‘Surfy Bear’ Fet Reverb

Possibly the most ramshackle reverb unit in the world.

God this took forever.  So, about three months ago I devised the brilliant notion of using an actual spring reverb.  At the time I was faffing around with a Strymon Flint and an EQ pedal to achieve that drippy, splashy reverb I’m so bloody fond of.  It worked – don’t look so surprised – but at the cost of ear bleeding treble.  I made a lot of sound engineers shit lists in that period.  And that was just my personality.

But wait, let me first bore you with the whole spring reverb point!  Are you sitting comfortably?  Tough.  So, in 196sometime or other, Fender were developing a spring reverb pan for Hammond (the organ makers), then something else happened, Dick Dale showed up and they eventually created an outboard spring reverb unit.  Ok, so some of the details escape me.  Spring reverb is (to my mind) essential for surf rock; running a guitar signal through a long set of springs creates a ‘watery’ sound.  Remember, surf rock aims to replicate the sound of the sea.

By palm muting the guitar strings, you can achieve drip, splash and trickling sound effects.  It’s cool, addictive and heinously simple.  Maximum authenticity tells you to use a Fender outboard reverb tank, effectively a valve amp head that powers a long spring pan.  Two problems though…1) That’s one more amp head to carry around than you really need to and 2) Silly expensive – they are not widely available in Europe (despite that whole world free trade agreement thing in the 80’s) so second hand units are as rare as hens teeth.  So that idea was sunk.  Not actually aiming to do surf / water related puns, that just kind of slipped out.

You want it? Dig deep, sucker.

Anyways!  Back to now.  The Flint is an excellent pedal: but, no matter how impressive Strymons boffins are, it is still digital architecture.  Which means it hates distortion, which means sound engineers hate me and I, in turn, end up hating myself.  Over on the forums at SG101 (where else?) I was bugging other members about how to remedy the harsh sounding reverb whilst maintaining drip.  This ended up with them nagging me to pull the trigger on a Surfy Bear Fet Reverb kit.  I folded like laundry to peer pressure and ordered one.

I went for the pre wired option because I am stone cold awful at wiring circuits and pretty lazy to boot.  It turned up.  Unfortunately, I was about to go up a mountain on some corporate retreat thing for a week, so no spring reverberating for me quite just yet.  I headed off into the wild, learned a bit about myself, constantly got asked by other people in my group what surf rock was and came back…well, pretty much the same, really.

Not quite as fully assembled as I would have liked.

I earmarked the Saturday to build my unit.  Here was the original plan: I would use an 8″ spring pan I had cannibalised from an old amp, the enclosure would be a small wooden crate that my Electro Harmonix Polychorus came in (mind EHX used to put all their pedals in wooden crates?  Wasn’t that cute?  I really wish they still would) and I would stuff everything in there.  It would be compact, powerful and extra absorbent for all that splashy wetness sloshing around inside.  Like a tampon, if you will.  What an unfortunate analogy.

Box Wars

Off we go.  The enclosure for the circuit has to be metal so as to shield it.  Last I checked, of course, wood wasn’t metal.  But tinfoil is close enough, so glued loads of it to the interior:

DIY shielding. Bacofoil, no less – only the good stuff here.

That was good fun.  I remember literally laughing to myself whilst doing it.  Next, the bit I was dreading – wiring the connectors up to the reverb circuit board.  Now, remember I had just gotten back from my corporate retreat?  There were a lot of activities and sessions, what have you…and some intense after hour drinking sessions.  I had been ‘on it’ heavily for the past four days at that point and was, to all extents and purposes, a hot mess come Saturday morning.  What I am driving at here is never, ever, attempt to solder fiddly little wires when you have the shakes real bad.  What should have been an hour long task stretched out into about 6 all in.  I was almost in tears at one point.

But I am nothing if not persevering, so voila:

Look at that, says ‘Surfy Bear’ and everything

Doesn’t it look all neat and colourful?

That’s a handsome reverb circuit right there.  But beauty is only skin deep, let’s plug it in and see how it sounds.

And of course, at this point here was the screw up: no sound.  Nothing, nada, zip. Something somewhere had a bad connection, and my absolute lack of electrical knowledge means I am about as helpful in this situation as a can of petrol in a house fire.

