, this bravado hides the fact that they are not in a band, and you are.
3 – Paranoid Lunatics
"No you can't hear my songs. You'll steal them."
Gender: Usually Male
Instrument: Usually guitar or vocals.
The Paranoid Lunatic tribe is an offshoot of the Failed Pro tribe, but the Paranoid Lunatic has taken his failure to "make it" in a different way. He has decided that his shattered dreams are not a result of his lack of talent or highly defective personality, but because mysterious forces, possibly aliens, have intervened to ruin his career. He thus treats all bandmates with suspicion, regarding them as agents of the evil record industry who want to steal his song ideas, ruin his reputation and render him homeless. Every rehearsal becomes a stressful ordeal, as he must hide his genius, but not so much as to be thrown out. Eventually, he can take the strain no longer, and leaves, citing his bandmates' "ulterior motives" and add those bandmates to his long list of mortal enemies. This comes as a surprise to the bandmates in question, who just wanted someone to play bass on their Queen covers.
4 – Riot Grrrls
"I wrote this one about my mum. It's called 'I hate you and want to kill us both'."
Gender: Female
Instrument: Guitar, Bass, vocals.
A rare female-only tribe of musicians, Riot Grrrls learn the minimum amount necessary to play 3 chords and devote the rest of their time to learning how to shout into the microphone about things that bother them or just for its own sake. Their musical tastes generally run from Bikini Kill to L7 and back again. Most of the time they don't appear to have any reason to be so angry, apart from a residual teenage dislike of their parents, which is often the chief theme of their songwriting. Whereas many males enter rock music in order to attract girls, the Riot Grrrl either hates men for political reasons or already has a boyfriend, the more disreputable and disliked by her parents the better. Their wardrobe consists of torn jeans, faded t-shirts featuring obscene slogans, and things with spikes on them. Their instrument, by law, must be covered entirely with stickers featuring the aforementioned obscene slogans and anime characters wearing very little clothing.
5 – The Wasted
"Whuuuuuuh?"
Gender: Any
Instrument: Any, although once again drummers feature prominently.
Now the world of rock and roll may have a veneer of anarchy and chaos, but it in fact has a great many rules. One of those rules is that your career must proceed in the following order:
1 – Learn an instrument
2 – Join a band
3 – Become rich and successful
4 – Enter a "Booze and Drugs Hell ™"
Some musicians, however, will break this order, and get themselves wrecked on all manner of substances before becoming famous, or even learning to play their instrument properly. Likewise, it is considered bad form to get high as a kite an hour before auditioning so that the audition coincides with your comedown from whatever dubious substance was upside your head. This condition caused one poor soul who shall remain nameless to lurch into the rehearsal room, demand that we turn off the lights, make no attempt to tune his bass, plug in into the keyboard amp by mistake, thump his strings tunelessly, complain that he couldn't hear the drummer that he was standing right next to, swear at us, and lurch out again.
6 – Mr. Jazz
"You guys don't have any songs in 9/14 time? Are you all mongs or what?"
Gender: Male
Instument: Any
There's a distinct chicken-and-egg question that needs to be asked about jazz musicians who audition for rock bands. Are sociopaths attracted to jazz music, or do the smug, vacuous melodies, interminable tedious meandering solos, and complex, unpleasant-sounding time signatures rot the areas of the brain associated with social skills? In any event, any jazz musician auditioning for or playing in a rock band considers himself to have failed, and to have to play with such lower forms of life as (spit) rock musicians damages their egos so much they must demonstrate their superiority both musically and by being a haughty, superior waste of carbon to everyone. Despite his self-assured sense of superiority, Mr. Jazz often has surprisingly poor timing, and is fond of forming side-projects that get nowhere.
7 – Genre Bigots
"This isn't emo-trip-straitedge-techno-metalcore! It's more like emo-trip-straitedge-metal-technocore! What kind of jerk plays that any more!?"
