John Hendow

On Friday 9/16 The Dudley Manlove Quartet performed at the Wallingford Wurst Festival in Seattle. It’s an event the band has performed in years past but was my first time. The event occurs at a local Catholic grade school in Wallingford. Just entering the building was a flashback to my elementary school years in Catholic school. It’s funny how eerily similar all such schools are – especially those that appear to be of the same approximate vintage. Seeing that classic linoleum and tile environment made me nostalgic and slightly anxious (I have a completely irrational fear of yardsticks as a result of a few thousand thwacks from irate nuns).

Our performance took place in the auditorium, which was also the beer garden for this event. Washington State has a law prohibiting musicians from drinking onstage, and whenever we perform in bars we’re reminded that there will be no drinking permitted onstage. Ironically, Catholic grade schools seem to be exempt from this law, so the band was delighted to have cups of tasty IPA while playing.  For this show I put the Lonestar on the amp stand, placed about two-thirds of the way toward the back of the stage. It seems to me that most Boogies have a tendency to be “beamy”; they produce a very tightly focused output that doesn’t fill the stage. My Boogie Mark III, and my Boogie 1×12 cabinets had a very tight pattern onstage that allowed my to place the amp very far away and still hear it – provided I stood directly in line with the speaker… just a single step to the left or the right and the sound was gone. The Lonestar has a much more “Fender” type spread and cleanly fills my playing position with usable volume.

At this gig I tried running the clean channel a little hotter. It’s interesting that the clean channel on this amp still has considerable headroom even at the higher end of its gain structure. My Strats are wired with medium output pickups so I generally don’t wind up with much unwanted grit. The lead channel on the Lonestar has a good bark to it but still has clean articulation for chords. Compared with my Fender Twin, the Lonestar has a truer gain structure; it seems to me the Fender AB763 circuit has a tendency to naturally compress the guitar dynamics. I’m finding the Keeley compressor is more usable with this amp than with the Twin. The entire gig was an opportunity to try new settings on my pedalboard, with new clean tones and more amp-based drive in the lead settings. It’s especially good for big driven tones for songs like “Rio” and “Don’t Stop Believing”. The gig was a great success and we look forward to the next event!

About a month ago I sold my Fender Twin and purchased a Mesa Boogie Lonestar 1×12 to replace it. The Twin is a great amp and produces a classic tone. My decision to switch to the Lonestar was prompted by hearing the great tones the amp produces, and by my interest in getting a better blues tone. The Lonestar has two channels, “clean” and “drive”. Each channel can be set to 100 watts using a solid state rectifier, or 50 watts using tube / solid state (switchable) rectifier. The overall reverb level for each channel is assignable and there is a programmable boost function for solos.

Overall the amp produces a fantastic clean tone with deep dimensionality and lovely coverage. It has a pure 1:1 response for input dynamics, which is unlike the Twin with its natural compression. It was easy to get a beautiful clean sound out the amp, and to get a classic driven blues tone from the lean channel. On-stage coverage is amazing from this amp. For a single 12 inch speaker it has surprisingly broad spread. I’m pretty pleased so far and look forward to putting this amp through its paces at upcoming gigs.

I am interested in using my iPad (and iPhone) as a controller surface for music applications and hardware. Most of my equipment can be controlled via either MIDI or USB. My preference is always USB over MIDI, and for live use I prefer bluetooth. Some equipment manufacturers do not provide USB for music equipment at all, defaulting to MIDI as the standard. I’m especially baffled by the omission of USB from my Line6 M13 and M9 processors; my Line6 XTLive is several years older and has full USB implementation *plus* a great GUI editor. I hope there will be a update to these devices eventually.

I’d like to be able to use the iPad with my M13 in the following ways:

• Connected via bluetooth (USB would be a good for home, but live, I want fewer cables).
• As an editor / librarian.
• As an external secondary display for live use. It should show patch configuration and be usable as a teleprompter for notes, a lead sheet or set list.
• As a control surface for live use. I frequently wish I could make a quick tweak to my settings without having to get down on my hands and knees, and twiddle dials on the dark stage.

