My new Fender Jazzmaster!

Last Thursday was a great day in the life and times of Allen Morris... that's me in case you were wondering. I finally bought a Fender Jazzmaster! The guitar was sold to me by a good soul on craigslist. I've been dreaming of owning a JM for quite some time, and now it's finally mine!

This particular Jazzmaster is a made in Japan model ("Crafted in Japan" for all those Fender afficionados), and appears to be emulating an early 60's style JM with the tortoise shell pickguard, a 7.25" radius fretboard, thicker neck profile, and all the normal JM fittings: two wide single coil pickups, switchable rhythm/lead circuits with volume and tone controls for each, three-way pickup selector switch, and floating vibrato. 

The guitar however had several modifications. The bridge was replaced by a Mustang bridge (a common mod to Jaguars and Jazzmasters) to keep the strings from skipping out of the saddles. A tension bar, called a "Buzz Stop" was also added to increase downward force onto the bridge. This addition in my opinion affects the guitar tone significantly, making the signature plunky attack of the Jazzmaster more subtle, and significantly increasing sustain. I personally like the addition because it makes the guitar a little more versatile and adds a more fluid, singing quality to leads. The attack is still there though, so don't worry, it sounds nothing like a Stratocaster (also because of the huge pickups).

The Rhythm/Lead Circuits

One of the neatest features of this guitar is the dual circuit design. This concept is similar, though not the same as guitars like the Gibson Les Paul or SG that have volume and tone controls per pickup. On the Jazzmaster, the two circuits are actually voiced differently as they run through different value components. 

The rhythm circuit is activated with the switch "up," and only uses the neck pickup; the pickup selector is made inoperable when in the rhythm circuit. The sounds is darker and mellower than the lead circuit, even with the volume and tone wide open. The idea behind this was to create a smoother, subdued jazz tone, which this guitar excels at. On clean, the guitar easily gets that cool, small club jazz sound. When overdriven, this setting is very fluid, sustaining, warm and fuzzy; fuzzy like a wool blanket I'd like to say. 

The lead circuit activates the 3 position pickup selector: neck, middle (pickup blend) and bridge pickups. This circuit is significantly brighter, though can be made dark like the rhythm circuit by rolling down the tone control. Most players use the lead circuit for this reason, though I personally have found it great to be able to switch from a warm jazz tone on the rhythm circuit, to a glassy surf tone on the lead; or a jangly tone for playing chords on the lead,  to a fuzzed out mess for solos on the rhythm. The possibilities are endless!!!

Floating Vibrato

Another cool feature of the Jazzmaster (also found on the Jaguar) is the "floating" vibrato. It is floating because internal springs counter the pull of the guitar strings, making it possible to up and down bend using the whammy bar. The action of the whammy is very smooth, making those surfy warbling sounds easy. The range of motion is much smaller than that of the Synchronized Tremelo bridge of the Stratocaster; this thing is not made for wild dive bombing! But for accenting, this bridge has no parallel.

Conclusion

Well I'm sure you all know what I think about this guitar. I LOVE IT! The Jazzmaster is a versatile guitar that has lots of tonal options at your fingertips. It may not be the most straightforward guitars out there, but it agrees with the way that I play and my style. It is also worth mentioning that it's one of the most ergonomic and balanced guitars I've ever played, very comfortable both sitting and standing. Now I know why the Jazzmaster has such a respected following. I'm very proud to own this guitar!

Photo Gallery

The new addition to the family: CIJ Fender Jazzmaster. Note the addition of the Buzz-Stop.

Jazzmaster in case.

Headstock detail, with 1960's logo styling and decals.

Famous Jazzmaster players

Bilinda Butcher, Kevin Shields (My Bloody Valentine)

Nels Cline

Elvis Costello

John Davis (Superdrag)
Mike Einziger (Incubus)

Kim Gordon, Thurston Moore, Lee Ronaldo (Sonic Youth)

Ira Kaplan (Yo La Tengo)
Stephen Malkmus (Pavement)

Jeff Tweedy (Wilco)

Tom Verlaine (Television)

"Roadwaves" Pre-Production

Since my recent graduation, I haven't skipped a beat and dove headlong into getting ready for the recording of a new album with my band, The Short Term Melody. The album project, dubbed "Roadwaves" by The Short Term Melody's bassist, Alec Giel, has been waiting in the wings for more than a year. We've attempted to record this album twice, but extenuating circumstances have always got in the way.

So third time's the charm, right?

Anyway, for the past two days, I've been doing non-stop pre-production recordings, "scratch" recordings per se, in order to establish song arrangement as well as play with guitar and vocal parts, and of course, experiment with mic placement. Once I am finished with these scratch recordings, I will hand them off to Alec and Mike so they can brainstorm parts on their respective instruments. I have never done things this way before, but I hope that in doing so, will allow Mike and Alec more ample time to think of what they might want to contribute.

