Home » VintageKustom.com » Comment Board » Kustom jam

Show: Today's Messages :: Polls :: Message Navigator

Kustom jam [message #3306] Mon, 08 December 2003 16:09 QModer Messages: 413 Registered: June 2003 Senior Member We had a band practise, jam or whatever you wanna call it the other night in preperation for a new years party. My rymthm buddy used one of my Kustoms with a dano fab tone pedal for his distortions. It was the best he's ever sounded. I told what he needed all along was a kustom LOL.. Report message to a moderator

Re: Kustom jam [message #3310 is a reply to message #3306] Tue, 09 December 2003 12:08   RoyC Messages: 97 Registered: April 2000 Location: East Central Illinois Member As ET has said on more than one occasion, the vintage Kustoms sound GOOD with effects plugged into the chain. I don't have any experience with the Dano pedals - my pedalboard was already assembled before they came out - but I have noticed the Dano's are considerably more affordable than some. I have the Line6 DL4,MM4 and DM(4?), the Fulltone FD2 and FatBoost and some other stuff on my 'board, and can cover quite a few sounds. We play stuff that runs the spectrum from CCR through Pink Floyd and on up to some Metallica, Collective Soul, and some newer stuff, so I NEED a lot of varied effects. I usually play into a 2x12 150sc, or a 200b4 w/1x15+H or a *gasp* Fender TwinReverb, and any one of these amps handles a full load of effects very well. Report message to a moderator

Re: Kustom jam [message #3311 is a reply to message #3306] Wed, 10 December 2003 00:39 QModer Messages: 413 Registered: June 2003 Senior Member The best Dano's are the bigger ones. Some of the smaller ones are Ok too. The Fab tone he was using of mine sounds better for metal to me than classic rock. The Dano DaddyO I have is more of a classic roc pedal. I have several echo pedals and the Dano is pretty good in it. I have a what fender calls and evil Twin. He used it tonight because the bass player wanted even more kustoms LOL.. The rymthm players tone was not near as nice tonight. But to be fair he had a 40 year anniversary Strat he used instead of his 335 and I have never seen a Strat with so much treble. That particular Twin has a good bit of treble too. He was running it thru a 4x12 fender cab I have. He has and old silverface Bandmaster out here but the head is acting up. He has an ultimate chorus amp at home. But all my amps are sucking up the available room. He was very astounded at the sound of his 335 thru the kustom too though. Report message to a moderator

Re: Kustom jam [message #3313 is a reply to message #3311] Wed, 10 December 2003 09:20 C4ster Messages: 686 Registered: June 2001 Location: Mukwonago, WI (Milwaukee... Senior Member I am a purist. I run my Gibson ES335 through a cable to my unmodified K100-2 into 2 12" Jensens. Hey, thats a stock setup!!!! That's it!! To be truthful, I love the sound of an undistorted guitar. (The following is a personal opinion not based on any fact, so save your rebuttals.)Distortion can cover all kinds of mistakes by a mediocre guitar player. Sustain is greatly increased as your distortion level goes up. Your technique can suck but you sound good. But in fairness, I will eventually setup a pedal chain, overdrive, chorus, eq, and not much more. I like the Dano pedals, but the tremelo in the Kustom is far better than any pedal. And don't think that your Kustom's don't add coloration to your sound. Any EQ at all, will give any amp a distinctive sound. The frequency points peak your sound and the guitar type, solid, hollow, semi hollow, single coil, humbuckers etc. all interact. Then if you play at the neck or bridge, hard or soft all create your sound. Besides, after the first song in a evening, I forget to reset the effects and end up playing straight through anyway. If I had to remember all the settings, my head would explode. Come to think of it, I may NOT buy any pedals. Conrad Report message to a moderator

