A Little TubeScreamer Repair

Well, I had to break out the soldering iron and solder a couple of nights ago. My Ibanez TubeScreamer TS7 had been gradually getting worse and worse in not switching on when I stepped on the footswitch.

If you haven't seen one, this thing has a tiny little switch. Here's a pic of the switch:



This is where it is located in the pedal itself:




Taking the pedal apart wasn't that hard. There are a couple of boards with connectors and then there are the input and output jack assemblies to remove. The difficult part was trying to solder that tiny little switch onto tiny little traces without bridging any of those traces with excess solder. However with a bit of patience and a really bright light, I got the job done and the pedal works beautifully now!

Clear Blue Sky

I wrote and recorded a new song last night. Except for the drums which are from a drum track program all parts are using my Peavey Generation EXP recorded straight into my PC with a Guitar Rig for effects.



Check this out on Chirbit

RiffWorks Recording Software

Recently, I started using RiffWorks to record my guitar through my PC. Previously I used a program called Audacity with my Marshall Amplifier mic'd into the microphone input on my PC. With RiffWorks, I plug straight into the line-in port with a 1/4" to 1/8" adapter.

RiffWorks is easy to get started with but also has some in-depth features that take a bit to get acquainted with to fully use the program. It allows you to record into a looped measure that you can define as far as time, length and beats per minute.

Let's say you have a guitar rhythm part that is 8 bars long, is in 4/4 time and has a tempo of 120 bpm, you just set RiffWorks to record with an included Instant Drummer playing and you've got the beginning of a song. This little segment is called a 'Riff'. You can build on these Riffs by adding a bass part and a lead guitar part and also make new riffs for the different parts of the song such as lead in, intro, bridge, chorus, etc.

Once you have all the parts of the song, the Riffs, made, then you can drag them into the Song Timeline in the correct order and you have a complete song. You can then save the song as a wave file for conversion to MP3 as I do, or for any other use you have for it.

RiffWorks also has a lot of built in effects such as auto-wah, multiband compression, modulation, delay, and reverb and can also access VST plugins from other programs such as AmpliTube or Guitar Rig. This is another really nice aspect of this program because it allows you use many different simulated amps, effects, and cabinets. Whether you want to get a Blues Crunch, a Texas Twang, or EVH 5150 sound, tweak the settings enough and you can get these and more.

I'm sure there are many more aspects to RiffWorks that I haven't discovered yet but so far this software is head and shoulders above using Audacity for recording guitar into a PC.

Reprinted from The Single Coil