deeaa
November 15th, 2011, 10:19 AM
I’ve introduced myself previously, but since I had some time on my hands watching a sick kid at home, I thought I could write a proper introduction and also a history of my main gear over the years, if not for any other purpose, then merely for trying to keep it in my own memory at least. So here it goes, complete with a few photos and links to most important videos! See much more at http://deeaa.pp.fi if you like.
My music hobby begun properly around 1987, when I was in school, and pretty much all my friends – likely inspired by the then-incredibly popular heavy metal bands – got the idea that they’d build electric guitars at the school woodshop lessons. Supposedly it would be an easy enough task...but whatever the various outcomes of the joint venture, it certainly introduced me to making music.
To be fair, music had been a part of my life of course previously, but almost exclusively classical music or jazz, blues and Motown, which my parents listened to. Aretha Franklin and Beethoven, Dvorak (I still can hum thru most of Dvorak’s New World etc…anyways in '75 or so I had been really keen on the piano as well, eagerly making my own tunes hours on end, until my parents decided to get piano lessons for me. Which abruptly cut that hobby in short; I went for one lesson and nobody knows what happened but I refused to touch the piano ever since. Likely just my innate rebellion trait against doing things like all the others do, heh…
But let’s get back to the happy ‘80s when we all feared the bomb and were certain USA will attack Russia or vice versa any given day. The woodshop project ended up with me building a quirky guitar that was a sort of a bastard child of a flying-V and an aborted whale fetus, and likely as playable as the latter as well. I ended up making two necks out of birch, as my teacher (yes really, he was always drunk out of his head) spoiled the first neck when sawing the headstock and ‘slipped’ a little…
http://muusikoiden.net/dyn/articles/760.jpg
Still, it was playable, with one PAF copy mic I had gotten from somewhere (remember I had never even touched a guitar before so it REALLY was a learning experience to build one)…thick neck, as it had no truss rod…but I didn’t even know how to tune it yet. I can only imagine how the sound of me trying to play Smoke On The Water with it thru the family Sony stereo system must have nearly stopped blood in my parent’s veins from running upon hearing the cacophony. Maybe to save the stereo system my dad then bought me a ‘Cub 10’ amplifier, which was covered in some gray matter that could have been mistaken for a Mongol warrior’s saddle cushion, but was capable of reproducing the fine tones my fetus-V was able to produce without a terrible rumbling. And once I gathered enough money for a Boss HM-2 distortion pedal, I could take pride in being able to figure out how to play ‘Paranoid’ and a few other classics over the xmas holidays.
Later I built another V shaped guitar, this time with a hollow body, with wood bits on the side and veneer on each side…terribly neck heavy naturally….but I still have that neck; used it for building a stone guitar much later in life.
A year went by and the next xmas I was in extacy expecting an exceptional present. A Musima brand strat-copy. It had a passable neck, rather high action (which I didn’t understand anything about) and all the bells and whistles of strats. Like the usual cheaper 80’s instrument, it held in tune terribly, and was covered all over in very very thick lacquer, under which you could not tell whether the neck wood was maple or compressed toilet paper or perhaps swiss cheese sans the holes.
By the last year in comprehensive school, 9th grade, I then convinced my parents I had the mad skillz that required me to get a decent guitar, and I got me a Charvel model 3 in electric blue. Built a hard case for it in school woodshop too. Put on lots of stickers and I was a rockstar! By then my hair had also reached a respectable length, and my jacket was adorned with so many studs and all, I was getting plenty of exercise just hauling that jacket and the studded belt and all around.
And to top it all off, it was soon followed by my first Marshall, a 75 Reverb 1x12” and a bunch of pedals like a chorus. For some reason I ripped the pedals off their covers and built an aluminum box for them, and it also had switches for switching the amp channels&verb, so I ended up with a sturdy 5-button foot controller that was the envy of the whole neighborhood.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qc8FrRMsoek
It was with this gear that I put up my first band called ‘Big Deal’. Before that we had of course played some with my buddies, the local church was nice enough to let us use their band room for that, so we’d played some Mötörhead etc. but now, in the 1st year of Highschool (called Upper Secondary School here) I had a proper band. The only problem turned out to be we needed a singer…so before I knew it, I had sold off the Charvel and the Marshall, and instead owned a 500W or so PA system and a Charvel electroacoustic guitar. Which was largely sounding like a cardboard bit with those 1st gen piezo pickups. Although we were 15 to 17 years old, for some reason we suddenly noticed we had gigs in local bars downtown and even smaller festivals. We did a few demo songs too – none of us really knew any music or notes but they turned out OK. Here's my first song ever in studio:
http://deeaa.pp.fi/Shout.mp3
That lasted some 3 years or so, until I went away for University studies, left home etc. and sold off pretty much every piece of music gear I had save for the mixer, which nobody wanted, and a Boss SE-50 multifx unit I still have. It was 1991 and I moved to a 1-room student apartment with my GF. Oh, she gave me a nylonstring guitar, though, which I also still have. Turned out I didn’t get to studying proper in a few years, so I managed to get a job at a local music store, and that in turn lead me to taking up the hobby again after a pause of maybe a year. I got this white Aria Pro II guitar from somewhere, and a Boss drum machine, and then I delved into making weird recordings using the Boss and the drum machine and two cassette decks for multitracking. Luckily I still have them tapes. Weird stuff. You’d think we’d been on shrooms while writing the lyrics. I visited a few local bands as a singer, until put together the next gigging band, Murphys Kidz. With them we did a few demo releases which got some radio play too.
