New gear – Gloopy Guitars

New stuff day!

I ordered a few bits and pieces from Thomann on Sunday evening, and they arrived today – pretty quick service!

I needed some components to play with for my Crimson build guitar, so I ordered two 250k pots, two 500k pots and two output jack sockets. I also got three more packs of my favourite Ibanez Grip Wizard picks, and the big thing is a new power supply for my pedalboard, to replace my two Harley Benton Power Plants and the separate Strymon adapter. I’m hoping that this will eliminate the noise that comes from my pedalboard.

The 1Spot Pro power supply was recommended to me when I last visited Anderton’s in October. It has 12 outputs, although I won’t use all of them – there are two 18v outputs and an AC output which are all currently useless for me, but that still gives me nine usable outputs. As I currently have 12 pedals on my board, I will either daisychain a few of them or kick a couple off the board.

On the bottom of the power supply, there are some dip switches which allow you to choose different voltage options for five of the outputs. These make it a very flexible power supply.

This could well be my only new gear day for 2017 as I don’t really intend to buy anything else. On the other hand….nah, that’s not going to happen!

A genuinely new type of pedal?

I don’t normally make posts about new pedals because they are usually variants on existing themes. However, TC Electronic has just announced a new pedal called the Mimiq Doubler which seems to be a genuinely new type of pedal. It replicates your guitar sound with tiny variations in parameters such as the pitch or timing in order to sound as though you have doubled (or trebled or quadrupled) the guitar track. It splits the guitars into a stereo signal, arranged depending on the number of dubs, and really sounds impressive in their video demo.

tce-miniq-doubler-front-view-hires

Go to the TC Electronic Website for the Mimiq Doubler product page. It is supposed to be available this month (September 2016) for $129 / €129 (maybe around £110) although I haven’t yet found it on retailers’ websites. Congratulations to TC Electronic for managing to innovate in the pedal market!

First look at Gibson 2017 models

A site called “The Hub” at Musician’s Friend has just posted an article showing some of Gibson’s new models for 2017. This information isn’t available on the Gibson website yet, and there are some rather tasty-looking guitars in the new line-up, with a few colours that verge on gaudy (sometimes possibly from the wrong side!).

You can find their article by following this link. Surprisingly, although I’m not particularly an SG fan (nothing against them either), I thought that the SG Special below looks really smart. I’m also partial to the rather colourful Les Paul Standard depicted on that page, at the other end of the spectrum between sober and gaudy finishes!

Anderton’s has also got on the Gibson 2017 bandwagon with some more picture on their blog.