Gender: Male
Instrument: Guitar, Bass
Good musicians are always in demand. Thus to some extent they can pick and choose their bands until they find one that's right for them. This is fine as it goes, but some individuals take this too far. They only own a handful of CDs, usually by bands so obscure they haven't even heard of themselves, but nonetheless have very strong views about the kind of music they'd like to play, even if it's only audible in their head. These individuals (you can substitute the word "tossers" if you prefer) are usually around 17 and suffer from acne. They also combine bagfuls of attitude with a spectacular lack of creativity, motivation and maturity. This leads to some interesting conversations at auditions:
Us: "Shall we jam to something? Maybe a cover?"
Loser: "I don't do covers, man. Covers are for pussies."
Us: "Fine, we want to write our own material anyway. Do you have any riffs or anything you've been working on?"
Loser: [long pause] "No."
Us: "Then we'll play something and you join in then."
Loser: "I've heard your stuff already. It sucks. I just wanna play grindcore."
Us: "But we don't play grindcore. It said so on the ad you answered."
Loser: "You guys suck."
Perhaps some day they will find the three other people on earth who share the same taste in music as they do. Perhaps they will buy another CD, maybe even by a band someone's actually heard of. Or maybe they will be the musical equivalent of the Flying Dutchman, doomed to forever trudge from audition to audition in search of the mythical Sludge-ragga-giraffecore band that they're convinced must be out there somewhere for them.
8 - Failed Guitarists
"That's a nice looking guitar. Can I play it? Please??"
Gender: Male
Instrument: Bass
Being a guitarist can be tough – there are so many around that it can be hard to get a gig even if you're really good, so some opt for what seems to be the easy life, and pick up a four-string. I mean, that's 33% less strings, so that's 33% easier, right? They are easy to spot, especially at auditions. They have a cheap bass, purchased within the last six months, which they play in a furious style, at the rate of about twelve notes a second with little regard for timing. They sprinkle their conversation with references to the bands they used to play guitar for, and drop unsubtle hints about how they would like to play guitar "just for a couple of songs." If one of the band's guitarists plays a piece of music that they can't manage on the guitar, or, even worse, turns out to be a better bassist than them as well, then the death wails of their ego can be heard above even the most frenzied drumming.
9 - Flawed Geniuses
"I've written this 13-minute epic, and... Oh, it seems I forgot to put any clothes on again."
Gender: Any
Instrument: All of them. Sometimes more than one at the same time.
Nature has a habit of balancing out people's traits. That pretty girl who turned you down is probably as mad as a sack of eels. The brightest kid in the class is fat and ugly. John Prescott somehow ended up as Deputy Prime Minister, so he must have some talents, even if they only extend to blackmail and hypnosis.
So when you come across a musician who is clearly touched by the hand of genius, run away and hide, because they will have a serious flaw in their personality or general genetic makeup. It may be immediately apparent what the problem is the second they call you "braindead toilet-face", but some flaws are hidden and will only surface at the worst possible time, such as five minutes before your first gig, where they announce that unless they are allowed to play keyboards in a pink catfish costume, the invisible squirrels in their socks will unscrew their feet.
10 – The Prima Donnas
"From now on, I want you all to play your instruments backstage. You're blocking the audience's view of me."
Gender: Any, but girls do it best.
Instruments: Vocals (girls), Guitar (boys).
The Prima Donna tribe have a select choice of role models. Mariah Carey, Whitney Houston, Prince, Yngwie Malmsteen, all people who have got what they wanted and got it in style. Because the Prima Donna clearly has as much, if not more, talent than any of these people, she (and it is nearly always she) is entitled to the very best. Whilst the guitarists struggle to untangle their leads and get their pedals working, and the drummer assembles a kit the same weight as an aircaft carrier and twice as complicated, the Prima Donna complains that no-one has yet offered her a drink and that her microphone is the wrong colour.
Of course, there are two facts that the brave or foolish may point out to the Prima Donna:
1: You are not playing Madison Square Garden, you are playing the back room of the Dog and Vomit in Romford in front of an audience consisting of reluctant members of your family and inebriated street vagrants. Therefore demanding your own makeup artist and a rider of Chateau Neuf du Pape may be considered slightly excessive.