I acquired some gear, including a Takamine 12-string into which I put a Fishman piezo as well as a Dean Markley...and a number of ‘visiting’ guitars I can’t even remember but used mainly to hone my setup skills etc. as that is what I also did at the music store I worked at. For gigging purposes I needed an amp, and while I lusted after a Marshall JCM800 or a Bluesbreaker, I had to do with an Ampeg VT-22, which was a mistake. 120 tube watts, incredibly sweet clean sounds, no drive, and weighed like a sin on clergyman’s shoulders; it had power transformers the size of baby heads! Since it had no casters and I was a skinny rocker dude it was just too damned hard to carry (despite yielding nice tones with a Chandler Tube Driver preamp and the Boss in loop).
And finally, as I worked in a music store and could get great discounts, I went ahead and bought me a transparent wine red Gibson Les Paul Standard, which I subsequently played as my main axe for 13 years that followed. The funny thing about the Gibson is, it cost like the amount of money equal to our yearly food budget, so I didn’t dare tell my fiancé about it at all for a looong time…and when she did find out, well you can guess it wasn’t such fun…
Anyways….at that point I played Fender amps…the best of the bunch was the red-knob twin, which was actually really good. I used a Boss MIDI controller to get FX from the same old Boss in the loop. (Believe it or not, the damned Boss is now in my JVM’s loop!) The LP received an EMG PA-1 preamp and a TP-6 tailpiece. Many demos done in these years, and loads of gigs, mostly in those college parties.
My music hobby begun properly around 1987, when I was in school, and pretty much all my friends – likely inspired by the then-incredibly popular heavy metal bands – got the idea that they’d build electric guitars at the school woodshop lessons. Supposedly it would be an easy enough task...but whatever the various outcomes of the joint venture, it certainly introduced me to making music.
To be fair, music had been a part of my life of course previously, but almost exclusively classical music or jazz, blues and Motown, which my parents listened to. Aretha Franklin and Beethoven, Dvorak (I still can hum thru most of Dvorak’s New World etc…anyways in '75 or so I had been really keen on the piano as well, eagerly making my own tunes hours on end, until my parents decided to get piano lessons for me. Which abruptly cut that hobby in short; I went for one lesson and nobody knows what happened but I refused to touch the piano ever since. Likely just my innate rebellion trait against doing things like all the others do, heh…
But let’s get back to the happy ‘80s when we all feared the bomb and were certain USA will attack Russia or vice versa any given day. The woodshop project ended up with me building a quirky guitar that was a sort of a bastard child of a flying-V and an aborted whale fetus, and likely as playable as the latter as well. I ended up making two necks out of birch, as my teacher (yes really, he was always drunk out of his head) spoiled the first neck when sawing the headstock and ‘slipped’ a little…
http://muusikoiden.net/dyn/articles/760.jpg
Still, it was playable, with one PAF copy mic I had gotten from somewhere (remember I had never even touched a guitar before so it REALLY was a learning experience to build one)…thick neck, as it had no truss rod…but I didn’t even know how to tune it yet. I can only imagine how the sound of me trying to play Smoke On The Water with it thru the family Sony stereo system must have nearly stopped blood in my parent’s veins from running upon hearing the cacophony. Maybe to save the stereo system my dad then bought me a ‘Cub 10’ amplifier, which was covered in some gray matter that could have been mistaken for a Mongol warrior’s saddle cushion, but was capable of reproducing the fine tones my fetus-V was able to produce without a terrible rumbling. And once I gathered enough money for a Boss HM-2 distortion pedal, I could take pride in being able to figure out how to play ‘Paranoid’ and a few other classics over the xmas holidays.
