Happy New Year! Kicking it off with a video I just made of the hardware mod I did yesterday to my ‘new’ Dunlop Cry Baby GCB-95. I was a little surprised at how easy it was, but it really is just a simple pedal. I also changed the sweep of the wah to remove a little of the very high end. I point out how to do that in the video as well. Questions? Comments? Let me know or add them to the video, embedded here or find it at YouTube. Rock on!
(Note – this revised version of the video includes the board modification step omitted from the original video!)
My favorite guitar pick is one I grabbed for free at a trade show booth. Had I known at the time, I probably would have kept walking…
When I started learning guitar a few years ago, I collected picks wherever I went: club shows, trade shows, guitar stores. At first I didn’t know how different they were, and once I did I wanted to try them all!
At some point early on I found myself using a pick I had grabbed at MacWorld from the RiffWorks booth, a white Dunlop-style pick that just felt right to me. I’ve used one now on nearly every one of my recordings. I got a couple of them that first day, and then made sure to visit that booth the following year at MacWorld to grab a few more. After that, they no longer had a booth there and since I had several picks in my possession I didn’t think about it any more. Till recently.
Realizing that they wouldn’t last forever, I went on a hunt for a similar pick. It’s right between the Dunlop Tortex yellow & green, and nothing I found felt like it. I even did a full-flight test of a series of different picks at my local music shop, Marin Music Center, with the assistance of the the owner, the ever-helpful Jesse Harms, but without finding one quite like it.
Turns out that though it feels like Tortex, it’s actually a similar plastic called Delrin, and though it’s .05 thicker than the yellow Dunlop it’s slightly more flexible. Nothing else will do for me at the moment, which is kind of a problem!
I decided to go back to the source and order a bag of them from Riffworks to last me as long as possible. Luckily they still had some in stock, so now I have what I hope is a lifetime supply! For the bass I use the green Dunlop Tortex or a nylon Fender Heavy but for my Black Betty nothing else will do!