2: Mariah Carey "didn't do stairs" and as a result now "doesn't do record sales", Whitney Houston has been in and out of rehab so often she has her own shuttle bus, Prince gave his last album away with a newspaper who supported the Nazis in World War Two, and Yngwie's last gig was in his garden shed, where he was booed offstage by woodlice. And they were all way better than you.
Thursday 9 October 2008
Tuesday 7 October 2008
Review: PRS CE24
OK folks, it’s time for the most obvious statement of the year: relationships can be difficult. You meet that someone special, you convince yourself that you’ll be together for all time, and make all your friends vomit with levels of sticky-sweet schmaltz that would shame the end of a Robin Williams movie, and a short time later you want to pull their arms and legs off just to stop them breathing that way, dammit.
I think the problem is this – at the beginning of the relationship, you see everything through the eyes of someone who is deeply in love, and it alters your perception of reality. That slightly larger than average nose, the one that in six months will gouge into your consciousness like some kind of nasal piledriver of doom, is cute. That way she can’t pronounce her r’s is endearing, until six months later, at which point you want to fix her up to some kind of Stephen Hawking vocoder just to get her to pronounce the damn words properly. Grrr.
So basically it’s the little eccentricities that start off so appealing and end up so annoying. And so it is with the PRS CE24 I bought in late 2007.
The RRP on this axe is a hefty £1400 but yours truly managed to wangle one for £949, because of my superior charisma and charm (ok, because the shop I bought it from was about to go bust and it had a chip in the paintwork). This was a whole new level in price for me, so I had high expectations.
And boy were they met. The key points of this guitar are 100% on the money. The pickups are beyond belief. I’ve never got so much tonal versatility from a guitar. The bridge pickup screams like your girlfriend over something meaningless, like a picture of a mouse in a book or something. The neck pickup is as bluesy and melancholy as a girl moaning about how you don’t pay her enough attention, despite the fact that you have spent so much time with her that your friends hate you and your social life has gone down the plughole.
Not that I’m bitter or anything, you understand.
The neck is lightning fast and all 24 frets are easy to access (just like the toilet seat, so what’s the big deal with getting upset about leaving it up? What’s with that anyway?) As you would expect at this price, the tone and volume pots are as smooth as the skin she insists is pockmarked and ugly to justify eating ice cream to make herself feel better (just eat the damn ice-cream, I honestly don’t care any more). The hardware is excellent, and is likely to remain so for the time you have the guitar, so you don’t have to buy shiny things to keep it (her) happy.
Actually, here’s some more reasons why a PRS CE24 is better than a woman:
*It’s always curvy, no matter how old it is
*You can go back to playing your old guitar without it getting upset
*A PRS CE24 won’t object if your best mate brings his for a ‘jam session’
*It has a volume control.
Anyway, I digress. This guitar sounds awesome and plays like a dream. What more do you want?
Well, about halfway through the relationship, sorry, the article, is where the moaning starts. And it’s the little things that first seemed so good…
Take the tremolo arm. It’s based on a strat-type, but instead of a screw fitting, the bar simply slips into a rubber sleeve (har har). No twirling, no fiddling, no screwing (especially if you said the wrong thing, such as “what's wrong?”), just put it in and there it is (though she might complain about that). The only trouble is, it comes out as easily as it goes in (fnurr fnurr), and any serious wang action could leave you with your whammy bar coming off in your hand in the middle of a vital performance (ouch) There's a tiny little Allen bolt that supposedly tightens it, but I think PRS put it there just to keep you amused. It certainly doesn't do anything as far as I can tell. Maybe it's not the size, maybe I'm just not doing it right...
Even more eccentric is the pickup selector, which is a fairly standard 5-way setup, but using a rotary control (the same knob used for volume and tone). This looks pretty, but it’s almost impossible to tell what pickups are selected by looking at it, which can be infuriating. “5” is neck pickup only, whereas “8” is the two humbuckers coil-tapped and out of phase. Yeah, that's easy to figure out on stage.
