Dunlop’s FFM6 Band of Gypsys Fuzz Face Mini Distortion has an AC power jack, on/off status LED, and true-bypass switching. Based on a rare vintage fuzz circuit, it’s designed to produce a fuzz tone inspired by that used by Jimi Hendrix for the Band of Gypsys show and other performances. Go to www.jimdunlop.com.
Blackstar’s Fly 3 Amp for guitar, phone, or tablet incorporates two channels, the company’s Infinite Shape Feature (ISF), and digital tape delay. Designed for practice and recording, it operates on AC or DC power, has an MP3/Line In socket, and offers six watts of stereo output. Visit www.blackstaramps.com.
Corb Lund may not be well-known to American audiences, but he’s been around 30 years in Canada. As a solo act, he developed a simple, in-your-face country and roots sound with his longtime band, the Hurtin’ Albertans: guitarist Grant Siemens, upright bass player Kurt Ciesla, and drummer Brady Valgardson. They’ve won tons of Canadian and Australian awards, and are gaining recognition in the U.S. On this new album, recorded live and in mono at Sun Studios in Memphis over two days, the band revisits a dozen previously recorded tunes.
Lund’s engaging, witty compositions stand apart from the many rootsy American singer-songwriters who strive to be profound but come off as pretentious. These sparkling and unvarnished performances showcase Lund and Siemens, who alternates between lead, slide, and lap steel.
Siemens’ slashing slide work is a perfect foil to Lund on “Counterfeiter’s Blues.” On “Little Foothills Heaven” and “Five Dollar Bill,” every lap steel lick is perfectly placed. His leads on “Roughest Neck Around” and “Truck Got Stuck” are slashing yet economical and “Big Butch Bass Bull Fiddle” puts the guitarist in full rockabilly mode.
A bonus: The actual sessions (and their gear) are chronicled on Memphis Sun, an accompanying DVD.
This article originally appeared in VG‘s November ’14 issue. All copyrights are by the author and Vintage Guitar magazine. Unauthorized replication or use is strictly prohibited.
This infectious record has the homemade feel of mom’s Sunday dinner. North Carolina boy Burke Long evokes writing models like Rodney Crowell and Gene Clark for the almost California country of “About Love,” which features pedal steel from a very able John Macy. But Long’s country rock strain is more Marshall Crenshaw or Richie Furay era Poco, gutsier, than flower power or Dead.
The sassy “Downtown” shows the best parts of Elvis Costello may be in the mix. But Long is still proudly country even with nods toward Bo Diddley in “Big Ol’ Town” and to blues in “Down In The Country.” These tunes also confirm the first impression of him as a player of sureness and creativity, especially when squeezing out some nasty sweet Tele licks on the latter tune or laying a crackling series of rockabilly lines under an arrangement that would have pleased Elvis and the Jordanaires on the title cut.
Some of Long’s songs don’t let go. “Old Music Man” would have been a sure fit for Waylon Jennings and, neither derivative nor imitative, the album’s signoff “Almost Free” could almost have come from Gene Clark himself. It caps an excellent album.
This article originally appeared in VG‘s November ’14 issue. All copyrights are by the author and Vintage Guitar magazine. Unauthorized replication or use is strictly prohibited.
The Way Huge Saucy Box Overdrive uses a single Drive control to balance the ratio of clean and driven signal. The design offers a unity-gain buffer and produces clean boost to overdrive using a passive tone circuit with discrete signal paths. Visit www.jimdunlop.com.
Aguilar Amplification’s Chorusaurus bass chorus pedal uses a four-knob layout with Mix (to vary the ratio of dry and wet signals), Rate, Depth, and Width. The unit offers stereo or mono output, 9-volt battery or AC compatibility, and a steel housing. See more at www.aguilaramp.com.
B.B. King, 1971: Heinrich Klaffs.If you’re going to take on the life story of B.B. King, you’d better do it right. Not only is it one of the most remarkable rags-to-riches stories in show business (or any walk of life), but King’s stature truly transcends music. He’s not just blues ambassador to the rest of the world, in many ways Riley King, better known as “B.B.,” is America’s ambassador, period. Thankfully, director Jon Brewer made a film befitting the man.
Clocking in at two hours, the DVD goes beyond King’s music and his incalculable influence on other musicians. Brewer takes his subject (pushing 90 as of this writing) all the way back to Itta Bena, Mississippi, the place of his birth, near Indianola.
