Tuesday, February 01, 2011

For boat bound guitar players only...

Being a floating guitar player has its disadvantages and the main biggie is folks who don't play don't have a clue of what a hassle it is, ya know?

For instance, they think that a single backpacking guitar will suffice as a replacement for the step van load of gear you used to work with, or worse, they suggest you might just want to get a Uke!

My old amplification rig of choice was a pair (I always ran my guitars in stereo) of half stack Orange amps, two Leslies and an ancient but oh-so-wonderful Standell amp I used for acoustic guitars... sort of hard to fit that on a boat! Most of what passes for a certain sound in an electric guitar is what the guitar plugs into.

So I have been spending a lot of time looking into various solutions for a boat friendly amp package that would give me the sound I'm used to working with for various recording projects and the odd gig if it were to come up in a boat friendly size envelope... Yep, nothing hard about that is there?

Speakers are a pain. I'm pretty sure I can find stowage for a pair of 2X10 cabinets and I have the inkling of a cunning plan that would make them hold up better in the high humidity hell that is a cruising boat in the Caribbean.

But, speakers need POWER!


Some time ago I mentioned that Electro Harmonix had a nifty little power amp producing 22 watts of clean power and that a while back they worked up a big brother of 44 watts which certainly has possibilities. The fact that I need two power amps for my stereo rig and 44 clean watts per channel makes sense. Even cooler is the size of the 44 Magnum is so small that storage is not problematic at all. I could even easily build them right into the speaker cabinets!

You still need a preamp of some sort and Electro Harmonix has a very cool stereo tube preamp pedal that does everything (more or less) that I desire in a preamp circuit.

Life, as they say, is good!

Yeah... I know, I'm still working on the Leslie problem...


(Leslie offer only good via flashback or modified Delorean)