BONUS BONUS #147: DCQA – Dylan Brady's Football Jersey Half-Shirt

Can’t speak for mr. judge of course but having read ellroy’s American trilogy and spent a long while researching the deep state of the Cold War era, ellroy is useful in sketching out the general milieu (spies, mafia, clansmen, dirty cops, fbi fixers, etc) and the deeply reactionary undercurrent of that culture but I would take the specifics of his narratives w/ a grain of salt. Particularly his portrayal of the Martin and Bobby killings diverge substantially from the best evidence. Likewise his portrayal of cia involvement in the drug trade is less systemic and more dramatic. But the flavor is probably pretty accurate, in terms of personalities.

I was doing some gear obsessive shit about how David Gilmour ran a Mesa/Boogie Mark I head via a speaker-tapped line out into the front of his Hiwatts for his distortion tone on "Comfortably Numb" – true OCD hours – and then couldn't stop thinking about how funny it is to refer to an ass as having a "corner"

If they get through the song part of the song quick and it's mostly Knopfler playing guitar, I might be able to survive. You know he played guitar on the all-time greatest Bob Dylan B-side, and a top 5 Dylan song to boot, "Blind Willie McTell"?

I didn't mention this one because changing string gauges isn't as simple as it might sound – apart from re-intonating your guitar, maybe raising or lowering the action, maybe tweaking the truss rod (or paying somebody else $50 for all that), you've got to alter your touch at least a LITTLE bit when you switch strings, even just .010 down to .009. All my guitars have either 9s or 10s, and they each need a different kind of finesse. If you're used to 10s and play something with 9s, all your chords are gonna be out of tune until you get the feel for it, because you'll be pushing down too hard and unconsciously bending every note a bit. But! That said, if you're willing to make the adjustment, that is true. Playing .009-.042 will give you a different top end, with a different bandwidth, and it'll also clean up some of the upper bass frequencies that muddy up your tone, that whole "hearing it through an apartment wall" range of sound. If you fingerpick, however, and especially if you fingerpick chords claw-style, lighter strings can take some of the body out of your tone if you're not very intentional about striking every string with the right force and right part of your finger and all the rest. I use 9s and 10s because I'm a pretty light-touch player – I think of it as trying to draw the sound up out of the strings rather than hitting them (which is, incidentally, the right way to learn drums too, but I could talk about that for hours). I used to be a true guitar basher, but I eventually learned that it's not just a matter of the player's comfort: guitars *sound better* when they're being allowed to resonate, not being choked out with huge smacking transients that overwhelm its natural harmonics. That sounds like woo-woo hippy shit, but I promise, a guitar sounds audibly, unmistakably different when you're playing it the way it's comfortable with. (And if you've got a Strat with .013s on it, that guitar might *want* to get slapped around in a certain specific way, which is why I don't play a Strat with .013s. Among other reasons.)

A great and horrifying book. Having tried to drink myself to death, yes, that's what it's like when you try to drink yourself to death. And particularly pungent for me, because I lost my copy, bought another one, and found that it was part of the death auction from a favorite professor who, you guessed it, drank himself to death. I've got several of his books, and in every one, he'd underline a single phrase. In VOLCANO, he'd underlined someone handing Firmin a drink and saying, "Come, amigo, throw away your mind." I gave it to a girl at a bar because I didn't want to own it after that

One of the last pleasures left to the truly civilized human being. They've done all they can to eliminate everything else. I can walk through the goddamn Hindu Kush, pass a guy I've never seen before, light whatever he's smoking, and trade hits. THAT, as Ezra Pound would say, is KULCHUR. (Plus, if you've ever been to an old-style mental asylum, you know that *everyone* there smokes. Among the gravely mentally ill – and I, for all my dicking around about it, am among the gravely mentally ill – smoking is one of the only tolerable ways to divide the time. "Getting through the day" horrifies me. "Getting through 40 cigarettes," that I might be able to do.)