King not only grew up there, he was plowing the cotton field, working alongside grown men, from the age of seven. The product of a broken home, he was living alone in his own shack, sometimes driving a tractor, working his own share on the plantation for $15 a month when he was only 14. Walking 30 miles a day, King estimates that in 18 years he did the equivalent of walking around the world, but the math actually adds up to more like three and a half roundtrips. He talks about those days with nary a hint of bitterness.
Interviews with cousins, neighbors, classmates, the brother of civil rights activist Medgar Evers, and his second wife, along with current and archival interviews with B.B. himself are far more illuminating than rock stars singing King’s praises – although plenty of them (Bonnie Raitt, Leon Russell, the Rolling Stones, Ringo Starr, Dr. John, U2) weigh in, with Eric Clapton declaring King “the Grand Master.”
As the timeline progresses, we also hear from producers and managers, and King graduates from the chitlin circuit to the world stage. If there are criticisms to be made, songs are never shown in their entirety and so-so albums like In London and Riding With The King are treated like milestones.
King demonstrates his “trilling” finger vibrato and retells the story of running into a burning club to rescue his guitar (named Lucille ever after), and classics like Live At The Regal and “Thrill Is Gone” get their due.
In his inimitable way, Carlos Santana defines the blues, and, in doing so, B.B. “Sincere, honest, truthful, real, and genuine,” he states. “If you have those five things, then you can play the blues. Otherwise, you sound like a parakeet repeating something that you don’t understand.”
Best quote honors, though, go to Bono, describing performing “When Love Comes To Town” with the man for whom he wrote it. “I gave it my absolute, everything I had in that howl at the start of the song, and then B.B. King opened up this mouth and I felt like a girl.”
It’s called mileage and seasoning. And not to worry, Bono; in another 20 years, you’ll have it too.
This article originally appeared in VG‘s November ’14 issue. All copyrights are by the author and Vintage Guitar magazine. Unauthorized replication or use is strictly prohibited.
How many guitarists can masterfully play flamenco and then bottleneck Delta blues just as convincingly? There are eclectic, versatile guitarists, and then there is Fernando Perez. Usually if someone can play bebop with a plectrum and bossa nova fingerstyle, that’s considered versatile – or in Chet Atkins’ case, bouncing from country music to classical technique and repertoire.
What Perez accomplishes is as though Michael Jordan had succeeded at baseball – and then tennis and ice hockey. To do this, he didn’t just travel the world, he lived for years in Greece, Hawaii, Egypt, India, Turkey, China, Sudan, America, and his native Spain. Wherever he went, he absorbed the indigenous music and the culture behind it. This two-hour DVD includes 18 pieces for solo guitar (classical, steel-string, fretless gut-string, and a customized lap-style Hawaiian guitar, but with sympathetic strings used for Indian music), with Perez explaining their origins.
If you’re not in the mood for history lessons, you can just play the songs, although you’ll probably eventually want to learn more about the styles, be they familiar or foreign.
This article originally appeared in VG‘s November ’14 issue. All copyrights are by the author and Vintage Guitar magazine. Unauthorized replication or use is strictly prohibited.
Todd Rundgren is preparing to auction some of his personal and professional memorabilia, including various items of clothing and stage-played instruments like an Italia guitar and a Roland digital piano. The singer/songwriter/producer is selling the items to benefit his Spirit of Harmony Foundation, which nurtures the cultural, academic, social, neurological, and personal benefits of music through events, mentoring, advocacy, social entrepreneurship, and strategic partnerships. For more, go to www.spiritofharmony.org.
Dutch Kazoo Analog Fuzz Pedal
Price: $225 retail
Info: www.dutchkazoo.com
It’s not easy for a new boutique overdrive or distortion pedal to stand out in today’s thick fog of clipped signals, high gains, and crunchy fuzz. After all, properly tweaked, they all can be made to sound about the same, right? This may not be a winnable argument, engaged over a cold one, no matter which side of the distorted fence you sit on. Are you a Tube Screamer or a Blues Driver? A Big Muffy or a Fuzz Face? Or perhaps you’re one of those players who will let nothing come between your pickups and your preamp tubes except naked, electromagnetic signal. In other words, it’s fair to ask, “Does the world really need yet another fuzz pedal?”