Oooh, oooh, I thought of some more:
*If you don’t like the guitar’s tone, you can change it
*If the guitar is too highly-strung, you can adjust it with an Allen key
It’s not all doom and gloom about the eccentricities, though. The tuning heads incorporate some rather clever string clamps, giving you both easier string changing and better tuning stability than you usually get with a strat-type trem (though not as good as a Floyd Rose). I can’t believe that putting a little plastic doodad in the tuning heads costs a great deal, so I guess this is an example of PRS thinking just that little bit harder than other manufacturers. That’s why PRS have a user-list that’s a veritable who’s who of just about ever genre of music. And Chad Kroeger. (I bet Chad Kroeger gets loads of hot chicks, despite looking like an accident in a baboon factory. Maybe it’s because he plays a PRS. I’ll keep you updated on that one.).
*If a PRS CE24 screams, you’re doing it right, it’s not faking.
So what’s the verdict? Well, the very best relationships aren’t based on looks, or words, or petty squabbles. They’re based on mutual understanding, and how the other person makes you feel. In a truly great relationship, those, small, infuriating things don’t matter. For me, the CE24 was love at first play. I don’t care what it looks like. I don’t care that the tremolo arm has a semi-detached relationship with the actual guitar, or that the pickup selector seems to have been designed by Salvador Dali. On an intellectual level, this guitar delivers everything. It’s a disservice to this guitar to say that it can ‘do’ a Les Paul as well as it can ‘do’ a Strat. This guitar has its own voice, that is both of those things, and yet neither. That puts it on the same level as those classic designs, and considering that it’s half the price of a Les Paul that’s quite frankly astonishing. PRS may have come late to the design party, but this design, and bear in mind this is at the lower end of its prices, stands up in its own right.
But there’s something beyond that. Something that fuses with your very soul, that makes love to your fingers and soothes your troubled mind (why did she stop talking to me for a whole weekend? What did I say? Why? Why?!?”) For me at least, the CE24 feels right. We were meant to be together. And, like the very best relationships, I am prepared to overlook the imperfections, the madness, the occasional bouts of insanity, for the beautiful thing this truly is.
p.s. A PRS CE24 won’t convince itself that you don’t want it anymore if you don’t play it for a day or two
p.p.s You only need to flick a switch to turn on a PRS CE24
Verdict 5/5
Truly, madly, deeply.
I think the problem is this – at the beginning of the relationship, you see everything through the eyes of someone who is deeply in love, and it alters your perception of reality. That slightly larger than average nose, the one that in six months will gouge into your consciousness like some kind of nasal piledriver of doom, is cute. That way she can’t pronounce her r’s is endearing, until six months later, at which point you want to fix her up to some kind of Stephen Hawking vocoder just to get her to pronounce the damn words properly. Grrr.
So basically it’s the little eccentricities that start off so appealing and end up so annoying. And so it is with the PRS CE24 I bought in late 2007.
The RRP on this axe is a hefty £1400 but yours truly managed to wangle one for £949, because of my superior charisma and charm (ok, because the shop I bought it from was about to go bust and it had a chip in the paintwork). This was a whole new level in price for me, so I had high expectations.
And boy were they met. The key points of this guitar are 100% on the money. The pickups are beyond belief. I’ve never got so much tonal versatility from a guitar. The bridge pickup screams like your girlfriend over something meaningless, like a picture of a mouse in a book or something. The neck pickup is as bluesy and melancholy as a girl moaning about how you don’t pay her enough attention, despite the fact that you have spent so much time with her that your friends hate you and your social life has gone down the plughole.
Not that I’m bitter or anything, you understand.
The neck is lightning fast and all 24 frets are easy to access (just like the toilet seat, so what’s the big deal with getting upset about leaving it up? What’s with that anyway?) As you would expect at this price, the tone and volume pots are as smooth as the skin she insists is pockmarked and ugly to justify eating ice cream to make herself feel better (just eat the damn ice-cream, I honestly don’t care any more). The hardware is excellent, and is likely to remain so for the time you have the guitar, so you don’t have to buy shiny things to keep it (her) happy.