Re: Kustom jam [message #3314 is a reply to message #3313] Wed, 10 December 2003 12:22 axeman Messages: 25 Registered: March 2003 Location: Overland, MO (near St. L... Junior Member I'm with you Conrad. I also love the sound of an undistorted guitar,. preferably with humbuckers and tone controls set toward the "dark side". Makes the floor shake, the windows rattle and the hair on the back of my neck stand up. I do have several pedals, however, nearly all of which are BOSS. I find I use them rarely, and then only for a particular sound/song. The most useful to me and, therefore, my favorite is the Blues Driver. I also like the older style three knob effects, i.e., Fuzz, Temelo, etc. They are just easier to dial in. I have a few (Bass Chorus, Metal Zone) with concentric knobs. They have more knobs than some of my amps. Just too hard to dial in, especially in a hurry. Multi effects tax my limited memory and patience, and frankly don't sound that good, IMHO. Sometimes the effects are fun to play with, but I find I mostly just use the guitar plugged directly in. I'd really rather just play than fiddle with knobs. Or, maybe I'm just lazy! Axeman Report message to a moderator

Re: Kustom jam [message #3316 is a reply to message #3314] Wed, 10 December 2003 17:05 C4ster Messages: 686 Registered: June 2001 Location: Mukwonago, WI (Milwaukee... Senior Member The settings on my 335 are, write this down, 10, 10 ,10 ,10. I ALWAYS have both pickups on and I find that the K100 sounds best at Bass 10 and Treble 5. Anything higher than that and the sound is sooooo bright it hurts. If I take the guitar's volume down even to 8, the sound drops off. There is a lot of interaction between the impedances of the guitar and the amp that come into play if I drop the levels of the guitar, so I run wide open. Also, that helps the signal to noise ratio. If my guitar were wired without any controls, that would be fine with me. BTW, you can see my guitar and amp along with my brother's rigs at Kustom Player under group photos. Conrad Report message to a moderator

Re: Kustom jam [message #3317 is a reply to message #3306] Wed, 10 December 2003 22:07 JB Messages: 32 Registered: January 2003 Location: Maryland Member IMO, Conrad is right, wide open is the way to go. I like a nice Humbucker but I'm partial to P-90's. I love the tone of my 54" Guild Aristocrat through my K200A-4 with JbL D-130f's NO effects. It rings like a bell. Of couse the built-in Effects, Reverb, trem, boost, HC are great sounding too but the clean sound is addictive. I do occassionally like to Hook up my old Ross pedals,(delay, flange, Compressor) for some stuff but when I'm not using them I'll disconnect them and go direct to the amp for that perfect CLEAN sound. I feel that pedals suck the tone from your rig even if they are said to be true bypass. I still think I can hear the difference, maybe it's just in my mind. John Report message to a moderator

Re: Kustom jam [message #3318 is a reply to message #3306] Thu, 11 December 2003 03:44 QModer Messages: 413 Registered: June 2003 Senior Member I tried the clean route tonight. I intended to play some fifties and Beatles stuff. Perfect set up for wonderful cleans. But I fell in with bad company. My rymthm buddy did'nt show it was just the bass player who brought a long another friend who's a bass player too. Well he's over there looking at words to songs on a stand while we are doing the clean thing. We finish that set and it went well. Then he says is it Ok if I try to sing this Metallica thing thru the mic. I said of course we'll back you up. So out comes the metal pedal. He sang it great the first run thru was fine. He's a natural screamer. He's about say early twenties. So he probably won't be able to talk over a whisper by the time he makes forty. It was so funny the other night. I had learned the song for the bass player as he's a self confessed metal head and the rymthm player is a closet one. So I 'm not gonna scream that stuff. My limit to screaming is an old Beatles type of scream of two of so and no way the entire song or night. So there those two trying it for umpteen times and its never happens. Not once did we get thru that monstersity. I was really getting tickled as the rymthm player was saying to the bass player do you have a sister. The bass player shakes his head yes. So he tells him you have to scream this one as though she just broke your favorite model car. So back to screaming they went for another hour or so LOL.. I even fired up the Tone Master and the paint was pealing off the walls but the metal heads were in hog heaven. I of course had it plugs by this time and did'nt care. But the Kustom cleans were great while it lasted. However the metal pedal thru them when the rymthm player was in there took me back to my old dallas arbiter fuzz face days of playing at the skating rink LOL.. Pleasant Kustom memories sweet Kustom memories. Report message to a moderator