So this week I've been making good progress, and hopefully by Monday next week, I will have all the scratch guitar and vocal takes recorded.

I have also been in the process of designing a website for the band, which will hopefully be launching sometime in June. The website will be the official hub for all things Short Term Melody, and once the site is launched, I will be periodically be posting sound clips of our album progress. Stay tuned for more news!

ART Pro VLA II Compressor Review.

ART Pro VLA II Leveling Amplifier and M-Audio Fast Track 8R.

Today was a joyous day in my little world. A little box (actually it was a pretty big box, and quite heavy at that) arrived at my door this morning from our friends over at Sweetwater.com.

The ART Pro VLA II Leveling Amplifier is a rather inexpensive tube driven two-channel compressor/limiter. Vacuum tubes are all the rage lately, (when I say lately, meaning the past decade or so) and nearly every professional audio company seems to be cashing in on the craze. The audio recording world has been no exception. Many feel that digital recording sounds "cold" or "sterile," and many companies are adding tubes in the signal chain to add some "warmth" to the sound. Now I’m not completely sure how grounded these claims are, being that any quality analog piece of recording equipment, solid state or valve, will have it’s own sonic character. Solid state mic pres, such as ones made by API or Neve, or compressors such as the dbx 160a or the famous UREI 1176 will have plenty of warmth to go around, but we’ll save that discussion for another time.

First Impression

In my little world, the arrival of this ART leveling amplifier is nothing short of a godsend. As a home recordist, I have been using plug-ins for quite some time, but through experience found that working with analogue equipment was more inspiring and easier to get the sounds that I heard in my head. I heard a many good thing about the VLA II and decided to pick one up myself. Unwrapping the unit revealed a quality piece; it had detented pots with well marked descriptors and values, two large analogue VU meters with selectable input/output metering, gain reduction and output level displayed via LED meters, a bypass switch per channel to take the compressor circuit out of the signal chain, XLR and quarter-inch TRS input and output jacks on the back, all housed in a study, stamped metal chassis.

Totally spiking the output meter. Rawr!

The controls, per channel.

Without ado, I connected the VLA II to the I/O of my M-Audio Fast Track 8R interface and began running 2 Track stereo mixes through the unit. My immediate reaction was, “Boy, this thing really colors the sound!” And it does. It rolls a bit of the high end off and even with the Ratio set at 2:1 (the lowest setting) and Input Threshold set to have a gain reduction of only about 1dB to 2dB, compression was quite audible. With a little tweaking of the attack and release times, the compression was tamed and sounded very smooth and pleasing. The overall character however sounded a little too "tubey." Even when I backed off both the input and output gain, I would run into some slight distortion in sound of fizziness on the lead vocal.

Now I’m not completely sure where the sound coloration is taking place, but my guess is that the tubes have something to do with it. Being that this unit is advertised as a "vactrol" type compressor (in other words, a compression circuit that utilizes an optocoupler) chances are the tube itself has little to do with the actual signal attenuation, and more to do with the output gain stage (output level). This however still gives the tube plenty of room to impart it's own sonic character to the overall signal.

Diving In

Opening the unit up revealed the presence of two 12AT7 tubes, one for each channel. 12AT7s are lower gain (but higher current) than the more popular 12AX7 seen in guitar amps. Upon inspection I found the stock tubes to be Ruby Tubes. Being that the VLA II is the only unit I have tried with these tubes installed, I cannot make any reliable judgment on how good these tubes are. Poking around my parts drawer, I luckily found two Tung Sol 12AT7s and quickly popped them in. I love the way Tung Sol tubes have a nice, bright chime in guitar amplifiers, and I hoped that they would sound about the same in the VLA II.

Replacing the stock tubes with any high quality type (in this case a pair of Tung Sol) will help extend the frequency response, increase headroom, and help with overall clarity.

To my luck, they did! I wouldn't go so far as to say it was a "night and day" difference, but much of the higher frequencies that were attenuated with the stock tubes did not occur with the Tung Sols. They were significantly clearer, the bass tighter and more defined, and had much higher headroom... they didn't even distort if I drove the output level very hard (the picture where I'm spiking the output meter). The addition of the Tung Sol tubes really helped the unit out, but I could only imagine that any quality tube from RCA, Phillips, GE, Mullard, or GT would help the output stage immensely. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not knocking the Ruby Tubes at all. I think possibly the VLA II is designed with a lower plate voltage that in turn lowers the headroom, and maybe the Ruby Tubes are less adept to handle such conditions, but that's only a theory.

