My Electric Guitar Setup

music

Chris asked about my guitar setup, so I thought I’d lay the basics out here.

I started with a Fender Texas Special American Strat, and added a L.R. Baggs X-Bridge (a piezo pickup) to get a pretty convincing acoustic guitar sound. The X-Bridge signal goes to a DTAR Mama Bear to pre-amp, neutralize piezo pickup unpleasantness, and add in acoustic guitar emulation as needed.

The Strat’s magnetic pickups go into my DigiTech GNX4, which is just crazy all by itself. Sometimes I refer to it as my semi-portable MP3 player.

Anyway, I then mix in my piezo/Mama Bear signal into the GNX’s line inputs so I can have straight acoustic sound, electric sound, or my favorite: the acoustic/electric blend. It’s pretty fun and almost too flexible with all the tone-tweaking possibilities.

The signal currently is just going into my bass amp/cab–a Fender Bassman 60.

So no tubes–at least not yet…

April? What Happened to March?

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I’m slacking at this blog thing. What’s that, you already knew that?

Let’s see, my wife Angie has started a blog and it’s much cooler than mine–it has a lot of pictures.

Josiah started swim lessons yesterday. He’s learning how to blow bubbles under water and kick his feet. I’m starting to get caught off guard once in a while about how he is growing up. We visited friends this evening who just had their fourth boy. Seeing their baby reminded me how itty bitty Josiah used to be. Then, I look over at Josiah and he’s running around playing with their other boys and having conversations. Well, psuedo-conversations anyway. One was talking about “army men” (which came out something like “em-en”) and Josiah thought he was talking about M&Ms.

Playing in the Sand Box–In February

weather

Playing a little catch-up here…
Josiah likes playing in his sand box and it doesn’t really matter to him that it’s raining outside. Since it matters to Angie and I, I rigged up a tarp under the deck stairway above his sand box. Now everybody’s happy.

Snow in Portland–In March

weather

So I heard Wednesday afternoon about a “blizzard warning” for the Cascade mountains and saw snow level of 1000 feet and thought, “That’s nice. Too bad I won’t see any at my house.” Well by morning the snow level dropped to 300 feet and voila–there was snow. Here’s a shot I took yesterday morning before it started warming up.

I knew Josiah would be excited so I delayed going in to work. When he woke up I took him to the window and he said, “Hey, snow!” After about a minute of him listing off all the things that had snow on them, he said, “I need my boots! I need my hat! I need my jammies off!” Unfortunately, I had to go to work, but he got to go out with his mommy. They built a snow man, a “Snow Mommy“, and a “Snow Josiah.“