Picture Gallery

This no-nonsense, military looking piece of equipment is a "STEPRIDER" (the machine,.. silly) and it was a great help for getting heavy things up and down stairs, on and off the van etc.,.... We got it from CASTLE FORKLIFTS in Rugby and it has proved to be not only strong but also very gentle with fragile kit.
Just the thing for those delicate "organ transplants"!
The no-nonsense looking lady is Kate!

And the "Toys"(Instruments I play with)

This is my favourite guitar,.. a Takamine 12-string.
It's strung with Labella 710-12L Silk & Steel strings and I have never found anything else that works on it as well. Actually, I still use this one for writing songs as long as I can still get new sets of frets to stay in the neck,.. it's on it's fourth set right now. I guess it's a kind of love affair, I think we're stuck with each other. Yes it's the really early model with the headstock design that Martin told them to stop using. I did try a Martin 12 before I bought this one,.. er,.. I think this one outclassed the Martin because it lets me play chords right up to the 14th fret and is still in tune! (The Martin was well sharp by the 10th and very harsh too.)
I bought this one from a place called Sharon's Music in Tunbridge Wells, way back in 1982,.. for a really silly price considering what Takemine guitars now sell for! I have been asked if I want to sell it many times,... in case you were thinking of asking again,.... NO!

I put a deposit on this Burns Marquee Double-Six before telling Kate,.. er, yeah she did rant a bit but only till she heard it! The original vesion of this beastie I met up with back in the seventies, as you can see here.
It has some power with the "Trisonic" pick-ups,.. had it for months but still experimenting. I did change the knobs the moment I bought it,... the ones it came with were really naff!

This modified Aria Pro2 Lazer Bass has been around a while and has been quite seriously PB'd by having pick-ups, fretting and scratch-plate mods, as well as tweaks to the tone circuit. The pick-ups are a Status at the bridge which gives a fat crisp sound and the split pair are Velvet Hammers, really smooth and with the active tone switched in, it can be made to sound like Stanley Clarke although I have to admit, not by me unfortunately cos I never got that good! The bit of brass inliad at the bottom of the neck gives a hard twangy slap effect which I happen to like. Not everybody's taste maybe but I'm just weird!

Er,.. I think this is an old Aria copy of a Les Paul,.. and I mean old too! I found this one in bits after a neck / headstock crack. To be honest, having sort of thrown it all back together, the neck really needed to be re-shaped,... it was like trying to play a baseball bat! I took a spokeshave and a power sanding wheel to it and now it is a heck of a lot more payable. I does sound nice though, especially with the addition of a Dimarzio split which opens up the range of tones available. I just had to have a Gibson shaped thing but simply didn't have the money for a genuine one. This was in need of rescue,.. so I rescued it. Ho-hum!

Why would I buy the Yamaha Magicstomp Bass you might wonder. Well the answer lies in the fact that the Takamine has some very rich tones which most 'guitar' pedals simply don't do justice to and the bass version here, seems to have an extended bottom end. As it's possible to load any of the settings from the acoustic or the guitar versions using the computer USB link, its the most amazingly versatile tool. I simply haven't had anything but nice sounds out of it since I got it, well worth the investment as it saves me stringing a load of pedals all over the place on stage.
If there's a particular sound I want, I can sit down with a lap-top and fiddle about till I find the right settings, then just store it for use later. It's also got a load of settings backed up and burned onto a CD so even if the whole computer fries it's nuts, I will still have my effects settings. Yup, I'd say that's a pretty cool solution. So why the f**k did Yamaha stop making these?? Mine's staying in the bag!

Yamaha PSR540. This was also an impulse buy,.. secondhand. Actually I still like the old Roland JX3P too, it's just that it makes it easy to mess about when playing around with a new song, or re-doing an old one. Ah yes, there is the midi interface that makes score writing simplicity itself with the addition of Print Music software via the computer. If you haven't got a clue how to create musical score, that really makes it quite simple and you can learn a lot in the process!
There are more keyboards now, I'll have to take some pics and show them off as soon as the studio refit is finished.

Yeah, yeah,.. I've done all the drummer jokes as well, this wee black box is the Alesis SR16 drum machine. It's basically a load of rather good drum sound samples with preset patterns and also, user patterns too. It's quite an amazing way of dispensing with that guy in the band who needs half the van and six roadies to get between gigs! (Doesn't speed up, slow down or chuck sticks at you in the middle of a number either,....)
Having said that, there's some things it can't do that human drummers do so well, like drop a beat when you missed one, play an extra intro when the lyrics vanish into 'La-la Land' and attract girls like a complete babe-magnet!

Hmmmmm,.. this little thing is a Yamaha QY70. It's basically a tool for putting whole songs together, it can also work as a band in a box but to be honest,.. even if they are a pain at times, I still prefer a band of sweaty real live musos!

This was where I started in digital recording. I just never quite got on with messing about in a computer. My computer is for doing other things, like creating this website for instance! It's a Fostex VF160 and with 16 tracks plus eight 'virtual' ones to try variations on a theme, it's possibly the best investment I've ever made in my musical life! It also has two digital effects channels and a host of tone tweaks that makes it a really useful tool-kit. I have found that the best way to produce a CD with this is burn the master using the built in burner and then do the final editing and CD runs on the computer,.. the screen is a wee bit small to actually do the editing and it's a bit hard to fool with a magnifying glass and edit at the same time.
There is one massive drawback with these machines as I found out the hard way,. Fostex, apparently to combat 'acoustic noise' from the hard drive, wrapped the thing in bloody foam and it runs waaaaay too hot! So hot in fact that I blew two drives before I twigged why they lost hours of hard work. With the foam round them, they heat up to around 70 centigrade and the absolute max is supposed to be 60! The solution was easy, remove nearly all the foam wrapper and leave just a few pads to support it in the mounting, then drill six decent sized holes in the bottom panel. I can't hear the difference so there must be some nut at Fostex who has a bat in his gene pool!!! And anyway, this is a 'home studio' recorder so the 'studio environment' is hardly going to be quiet enough to hear the damn drive is it? If it is in a real 'studio' then the recorder would be in a separate bloody room anyway so i really don't get the reasoning behind that particular design FUBAR!! Oddly enough, I ran out of tracks in that one so I sold it,..
..now I have a Tascam 2488.