Re: Kustom jam [message #3322 is a reply to message #3317] Sat, 13 December 2003 02:18 QModer Messages: 413 Registered: June 2003 Senior Member What are some of the examples of the clean songs every one is doing with their set up. I have found that what some of you are saying about loosing tone can be correct in backing off the guitar volume to say eight if you are using standard pickups on a guitar. But if you are using very hot pickups on a guitar. The clean tone of the volume pot backed down to eight or so on the guitar is still quite nice. Its a simular effect to using a pedal to hit the input of your amp and push it over the edge into overdrive. You might loose a little of the edge off your clean and jangle but not much. For instance I have standard pickups on my 66 Strat and it looses some of that bell glassie jangle if I back on its volume pot. But I have a Malsteen strat with some hotties on there and it looses almost nothing of its clean ring. For instance some people will tell you they can hear the difference in a Ric with toasters and higains. I would like to see them do it several times on a blind test listening to a record. Most people now days can not even pick out the kind of a guitar used on a given record. Thats why there are so much of this band and that bands gear setups being looked at so closely in magazines and on the web. Report message to a moderator

Re: Kustom jam [message #3328 is a reply to message #3318] Mon, 15 December 2003 16:33   RoyC Messages: 97 Registered: April 2000 Location: East Central Illinois Member I guess I'm one of those guys that can't bear to crank down the vol. pots on the guitar. I tend to want the full signal going to the pedalboard. The 'clean' volume I generally control at the amp - the OD volume is set on the FullDrive2, and the over-the-top stuff is either controlled by the Boost level on the FullDrive or the level on a Boss HeavyMetal pedal - but I don't use the HM pedal very much. I've got a LP Classic (cherry sunburst) that I removed the stock Gibson vol. pots and replaced them with the 500K pots from Torres Engineering. I also clipped the leads going to the tone pots, effectively removing them from the chain. This guitar has about as much resonance as any LP I've seen, and has harmonics to die for. Just last night I was goofing around in my studio (garage) with the LP plugged through the pedalboard into the K200b4-1x15+H, and just fooling around with the harmonic clipper and I could just about make that LP come alive - if ya didn't keep a hold of it, it would take off on it's own. Some of the noise might not be too useful, but interesting anyway, Report message to a moderator

Re: Kustom jam [message #3329 is a reply to message #3328] Mon, 15 December 2003 16:46 C4ster Messages: 686 Registered: June 2001 Location: Mukwonago, WI (Milwaukee... Senior Member The balance between the pickup impedance and the potentiometer value is rather important. If the value gets too high then it becomes part of the signal path and a percentage of your pickup's output is lost in the potentiometer's resistance. I'm not talking about the voltage divider action of the volume control, but a Thevenin equivalent resistance that causes losses that are not intended. Also, the tone control is just a treble rolloff and removing it will increase a portion of the lost highs that you don't even know exist. Besides, I contend that the majority of sounds produced by musicians are just mistakes masquerading as music. I figure by the time you amplify the stage sound, including those obnoxious drummers, the fine harmonics are lost and what you have left is bottom heavy ROCK AND ROLL!!!!! And isn't that what we are all striving for? Report message to a moderator

Re: Kustom jam [message #3333 is a reply to message #3306] Mon, 15 December 2003 22:58 QModer Messages: 413 Registered: June 2003 Senior Member I've got a late 70's Lp thats pretty hot. Years ago when I first picked up that thing. I used to run with an lpb2 by electro harmonics with a Strat. When I hooked that Lp thru it the sound went crazy. Those Lp humbuckers are some bad boys. If they made 335's that hot you would still be hearing the feedback. Report message to a moderator

Previous Topic:	Challenger Speaker
Next Topic:	Kustom Kombo organ dates, serials

Goto Forum:

- VintageKustom.com  Comment Board  Replacement Part Suggestions  Repairing Kustom Amps- Classified Ads  For Sale  Wanted- FUDforum Questions & Problems  Questions & Problems about FUDforum