Phonic Helix Firewire Mixer/Audio Interface

Phonic Helix Firewire mixer/audio interface.

The shiny Phonic vaguely brought to mind a 1969 U.K. club awash with mini-skirts and wafting clouds of pot smoke. I didn't actually get into that club, I wasn't of age, and also on the wrong continent.

My imaginings were way off. Phonic was founded in 1977, and I'm not even sure they are British. But I guess it just looked sexy to me. Silver and all with all those knobs.

The Phonic Helix 12 is more than an analog mixer, it's also a digital audio interface. All those channels feed into a stereo out which brought music into my computer via firewire.

There's a bunch of similar products around now, mixer/audio interfaces in the under $500 range, like the ones made by Alesis and Behringer.

At the time this one was the only one I'd ever seen in that price bracket that utilized firewire. I had a notion that firewire was faster than usb. In addition, I figured I'd be sharing my usb bandwidth with my keyboard, mouse and midi in and out. Having a dedicated bus for audio and another for midi made sense to me.

The Phonic had built in reverb, delays and chorus effects too, but it was convoluted to route them to the computer. You had to physically patch a cable back into a mixer channel and be careful of your sends so as not to have any feedback loops. The digital bus just didn't include what came back from the effects return. Almost seemed like the audio interface was tacked on to an already designed mixer schematic, which is probably the case.

But it was pretty good sounding. Once I got my software set up with the right buffer sizes and latency settings I got consistently good audio. Sometimes I'd get some digital crackle. A restart would usually fix that. Cranking the trim did bring forth a transistor sounding hum.

I've read quite a few shaky reviews of this piece of metal, but mine was fine for about 2 and a half years. I had a drum machine, a midi module or two, and a guitar coming through a Pod Line 6, all in stereo. Then a condenser mic (yes, it had phantom power). That's 9 inputs right there. I liked having everything plugged in and ready to go.

Soon I needed to purchase Protools to use with my work projects, and of course it came with its own audio interface, an M-box. It was usb, but it use it seemed just as fast to me as the firewire the Phonic served up.

Eventually I trimmed down my setup and was using mostly virtual instruments and one keyboard only. When I had so little left to plug into my Helix, I sold it for the sake of keeping things simple.

Paid: $299. Sold: $150. When it sold very quickly I thought that I could have gotten a bit more.

But do the math: My Helix cost me like $0.15 a day. Totally worth it.

Ibanez Tube Screamer

Wahhhh!

What can I say. This was my first guitar pedal and my best guitar pedal. And I got mine before they became collector's items and classics. It was actually pretty cheap when I picked it up, maybe $40-$50.

Never had an A.C. adapter and I can't tell you how many batteries I went through by leaving my guitar plugged in and walking away for a beer or 2, then forgetting about it overnight.

It kicked ass, nothing subtle about it. It was very aggressive and made everything sound loud, in your face and good.

I had particular success routing my Sequential Circuits Pro One through it to produce raunchy distorted lead lines from hell.

I traded it in at Rogue Music for God knows what.

El Straticastor Mexicano

No actual photographic record of mine exists.

But his one is identical, I believe. (Aren't they all?)
I love guitars, more than a non-guitarist should. Eventually, though I remind myself that I don't really play that well and I sell them to get something else. But the allure remains.

Oh, to own an "American" Strat! That would be a sweet thing.

Guitars, guitars, guitars... Let's see: There was a white Univox strat style guitar on semi-permanent loan in the 1980s, a few junky acoustics, a black Chinese-made Strat, an Ovation acoustic-electric with the plastic bowl back, both in the 90s, a Washburn acoustic, my beautiful "garbage guitar," the Cortley Gibson Humingbird clone, and a $200 Fernandez exact clone of a '58 Sunburst Strat.

And then there was the one that looked what you see to the left.

The gunmetal strat was Mexican, or assembled in Mexico and sported a techy-0ut fine sparkle-gray finish. And yes, it was Mexican, but I couldn't tell the difference between it and the American ones that cost 10 times more. I sounded pretty much the same on all of them, and I couldn't justify the cost of an "American" model. So this is the one I got.

But let's face it, the specs used to engineer these things are pretty universally copied and basically the shape of these guitars is identical. Sure, the costly ones use better materials, electronics, have better quality control, finishes and perhaps more consistency out of the box. Ok, that is something. But the shape of a Strat is the shape of a Strat.

I'll always remember a time when a friend of mine, a pretty good bass player who played a Fender Jazz, picked up a Hondo clone of the the Jazz at the music store. He was amazed at how identical the feel was. He loved it. It was $150 or something. He sounded great on it. I'm pretty sure 80% of the sound comes from the fingers, from technique, the remainder might be a tighter coil, a denser wood, your amp or whatever.

Clapton would still sound awesome on my Mexican strat.

My guitar, similar to the one above, was a particular winner. I wasn't crazy about the finish, a little too Vegas for me, but it felt good in my hands. The neck was nice and smooth and the action was the way I liked it right off the rack. It had a locking nut, which was all the rage at the time, (this was the Eddie Van Halen days), but I wasn't so much dive-bomb crazy and happy the guitar stayed in tune forever.

How much? I don't exactly recall, but it couldn't have been more than somewhere in the $200 -$350 range at the time (mid 1990s). I almost didn't buy it because once at the counter they discovered didn't have a Fender case available for it. They ended up throwing in an oddball Ibanez case with a loud purple lining for like $20, which I reluctantly accepted.

I played it for a year or two. I sampled it, recorded some demos, etc. I discovered one unpleasant detail, a sharp edge at the nut. It wasn't a Floyd Rose.