This very compact beastie is about the same cost as a few days professional studio time and to be honest, it's every bit as good as Tascam have proved to be over the years. 24 tracks that are really more editable than most musicians will ever find routes to! It has a very good guitar input that has a range of dedicted effects I certainly haven't found the bottom of yet! The CD burner is so fast, it kinda surprised me the first one I did. I'm still very much playing with it and will probably write a bit more about my experiences with it later.

This was the business bit of the PA for most purposes,.. well to be totally honest, this is an original version of what I used because on mine, there's independent switches for phantom power and the VU metering is now four LED meters. Just let me keep tabs on a bit more of what's happening. This is a powered mixer that puts out 350watts a side which is fine for smaller venues on its own but I would hook up the main rack, 900watts a side, for bigger venues and use the built in amps for fill at the rear. That gave me a 'box' of sound that is more controlable than just using raw power up front in the region of 6 Kilowatts! (Less to cart around!)
Ah yes,... one more thing, it has is a record output so we can hear all those bum notes and mistakes when we wake up the next day! No, seriously, it's a great way to produce a genuine 'gig' demo, or a 'live' CD, particularly for solo artists. (Like me.) As you might have noticed, it's all past tense cos it was REALLY BLOODY HEAVY and as my legs and back were making it very clear to me that they weren't up for this kind of abuse, I sold it.

This one is what you see on the main pages as a background! It's the Studiomaster 16-4-8 Mixdown from the sadly 'gone' British company. However, it's a brilliant desk and I've fitted a complete set of very sexy faders (ALPS) and it is every bit as good as anything else on the market, possibly with a warmer sound. The 16-4-8 really refers to its studio role but it does have a stereo master out as well and for working on my music it's more than capable of handling everything I chuck through it! I picked this one up rather cheap because it had a few bits that had got damp.(Some eegit spilled beer in it) but as all its bits are still very much available off the shelf, it didn't cost much to fix either proving to be an absolute bargain.
To be honest, I've tried the stuff now being sold with the Studiomaster name on it and it's just not even close to being in the same class as this desk of mine.
Yes there are more compact desks around and I even have a couple but when I'm working under pressure, it's very nice to be able to actually see where the controls are set without a magnifying glass! (Am I too old for this shit?) The other major advantage is that it's fixable if it breaks! Most modern compact mixers are made with tiny surface mount components and cost an arm and a leg to sort out,.. because the bits probably ain't available 'off-the-shelf' anywhere.

These little Peavey Deltafex units have had some bad reviews but I notice always from people who try to use them for studios. To be honest, they ain't that popular for studio use because they don't have the range of effects that studio engineers expect. For my purposes, in live situations they are simple and quite enough for the task, I hate wasting ages setting up gazillions of buttons just to get a slight edge of delay,.. this one is only a couple of tweaks and job done.
Having said that, I run two of these with a stereo noise gate and they work fine for me.

These beasts are the result of re-doing an old PA cab design I originally put together in 1989, I just happened to have the old drawings kicking around and figured that all those bins in the stack would take much less time to set up, if I put them all in a single box. Well,.. it sorta works.
For those who wanted to know they are called PA900Bi_02 Bins.
They are a trapezoid cab with a 15" horn mounted + 12" front mounted, both 300watts RMS. The top end are a pair of 8" 150watts RMS with piezo horn and tweeters for the squeaks. This is driven from a Bi-Amp set-up giving 900 Watts RMS and trust me,.. they really do sound nice. I thought they would work out really heavy but as they are made in 18mm hardwood ply, they are surprisingly light for the size. (They still don't quite come under the heading of 'pocket rock-boxes' though!)
Oh yeah,.. I know there are some other bins very similar to these around and no, I didn't poach the design, I worked them out from three 8x4 sheets (cos that's what I had at the time) and a couple of months of playing with acoustic dimensions. Again, these have left the stable! Just the job for someone with far more beef than I want to muster and roadies are getting expensive!

This little Carlsbro GLX 30 is quite amazing really. It handles both the electro-accoustic Takemine as well as the electric guitars and for only 30 watts, sounds great. It didn't cost an arm and a leg in the first place but out-performs other more expensive amps. It will DI to the main PA and so acts mostly as a stage monitor for me really. For some reason it reminds me of the Vox AC30,... without the hum! This one is going to find a new 'home' but will still be in the family,.. my little star Hazel needs an amp up in Scotland so this is her starting point for some amazing music!

This little box often gets a comment from people at gigs! No, I don't shoot hecklers, though sometimes,....
It actually is the case for my microphones. Lined with a layer of foam, these little ammo boxes are really cheap and you can find them at any surplus store. They actually are far stronger than any "flight-case" and how do I know this? Well, someone actually drove the van over mine once, by accident of course. (Yes it was me OK.) All the mics survive to this day! I use several of these cases, in varying sizes and shapes, for loose gear like leads and stuff. There are also some plastic 'shock-boxes' (surplus stores again) that hold the leads and the multicore. Most of them get re-painted but I left this one with all it's print on,... just for laughs.

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