Later I built another V shaped guitar, this time with a hollow body, with wood bits on the side and veneer on each side…terribly neck heavy naturally….but I still have that neck; used it for building a stone guitar much later in life.
A year went by and the next xmas I was in extacy expecting an exceptional present. A Musima brand strat-copy. It had a passable neck, rather high action (which I didn’t understand anything about) and all the bells and whistles of strats. Like the usual cheaper 80’s instrument, it held in tune terribly, and was covered all over in very very thick lacquer, under which you could not tell whether the neck wood was maple or compressed toilet paper or perhaps swiss cheese sans the holes.
By the last year in comprehensive school, 9th grade, I then convinced my parents I had the mad skillz that required me to get a decent guitar, and I got me a Charvel model 3 in electric blue. Built a hard case for it in school woodshop too. Put on lots of stickers and I was a rockstar! By then my hair had also reached a respectable length, and my jacket was adorned with so many studs and all, I was getting plenty of exercise just hauling that jacket and the studded belt and all around.
And to top it all off, it was soon followed by my first Marshall, a 75 Reverb 1x12” and a bunch of pedals like a chorus. For some reason I ripped the pedals off their covers and built an aluminum box for them, and it also had switches for switching the amp channels&verb, so I ended up with a sturdy 5-button foot controller that was the envy of the whole neighborhood.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qc8FrRMsoek
It was with this gear that I put up my first band called ‘Big Deal’. Before that we had of course played some with my buddies, the local church was nice enough to let us use their band room for that, so we’d played some Mötörhead etc. but now, in the 1st year of Highschool (called Upper Secondary School here) I had a proper band. The only problem turned out to be we needed a singer…so before I knew it, I had sold off the Charvel and the Marshall, and instead owned a 500W or so PA system and a Charvel electroacoustic guitar. Which was largely sounding like a cardboard bit with those 1st gen piezo pickups. Although we were 15 to 17 years old, for some reason we suddenly noticed we had gigs in local bars downtown and even smaller festivals. We did a few demo songs too – none of us really knew any music or notes but they turned out OK. Here's my first song ever in studio:
http://deeaa.pp.fi/Shout.mp3
That lasted some 3 years or so, until I went away for University studies, left home etc. and sold off pretty much every piece of music gear I had save for the mixer, which nobody wanted, and a Boss SE-50 multifx unit I still have. It was 1991 and I moved to a 1-room student apartment with my GF. Oh, she gave me a nylonstring guitar, though, which I also still have. Turned out I didn’t get to studying proper in a few years, so I managed to get a job at a local music store, and that in turn lead me to taking up the hobby again after a pause of maybe a year. I got this white Aria Pro II guitar from somewhere, and a Boss drum machine, and then I delved into making weird recordings using the Boss and the drum machine and two cassette decks for multitracking. Luckily I still have them tapes. Weird stuff. You’d think we’d been on shrooms while writing the lyrics. I visited a few local bands as a singer, until put together the next gigging band, Murphys Kidz. With them we did a few demo releases which got some radio play too.
I acquired some gear, including a Takamine 12-string into which I put a Fishman piezo as well as a Dean Markley...and a number of ‘visiting’ guitars I can’t even remember but used mainly to hone my setup skills etc. as that is what I also did at the music store I worked at. For gigging purposes I needed an amp, and while I lusted after a Marshall JCM800 or a Bluesbreaker, I had to do with an Ampeg VT-22, which was a mistake. 120 tube watts, incredibly sweet clean sounds, no drive, and weighed like a sin on clergyman’s shoulders; it had power transformers the size of baby heads! Since it had no casters and I was a skinny rocker dude it was just too damned hard to carry (despite yielding nice tones with a Chandler Tube Driver preamp and the Boss in loop).
And finally, as I worked in a music store and could get great discounts, I went ahead and bought me a transparent wine red Gibson Les Paul Standard, which I subsequently played as my main axe for 13 years that followed. The funny thing about the Gibson is, it cost like the amount of money equal to our yearly food budget, so I didn’t dare tell my fiancé about it at all for a looong time…and when she did find out, well you can guess it wasn’t such fun…
Anyways….at that point I played Fender amps…the best of the bunch was the red-knob twin, which was actually really good. I used a Boss MIDI controller to get FX from the same old Boss in the loop. (Believe it or not, the damned Boss is now in my JVM’s loop!) The LP received an EMG PA-1 preamp and a TP-6 tailpiece. Many demos done in these years, and loads of gigs, mostly in those college parties.