Yep, exactly what I found in looking up their history

It's not specifically about that, but anyone interested in the subject has to read Ian MacDonald's REVOLUTION IN THE HEAD, a track-by-track breakdown of the composition and recording of every Beatles song. The Beatles were inventing modern recordmaking as they went, so that book will teach you how we got from whole bands playing into one microphone that was plugged into a shellac-disc cutting machine to multitrack infinite-overdub recordings.

Oh, I'm not quitting smoking, I'm just quitting Lucky Strikes. The last time I went to a physician, he asked me if I smoked, and I said yes and then told him my history with other drugs when I DON'T smoke, and he said – I swear this is true – " ... Yeah, for now you should keep smoking."

I lived in Northern Virginia for most of my life. It is hell, and it’s not an exaggeration to say it drove me mad. I worked at Starbucks when I was in school, and all of the customers were for the most part nice, normal people who went to their day jobs facilitating the crimes of the empire.

That makes sense in general, but I think Luckies may actually have a stimulant additive – I went back through old ads for them, back to the ’30s, and they were specifically billed as a stimulant (even for non-smokers) and were apparently distributed to GIs in WW2 to help keep them awake.

I just found out Whirlwind makes mic cables – the MK4(x), where (x) is the length of the cable you want – so I have some of those coming, but I am curious about those vs. customer-soldered cable kits, cos I've never had one of the latter. How long did it take you to get competent at soldering, and what iron and solder do you use? That's my big technical deficit: I've never had a chance to learn to solder.

I could go on about this at truly unbearable length, but the short answer is that there's no right or wrong, there's only what you like. It's very much like the question of capacitance by foot-cable: I use 10' cables because I don't want to lose a lot of high end, but I would never use a high-capacitance cable, because I don't want to *add* high end that isn't really an intended part of the signal. Nobody built that guitar or wound those pickups or voice that amp using a high-capacitance cable, and I've got anatomically unusual ears that are mega-sensitive, especially to high, high treble, so I don't want any 10kHz anywhere near my sound. Basically, the scenario proceedeth thusly: if you run even a few pedals, even if those pedals are beautifully designed and built, the cables and the series of input/output jacks alone are going to add some capacitance, which means a touch less treble. The more cables and the more pedals, the more capacitance, the more top end roll-off. So a lot of people will run a buffered pedal at the end of the chain, or a buffer at the beginning and the end, or a buffer every few pedals if they've got gigantic boards. There are, however, problems. As usual. For one thing, the buffered bypass you're getting from a pedal is NOT "restoring" the high end you lose on a long cable run; it is, effectively, *creating* new high end by lowering the impedance of your signal, and that brightened-up signal now includes all the stuff that's been introduced to it by your other pedals, which could be almost nothing (if you've got a good isolated power supply like a Voodoo Labs Pedal Power) or unusable amounts of noise (if you're using a daisy-chain supply or something non-isolated like an MXR Power Brick). The other thing, and this is where a lot of people get twisted around, is that there are certain pedals that you *really* don't want getting hit in the front end with a super-bright buffered signal. Fuzz pedals are the classic example: they were invented before anyone used multiple pedals in a signal chain, and they are expressly designed to "see" the signal straight from your guitar's pickups, which is weak and high-impedance. If you follow standard pedal order and run, say, a buffered compressor like a Boss CS-2 or a buffered wah into your Fuzz Face, Tone Bender, Big Muff, etc., you're going to get a hideous slice of decapitating treble, because the signal is way too strong and bright. That means fuzzes have to go first, which means, in turn, that they're going to go into a wah and do that weird thing where the entire signal chain gets wah'd, including the sound of the fuzz itself. People have been trying to figure out how the hell to wire up Jimi Hendrix's Band of Gypsys rig (a Fuzz Face, a Cry Baby, and a Univibe) for 50 years, and there's still no broad consensus. So, basically, what I would say is this: #1, above all else, if your rig sounds good to you the way it is, fuck it, who cares. #2, don't use buffers in front of things that don't want to see them – not just fuzzes, but quite a few overdrives, and almost anything with an op-amp or transistor preamp in it. A Memory Man can sound awful with a strong buffer in front, because even though it's a delay, it uses a JRC3558 op amp to drive the signal, the same component that's in a million overdrive and distortion pedals from (certain versions of) the Tube Screamer to (certain versions of) the ProCo Rat. You just gotta test out arrangements, and make sure – it's amazing how people forget this – that *when you get a pedal, you plug your guitar straight into it and out into the amp so you know what the pedal actually sounds like*. There are plenty of people out there with half their knobs on 0.5 because they don't know that their pedals are getting slammed with low-impedance current and aren't supposed to sound that way. #3, and you're probably doing this already, use an isolated power supply, and keep the cable run as short as you can. And #4, the way I've always done it is simply to set the pedals up in the order I want them sonically, and then move stuff around if there's a problem. You're gonna go insane trying to build a pedalboard according to impedance and output buffering and state of bypass. And an increasing number of pedals are coming out with both true and buffered bypass, so try both. (An unbuffered wah is one way to fix the Hendrix fuzz problem.) As a general rule, I'm fairly sure that every single Boss pedal has a huge thwonking buffer whether it's on or off, and pedals with preamps, whether they're ODs, delays, reverbs, whatever, are going to restore a lot of top end anyway, so they don't need to be buffered. (The Tube Screamer is an obvious exception, but it's not *supposed* to have much treble content.) So just set them up the way that seems comprehensible and then troubleshoot. You might even find that you like a little bit of capacitance, which can help take the spikiness out of ODs and distortions. Generally, fuzz –> wah –> compressors –> gain stages (lots of people like to run gain pedals from highest-gain saturation to loudest/cleanest boost, because you can step on them in order and keep getting louder, but the other way around, you'd hit your compression limit long before you got to your high gain) –> modulation –> delay –> reverb. But some people love delay into high gain (I do), some people like modulation into gain stages (I do), some people like to put effects after their delays so they change the delay repeats too. Slide guitar players love ganging two compressors, one straight into the other, for infinite sustain. I love having more than one delay, so I can run my Boss DD-200 into my Memory Boy and not only make the two of them start pinging off each other but get the crumbling erosion of the Memory Man on the other delay, too. Oh, and I hate effects loops, and they make all of this way more complicated.

