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Might be an education to list all the bad gear we have bought and are willing to own up to, OK i’ll start off, i once bought 2 VOX distortion pedals from a guitar show, you know what its like you have £30 spare in your pocket and you see a bargain as you are walking out, i paid £30 for a VOX distortion booster and also a valve overdrive pedal, and it was the worst S&%T i have ever bought, i broke one up for its capacitors and stuck the other on ebay, it went for £55 and the guy loved it, but to me it was horrible and fizzy, Once bought an Epi casino which played quite nice til you tried to gig with it, it was like a howling wolf in the band. I also got some of those little Danelectro pedals, i bought 4 of them, a reverb, chorus, digital delay, and a tremelo, and they were very bad, they sucked the tone right out of the guitar, again i bought them without playing them on the spur of the moment, never again.
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The worst bit of kit I ever bought was a Washburn ‘Bad Dog’ Flanger pedal. It sounded like putting your guitar through one of those telephones kids used to make with two plastic cups and a piece of string. Once you added distortion you just became confused. How could a Flanger fail so utterly to sound like ‘Aint talkin bout love’?. The best bit about it was it was a metal casing – what a waste of effort though. I sold it on e-bay and it was accidentally damaged in transit – a fitting end.
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[quote=”bulsara”]Maybe not total rubbish.
I have a “Godwin Organ Guitar” it is beautifully constructed but overly complicated and so heavy you can not hold it for more that a few minutes at a time. It is a huge acoustic style guitar, the internal space of the body is completely filled with the electronics from an organ.
There are 13 knobs and 19 switches. Each fret is insulated into six sections across it’s length so that the strings act as separate earth returns when they are pulled down. Each segment creates a different note from the organ component.
Every time you play a note you get both guitar and organ tunes! It also comes with a huge volume pedal. Apparently it requires 2 separate amps to work. No one has been able to play it successfully at this point.
Has anyone ever played one of these beasts? :?[/quote]
HI,
I read your quote about owning one of these. I’ve had a Godwin organ that I bought to fix up (and never got around to it). Is it possible you could email me privately so I could ask some in detail questions about how it works and about the expression pedal that came with it? My e-mail address is [email protected]
Look forward to hearing from you
Cheers
Pete
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Re: a Ross or a Boss???
While in highschool in the late ’80s, my guitar playing friends and I all seemed to have one of these:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&category=22669&item=7331078017&rd=1&ssPageName=WDVW
They weren’t bad at low levels for overdriving an amp, but if you cranked them up they sounded terrible. I also had a ProCo Rat that, in my opionion, sounded like crap.
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[quote=”lee_UK”]A ROSS or a BOSS?? Ross make real cheap and nasty headphones, must be them, but i dont remember seeing any effects by them, Ive played a Variaxe, the first one, i think its the 500 series, and for the money they are very good, i would have like to hear them in a band mix at volume, cos as we know the tone completly changes under these conditions, but overall i thought it was a good soundy likey guitar,…[/quote]
Did a bit of research on the Variax guitars. They emailed me (within a couple of hours). The 300 has a fingerboard radius of 12 inches and the 500 and 700 are both 10 inches. the only leftie I’ve seen is the 500. They have a good forum on their site and it’s been flaging up a lot of the regular problems with the electronics etc worth a look for the “shed some light on the Variax” dept.
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I made the mistake of trying to save like $5 by purchasing a DOD FX64 Ice Box Chorus Pedal instead of the BOSS equivalent. The depth and level have to be set on 10 to get ANY chorus at all – JUNK! What’s worse is that before this unfortunate purchase, I talked to a guy from my hometown who worked for Digitech in the early 90’s. He said that the general feeling on the assembly line was that they were producing a second rate product.
I also own a solid state Fender Deluxe 112 amp that has all the warmth of a frozen turd. Its only redeeming quality is that I accidentally backed into it with my truck and it still works. Cheap and Loud!
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Maybe not total rubbish.
I have a “Godwin Organ Guitar” it is beautifully constructed but overly complicated and so heavy you can not hold it for more that a few minutes at a time. It is a huge acoustic style guitar, the internal space of the body is completely filled with the electronics from an organ.
There are 13 knobs and 19 switches. Each fret is insulated into six sections across it’s length so that the strings act as separate earth returns when they are pulled down. Each segment creates a different note from the organ component.
Every time you play a note you get both guitar and organ tunes! It also comes with a huge volume pedal. Apparently it requires 2 separate amps to work. No one has been able to play it successfully at this point.
Has anyone ever played one of these beasts? 😕
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[quote=”lee_UK”]A ROSS or a BOSS?? Ross make real cheap and nasty headphones, must be them, but i dont remember seeing any effects by them, Ive played a Variaxe, the first one, i think its the 500 series, and for the money they are very good, i would have like to hear them in a band mix at volume, cos as we know the tone completly changes under these conditions, but overall i thought it was a good soundy likey guitar, and would make a good recording guitar, not too hot on the shape though, i can never understand why they dont make the electronics in kit form, so you can have them fitted on a guitar of your own choice, 1Bassleft’s newly aquired Sun Mustang would obviously benefit a great deal from a 2 hour session with the wood router!! 😆 might add a bit of character… buzzzzzzzz[/quote]
Yeah! it was a ROSS. An orange thing two with slightly sunken controls. It was about twice the width of a Boss pedal. It makes me shudder just to think about it.
Oooohoooohhhoo! (I just thought about it!)
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If useful, ops are coming in from “The Bottom Line” on the Variaxe Bass. It’s blimmin’ heavy – check the guitar because, presumably, the electrics are the source of the added weight. That’s another worry I have about the “Transformer”, BTW. Apart from weight, ops are very postitive. Some decent players have tried them out and, eg, one regular now uses it and switches from ABG to flatwound Jazz to vintage Jazz rather than lug three basses around. Apparently, the fretless sounds OK on single note but doesn’t ‘glide’. That’s usually where the bass modellers fall down.
