This is quite possibly the best electric guitar ever.  Seriously.  As in, "since the dawn of time" ever.  I have always like Strats.  I even own a Strat.  A lot of my favorite players are (or were) Strat guys.  Guys like Eric Johnson, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Jimi Hendrix, Lincoln Brewster...  all phenomenal players and all Strat guys.  They also have a lot more skill than I will ever have on the guitar so they also have great tone.  Tone is more than just the gear -- it's how you play, it's your phrasing, your attack, your fingers... everything.  So since I'll never be as good as these guys, but I can still hear their tone in my head, my quest to produce that tone through gear is almost never ending.  Until now...

The Paul Reed Smith Swamp Ash Special model has never really had a strong appeal to me.  It's a cool guitar, with a maple neck (which I like) and has decent split coil tones to draw out the Stratness that I like, almost to a fault.  Even though I like Strat tone, I could never get the tone in my head to come out with a Strat or any other single coil/split coil configuration.  So to end my pain, PRS has created a new pickup for the 25th year anniversary models called "narrowfields."  They are basically underwound 57/08s with the pole pieces squeezed closer together so they pick up a "narrower" portion of the string as they vibrate.  They are humbuckers so they have no hum (obvious, I know), they have more windings than a single coil so they are hotter output and the tone is extremely Strat-like.  One guy describes them as "Strat on crack."  All I know is they are the epitome of Stratness that I've always heard in my head. The overall tone is "thicker" with nice highs like a single coil but better bass response that's clear and not muddy like typical humbuckers.

So... what follows are my thoughts on my 2010 PRS SASNF in Scarlett Smokeburst (aka... red 'burst).  I've had it about 3 months now and it's absolutely my #1 guitar.  I'll play others based on what we're doing, but for 90% of what we play, this is the guitar I use now.  First up is the case:

 

Yeah, it's really that white.  I think the 25th anniversary cases look cool and all, but after hauling that along with another guitar, floorboard, etc. to my weekly practice and gig for a couple of weeks resulted in the purchase of a new gig bag and a parking spot on the top of a shelf in the master bedroom closet for the case.  Cases are great protection, but not at the expense of being a dirt magnet and throwing my back out.  I can imagine guys rating the cleanliness of these cases after a few years.

In terms of tone, I figured I'd just let some sound clips do the talking.  I play 3 different phrases and each phrase is played with the 5-way in each different position, starting at the bridge pickup and going to the neck.  It's pretty obvious when I'm changing the switch.

Clean Sample:

Rhythm Sample:

Lead Sample:

These were all recorded direct into my X3 Live and then into Ableton Live and then converted to 128Kbit MP3s.

The build quality is awesome.  It's a bolt on maple neck (like my 24CE, and most Strat style guitars) that has great flame to it.  The knobs are easy to get to and the 5-way is immediately familiar.  As always, PRS finishes are top notch.  While mine is a two piece top, there are quite a few of these out there with 3 piece tops.  As such, there's quite a bit of variety.  If you're shopping for one of these, and you have to pre-order, make sure you have the option of seeing it before taking delivery to make sure you like the top.

PRS trems are always floating, and do a great job of staying in tune.  But if you're used to a Strat's non-floating trem setup, this may not be what you're looking for.  As with all floating trems, when you do string bends, all the strings will go slightly out of tune so if you're bending against open strings (think the open E followed by the bends in the intro of "Cliffs of Dover"), it's something you have to "plan for."  The good news is these pickups are on a couple of other models (the ME3 and the McNF -- the McCarty narrowfield).  Both of these are stoptail designs and also maple tops instead of swamp ash.  The ME3 would be a nice to have because it's got 3 pickups, but the Modern Eagles are always priced at a premium.

I'm sufficiently enamored with the narrowfield pickups that I plan on getting a McCarty Narrowfield as well.  The thicker body and maple top should provide some tonal variety and the stoptail bridge will be nice to have for quick alt tuning changes. Prior to getting this guitar, I was considering getting a 513 or a 305 to fill my desire for PRS constructed Stratness.  Unfortunately for PRS, this one guitar takes care of that for me.  But fortunately for them, I see other narrowfield guitars in my future.