Actually, here’s some more reasons why a PRS CE24 is better than a woman:
*It’s always curvy, no matter how old it is
*You can go back to playing your old guitar without it getting upset
*A PRS CE24 won’t object if your best mate brings his for a ‘jam session’
*It has a volume control.
Anyway, I digress. This guitar sounds awesome and plays like a dream. What more do you want?
Well, about halfway through the relationship, sorry, the article, is where the moaning starts. And it’s the little things that first seemed so good…
Take the tremolo arm. It’s based on a strat-type, but instead of a screw fitting, the bar simply slips into a rubber sleeve (har har). No twirling, no fiddling, no screwing (especially if you said the wrong thing, such as “what's wrong?”), just put it in and there it is (though she might complain about that). The only trouble is, it comes out as easily as it goes in (fnurr fnurr), and any serious wang action could leave you with your whammy bar coming off in your hand in the middle of a vital performance (ouch) There's a tiny little Allen bolt that supposedly tightens it, but I think PRS put it there just to keep you amused. It certainly doesn't do anything as far as I can tell. Maybe it's not the size, maybe I'm just not doing it right...
Even more eccentric is the pickup selector, which is a fairly standard 5-way setup, but using a rotary control (the same knob used for volume and tone). This looks pretty, but it’s almost impossible to tell what pickups are selected by looking at it, which can be infuriating. “5” is neck pickup only, whereas “8” is the two humbuckers coil-tapped and out of phase. Yeah, that's easy to figure out on stage.
Oooh, oooh, I thought of some more:
*If you don’t like the guitar’s tone, you can change it
*If the guitar is too highly-strung, you can adjust it with an Allen key
It’s not all doom and gloom about the eccentricities, though. The tuning heads incorporate some rather clever string clamps, giving you both easier string changing and better tuning stability than you usually get with a strat-type trem (though not as good as a Floyd Rose). I can’t believe that putting a little plastic doodad in the tuning heads costs a great deal, so I guess this is an example of PRS thinking just that little bit harder than other manufacturers. That’s why PRS have a user-list that’s a veritable who’s who of just about ever genre of music. And Chad Kroeger. (I bet Chad Kroeger gets loads of hot chicks, despite looking like an accident in a baboon factory. Maybe it’s because he plays a PRS. I’ll keep you updated on that one.).
*If a PRS CE24 screams, you’re doing it right, it’s not faking.
So what’s the verdict? Well, the very best relationships aren’t based on looks, or words, or petty squabbles. They’re based on mutual understanding, and how the other person makes you feel. In a truly great relationship, those, small, infuriating things don’t matter. For me, the CE24 was love at first play. I don’t care what it looks like. I don’t care that the tremolo arm has a semi-detached relationship with the actual guitar, or that the pickup selector seems to have been designed by Salvador Dali. On an intellectual level, this guitar delivers everything. It’s a disservice to this guitar to say that it can ‘do’ a Les Paul as well as it can ‘do’ a Strat. This guitar has its own voice, that is both of those things, and yet neither. That puts it on the same level as those classic designs, and considering that it’s half the price of a Les Paul that’s quite frankly astonishing. PRS may have come late to the design party, but this design, and bear in mind this is at the lower end of its prices, stands up in its own right.
But there’s something beyond that. Something that fuses with your very soul, that makes love to your fingers and soothes your troubled mind (why did she stop talking to me for a whole weekend? What did I say? Why? Why?!?”) For me at least, the CE24 feels right. We were meant to be together. And, like the very best relationships, I am prepared to overlook the imperfections, the madness, the occasional bouts of insanity, for the beautiful thing this truly is.
p.s. A PRS CE24 won’t convince itself that you don’t want it anymore if you don’t play it for a day or two
p.p.s You only need to flick a switch to turn on a PRS CE24
Verdict 5/5
Truly, madly, deeply.
