• Nashvill Amp Expo Website
• Exhibitor List
• My pictures from the 2009 NY Amp Show

You’ve seen the ads, you’ve read the reviews, you’ve probably even wondered “are they really that good?”.  Regardless of how you answer that question in your own mind, the fact is that you can never really know what’s so special about a boutique amp until you play it.

If you live in the south-eastern US, you can do exactly that on Saturday August 22nd and Sunday August 23rd in Nashville, TN.  For the past several years, tone-seekers on the East and West coast have flocked to the Amp Shows in LA and NY.  And now this one-of-a-kind event will happen again in Nashville.

If you’ve never been to an amp show, it is quite an experience.  Unlike NAMM (from what I’m told), there are no decibel police telling you to turn your volume down.  Quite the contrary.  You may wish that guy who just learned that Van Halen song, playing through an amp louder than God’s would turn down, but you’ll be out of luck.  Fortunately all you have to do is crank up whatever amp you’re playing through until you can’t hear him.

Here’s how it works.  Creation Audio Labs (the hosts of the Nashville expo), has rented out an entire hotel for the event.  Each amp or guitar or pedal company is assigned a room where they set up their goods and wait for you and everyone else to try it out and ask questions. 

If you go, be prepared to spend some time watching and listening.  There’s far too many people to spend your whole afternoon playing because everyone wants a chance to play the amp they’ve always wondered about, so you’ll have to wait your turn.  However, if you just focus on relaxing, having a good time, and soaking it all in, it’s an experience like no other.

Thanks for the great feedback on the pedal shooout and comparinator which are really the only big things I’ve done on this site this year. In the next year, I hope to be expanding the amount of pedals in the Comparinator, but I’ve got some life changes coming soon that I’ll be focusing on in the near future. I’ve detailed that over at StevieSnacks here: http://www.steviesnacks.com/blog/2008/12/further-on-up-the-road/

On Deck: Creation Audio Labs

Probably the next thing you’ll see on here is a review/demo of two pedals I’ve been playing with for a few days. Both made by the wizards at Creation Audio Labs (www.creationaudiolabs.com). Aside from being a tone junkie like many of you, I’ve also got a barely used degree in Electrical Engineering, which was earned while learning more about tube amps and effects pedals online than about fourier transforms in my classes.

Anywho, I say that to say that I’m a engineer at heart and I love to see people doing new stuff. I like old pedals as much as anyone, but I am a big fan of seeing people do things in a new way, and that’s what I’ll be talking about with these pedals. I ran into Sarge from Creation Audio Labs at the guitar show in Valley Forge a few weeks back and managed to steal about 20 minutes of his time having him explain what makes his pedals different and it left this engineer very impressed. I’m liking these pedals more and more as I use them and I’ll be explaining why in my demos.

That’s all for now, and if anyone gets any new gear as a gift that you like, post it in the comments below.

Rock on

• A Boss Blues Driver (BD-2) with the “Super” mod
• A Boss SD-1 with the “Silver” mod and a symmetrical/asymmetrical clipping mod.
• An Ibanez TS9DX with the “Classic” mod.

For those of you not familiar with Analog Man, first of all, where have you been for the past 10 years? It’s hard for me to pinpoint when I first heard about him, but I’m pretty sure it was back in my days at Penn State, browsing the effects and amp forums instead of studying for class.

Analog Man is kind of like the old BASF commercial with a twist. They do make their own pedals, but they also makes a lot of the pedals you buy, better. I can say with 100% honesty that I noticed a difference immediately between the BD-2 and the SD-1 that were sent to me, compared to the original pedals.

A stock SD-1 sounded so bad to me that I didn’t even include it in the shootout. The bass was way too thin and the resultant sound was very nasal. The AnalogMan modded SD-1 restored that low end giving it a much fuller sound. It’s still not my favorite pedal but a vast improvement over the stock SD-1.

Likewise a stock Boss Blues Driver was too brittle on the high-end for my tastes, and the AnalogMan modded BD-2 tamed that brittleness quite nicely. When you get the distortion at it’s highest, the midrange tends to get lost a bit, but on the Partial Gain settings in my tests, it was downright pleasant.

I had never played a TS9DX before, and I don’t know what the stock version sounds like but the modded version sounds great. The Mode switch seems to add in levels of low-end making the pedal fatter and fatter. Of course you lose a little bit of articulation when you’ve got a really thick tone, but having 4 different modes allows you to pick the setting that suits your fancy. I like this pedal a lot.

Check out all 3 of them in the Comparinator.

My steady-cam work is awful in this video, but here’s a few clips from the show, a little heavy on the strat side, but a few other interesting pieces in there as well.

There were a few guitar/amp/effects builders there which stood out from the rest of the crowd because they were creating new stuff, rather than selling old stuff. Specifically I saw goods from JCA Circuits, Alessandro Amplifiers, and someone you’ll be hearing me make some noise about in the near future, Creation Audio Labs and their fabulous Redeemer Circuit.

Compare OD Pedals…

The current format is pretty, but it only allows you to play one at a time. So comparing two pedals involves some tone-memory as you skip from pedal to pedal. Maybe it’s because I have Adult ADD, but I find this difficult.

So I’ve been researching a way to do what I really want to do which is to play two recordings at once, and switch between them. Luckily, I’ve figured out how to do this on the web.

I’ve built the basic functionality, and will be putting the polish on it over the next couple of days. The Pedal Comparinator will allow you to pick any two pedals from the shootout, and one of the settings, load them up and toggle between them as they both play. If you wish it will even toggle automatically if you want.

The first time I got it working I had to laugh out loud as I saw it switching pedals automatically with the music (almost) perfectly in sync. For some reason that was amusing to me. Hopefully it will be a little bit useful as well as entertaining to watch

Conclusions to follow…..

I then set up 3 different backing tracks to play along with.  I then created 3 categories, “Clean Boost”, “Partial Gain”, and “Full Gain”.  I put two backing tracks into each group for a total of 6 minutes of backing music.

For the next 4 hours that night, and for 5 hours the next day, I went through 17 pedals, recording each one at 3 different settings matching the groups above.  Each pedal was played over the exact same backing tracks with the exact same recording setup.

By the time I was done, my fingers hurt so bad I that it hurt to type.  My ears were complely worn out and I think I’ll never want to hear those tracks again.

So to sum up,  my weekend was spent like this: 17 commonly available distortion/overdrive pedals recorded the exact same way, over 6 minutes of the exact same backing tracks for a total of 1.7 hours of audio for your evaluation.  I think I’ll name this pedal shootout “Play through the pain”

I’ll be posting the recordings here sometime in the next week or two after I get them mixed down.