So, in short, if you're a Strat guy, you really should try one of these out.  If you can work a deal to get one on approval for a couple of weeks or borrow one, do it.  While this is a 25th anniversary model, I asked PRS himself at this year's Dallas International Guitar festival about this model and he said they'd be continuing this one post 25th.  That good, and also not surprising since I'm sure it's pretty expensive to tool up for a new pickup configuration like these.  It's different rings, different routing, the whole deal.  I doubt they'd go to that effort for one year's batch.  Here's one last "art" shot: 

I'm hoping they do some Customs with Narrowfields, kind of like their soapbar Customs -- 3 pickups, maple top, trem and a wide thin neck option.  Then I'll be done buying guitars.

Yeah, right...

When I first heard about JamHub (http://www.jamhub.com), my first thought was where was this 30 years ago?  My second thought was: I need to get this for my band.

So, what is JamHub?  It's a very specialized mixer that was designed to facilitate a band rehearsal without the Marshall half stack and 8x10 Ampeg cabinets.  In any apartment, dorm or even residential community, practicing at any kind of volume is sure to draw attention from neighbors and their friends at local police precinct.  The basic design is each person has a "station" and they plug in their instrument or the line out from their modeling pedals and their mics (through the XLR jacks) in directly.   They then have control over the trim on those two sets of inputs (which sets the maximum volume from their station available to the other stations for listening).  Everyone then has a knob for each station and they can determine the level of themselves and everyone else in their own mix.  Each station has a headphone jack (and an associated volume control there also) to plug in and hear everyone else along with their own instrument and mic.

For this basic problem (the "silent rehearsal studio"), the concept works exactly as designed.  It's very portable, pretty quick and easy to set up and for even the somewhat technically challenged, it's easy to figure out and be productive with pretty quickly. In terms of getting it up and running, probably the hardest thing to get used to is using headphones.  If you're used to any kind of "stage" volume, switching to an in ear monitor system of any kind is difficult.  You don't have the same "feel" that you get from the booming speakers.  You also get a slightly isolated feeling because with a good set of ear buds, you're not going to hear much ambient noise.  So if everyone stops playing and starts talking, you have to be ready to either give everone mics or everybody starts taking one of the ear buds out to hear.

The other thing that takes some getting used to is adjusting all the different gain stages to get what you want to hear.  The trims on the inputs have an LED that that will show when there's signal (green) and when it's clipping (red).  In theory, you just dial till you have green while you are playing and dial back if you get red.  This is no biggie when you have a sound guy at a mixing board -- that's what he does, especially as different songs result in different vocal styles or playing styles.  You'll be tempted to "fiddle" with the trims a lot but in our case, we eventually got used to were they are and don't mess with them all that much.  The next challenge is balancing out everyone's levels with the overall headphone level.  If you want more of the vocalist and you've got their station's knob maxed out, then you have to dial everyone else down, so you can turn your headphone up.  Again, if everyone is pretty consistent in their vocal or playing style, this is easy to dial in.  But if there's a lot of variety, this can lead to more desire to tweak.  In a pure practice environment, none of this matters that much because you can always stop and tweak and then resume.  In a live environment though, you truly want to set it for a "happy medium" and then hope that works for the entire set.

And that's how we wanted to use the JamHub.  Our praise and worship band is a pretty conventional set up -- electronic drums, bass player/singer, acoustic guitar player/singer, electric guitar (me) and a keyboard player/singer.  Obviously some of these guys also sing.  I do not.  Playing guitar consumes about 90% of my mental bandwidth so singing and playing isn't going to happen in my lifetime.  Anyway, for years we've played through a 16 channel board with 2 sends for the mains and 2 sends for the monitors.  With that many instruments and vocals in a small space, trying to make everybody happy with only two monitor channels has been difficult at best.  Just ask our sound guy -- I think when somebody'd ask for "more" he'd just hold his hand over the knob like he was adjusting it but wouldn't really change anything because it was probably already maxed out anyway.  This lead to a loud monitor mix, which then muddied the sound in the house and nobody could ever really hear what they wanted to anyway.  We looked at upgrading to a professional "in ear" system, but none of us had won the lottery yet so that just wasn't a practical option.