Wednesday 1 October 2008
Review: Danelectro Fabtone Distortion
Some things just don't seem to go together. Bananas and Marmite for example – a friend of mine at primary school used to eat Marmite-smeared bananas so that he would violently throw up and get to avoid school (Of course, thanks to the marvels of modern technology, any schoolboy can now easily achieve the same effect by performing a Google image search for Chad Kroeger, and no bananas get hurt). Chalk and cheese. Simon Cowell and likeability.
However, some things that seem like they shouldn't go together end up working very well. Take Shane McGowan. His face looks like it lost an argument with a cluster bomb, he drinks enough to qualify as a member of the Politburo and has a voice like a zombie gargling battery acid. Yet somehow he is a professional vocalist, and a very good one. All the ingredients are wrong, and yet the final product is somehow right. I have a friend who is a skinny, ginger, nerdy-voiced, buck-toothed computer programmer called Kevin, who is also, somehow, the coolest man in the universe, with hordes of girls fighting over him. Everyone who meets him agrees on his coolness, yet they are all mystified as to its origin. Sometimes things are more than the sum of their parts.
What I have in front of me here is a heavy metal distortion pedal made by Danelectro. Read that sentence again. This is Danelectro, a company that produces an EQ pedal called “Fish and Chips” and builds guitars that Aristotle would call Retro. I'm pretty sure that their entire board of directors consists of former Happy Days cast members. Now the whole “50's Diner” vibe is great if you're playing echoey surf rock in the background of a Tarantino film, but this pedal purports to produce a high-gain modern metal wall of distortion, whilst looking like a spare part for a Cadillac. Now this really shouldn't work, but as we know, that doesn't necessarily mean anything. So, are we talking Shane McGowan or Chad Kroeger?
First up, this is a big, chunky, heavy pedal that looks like it could survive the climactic gunfight in any good Tarantino film. Everything is controlled by big, chunky, good ol' American hunks o' metal with no mussin' aroun'. If Jimmy Hoffa had a pedal, this would be his pedal.
OK, let's plug it in and...
JESUS H. CHRIST!!!
OK, now I've scraped the last of my entrails off the wall, apologised to the neighbours and convinced the local constabulary that I'm not testing nuclear weapons in my bedroom, allow me to share my first two conclusions about this pedal:
1 – This pedal turns itself on when you plug it in.
2 – This is very possibly the loudest pedal in the known universe.
We can only pray that Kim Jong Il is not developing a pedal such as this. The big round metal button in the middle of the Fabtone unleashes more destructive power than the big red button in the Oval Office. The sheer quantity of gain this pedal puts out almost defies belief. That heavy, chunky metal case is evidently not there to protect the pedal's innards – it's to prevent whatever demonically-enhanced circuitry, possibly a portal to a dimension of pure noise, a dimension where the controls on the amps start at 11, resides within from escaping and possessing your family pets.
OK, so it's clearly very, very loud. Does it sound any good? Well, the unhelpful answer at this stage is that it depends.
The first thing it depends on is how you set the EQ on the pedal. The Fabtone has to have the most unbalanced EQ controls of anything ever, especially the treble control. Anything over about ¼ is unacceptably glassy and harsh, and anything over about ½ surely violates the Geneva Convention. Seriously, if you are ever captured by some third-world dictator and placed in one of his horrible torture camps, it's not the thumbscrews or the gouging knives you should be looking out for, it's a Danelectro Fabtone with the treble control all the way up. Then you know you're in real trouble. The bass control, on the other hand, needs to be set at at least ½, preferably ¾, before you start getting any real bottom end. There's also a third control, called, this being a Dano pedal, “Fab”. According to the manual, this does something about sustaining the distortion or something like that (it's not a distortion control – that seems to be set to infinity by default). All I could work out is that it seemed to make something already face-kickingly loud slightly louder. So, me being me, I set it as high as it would go and left it there.
The other thing the sound depends on, critically, is your amp. There seems to be no logic or reason to what amps this sounds good through and what it sounds bad through. As far as valve amps go, through a Marshall JCM800 stack it was superb. Through a Mesa Dual Rectifier it was horrible, but through a Roland Jazz Chorus it was great again. Almost any large transistor-amp will produce a horrible, tinny buzzing monstrosity of a tone, but my dinky little Peavey keyboard amp creates a great sound. Through my Marshall AVT50 hybrid combo it sounds fantastic, but through my near-identical VS100 combo it sounds horrible. All I'd say is try before you buy, with the exact model of amp you will be putting it through.