Concluding Opinion

The ART Pro VLA II as delivered is a good compressor/limiter especially if you want to add a certain vintage character to your recordings. It immediately gave more fatness to the bass frequencies, my guess about 200Hz and below. The only caveat is that some of the high end (especially above 9kHz) I felt was sacrificed, and the mids were not very defined overall. This is not however a criticism of the sound; it is still very useable and with some careful EQ treatments on the front end, will add just enough secret sauce to your mix.

With a higher quality tube replacement, I give the VLA II two big fat thumbs up. None of the high frequency gobbling, much better headroom, more defined mids, and bigger bass without sounding muddy or messy. What was a "character" compressor becomes a solid all around performer good for single sources and 2 Track stereo mixes alike. 

Recording: "I Fall Hard" by Todd A

Recently in January, my friend Todd A and I began to work on another recording of his song entitled "I Fall Hard." Very catchy tune that he has recently released on iTunes.

Differing from the "IRL" E.P. that Todd A and I recorded last year, this track included multiple layers of acoustic guitar, electric guitar, bass, percussion, and drum set. With even these basic tracks found on your standard rock/pop/country tune, there are many considerations that the recording engineer must make.
For example, how many layers of guitar? Will they be up front, in the background, and what timbre will the instrument(s) have? Will the vocals sound crisp and clean, or smoother and warm... uh oh, I'm starting to get into really esoteric (bordering nonsense) territory once I start using terms like "warm" and "crisp." Maybe I'll avoid those for now. Let's just talk about mics and mic placement.

Acoustic Rhythm Guitar

As I do customarily for non-solo steel string acoustic guitar, I miked Todd's Yamaha acoustic using an XY stereo pair of Audio Technica AT2020s. The AT2020's are excellent for acoustic guitar; they nice;y capture pick attack without sounding too harsh and have just enough low-mid without getting boomy from proximity effect. The stereo pair was placed 16 inches in front of the guitar, centered at the end of the fretboard.

Why XY? This ensures mono compatibility, represents a wider tonal palette of the guitar than a single mono microphone (as one microphone is oriented more towards the body of the guitar, while the other is more aimed towards the neck), but does not have a super wide stereo image (as opposed to other stereo miking techniques) to keep "out of the way" in a busy mix. Miking in stereo better illustrates distance from the sound source through parallax, the way that two ears can determine how far and which direction a sound source is... kinda like how having two eyes allows you to also see how far something is.

It was important to keep the acoustic guitar a certain distance in this song, being that the lead vocal could be overshadowed by a overly present acoustic guitar. Todd's particular guitar has a very percussive and cutting tone, and so keeping enough distance between it and the mics were necessary to attenuate some of the sharpness of the attack.

The Guitar Riff

Todd used my Fender Telecaster (MIJ) into a Vox Brian May Special, a cool little solid state 5 watt amplifier with only the basics: gain, tone, and volume. I love the amp cause you can get some nice vintage, twangy tones from it. Also if the gain knob is kept low, but the tone and volume are maxed out, the speaker does this awesome freakout-thing where it starts distorting and sounds like it's going to tear at any moment. Cool! Hopefully the neighbors didn't mind, too much.

Anyway, I miked up the amp using a Shure SM57 up close and an AT2020 a few feet away, and up a little higher to capture the tonality of the amp more similar to what it sounds like playing in the room. The close mic and distance mic were then blended together to taste.

Here's a different angle to show the distance of the AT2020. Sorry about the poor quality of the photograph.

The guitar riff played on the electric guitar was also mirrored on Todd's Baby Taylor. This guitar has a considerable amount of bite in the pick attack, and a rather short sustain which adds to the percussiveness of the guitar. Wanting to capture the percussiveness without the sharpness, I used an SM57 pointed out at the bridge to capture more body/wood resonance, and an MXL V67 condenser pointed at the strumming hand to get more of the picking sound.

The MXL V67 worked pretty well, balancing out the bright Taylor sound with the mic's inherent mellowness while still capturing the picking sound. The SM57 lent a somewhat dull sound in this application, but when blended together with the V67, gave just the right amount of body to stand out in the song above all the other acoustic and electric sounds.

You can listen to "I Fall Hard" and other songs by Todd A by visiting his website.
www.toddamusic.com/

Recording: Brother Cecil... record anywhere!

One of the coolest things about recording technology today is the ability to record basically anywhere there is access to electrical power. Location recording was of course possible ever since the start of sound recording, but in terms of quickness of setup, ease of use, and overall quality achievable, modern digital recording is without parallel.

On Saturday evening, Chris Lynch who performs under the stage moniker "Brother Cecil" came by to hang out with myself and my girlfriend. Along with him came a guitar and a tambourine, which he quickly brought out to show me some tunes that he has been working on. We had been talking about getting a recording of his music together for a long time, and so we thought of doing a test run of his songs while he was over.