That's when I found JamHub.  We ordered one of the first units, along with a couple extra headphone remotes and proceeded to completely rewire our stage and sound board connections.  The trick was to put some splitters between our instruments/mics and the JamHub so we could send the signals to both the JamHub and the sound board.  Here's a picture of our setup:

We run everything into an ART T8 and ART S8.  The outputs of those go into a short XLR snake to plug in where the output of everybody's direct boxes would plug in.  We then used a bunch of insert cables to take the 1/4" outs to the instrument inputs on the JamHub.  The mics just used some short XLR patch cables.  The cool thing here is that the levels on the JamHub only affect monitoring -- they don't have any effect on the mains.  We've had some issues with 60hz hum due perhaps to the S8 not being fully isolated so there's still some kinks to work out, and all the cabling doesn't look as neat as it could, but it all works.  Everybody but one vocalist loves it and would never switch back.  The vocalist is a dedicated vocalist, so she just picks up the mains and the other vocalists around her because the stage volume is almost silent.

The drummer still complains that he can't turn me completely down because there's a main speaker not far from him, but otherwise, no complaints.  It takes a little creativity to run the headphones and we don't move around a lot so that's manageable.  We've gotten compliments that the mix sounds much better because there's nothing from the monitors to muddy up house mix.  The sound guy can focus just on the mains because we control all the monitoring.  I can finally hear my guitar as loud as I want! This feels like an analog unit -- you can get a fair amount of hiss if you don't get the trim and gains set right.  If you've got everything dimed and then turn down the headphone volume, you're going to get a lot of hiss.  Also, there's no way to adjust the mix of a single station's instrument/vocal mix.  It will be whatever that guy sets his trim at.

So, the JamHub guys will tell you it wasn't designed for a permanent installation, and it's not (as you can see from the rats nest of cables), but it can work and is very cost effective.  And it looks pretty cool...

In summary, if you are thinking about going in ear and you have a limited budget, this is a great option. Make sure you consider how you'll wire it in.  It needs to be centrally located and accessible to most everyone. Also, consider everyone's mobility.  If you have a large stage and people are moving around a lot, this can still work, but you're really going to want wireless for the in ear monitors.  That will drive the price up quite a bit.  Also, and this is really important -- don't cheap out on the headphones.  You'll need something better than the $19 set of buds for an iPod from Walmart.  Think $60-75 at a minimum for a good set.  We spent about $1,000 on the JamHub, the splitters and additional cabling and now have a great in ear system that everbody loves.  It would have cost quite a bit more to do this with a "professional" system but this works great.  Maybe the JamHub guys will come out with a version that's designed for a permanent installation that is rack ready and has the splitter function built in.  That's about the only thing I can think of that would be nice to have with this system.

Our first unit had a "green light always on" issue but their customer service was great.  I gave them my CC #, they second day'd a replacement to me.  I swapped it out (took about 10 minutes), and dropped the broken one in the box back to them.  The whole process took maybe a week.  Sliced bread is still pretty cool, but this is a close second.

When I first got back into guitar 7-8 years ago, a friend recommended I check out GuitarPort from Line 6.  Since then, I've run through quite a few different products from them.  After getting hooked on modeling with the GuitarPort, I got a used Vetta that I used for playing out live.  Even though they have not updated that in years, it is still a great modeling amp with an almost perfect feature set.  The down side was, well, it's an amp and weighs a ton.  Somewhere during that early period I got a regular gig playing in the band at church and the thought of hauling the Vetta back and forth twice a week quickly wore on me.  So... I picked up the Pod XT Pro and stuck it in a portable rack case and used the same floor board that I used with the Vetta.  That wasn't bad, but the tone options weren't as good as with the Vetta.  Thus began a years long quest to find the Vetta options in an extremely portable package.

The Vetta and Pod XT Pro eventually went on eBay and I picked up a new Pod XT Live.  Finally -- portability was at hand!  I also added a Variax 700 to my rig and with just two pieces of gear to haul, I could cover all the bases, from acoustic to Stratocaster and Les Paul sounds. That was my main rig until the Pod X3 came out a couple of years ago.  I sold the XT Live and switched to the X3 Live.  With dual tones, I finally had a lot of the options I missed from the Vetta without the back pains to go along with it.  What follows are my thoughts on two years of regular use of that combination.

First, here's the things that I really like about it.  It's extremely light.  The pedal is much more fluid than the XT's pedal was.  It has built in S-PDIF out (that I use for recording) and stereo XLR outs.  It also has the ability to drive 1/4" outs at the same time and have the volume knob control only the 1/4" outs.  Why is that handy?  Because you can hook up your own monitor to hear yourself and control the volume from that independent of what you send to the board.  We play on a pretty crowded stage and with only 2 monitor channels and the inevitable "more me" from everybody, it got pretty loud.  Being able to drive a separate local floor wedge was a great solution.  At least for me it was :D  Another obvious plus is you can control the Variax with the patches, so switching from acoustic to electric is as easy as changing patches. Definitely a cool option.  Another plus (and a huge minus) is that the dual tones are completely separate.  If you have a guitar with a piezo output, you can route both cables to the X3 and get some of the same Variax style flexiblity -- switching between acoustic and electric (and controlling which of the two 1/4" inputs the tones use) -- at the stomp of the foot.

