Indie IT30 revalve

As well as doing a line of guitars I'm fond of, Indie also do their own amps. I got this IT-30 with my BFI, securing the pair for a pittance off eBay because one of the machine heads on the guitar had been replaced so didn't match.

The IT-30 is a Valvestate style hybrid amp with a ECC83/12AX7 valve in the pre-amp driving a 30W solid state power amp. There are two footswitchable channels, shared EQ and a real spring reverb tank. All-in-all a well specified amp essentially for free.

This has been my main 'marmalade' amp for the past couple of years. At 30W it's more than loud enough and the 'Tube Drive' channel does enough gain for all but the heaviest of material. The EQ is very flexible and reverb decent. It was never going to be a patch on a serious big name amp but I've always been happy with it.

Over the last few weeks I'd noticed the drive channel seemed to have got a bit 'fuzzy', where I'd previously been very happy with it.

Ordinarily I'd just see this as an excuse to spend money on something shiny (like a Blackstar HT5 or HT1) but I thought I'd have a go at changing the valve as they're only £10 if you stay away from fancy stuff. Pre-amp valves should last ages but then again this amp is probably 6-7 years old now and I've used it a lot in the time I've had it.

As it's only a pre-amp there's no clever stuff to be done, just open up the box taking sane precautions and carefully swap the valve, while avoiding getting oily fingerprints on it. Having done this, it seems to have cleaned the drive channel up again.

While in there I noticed there is a jumper on the board for an effects send/return that is shorted out. If I thought I'd use it I'd look into making this work.

Amplug at Indiecon

Well the idea worked. I had a couple of evenings free and got some solid practice in instead of vegetating in front of the TV. The only problem I had was that my old MP3 player has no repeat function and the buttons are a bit dodgy so I found myself slightly annoyed by it. You can pick up a 1GB 'stick' MP3 player for a pittance so I may do so.

My next hurdle is to take it into work and use it effectively there. I'm not quite sure where I'd go to practice. We tend to have a bunch of meeting rooms free in the building so I may just wander round until I find one.

Have Amplug will travel

I've got a gaming convention coming up and I thought it'd be a good opportunity to assemble and try my 'travel kit'. At these events, games are in 4 hour slots and unless you play 12 hours a day you can end up with a fair bit of time to kill.

This is based around the Amplug I bought, the WI66ProE and an old 128MB MP3 player I've got kicking around. I've given it a spin and found that mixing the backing from the MP3 player with the guitar is a bit hit and miss but works OK once you've got the levels sorted. It all runs on AAA batteries, bar the EMGs in the guitar which last ages, so I can have a single set of batteries and charger.

This should all fit in one of my gig bags easily and if it gets dropped or nicked won't be a tragedy as the WI66ProE cost me tuppence.

Isn't technology great pt. 2 - Vox Amplug Metal

The tagline is 'Plug in. Get Metal'. They're not wrong.

Despite the crapulence of my recent attempt to buy a small guitar to leave at work so I can practice occasionally I've just taken care of the other half of the bargain with this.

Last time I left a guitar at work I had a Zoom 9000, which I never liked. It did loads and I even bought the optional footswitch controller but it just somehow never suited despite being an ubergadget at the time.

Nowadays digital modellers have moved on, getting better and cheaper but they're still generally a large lump and perhaps too pricey to leave kicking about in a gig bag at work. Even a 'Pocket Pod Express' which is about as small and cheap as you can go is something as large as an effects pedal that takes four batteries and needs a lead to connect it to the guitar, plus headphones with a long enough lead to go off to wherever you've perched it.

What I really wanted was a 'headphone amp' and this fit the bill. It's all analogue (with a proper hard off switch so the batteries won't go flat), has simple controls and simply plugs straight into the guitar. It only does one tone, which is METAL but then it does say that on the front. It does a good approximation of my usual tone choice of 'late 80s thrash' just great and the lack of anything much to fiddle with is a plus in my book. I've already got a couple of things that you can create a bazillion presets on.

There's tons of gain, it's not tinny like you'd expect if anything it's bass heavy and you can get decent articulation depending on how you play. Despite the plastic case, huge gain and lack of noise gate it doesn't suffer from loads of hiss/EMI. The only thing it's missing is a tuner but then I have a spare.

On paper the 'Pocket Pod Express' is far superior and not that much more expensive new but this really is a 'slip into a pocket' zero frills device.

Sanding my nut pt. 1

Look away now if you're squeamish, today I sanded the nut shelf on the project Mockingbird.

To do this I made another makeshift tool. Using a rotary trimmer I cut a piece of sandpaper the same width as the nut then stuck it to a piece of wood with double sided tape. I slackened the strings off and held them out of the way while I carefully sanded the nut shelf, trying to keep it as flat as I could.

This seemed to work OK, I put the guitar back together and there were no disasters, but I really haven't taken anywhere near enough off yet. If I fret a note at the first fret you can see I'm bending the string down hard towards the fretboard as much as I am fretting it. This ruins the intonation at low frets and makes the guitar tiring to play and I've come to the conclusion this is why I've never really liked it.

So I'm going to have to repeat this process, perhaps actually measuring how much I'm taking off this time. There is probably some special jig a real luthier would have for doing this kind of thing, I'll just continue with the bodgery.

It's not a Gibson, don't pretend it is.

Today I dug out my Vintage Goldtop for a play and decided it needed a little more setup. Sometimes when I get a guitar I spend ages setting it up, other times I don't bother. I think the Goldtop was one of these.

There was zero relief in the neck so I decided to slacken the truss rod off a tad and this reminded me of one 'upgrade' the previous owner had done to it when fitting the pickups etc.

There was a bit of foam wedged in the truss rod cavity then an old piece of scratchplate material cut to shape and stuck where the lower screw hole needed to be. None of this really worked very well so I removed it all. Then I used the bit of scratchplate to hold the screw head  in place and simply cut the rest off.

It's not a Gibson, don't try and pretend it is.

Washburn #12 - 'MG440' padauk stain

This is not made from padauk, it is a 'padauk stain' finish. So it's an undistinguished two-piece ash body with a veneer top and satin coloured finish to make it look vaguely like the padauk N4s. I'm assuming it's a maple neck and it looks like it's one piece. The fretboard is the usual rosewood unlike my other MG440.

This is the other of my 'bridge repair' Mercury IIs and perhaps the classier of the two because of that faux padauk finish. Also, the black scratchplate is slightly nicer than the slightly cheap looking white pearl one.

Otherwise they're identical. This one also had a bit of a crackle in the pots so I've just squirted some switchcleaner at them. In doing so I noticed that they have Ibanez-style 5-way switching with the humbuckers being coil tapped when used with the single coil. I'd not previously noticed this has I haven't played them much. It's a shame they didn't go the whole hog and make it noise-cancelling in both positions rather than just with the neck, but that would have needed a fancier switch.

So, another nicely made Korean superstrat that I don't really have a use for. I suspect I'll be selling this. The original plan was to steal the tremolos from both then sell the parts, but I can't bring myself to do so. Besides in the meantime I've picked up a couple of decent branded tremolos including a really nice Graphtec one.