As you can see, there are no advertisements on this page. And for me, there are no costs to keep this page up. So, what follows is an unsolicited testimonial...
The happy face shown below is that of someone who used to purchase and lug-around thousands of dollar$ worth of gear just to get a few good guitar tones. I sold all my guitar gear when I quit playing publically in 1999. The only piece of equipment I have purchased in the intervening 9 years is the
Tone Works Pandoras Box PX-4D. I don't use any of the factory settings, so I've learned to create my own with the simply laid-out menu structure. After getting to know some of the finer points of the device, I am now able to replicate the tones of many of the great guitar amplifiers in history: The Vox AC-30TB, 100 Watt Marshalls from the 60's, 70's, 80's and present, the Fender Twin, Fender Bassman, etc. These amp models are then married-up with various speaker emulations from these various amps. My favorite now is the AC-30TB with a Boogie 4x12 cabinet. It's a bit unnatural when you think about it, but it sounds great. The only thing the PX-4D does not do well is when you turn the volume down on the guitar, the tone does not react like a real amp would. For this kind of sound, you would just simply write a new patch with the characterists you were trying to acheive. Of course any kind of effect you would want is built-in. I would wish for an "effect level" on the choruses, but hey, for $150 what do you expect? There is no footswitching ability of this model, but Tone Works has released
a new unit (for $250) that is footswitchable; I have no experience with this unit. I tape the unit to the mic stand and change patches mid-song with my picking hand. To have so many sounds in a device that is just slightly larger than a deck of cards is amazing. There are a lot of people who don't like amp modeling, but I am sold. There are a couple of VERY minor adjustments from playing through a real amp, but it has not taken me long to get used to this. I'd love to hear this thing plugged into a stereo tube power amp and into a pair of 4x12's, but that rig just wouldn't fit in the over head bin.
Cheesy grin not included with PX-4D
In other news, things continue to run pretty good around here, but there have been a couple of power interruptions. One of these happened while I was in the control room. I didn't hear the engine do anything differently, but the lights dimmed, and several science projects were affected. There were no fault codes or "smoking gun" evidence of what the failure was. We were planning on switching over to another engine anyway to perform maintenance on the suspect generator-set. For the other interruptions, I was asleep in a dark room; difficult to tell when the power is out under these circumstances. Naturally, the ol' alarm clock was flashing when I awoke.
There was a celebration of Yuri Gagarin's first trip into space on Saturday. I guess the South Pole was one of more than 100 sanctioned locations for this observance. It really didn't have too much impact on me, but the event was a great chance to hang out with some friends. My schedule will not allow for much daily interaction with people here, so a party is a welcome change (for everyone; no doubt).
Sometime early last week, I was feeling like I needed to watch Soylent Green. I don't know why, but it just seemed like the right thing to do. I don't think I had ever seen it before, but when I saw "the scoops" I remember being terrified of this as a child. The movie was released in 1973 when I was less than 10 years old. Radio personality Anthony Cumia does a great impression of Mr. Heston ("Charelton Heston Traffic" with the Ben Hur soundtrack in the background is a classic radio bit). The next day, I was listening to the Opie and Anthony Show when they announced the passing of the actor. Strange. I will probably begin the quintrilogy of Planet of the Apes this week in his honor; let the cheese begin!