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I didn’t get the Sunn Mustang. If you remember, I waited for some insight from the intelligentsia – and all I got was ” 🙄 ”
. TBH, I was thinking that even if the guitar stunk, there was a Dod pedal that might have some comedy shred to play around with on bass. £40 the lot, it was hardly going to kill me. Wait ’til you get a sprog saying “I’d like a violin.” Bet you don’t buy a Strad. Speaking of (Fender) Mustang, there is a nice nick Musicmaster going for £200. If I thought he’d make a go of it, I’d buy it. Plenty of Ross product. Their practice combos circle eBay with £10 starting prices, like lost, unloved souls. Their pedals did have the benefit of being instantly biodegradable when stood on. I remember seeing them in the stores way back. Even then, they didn’t conjure up the word “sturdy”.
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A ROSS or a BOSS?? Ross make real cheap and nasty headphones, must be them, but i dont remember seeing any effects by them, Ive played a Variaxe, the first one, i think its the 500 series, and for the money they are very good, i would have like to hear them in a band mix at volume, cos as we know the tone completly changes under these conditions, but overall i thought it was a good soundy likey guitar, and would make a good recording guitar, not too hot on the shape though, i can never understand why they dont make the electronics in kit form, so you can have them fitted on a guitar of your own choice, 1Bassleft’s newly aquired Sun Mustang would obviously benefit a great deal from a 2 hour session with the wood router!! 😆 might add a bit of character… buzzzzzzzz
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[quote=”Ibanthrasher”]I own a Fender Squire Strat… need I say more??? Of course, it was an xmass preasant so the price wuz right 🙂 :mrgreen:[/quote]
Quite possibly the worst piece/s of equipment were A ROSS phaser (cut the signal in half then distorted it. Then there was the Coron DC8 Distortion III. (I’ve never heard of it either and had to look at said pedal for the make and model) This distortion unit sounded more like radio interference than a guitar FX pedal. Utter, utter bilge both of them. My ZENTA Telecaster was a dog. My Shaftesbury Barney Kessel was OK but the neck was very narrow with the strings too close together. But, as a leftie, the double cutaway worked a treat.
By the way, my Squier strat (silver series) is a bit of a nice guitar (for the price!)
p.s. anyone know any thing about the line6 Vari-Axe
Dave
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In GuitarWorld magazine, I kept seeing these ads for something called a Jellifish. Basically, it was a regular pick, but with these little metal prongs at the tip. In the advertisement, it said that within 5 minutes, I could make my guitar “sound like a dulcimer, a 12-string guitar, a music box, and more!” So I figured “What the hey, I’ll buy one.”
Not only is it impossible to make ANY different sounds with the Jellifish (not to mention a normal guitar sound) I found the little metal tines were scratching my strings up and actually damaging them. I guess it was only $10, but still — NEVER BUY A JELLIFISH.
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Phew! Thanks, Lee. The V-amp comes up on Fleeb with ‘temptingly’ low prices – now I know. On the Max 100, I did a ‘it stinks’ review on HC and it’s not just me. Someone actually put up a mod to get rid of the hiss. Excellent post but I can’t help thinking why didn’t Peavey do this?
AFAIK (haven’t played one) the Musicman amps were SS preamps with a valve power amp. It can work for bass, but it’s not a great setup for guitar. Apparently, the earlier versions with a valve phase inverter sound better. I can’t comment. They fetch unrealisticly high money for checking out as an experiment. Incidentally, the amp side of MM had no input from Leo whatsoever.
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Did he use a music man amp?? probably just put his tag on it for the payout, bit like that pedal he has endorsed, while im here i’ll put another product in the bag marked ‘Old Duffers’ and thats my old Bheringer V-Amp it was the version 1 and it was truely awful, just goes to show, the best looking sweeties dont always taste the best.
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About 25 years ago I “upgraded” from a 60 watt Yamaha solid state amp to a 100 watt Music Man tube amp. At the time they had Clapton endorsing them. I regretted it the first time I used it in rehearsal. I could never get the thing to sound good — no warmth at all. The solid state was much better and easier to carry.
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Lee, the Hondo is up there. In my defence (and I’m scratching around here 🙂 ), ya hafta imagine a lefty bass player in the early 80s. It was the first damned thing I’d seen under month’s-wages money. An absolutely awful plank, though. If I ever fleeb it, I promise to let you know so that you can hit my face with a wet fish and do that Zola (Emile, not Gianfranco) “J’accuse” thing 😉
Other than the “Bass that dare not speak its name”, I have to put the Peavey Max 100 floor pedal in the POS category. Sounded alright on ‘phones in the shop, and it’s certainly rugged. Doubtless, Peavey reckoned a few owners would hurl it against a wall inside a week and claim a refund under warranty.
The DSP side is fine, there are some useable patches, but there are 95 duff presets too. Worse, the ‘transtube’ was designed by someone with severe tinnitus whose mate blu-tacked a seashell to his good ear. Absolutely incredible hiss. Not just the stuff that makes the recording engineer tut, but real “snake from Jungle Book” noise. Whereas the DSP can be bypassed, the preamp torture can’t. Another “hit me if I fleeb it” donkey.
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The worst piece of equipment I purchased was an electronic chord generator – essentially a calculator type doobery that displays a pictorial representation of any chord that you can’t fathom out yourself.
You can’t see the display in any room lighting as it floods the screen with flare.
The batteries are gobbled up in seconds.
It takes ages to work through the daft screen options to arrive at the key and type of chord you want displayed.
I gave it to my dog to chew.
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