So, what's not to like?  Well, the X3 was anticipated as the "Vetta on the floor" solution.  Unfortunately, if you want to do more than run a single amp model and limited effect options, it's not.  The Vetta still blows away the X3 in terms of routing flexibility.  The Vetta is more like a 2 amps at once feature rather than dual tone.  With the Vetta, you can stick an overdrive in front of the signal chain and when it's on, it drives both amps.  You can do the same thing with the the X3, but you have to keep them in sync on both tones and to turn the stomp on or off, you have to hit a button to toggle the stomp, then hit a button to switch to the other tone, and hit the stomp button again.  Repeat the process to toggle the effect.  The other option is burn another patch -- one with the stomp on and another with the stomp off.  So now 128 patch slots doesn't look so good.  This same issue affects the mod and delay settings.  The only way to turn an effect on or off globally is to switch to the patch that has it set the way you want.  Now when you're tweaking, even if you're using GearBox, migrating amp effects or stomp effects between patches is a real nightmare. The other killer here is delay tails.  When you switch patches because you want to turn off delay on both tones, the delay tails stop.

I've also had a few hardware issues with mine.  The main knobs have a "wiggle" sensitivity problem. Vibration or who knows what makes the X3 think you've changed a knob and so all of a sudden drive will go to wherever the knob is set.  You can park the knobs at 0 or 10 to minimize the issue but still -- it's a pain.  The other problem was the super-cheap S-PDIF connector they used.  If you apply any pressure what-so-ever when hooking up, it will eventually break one of the solder legs that connects the jack to the circuit board.  A little solder fixes the problem, but again, not something you should have to do with normal use. And here's the real problem -- it's plastic.  Plastic attracts dust like crazy. My XT never caught the amount of dust my X3 gets.  And as you can see from the picture, I'm not a fan of dusting.

Now there are solutions for all of this.  When the the X3 came out, there was no MIDI support.  With a software upgrade, they added full MIDI support so you could program a MIDI board to toggle the stomps with a single button press.  But then you're back to carrying something extra around, which defeats the purpose.  You could at a Line 6 M13 and use the famed "four cable method" to get some of the Vetta flexibility, but again, it's another box, to hook it up right you'd lose some of the Variax flexibility and you also lose the stereo separation because of M13 and FX loop limitations. And of course, I could dust more...

So there you have it.  Two plus years later, I still use the X3.  Mostly because I haven't found anything else in the price range that comes close to the options I want.  But that doesn't stop me from wishing that the X4 will be the Vetta on the floor we were all hoping the X3 would be.

This post is about two of my favorite subjects:  software and guitar.  I had been playing guitar for quite a while before I learned what a scale was.  I always played by ear and just accepted that for some songs, certain notes fit and other didn't.  Later in life I discovered that there was actually some reason behind determining the right notes and scales for a given progression and vice versa.

There's lots of software tools out there for learning scales (and modes) and finding the patterns on a guitar fretboard.  There's also lots of software that can chart out thousands of guitar chords.  What I always wanted was an easy way to, given a particular key, show all the chords that could be used and overlay them both on the fretboard.  The major and minor variations are usually pretty easy to figure out but beyond that, it was always hunt and peck for me.  So... I decided to write some software that would do it for me.

I've also been watching Silverlight as it has progressed along.  Version 2 was recently released (www.silverlight.net) and I'd say it's pretty mature in it's current form.  Early releases of this version were used for streaming video for the 2008 Olympics.  The really cool thing about it (aside from the fact that you can write in C#) is that the presentation model is the same for Silverlight as it is for WPF (Microsoft's new UI model for Windows apps).  The other cool thing is that it's more vector based rather than pixel based so scaling to different resolution devices should be easier.  But it's definitely a different way to think about building UIs.  You can build a rich client app that uses web services and WCF to talk to the back end.

So... my scale/chord applet was written in Silverlight using Visual Studio 2008 and C#. You can check it out online at http://www.keenesoftware.com/Samples/SilverFrets.aspx.

Enjoy!