It’s no secret that I love music gear. Today I received a pedal I’ve been wanting for a long time: the Ampeg Sub-Blaster Octave pedal. It duplicates my signal one octave down. It sounds really great and I’m looking forward to making fit on my board. The only downer is the thing is ridiculously heavy thanks to the case it comes in.
Life is so much harder without caffeine. My stomach has been bothering me the last several days, so I went to see the doc. In addition to giving me pills, he recommended laying off the pop until I’m better. I was dragging so bad all day. We’ll see how tomorrow goes.
On Tuesday I took the brave/scary step of replacing the pickups in my bass. It was my first attempt at soldering and it went pretty well. I really liked the sound of my bass (1998 American Fender P-Bass), but it wasn’t quite as punchy as I wanted.
My ridiculous number of hours spent ogling gear at guitar stores paid off in the decision making process. I’ve played a fair number of basses, and the one that had that elusive punch I was searching for was the Music Man Stingray. While very similar to a p-bass (both were designed by the great Leo Fender), the Stingray has a monster pickup with huge magnets. I never really put that together until much later when I played a Fender Mark Hoppus Signature bass at Twin Town. It was loaded with a Seymour Duncan SPB-3 Quarter-Pound pickup. Fortunately they also had an American P-Bass there to compare with. After that, I was sold on the new pickups. So far I’m very pleased with the result.
I was sitting on the couch the other day and, as I looked at Megan using her computer, I thought perhaps we should not have been so quick to sell her desk.
Well, I survived the weekend with my brothers. Nat and I rolled up to Moorhead to hang out with our other brother, Judah, at MSUM. It was amazingly quiet there as it was the first weekend of spring break. Friday night I bowled one of the better games of my life: 172. Saturday night we watched the Oral Roberts University basketball team get steamrolled by NDSU. Not what you’d call an entertaining game. The in between times were filled with tv, eating and sporting goods stores. All in all, a great time.
The Burlingames 