January 2008

Guitar Echo Units

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I remember the early days of my guitar infatuation. Back then (circa 1960), the only places you could hear live guitarists was the local ‘youth clubs’. These were often a local hall hired out for a few hours and a small charge at the door to let you in.

 At the time, most groups just played instrumentals – although the odd small group would have a singer who would step up and do a few rock and roll or chart songs. Things were simple back then, but because the advent of groups were new, they were incredibly exciting.
 
There were bigger and better local groups with exotic names like
Phil and the Stormsville Shakers – and boy did they sound great!
 
 
Early guitar instrumental hits like “Apache”, “Walk Don’t Run”, “Guitar Boogie Shuffle”, “Telstar”, and numerous others became the standard repertoire for local groups. After WWII, most guitarists were ex-dance band – so our parents were well catered for at dinner dances and the like.
 
But for us spotty teenagers there was little in the way of music and social life. We chatted up girls at bus stops, took them for a coke (the drink variety!) or coffee at the various coffee shops, and met up at the above ‘youth clubs’
 
 
But where is this nostalgia leading you may ask?
 
Echo Units.
 

The dear friend who helped me on the way to getting my first guitar, Derek Lee, had a “Bird” amplifier with built-in reverb. So even my early fumblings sounded spacey. I was always around his house learning to play on his guitar – trying to play a few notes from say, a Duane Eddy  tune (remember ‘Because They’re Young?). He taught me the first 3 notes to the main theme of Apache – boy – was I hooked….

Yeah! Sandie Nelson “Let there Be Drums”, “Red River Rock”….sigh…
Anyway, Derek showed me a few simple tunes and chords, and generally helped me in many ways too numerous to mention. He sadly passed away at the young age of 23 years from throat cancer – and he didn’t even smoke.
 
I got my Dad to buy me an early Vox Ace guitar (red, of course,  two pickups and a wang bar), which looked to my eyes like a sort-of Fender Stratocaster (although I didn’t even know what a Fender was back then – but Hank Marvin Had one – and it looked hotter than girls!!)

It must have been a couple of months later when I turned up at Derek’s house – and he had a Watkins Copicat Echo Unit!!!!!

Jesus, Mary and Joseph! It made me sound like Hank (and helped cover up a few ‘bum’ notes too). That was it – I had to have one. Fast forward two months, and with help from my Dad again (“This is just a craze – it’ll never last long – you’ll get bored….etc”)
 

I had a Hire Purchase agreement for a second-hand amplifier and a new black Watkins Copicat…..I used that darn thing right through the sixties and half of the seventies, when I finally replaced it with a small pedal along with a host of other effects units.

 

I know, the Beatles came along in the mid sixties, and echoey guitars went out of fashion, but you could still use a little echo to ‘lift’ your guitar sound.

 

If you read my blog, you’ll know at the ripe age of 61, I’ve rekindled my love of the guitar, and started investing in some new guitar equipment. Isn’t life tough eh!  When I needed good gear I couldn’t afford it, now I’m just ‘doodling’ for my own pleasure – I’ve got enough money to buy stuff that I ain’t good enough to play on or deserve!

 

A few weeks ago, I’m doing a little work in London UK, in Denmark Street to be precise, and I went into Regent Sounds. The Sales guy is I believe, Canadian – and real friendly and helpful. I tell him I’m looking to update my old 70’s echo foot pedal, and I’d recently seen a great review for an expensive digital delay unit.

 

Well to cut a longer story short, he gave me an A/B demonstration between that unit and an ‘old fashioned’ bucket-brigade’ echo unit. I’m darn pleased he did. The Bucket-brigade technology knocked the latest state-of-the-art pedal into a cocked hat (it kicked it’s a*se!). The digital unit sounded harsh, tizzy, weak, clinical.

 

Round of applause please for my new Electro-harmonix Deluxe Memory Man echo unit. Yeah, you may remember the name from way back – but don’t let that put you off.  The echo is full, woody, dynamic, squashy, warm, whatever…it sounds great. I’m plugging it directly into my vintage re-issue Fender Blues Deluxe. Sounds great on slow blues stuff too….

It cost half the price of the latest and greatest digital echo, and you know what, you can also get great (non-digital) chorus-vibrato sounds out of it. Ya Wanna Know More? Check out this link:

 
http://www.ehx.com/ehx2/Default.asp?q=f&f=%2FCatalog%2F09_Reverb_%26_Delay%2F14_Deluxe_Memory_Man
 
Paint Me Happy Folks.
 

 

Why use Product-Based Planning?

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It occurred to me that since birth, most of us have been “task-driven”, and so it was natural that we should take that concept into our adult lives.

As such, it’s not a bad thing, since it is tasks that drive our daily lives – both personally and professionally.
 
But here’s my point. Take your weekly shopping run for example. How many times do you return, un-bag all your items, only to discover that you’ve forgotten something?
 
So you end up going to a local shop because you’ve forgotten to buy salt, toothpaste, or something…
 
Go back even further. When I was a kid I was told “David – clean up your room”. I did as I was told; tidied up my clothes, put my toys away – Yep! Job done!
 
Next I know, Dad’s yelling at me “Get up here – I thought I told you to tidy your room”! It turned out that Dad had a different specification for a “Tidied Room” than mine. Looking back, we should have got a mutual understanding of what a tidied room looked like.
 
Dad had this crazy idea that it included picking up all the comics from the floor, taking down the week-old soda bottles, making my bed, staking my record collection back on the shelf….etc…etc..!
 
That’s the problem in a nutshell with using ONLY task based planning as a project manager – we have missed the first step out – Product Based Planning.
 
I’ll use the example of having your back yard cleaned up and landscaped. Let’s imagine you’ve just moved house, and your new plot is covered in weeds and rubbish – not a good situation to have a BBQ with your new neighbours is it?
 
Being busy at work, you hire a local landscaping service to carry it out for you, and they’ve sent their project manager to discuss and understand your requirements.
 
If you had got straight into task-planning you’d be discussing picking up all the rubbish, laying down some lawn, planting trees etc….
 
Put instead, let’s start by thinking of the PRODUCTS.
 
You are focussing on the end-deliverable. Right away your describe a built-in barbeque feature, the new path, the type of trees and shrubs you need and where you need ‘em….
 
Their project manager can now envisage the best sequence of how all these Products are to be created – and only then, consider the tasks, their durations, the resources needed, etc.
 
A simple sequence of planning steps would look like:
 
  1. Create and agree a Product Description for the end-product (deliverable).
     
  2. Determine the lower-level Products (such as shrubs, bbq, etc). It would be helpful to create a hierarchical diagram – here called a Product Breakdown Structure – to ensure you don’t forget anything.
     
  3. Create Product Descriptions if needed for these lower level Products.
     
  4. Create a diagram showing the sequence of creation of all the products – with the final one being the end-product. This will clarify the dependencies – some products will need to be created one after another – others can be done at the same time, in parallel.
 
In summary, Product-Based Planning should be done first and task-based planning second.
 
You be less likely to forget the toothpaste!!
 

 

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