elvis2's blog: "News from Disgraceland"

After almost 30 years of playing guitar i bought my first Marshall amp a few days ago.

And its a real one, not one of those cheap transistor amps, i bought an old school JTM45 with a 4X12 cabinet with celestion greenback speakers.

And theres nothing polite about this amp at all, its the loudest nastiest sounding amp ive ever owned and ive owned pretty much every amp out there, this is the one that makes every other amp sound like mickey mouse.

Im sure that in America there are 12 step programs for people that collect musical instruments and other music related gear, here in Iceland there is however no such program to the best of my knowledge, therefore i will continue to be an active addict. I bought two new noise toys today, well they arent exactly new, i bought them second hand but anyway, they are new to me. I traded some kid my Morley wah/volume pedal for a Boss DS-1, i didnt really have any use for either the wah or what i traded it for but i will probably modify the Boss pedal to make it sound a little bit more interesting. I also bought a Aramat Mojo Fuzz for around a 100 dollars, this pedal truly kicks ass and after browsing the Aramat website i found out that the guy who made these pedals died a year ago and there wont be any more of these pedals made which makes this pedal rare and probably valuable not that i intend to sell it. So, all in all it was a pretty good day for me.

The most recent addition to my music gear is a Fender tube reverb unit, now all my guitar tracks are starting to sound like they were recorded in the early sixties, im not sure if that is a good thing or not.. I almost bought a Gibson Les Paul Custom yesterday but the serial number didnt quite add up so i called Gibsons customer service hotline and they confirmed my worst suspicions, the guitar was a chinese forgery, i hope those goddamm thieving chinamen choke on their rice!

I bought a japanese Teisco guitar from the sixties today, didnt pay much for it but it needs some work done on it to make it useable. I really didnt need another guitar but im like an alcoholic when it comes to guitars, you can never have too many.

I just added a new noise toy to my ever expanding collection of musical instruments, its a harmonic octave generator (HOG) from Electro Harmonix, this thing makes my guitar sound like a church organ or a choir of singing mice and all points inbetween, its a strange toy indeed! A few days ago i bought a really gnarly sounding distortion pedal for guitar, its a Digitech Scott Ian Black 13 and it makes my guitar sound like a pissed off wasp.

Im an addict, my addiction manifests itself in a rather unhealthy obsession with musical instruments, i collect them like a really crazy person.. If all goes well then tomorrow i will be feeding my disease with yet another musical instrument, in this case a Gibson Flying V guitar, i already have tons of guitars but have managed to convince myself that i really need this one too, i wasnt that hard to convince. Thank god they dont have 12 step meetings for this form of addiction here in iceland, if i came into contact with more freaks like myself i would probably become even sicker..

I just received a new noise toy in the mail, its an old MXR Blue Box from the 70s. The Blue Box is a fuzzbox for guitar that adds a note 2 octaves below the note being played, well thats what its supposed to do but apparently it doesnt track notes very well so it spits out random bleeps and farts along with the sounds its supposed to be generating, i love unpredictable noise boxes so this one should be the bees knees.

I recently bought a Maestro Echoplex tape delay unit from the early seventies, these things can be heard in action on older jamaican reggae songs, they used to run everything through these things, drums, guitars, vocals etc.. I also bought a Gibson Minuteman guitar amplifier from the sixties, its a Fender Pro Reverb copy and it sounds pretty damm good, they sure werent skimping on expensive components when they built this thing, it has an alnico speaker and tube driven reverb and tremelo, good shit! I love old gear, if its kept in good working condition it will sound much better than anything made today.

I have been buying all kinds of gear for my studio recently, i bought a sE Gemini tube microphone for recording vocals and acoustic guitars, it sounds absolutely amazing! (It should, it was really expensive) I also bought a Shure SM57 microphone for recording electric guitars, i havent tried it yet but this is like THE industry standard guitar amp microphone so it should get the job done.

Fact : American guitars are way better than guitars made in other countries, i know, i have owned around 40 guitars and the ones made in the Usa run circles around guitars made elsewhere. Fact : Rock and roll was invented in the Usa and the true sound of rock and roll is built on american guitars, ok, you guys may be losing it big time these days with all the goddamm phony made direct for MTV crap that you export to the rest of the world but the guitars havent changed all that much, sure, the MTV target audience needs polite overly saturated guitar sounds that fit better behind talentless cute looking 18 year old vocalists with 500 dollar haircuts but these fads come and go, the basic Les Paul into a Marshall stack sound will still be there when people grow sick of guitars that just sound like some synthetic wash of sound. Fact : Your president is a dangerous asshole and he isnt the first asshole you elect for president, his father was no better nor was Ronald Reagan or indeed the father of all assholes mr Richard Nixon, but i still believe a nation that makes such great guitars cant be all that bad, i still believe you guys will wise up one day and stop putting dangerous assholes in postitions of power, look what these guys have been up to and learn from it, put the assholes where they belong, on toilet seats.