One of the rare cases in which I can say [Old Dirty Bastard on TRL voice], "Me? Nothing." Never listened to the Fall at any length, had no strong feelings or attraction when I heard (I think) HEX ENDUCTION HOUR in somebody's car. I much prefer Père Ubu. But I do appreciate what Mark E. Smith said about Mumford & Sons.

Dogshit. Gee, a chubby, balding middle-aged journalist wrote some novels about a chiseled, granite-jawed, brilliant, crusading journalist who gets effortless pussy ... from the victim of a brutal assault, which Fincher turned into an utterly gratuitous mini-snuff film. Very cool all around

Never gotten to play a Harvard, sadly. I've barely gotten to play ANY tweeds. Somebody should do something about it, and I mean that in a way which even I cannot interpret. (Audience, don't buy me an amp, but maybe get me into a rich guy's house with a lot of early Fenders for a few hours.) My impression of the Harvard is that it was kind of a double Champ, twice the output power and a little more push to the preamp, but not as powerful or as plush-featured (reverb & trem) as the Princeton. Kind of a weird amp, really, because in terms of gigging volume, headroom, onset of overdrive/compression, there's already not a ton of difference between a 5-watt Champ and a 12- or 15-watt Princeton. I'm thinking it was the poor man's Princeton, with more gigworthy power than the Champ but without the Princeton's features ... but then why wouldn't you buy a Deluxe? Maybe the Deluxe was more "rock'n'roll" (they're pretty loud and grungy even at low settings) and the Hahhhhvahd was moah refined? Whatever the case, yep, killer Tele sound from Steve Cropper on that. Wiry as hell – you can REALLY hear the guitar coming through, so maybe that's the hook on a Harvard. A Deluxe tends to make everything sound like a Deluxe, which is great, but you're gonna come out of it playing like Neil Young, whether you want to or not.