But when you finally hit the sweet spot with the right EQ settings and the right amp, this is an amazing-sounding pedal, producing a deep, rich, saturated tone reminiscent of an overcooked Mesa triple-rec, and with a detuned or 7-string guitar, epic, sweeping soundscapes reminiscent of later Deftones albums can be yours without massively expensive equipment (or a spectacular cannabis habit). Turn the treble up (very, very slightly, you don't want to frighten the horses) and add a little reverb and you're in Gary Moore/EVH territory, the super-saturated gain giving you massive sustain and huge harmonics, rewarding shred techniques and massive chords alike. Cut the bass a bit and you're into early Metallica thrash sounds.
It's not all good news sonically, though. This is one hell of a noisy pedal. Even with the guitar's volume at zero, the sound from your amp is not so much hiss as the sound of Niagra Falls in a thunderstorm. In a rehearsal studio situation, it's loud enough to drown out conversation. Should you be foolish enough to actually turn your guitar up, even with the strings muted, the hiss becomes a shrieking wail of uncontrollable feedback – the only way to achieve short, stabby chords is to time your chords with pressing the big round button o' doom with your foot so that the pedal is only on when the strings are vibrating. This is quite hard. A noise gate helps, but not a lot. On another note, unsurprisingly for a pedal with so much ear-smashing power, it eats batteries for breakfast, so get a power supply.
So, underneath all the cutesy 50's styling, this is a raging, rabid monster of a pedal that you don't so much play as desperately try to keep under control. It's (occasionally) wonderful sound is spoiled to a big extent by its raw, uncontrollable power and its infuriating habit of turning itself on when you plug a cable into its input (this pedal really needs a separate on/off switch. And a health warning. And a 2-mile exclusion zone). So, ironically for a company that makes pedals called Grilled Cheese, Corned Beef and BLT, they've overcooked this one a bit.
Verdict: 3/5
Boom shake the room.
However, some things that seem like they shouldn't go together end up working very well. Take Shane McGowan. His face looks like it lost an argument with a cluster bomb, he drinks enough to qualify as a member of the Politburo and has a voice like a zombie gargling battery acid. Yet somehow he is a professional vocalist, and a very good one. All the ingredients are wrong, and yet the final product is somehow right. I have a friend who is a skinny, ginger, nerdy-voiced, buck-toothed computer programmer called Kevin, who is also, somehow, the coolest man in the universe, with hordes of girls fighting over him. Everyone who meets him agrees on his coolness, yet they are all mystified as to its origin. Sometimes things are more than the sum of their parts.
What I have in front of me here is a heavy metal distortion pedal made by Danelectro. Read that sentence again. This is Danelectro, a company that produces an EQ pedal called “Fish and Chips” and builds guitars that Aristotle would call Retro. I'm pretty sure that their entire board of directors consists of former Happy Days cast members. Now the whole “50's Diner” vibe is great if you're playing echoey surf rock in the background of a Tarantino film, but this pedal purports to produce a high-gain modern metal wall of distortion, whilst looking like a spare part for a Cadillac. Now this really shouldn't work, but as we know, that doesn't necessarily mean anything. So, are we talking Shane McGowan or Chad Kroeger?
First up, this is a big, chunky, heavy pedal that looks like it could survive the climactic gunfight in any good Tarantino film. Everything is controlled by big, chunky, good ol' American hunks o' metal with no mussin' aroun'. If Jimmy Hoffa had a pedal, this would be his pedal.
OK, let's plug it in and...
JESUS H. CHRIST!!!
OK, now I've scraped the last of my entrails off the wall, apologised to the neighbours and convinced the local constabulary that I'm not testing nuclear weapons in my bedroom, allow me to share my first two conclusions about this pedal:
1 – This pedal turns itself on when you plug it in.
2 – This is very possibly the loudest pedal in the known universe.