As a company that seems to be most “in the lead” on music / computer interfaces for this kind of gear, I’m surprised Line6 hasn’t already done this.  I had hoped some kind of announcement would be made at summer NAMM, but alas. Hey Line6, you should pay me as a consultant! Make this stuff happen please.

I think we got it. My local shop tech has been up to his elbows in my Fender Twin on a few occasions now, and I believe we’ve narrowed down the issue to the plate resistors. Go figure. After a month of battling intermittent gremlins, it turns out to be a $1 part.

On Saturday 6/18 The Dudley Manlove Quartet played at the Sunset Tavern in Ballard. Our keyboard player Chris Joss opened the show with his accordion stylings, much to the enjoyment of the appreciative audience. We hit the stage and kicked into our regular set. We had a fantastically great show and the sold-out room was enthusiastically dancing all night. I had two minor gear gripes…

Gear gripe #1: My Fender Twin has been acting up for a while, to the point where I’ve become suspicious of its reliability. I actually brought my Fender Hot Rod Deluxe as a backup amp, and parked it onstage where I could easily get to it in the event of a problem. During the soundcheck the Twin seemed OK despite making some odd crackling sounds, but once we got into the full set the amp suddenly dropped about 50% in volume. I unplugged from the reverb channel and went into the other one, which at least had normal volume despite making some crackles and odd distortion. It did get me through the night, but that amp is headed back to the shop (again) to see if we can’t get it working happily. I’ve had these symptoms from the Twin since I bought it and it’s been in three different repair shops, all without any success at diagnosing the issue. The issue seems to be something very difficult to isolate, likely a circuit board issue. I’m working to convince my amp technician that we should simply pull out all the circuit boards and replace them with a hand-wired point-to-point turret board. This essentially would turn my 1965 Twin Reverb Reissue into an actual 1965 circuit. It would be a serious effort but I think the project would be fun and the outcome would be wonderful.

Gear gripe #2: My newly rebuilt pedalboard was perfectly behaved at the gig and I’m really happy with the way it sounds. My gripe is actually a little silly, but it’s for real. A few of my pedals have intensely bright blue LEDs on them, and since my corner of the stage is especially dark, it’s tough to see where things are on the board with those blinding blue lights in my eyes. I fumbled around in the dark trying to find some of the pedals and eventually gave up and just felt around with my hands to turn things off. The solution would be just to have a little light on my side of the stage (seriously… there isn’t a single light pointing in that direction) or to have some light at my feet.

All in all, a fun show! It’s a blast to see so many familiar faces at these local shows. Thanks to everyone who showed up.

In a previous post I mentioned that I intended to make some improvements to one of my guitar amps. I have had my Fender Hot Rod Deluxe for years and it’s been a great workhorse amp. Among my general observations of this amp:

The stock speaker is fairly flat sounding. It lacks dimensionality and punch.

I only use the clean and “yellow” lead channels. The “red” lead channel is useless to me. It has far too much gain and makes the amp sound fizzy and over-distorted.

The amp breaks up into distortion far too early in the gain stage. I want it to be louder and cleaner.

The amp has been retubed and rebiased ever few years, but it never seemed to address my gripes. I’ve discussed my wish list with a number of shop technicians and came to the conclusion that I needed to make some changes to the amp in order to tailor it more closely to my needs. I decided to switch brands of tubes from the stock Groove Tubes to JJ Tubes. Their sales tech was very helpful in tailoring the tubes to my needs. Here is what we decided to go with:

• ECC81 ( 12AT7 ) in V1.
• ECC832S in V2. This is a hybrid tube that is an ECC83S ( 12AX7 ) on one side and an ECC82 ( 12AU7 ) on the other side.  Essentially this will drop the gain in both the clean and drive channels and increase the headroom.
• ECC83S for the phase splitter.