Eventually the syndrome I began this post with kicked in and it went up for sale. This was pre-Ebay, but a Fender is a Fender, even if it is a Mexican one, and someone hopped on the classified ad the very first day. It sold by 4 p.m. that Saturday and ridiculously it fetched about what I paid for it, or maybe a bit more.

The guy who took it home played much, much better than I could and he didn't even try to bargain. I was so happy to see him walk away with it because I knew it was going to be used to make actual music.

Alesis NanoPiano

Alesis makes a lot of small, inexpensive music gear with a lot packed inside. Buy something Alesis and you'll get what you expected, once home you will likely find a whole bunch more functionality, sounds or something under the hood.

That it's almost a shame, as lots of potential customers may have passed this up, not realizing how much it could do.

Yes, it was "nano," that is, small. But the sounds were huge sounding, high quality (16 bit 48k) and it had 64 full notes of polyphony all packed into its tiny 1/3 rack space.

The name is also not right. Yes, there were amazing acoustic and electric pianos in there, all you'd need, but also bass, organs, mallet percussion, synths, sound effects and all manner of splits and layers.

They kept it simple and hands on, two knobs got you to all 256 sounds manually, and I never got so far as to try and use program change messages to switch between them remotely do any editing as you could with an external editor, apparently.

I, like most, I suspect, who got this, did so for the cheap and available sounds, the immediate gratification of the front panel. It was fun, but if you like to tweak, forget it.

It was not multi-timbral either, one patch at a time, kids. That was the ultimate downside for me, and I moved on looking for a rack unit that had performance set ups I could program per composition in my sequencer. A pallet of sound I could use AT THE SAME TIME.

I guess I just wanted more. I had plenty though, I just wasn't appreciating it. I've seen these on ebay for like nothing, and I've just set up an alert to tell me when one comes up.

I want my NanoPiano back.

20 Inch Zildjian Ping Ride

This is a stock photo, but you can see mine in the kit pictured here.

In some basic ways, a drum is a drum. As a kid, I figured anyone could buy the same drum head heads as Bonham used with Zeppelin and get the same basic sound, maybe fill in for him once in a while. Well, maybe not quite, but I do still believe you can get a decent boom out almost any drum if you tune it right.

Case in point: my first kit. It was a four-piece, $125, no name, purchased used from a newspaper ad. After some tuning, it sound fine. The cymbals it came with were another story. They were stamped out pieces of junk. They basically sound like ka-ka.

There's a lot of centuries old alchemy in the making of a good cymbal, and even an idiot can tell the difference between crap and the sustained ring, rich with overtones, of a nice forged and hammered Zildjian, Paiste, or even Sabian.

The year I got that first drum kit, cymbals were on my Christmas list. My dad went to Manny's and got me some high hats that were pretty good. They an identifying stamp that said "MANNYS," and the guy behind the counter told Papa they were Zildjian seconds. I don't know about that, but at least they were cast and hammered. They had that CHICK! sound, and when closed down, that PSHTT! that you wanted. They were decent.

Eventually I saved enough money and went shopping for a real Zildjian ride cymbal. A fresh faced kid, 14 or 15-years-old, I approached the counter. The guy asked me what kind of music I played. "Rock," said I. His face lit up. That was apparently enough unique information for him to immediately produce a recommendation. "I have a really nice one in here," he said, and pulled out a 20" Zildjian Ping ride, second from the top in a stack behind him. He played a few strokes on it, gave me a knowing nod and a wink. "Nice, right?" It sounded so different than the junk I had at home. Who was I to argue?

I wouldn't think of buying a cymbal now without auditioning at least a couple of dozen and even then I had the sense that I should have. On the subway, heavy cymbal in tow, I chided myself, "I acted so young, so dumb and shy in there!" I was sure I had a lemon under my arm. "That jerk was just waiting to for a sucker like me to pawn this thing off on."

Once at home, I played my way through a Doors tape. A warm feeling of contentment slowly washed over me as I floated through "Riders on the Storm." I'd been wrong. People weren't bad. The guy was an angel and this cymbal rocked. I loved it.

I was also an instant hit with my buddies in the garage. The signature "Ping" tone cut through the guitars with it's namesake sound. It was super thick and produced a great gong sound when hit with a mallet neat the edge or with a stick on the edge itself.

As I could afford it I purchased a 16" crash, then an 18" crash. After comparing my no name high hats with those in the store costing hundreds, I realized they were pretty good too.

I used the ride for about 10 years. My Ping never cracked, it never failed me. Today, when someone IMs me, "I'll Ping you later," I hear a sound effect in my head. It's my cymbal.

Before I sold it with the rest of my kit, I sampled the thing on my TX16W for posterity.

Good cymbals are essential to a kit and they are what really can help give you your signature as a player. Choose carefully.

Or maybe just get lucky like I did.

Ludwig Ghost Bass Drum Pedal

Back in the 8th grade, when I first started playing the drums, I sat in with a friend's band practice when their drummer didn't show. I broke his pedal in about 30 seconds. That's when I realized I had a heavy foot.

I broke through my own first pedal, which had a leather strap connecting the footbed and the the beater. A few flimsy chain drive pedals later and I invested in the Ludwig Ghost.

It had a radical design, seen at left. No chain drive, nylon or leather straps, but a metal mechanism. Those large cylindrical shapes on the sides contained enclosed spiral spring mechanisms (0r maybe there was one on only one side). The idea was to minimize moving parts and avoid squeaks and rinkatink chain noise, but rather provide silent movement, like a ghost.

It took some getting used to. The footbed didn't have a hinge above the heal, but rather was one piece. Different action but I liked it well enough. I kicked this sucker pretty hard and it never gave way. It lasted me through a decade or so.

Later it did start to squeak some and after trying some higher end chain-drrive pedals in the store I realized I was missing a lot of speed and fluidity. I moved on to a Tama or Pearl or some such new treasure.