We can only pray that Kim Jong Il is not developing a pedal such as this. The big round metal button in the middle of the Fabtone unleashes more destructive power than the big red button in the Oval Office. The sheer quantity of gain this pedal puts out almost defies belief. That heavy, chunky metal case is evidently not there to protect the pedal's innards – it's to prevent whatever demonically-enhanced circuitry, possibly a portal to a dimension of pure noise, a dimension where the controls on the amps start at 11, resides within from escaping and possessing your family pets.
OK, so it's clearly very, very loud. Does it sound any good? Well, the unhelpful answer at this stage is that it depends.
The first thing it depends on is how you set the EQ on the pedal. The Fabtone has to have the most unbalanced EQ controls of anything ever, especially the treble control. Anything over about ¼ is unacceptably glassy and harsh, and anything over about ½ surely violates the Geneva Convention. Seriously, if you are ever captured by some third-world dictator and placed in one of his horrible torture camps, it's not the thumbscrews or the gouging knives you should be looking out for, it's a Danelectro Fabtone with the treble control all the way up. Then you know you're in real trouble. The bass control, on the other hand, needs to be set at at least ½, preferably ¾, before you start getting any real bottom end. There's also a third control, called, this being a Dano pedal, “Fab”. According to the manual, this does something about sustaining the distortion or something like that (it's not a distortion control – that seems to be set to infinity by default). All I could work out is that it seemed to make something already face-kickingly loud slightly louder. So, me being me, I set it as high as it would go and left it there.
The other thing the sound depends on, critically, is your amp. There seems to be no logic or reason to what amps this sounds good through and what it sounds bad through. As far as valve amps go, through a Marshall JCM800 stack it was superb. Through a Mesa Dual Rectifier it was horrible, but through a Roland Jazz Chorus it was great again. Almost any large transistor-amp will produce a horrible, tinny buzzing monstrosity of a tone, but my dinky little Peavey keyboard amp creates a great sound. Through my Marshall AVT50 hybrid combo it sounds fantastic, but through my near-identical VS100 combo it sounds horrible. All I'd say is try before you buy, with the exact model of amp you will be putting it through.
But when you finally hit the sweet spot with the right EQ settings and the right amp, this is an amazing-sounding pedal, producing a deep, rich, saturated tone reminiscent of an overcooked Mesa triple-rec, and with a detuned or 7-string guitar, epic, sweeping soundscapes reminiscent of later Deftones albums can be yours without massively expensive equipment (or a spectacular cannabis habit). Turn the treble up (very, very slightly, you don't want to frighten the horses) and add a little reverb and you're in Gary Moore/EVH territory, the super-saturated gain giving you massive sustain and huge harmonics, rewarding shred techniques and massive chords alike. Cut the bass a bit and you're into early Metallica thrash sounds.
It's not all good news sonically, though. This is one hell of a noisy pedal. Even with the guitar's volume at zero, the sound from your amp is not so much hiss as the sound of Niagra Falls in a thunderstorm. In a rehearsal studio situation, it's loud enough to drown out conversation. Should you be foolish enough to actually turn your guitar up, even with the strings muted, the hiss becomes a shrieking wail of uncontrollable feedback – the only way to achieve short, stabby chords is to time your chords with pressing the big round button o' doom with your foot so that the pedal is only on when the strings are vibrating. This is quite hard. A noise gate helps, but not a lot. On another note, unsurprisingly for a pedal with so much ear-smashing power, it eats batteries for breakfast, so get a power supply.
So, underneath all the cutesy 50's styling, this is a raging, rabid monster of a pedal that you don't so much play as desperately try to keep under control. It's (occasionally) wonderful sound is spoiled to a big extent by its raw, uncontrollable power and its infuriating habit of turning itself on when you plug a cable into its input (this pedal really needs a separate on/off switch. And a health warning. And a 2-mile exclusion zone). So, ironically for a company that makes pedals called Grilled Cheese, Corned Beef and BLT, they've overcooked this one a bit.
Verdict: 3/5
Boom shake the room.
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