I have heard him play many times over the years that we have known each other, but have never tried to attempt to record him. Brother Cecil's music is very reminiscent of classic southern acoustic blues, mixed in with his garage rock and roll singing style (a la Roky Erickson of 13th Floor Elevators fame), so both him and I felt capturing a certain energy and creating a mood with the recording was a little bit more important than capturing pristine audio quality.

After taking a seat at my dinner table, I began to setup my mics, much to his surprise.
"We're going to record here?" He asked.
I responded with a, "Why not?"
So within about 5 minutes, the mics, the interface, computer and recording levels were all set. At first we used my two AT2020s set at the same distance from Chris, one pointing more to his mouth, and the other pointing down to his guitar, roughly at the sound hole. Normally I would not mic a guitar at the sound hole because of the boomy sound that normally emanates from the guitar at the sound hole, but given the distance of the mic and the microphone's position above the guitar, I didn't worry too much about proximity effect or boominess. I also placed both mics at the same point to avoid phasing and comb filtering between the two microphones.

Two SM57 in a coincident pair. Note one microphone is biased towards voice, while the other is biased towards the guitar.

The two AT2020s worked fine as they always do, yielding a very open, clear and crisp recording of both his voice and guitar, but we both agreed that it sounded a little too clean for his style of music. I then replaced the AT2020's with Shure SM57's set in a similar fashion, though slightly closer due to my M-Audio Fastrack 8R's relative lack of gain in the mic preamp. The sound of the SM57s was not as bright, a little furry, and a little ragged in comparison as to be expected, which served Chris's style much better. The SM57s however still captured a surprisingly open sound, possibly reflections coming off the walls of my kitchen, especially the wall directly behind him. Though of course again this was not an ideal recording environment, it was fun how impromtu the session was, and was a neat experiment in environmental recording. 

Sol Grill, Solo.

Sol Grill is this little restaurant down at the Newport Beach Pier, not too far from Blackie's, a place that I once surfed in my relatively younger years. They have great food and the atmosphere is really cozy and cute. There's probably only ten tables in the place, and you're surrounded on all sides by wonderful surf and beach related art.

Last night I played a solo acoustic gig hosted by my friend and local Orange County singer/songwriter Paul Hines. It was a fun gig. I hardly ever bring out my Epiphone Masterbuilt acoustic guitar for gigs; it's fun to let the Stratocaster and Les Paul take a night off! Sol Grill, as most restaurants can be a hard gig if you're the type of musician that likes to have the attention of the crowd and listener feedback, and Sol Grill is not that kind of place. You're pretty much wallpaper music. In the past this would have bothered me (since my music is so wonderful and unique... I say this with sarcasm) but being the center of attention has become less and less important to me. I guess the recording engineer part of my personality is getting much stronger; recording engineers are all about working their magic in the background. So lately I've found myself having a much better time performing since I'm not really expecting anyone to be paying attention. When somebody does, than it's just that much better.

I guess I'm playing more for myself; doing the best that I can do, pushing the envelope of my own abilities, and just trying to put on the best performance I can, regardless if anyone is really watching or not. It's pretty nice.

Break in the weather.

So today here in Southern California we've been given a bit of a reprieve from the warm weather. It's still fairly warm today, about 82 degrees, significantly cooler than it has been for the past week or so. Yesterday was an even hotter day in my hometown, and Mike (the drummer of The Short Term Melody, my band) and I attempted to record again in his garage. Not only it was hotter, but more humid, which made for a miserable session. We didn't get any useable takes, but that's okay, we tried. Blame it on the weather.

Given the improved weather conditions today, I should record, but I don't think I will. The band and myself have been pulling hard to get this album done, despite weather, scheduling conflicts and equipment issues, and we've done quite nicely. We've got about 4 songs so far, with two more drum tracks awaiting guitar, bass, and vocal parts, so we haven't done too bad for only 3 weeks of work. So I think I'm taking a break today. I suppose I may mix later on, but only if I'm feeling up to it.

Being productive is good. It's great to get things done in a timely manner, but sometimes you got to take a break. It's better to stay balanced. Being the songwriter, primary arranger, guitarist, singer, and engineer can make things a bit complicated, and it's quite easy to drive yourself crazy filling all of these roles. So today I'm going to do something unrelated to all of them, at least for a few hours. I hope that this coming semester with all the projects involved, plus finishing this album, I can stay fresh and inspired by staying well rounded and balanced. Though in crunch time, when deadlines must be met, this will be difficult, but on days like today when the sun is out and the breeze is blowing, I'll just kick back with a book and an iced tea.

Good day to you all!