Those rotten SG101’ers.  They repeatedly told me this was a simple project, nothing could go wrong.  Never trust surf guitarists.

At that point I had to dash off to a Full Moon Freaks practice, so bundled it all in the crate figuring I would sort it out later.  Time passed, and things went about their way.  I started trimming my beard more often, learned how to make ramen, learned how to play the drums, debuted Surf Manchu, pretty sure I started getting shorter.  I hadn’t actually measured my self in years.  I don’t suppose you really have to after a certain age.  All the while, the Fet Reverb was locked away in a – figuratively speaking – tiny wooden coffin.

Until…one thing I did do was go to the Surfer Joe festival and came back throbbing and bubbling about spring reverb.  All the bands playing were using outboard tanks, and it sounded incredible.  Very three dimensional sounding, thick, twangy, full…lush…god, I could go on.  It all reminded me of my failed attempt – so let’s get fixing it.  Luckily for me, when I am utterly useless at something, I usually know someone who is excellent at it.  My good pal Eddie C very kindly had a look at the board and did the sensible thing – removed all my wiring and just did it himself.  Of course, he did a sterling job and it was working!

Still had to finish the enclosure though.  So fixed the pan in there, and made various holes to put controls through, etc:

Spring locked in

However, it was getting a bit cosy in there once the circuit and wires were in.  Also, the short pan was fine and compact, but I started to realise that if I was doing this I may as well go hell for leather.  So I scrapped the ‘reverb in a box’ concept and ordered a whopping 17 incher of a spring pan.  Who doesn’t love a big 17″, right?  That’s going to need a big box, or we can simply BOLT IT TO AN OLD PEDALBOARD AND JUST HAVE THE REVERB CIRCUIT IN A PEDAL ENCLOSURE.  Are you getting excited by my feverish wild eyed ideas!?

Never liked that pedal much anyways

I had a Joyo ‘Voodo Octave’ pedal lying around that I had previously attempted to mod (botched that one too) which had lots of holes in it; ideal for the multitude of controls, wires and other random things that seemed to poking out of the circuit.  Stripped the pedal down, stuffed the circuit in it and – oh, my favourite bit – finished:

I’m going to paint it some day.

Well, not quite finished: I’ve not even labelled the controls for a start, and would like to paint it.  Might do a wave using the ram head as a guide.  Hopefully won’t screw that bit up.  So, to wit: the spring pan is screwed to the pedal board, and the RCA connectors run out from the pedal into it.  And it sounds great.  It’s all a bit ramshackle, but that adds a certain charm to it.  Fuzz sounds remarkable (I am really running up the gushing praise in this post) through it – squelchy and thick, none of the ice pick highs experienced previously.  It’s quite gain-y…having not ever used a valve reverb tank I’m unsure if this is a characteristic.  But, it does add a nice level of hair to things  And it drips and splashes and trickles.  Interestingly, I note that it does it more at higher volumes on the amp.  Possibly certain frequencies are been being boosted at higher levels.

And you can ‘crash’ it – this is where you give the pan a good kick and the springs rattle around creating a thunderous sound.  It’s a neat, silly trick and I could spend hours doing it.  And that is because my life can be quite empty sometimes.  Do as I say, not as I do.

Here are some brief samples.  They are brief from necessity as I have a sneaking suspicion that my neighbours don’t quite enjoy reverb splash to the same degree I do.  The overdrive is from an EHX Soul Food and the fuzz is (of course) the excellent and brutal Death By Audio Fuzz War.

Three months that took.  Three months.  Sake man.

Surf Jag (Baby)

Okey dokey, what we have here is my pure ‘surf’ Jaguar.  It’s another CIJ from the same era as Rosalita (2002 – 04), yet for some reason it seems to weigh half as much.  I’ve modded it to be a little more vintage correct.  Let’s face it, I’m writing this, you’re reading it, of course we’re going to go on about it.

Around Christmas time just past I was looking on The Google at Jaguars, and this little beauty popped up.   I would love a Fender Custom Shop guitar.  Sometimes I’m tempted but I tend to fuck my equipment up fairly easily.  A light scratch on something that cost that much would send me on a dark downward spiral of depression.  I’d need to set up a new blog called ‘Experiments In MISERY’.