Enter into the fray the Dutch Kazoo – an all-analog OD that’s hand-assembled by C Mandel. One thing’s for sure: the Dutch Kazoo doesn’t look anything like the other pedals on your board. First, it’s beefy – as in about the size of a wah pedal. Not only that, but the pedal’s housing is made from a routed-out block of solid hardwood, capped by an .125″-thick aluminum control plate that, depending on your preference, is painted white with blue, leafy designs. Said designs might feature bats, foxes, a female Cyclops (huh?), or, as one might be more incline to expect, kazoos. Regardless, the overall effect is that of a stompbox that could withstand the constant pounding of nightly gigging and double as a piece of Delft pottery hanging on your kitchen wall. Pretty cool.
The Dutch Kazoo is a two-stage overdrive. Individual volume knobs control the relative drive of each stage, and a blend pot dials in each stage’s contribution to the signal clipping. Drive 1 seems to work mainly on the low and mid frequencies, Drive 2 the upper-mids and highs. The tone pot affects the signal from both drive stages and, unlike a lot of OD pedals, this tone control has a noticeable effect. And it’s all mercifully intuitive. The single 3DPT stomp switch is true bypass and well out of the way of the knob controls, even for size 13 shoes. The LED light, indicating the pedal is in the signal path, is easy to see even in natural sunlight, and the pedal accommodates a 9-volt battery and a Boss-style wall-wart transformer (not included).
In testing, the Dutch Kazoo was run through a variety of tube amps and one solid-state beast. The guitars used were equipped with P-90s, Fender single-coils, various humbuckers, and a set of active pickups. The first thing that one notices is that the Dutch Kazoo is unusually quiet for an OD pedal, even with both volume knobs cranked. Second, the distortion is very touch-responsive. In front of tube amps and at low gain, it brings to mind a TS808 (which was A/B’d for this test), providing noticeable crunch while maintaining the amps’ intrinsic tones. High gain resulted in Randy Rhoads fuzz, very comparable to a MXR Distortion+.
Unlike most digital effects, this analog pedal accentuates the native signal rather than reinterprets it. Some great Hendrix-like fuzz was coaxed from a Strat as the Kazoo’s volume was dialed up. An old Peavey solid-state was converted into a passable vessel for Reverend Billy Gibbons-like sermons. At the other end of the spectrum, fully dimed and with a P-90-equipped Les Paul plugged into it, the Kazoo pumped and squealed in a most appealing Neil Young/Old Black manner. For full-out metal craziness, the Dutch Kazoo probably won’t be a pedal of choice, but overall, it delivers impressive dirt of all varieties while retaining the tone of each guitar and amp.
The Dutch Kazoo is a great-sounding OD/fuzz pedal. Could the same tones be summoned with other pedals or combinations? Probably. But how often will you get the chance to kick in fuzz tones by stomping on something that looks like it came out of your mother’s china cabinet?
This article originally appeared in VG March 2014 issue. All copyrights are by the author and Vintage Guitar magazine. Unauthorized replication or use is strictly prohibited.
Dunlop’s FFM6 Band of Gypsys Fuzz Face Mini Distortion has an AC power jack, on/off status LED, and true-bypass switching. Based on a rare vintage fuzz circuit, it’s designed to produce a fuzz tone inspired by that used by Jimi Hendrix for the Band of Gypsys show and other performances. Go to www.jimdunlop.com.
Blackstar’s Fly 3 Amp for guitar, phone, or tablet incorporates two channels, the company’s Infinite Shape Feature (ISF), and digital tape delay. Designed for practice and recording, it operates on AC or DC power, has an MP3/Line In socket, and offers six watts of stereo output. Visit www.blackstaramps.com.
The Way Huge Saucy Box Overdrive uses a single Drive control to balance the ratio of clean and driven signal. The design offers a unity-gain buffer and produces clean boost to overdrive using a passive tone circuit with discrete signal paths. Visit www.jimdunlop.com.
Aguilar Amplification’s Chorusaurus bass chorus pedal uses a four-knob layout with Mix (to vary the ratio of dry and wet signals), Rate, Depth, and Width. The unit offers stereo or mono output, 9-volt battery or AC compatibility, and a steel housing. See more at www.aguilaramp.com.
Todd Rundgren is preparing to auction some of his personal and professional memorabilia, including various items of clothing and stage-played instruments like an Italia guitar and a Roland digital piano. The singer/songwriter/producer is selling the items to benefit his Spirit of Harmony Foundation, which nurtures the cultural, academic, social, neurological, and personal benefits of music through events, mentoring, advocacy, social entrepreneurship, and strategic partnerships. For more, go to www.spiritofharmony.org.