The next big improvement was installing a Weber Ceramic Chicago 12 speaker in place of the stock Eminence 12. This process was actually pretty involved. I had to remove the back panel of the amp, pull the amp chassis, remove the stock speaker, install the new speaker and re-assemble the entire amp. It took about an hour to do all this, but fortunately I had a great hockey game on TV to watch while I was doing the work. The Chicago 12 speaker is pretty stiff and dark sounding until it’s broken in. I had Weber perform about a week of initial break-in, and I expect that it’ll take a few months of regular gigging / rehearsing to really bring out the full tone of the speaker.

So, after those modifications… the amp sounds MUCH better. First off: the tubes made a huge difference in the overall tone. It seems bigger, warmer and cleaner. That pesky “red” lead channel is actually usable and great sounding; it has the nice bluesy grit I associate with vintage Fender amps. With the addition of the new speaker, the amp’s voice seems bolder and cleaner. I think it’s delivering higher volume due to the speaker’s efficiency. Definitely a big improvement across the board. I’m really looking forward to hearing how this amp performs at upcoming gigs.

Last year Gibson did a limited run of reissue Les Paul Gold top guitars with P90 pickups. I attempted to order one but they sold out very quickly and then started showing up on eBay at a premium. I kept an eye out for one in smaller local stores, but never came up with one. About four months ago I noticed that Gibson was doing another limited run on these guitars, and I placed a pre-order hoping for the best. I was notified that the instruments were back-ordered, then on street date the status immediately changed to sold out.

We left for a few weeks of vacation in Italy, and upon our return I found that the guitar had been delivered to the office! Hooray! I only brought it home last night and haven’t had much time to put it through its paces, but so far I quite pleased with it. This guitar will get a lot of action in the Dudley Manlove Quartet and the 1 Uppers.

This week I dropped my 65 Twin Reissue for some routine maintenance including replacing some tubes, and tightening up tube sockets. The amp generally rides in a flight case when being transported, so it’s in pretty good condition. The biggest environmental impact to my amp is probably the temperature and humidity of the northwest. So far I’m pretty satisfied with this amp; it produces a characteristic Fender tone with plenty of clarity and volume. It’s likely I’ll eventually replace the speakers with something like Weber Californias, but the tone of the stock configuration is reasonably faithful to the original hand-wired models from the mid-60s. I have a suspicion that replacing the speakers will make the amp more efficient and produce a tighter punch at stage volume.

I recently discovered there is a great amp technician right in my neighborhood, and I’m looking forward to hearing the Twin when he’s gone through it. Once this amp is back from being beautified, I’ll probably drop off the Hot Rod Deluxe for a similar spa treatment.

On Wednesday 1/19 The Dudley Manlove Quartet performed at a private corporate party. This show marked the debut of substitute keyboardist Chris Joss, who is filling in for a few months while Mack Grout is off exploring the world. Chris and I went to high school together, performing in jazz band and occasionally noodling around. He was without question the most musically talented person in my high school – voted so by peers – and was always a lot of fun to hang out with. I’m delighted that he was available and interested in acting as a substitute for a few months. He was so well prepared that I actually had to remind myself it was his first show last night. Great music and great fun.

We played the usual assortment of jazz standards, pop hits and rock classics. It was an interesting audience composed of technology developers from around the world. The French members of the audience were quite attentive as we played (indicative of their taste and sophistication), but they were also thoroughly amused by Stefan pretending to herd invisible sheep – to the point where they repeatedly asked him to perform this odd little pantomime throughout the night (again, indicative of their taste and sophistication).

My Twin acted up a bit during the show and I think the tube sockets might need tightening. I plan to drop it off tonight at a newly discovered electronic repair shop in Burien. More information on this process will be forthcoming. All in all, great show and always a delight. Our next show is this weekend, also a private party. Those of you looking ahead to our next public performances should mark you calendar for Saturday 2/5 at the Showbox, and Saturday 3/5 at the Triple Door.