But why drop 2 grand when you can just have a go yourself, right?  Further querying of The Google revealed – get this – a guy in Wales selling a CIJ Jaguar.  That’s some hit rate in Wales right there.  There must have been a job lot of these guitars there years ago.  So, flogged the Cabronita on Ebay to fund it and blammo, it was en route.  He packaged it in a hard case.  Charming.  I don’t use hard cases as it makes me look like an actual professional.  Screw it, maybe I’ll start.

It played well in stock form.  Those damn pickups were still brittle as hell though, but the previous owner had clearly done a good job on setting it up.  Even with the stock bridge.  The frets were in great nick as well.  I really liked the colour because, well, I’m a little shallow like that sometimes.  Interesting (not really) fact: it looks like it’s Daphne Blue, but is, in fact, Sonic Blue. Apparently Fender Japan use a slightly darker shade of Sonic Blue.  I don’t know where the hell I pick half this stuff up from sometimes.  Wow the guests at your next dinner party with that nugget.

So, I studied that Closet Classic carefully to figure out how to effectively clone it.  All the while, at the back of my mind, a little voice was telling me that if I pulled this off maybe I could counterfeit guitars and make, literally, some pounds.  Here’s what I drew up:

SURF JAG SHOPPING LIST

– Red tortoiseshell pickguard

–  Fender Mute

– Extremely vintage sounding pickups

Ebay did the job on the first two no bother.  For the pickups, I was kind of limited and kind of not.  I didn’t want to put Seymour Duncans in there again.  Over on SG101 there was extremely high praise for the Fender AVRI ’65 pickups.  I couldn’t find them anywhere.  Then I realised they are actually called ‘Pure Vintage’ and were widely available everywhere.  Ordered.

Can’t remember what arrived first.  Don’t really care, and – frankly – neither do you.  I do know that the Mute was the last bit to arrive.  So, had all my bits – let’s get making shit.

Stripped it down, got wiring the pickups in.  Credit to Fender for these, they come with pickup covers and claws, so no fucking around for an hour trying to solder grounds to stainless steel again.  I clearly did a better job with my wiring this time as there’s less hum than Rosalita.

Done.  Next up was the pickguard.  And great news: IT DIDN’T FIT!  Of course it didn’t.  I knew this had being going too well.  Why, I was even having a few chuckles when I was doing it.  Turns out the guard was for an American made Jag, not Japanese.  Why they can’t all be the same, I have no idea.  Sometimes Fender can be real dicks about stuff.

I marked some holes to drill into the guard, lining up the screws and just got the Dremel out.  It’s a fairly tight squeeze, and if you look closely, it shows.  Again though, people don’t check out my crotch too much so I think it will fly.  I really like the red on blue, by the way.  I may start dressing like that.  With my hard case.  I’ll have a record deal with all the cocaine and limos I can handle within a week.

Next up was the Mute.  Now, I had intended this to be fully functional: there is debate in some quarters whether or not the Mute was ever a good idea.  What it does is basically flip up and pushes a foam strip against the strings, thus ‘muting’ them.  Same effect as palm muting.  For surf, clearly useful.  People will argue that it’s not as good as palm muting, and is redundant.  Most people put them on for display these days.  I have never used a Mute before so I can’t comment.

And I still never have cause I could not figure out for the life of me how the hell to install it correctly.  As such, it’s there but won’t stay in place when flipped up.  I have subsequently found an installation guide so when I change the strings I’ll re install it correctly.  It’s kind of annoying actually, as the foam bit keeps catching on my hand and is now peeling off a bit.  But hey, vintage correct and all.

Lastly, this time I decided to try a neck shim.  A shim is where you artificially raise the fretboard closer to the strings.  It’s used on Jaguars a lot due to the higher bridge height offsetting string tension.  This, I always thought, was master builder level stuff.  Dark arts, you must train for two years under close watch by elders before being allowed to touch a neck, then carefully craft a precise, immaculate wooden square by hand, which is then blessed before being used.

Bullshit.  It’s literally just stuffing card into the neck pocket of a guitar.  Business cards work great for this.  I think I used three all in.  Lopped the neck off, put them in the pocket, screwed it back on.  Done and done.

Headless!

I sacked the bridge (as usual) and put in a Staytrem Mustang style bridge that was previously in Rosalita.  It’s actually a pretty good bridge, good intonation, no rattling.  No way was I shelling out for another Mastery.  They can sponsor me, by all means, and shower me in the damn things.  I can live with that.

All in, this was just an afternoons work.  Sometimes I think I’m getting the hang of this stuff.

I decided to roll with 11s for the strings this time to give my wee digits a rest after hammering Rosalita.  Put her all back together, strung it up and went surfin’.  First thoughts?  Neck shims are the fucking business.  Seriously.  It allows really comfortable action without string tension being compromised.

And then…holy sheeeiiiiit, fuck me sideways said the actress to the Bishop because those pickups are quite simply the dogs balaerics.  I have never heard a single coil as sweet as this.  Incredibly crisp, clean and they have that ‘vocal’ quality I’m always going on about.  Just the right amount of highs and lows.  They just…sing.  Also, they don’t even feed back that much when distorted and it’s possible to actually play with the treble fully on.  A set is about 70 bucks from Thomann and I would urge ANY Jaguar player to install them.  Why, only yesterday I ordered another set to put in Rosalita.  I don’t care if I effectively have the same guitar twice: they are simply that good.

Someone told me that only Fender do ‘actual’ vintage pickups.  Apparently other manufacturers will artificially age modern magnets to make them vintage sounding, but Fender just make them period correct, use weaker magnets or something.  Look, I don’t know, if you’re big on magnets this is probably fascinating stuff.

I use this Jag with my surf covers band.  Hey, check it out being used at a practice this week.  It’s actually good to hear how it sits in a full band mix.  Well, is the answer.

Rosalita

A (very grubby) Jaguar

 

This is my red Crafted in Japan (CIJ) Jaguar.  This is ‘Number One’, as they say.  It’s the longest serving guitar I’ve ever had, and it’s caused me more grief than I care to remember.  As with all abusive relationships however, I can’t quit it.  And yes, I named it.  That’s right, I’m that guy http://i.imgur.com/Sn6PD.jpg.  I’ll be buried with this damn thing.

So let’s just get the taboo out of the way: Jaguars are the best electric guitars, ever, period.  They combine functionality, style, playability and massive sonic potential.  Although not always a perfect marriage, a correctly set up Jag will whip any other guitar into the long grass.  If you disagree then you are wrong, a liar and obnoxiously ugly.

In 1962, Leo Fender unveiled the Jaguar as the successor to the Stratocaster.  Unfortunately people are morons, and it didn’t take off.  It was then discontinued in the 70’s.  Luckily for the world, post punk and grunge bands lapped up the guitar due to them being dirt cheap, they were back in the public eye and put into production again in the 90’s.  Good times.  Leo Fender was dead by then though.  Bad times.

Growing up casually listening to surf music and heavily listening to grunge, I was always fascinated by the Jaguar.  Strat and Les Paul style guitars were rampant and generic.  The weird look of the Jaguar offset body was so alien and cool I would obsessively sit through TV chart shows to see if any bands were on that used them.

I can’t remember when I first actually played one, it was later…maybe 2006, Sound Control?  I had probably romanticised the idea of it by that point, but I was utterly enthralled: the low action combined with the short scale neck meant, for the first time ever, I could easily bounce around all over the fretboard.  It was liberating and revelatory.  I couldn’t afford it though, so left with a Schecter copy of something and a broken heart.

Two years later, I was idly googling ‘Fender Jaguars For Sale’ one afternoon and hit upon a classified in some Welsh local town newspaper.  It was a month old, but I figured what the hell, and contacted the guy.  He still had it, he was still selling it cheap and – yes – he was prepared to post it to Edinburgh.  Deal done.  It arrived two days before I was due to play a gig (the penultimate Guarana Drought appearance), so it got a live debut promptly.

And I’ve never really looked back.  It has a perfect neck profile, I can still set action to silly low levels and I know exactly how it will react all over the fretboard.  It is also my most heavily modded guitar, and before I bore you with the individual details, here it was totally stock with The Jane Austen Experience:

Not bad, but things can always be improved by stuffing other shit into them.  Here we go:

PICKUPS – SEYMOUR DUNCAN ANTIQUITY IIs

Wee bag, sticker and everything

Seymour Duncan make some excellent pickups, though most are geared toward high gain / modern sounds.  Nothing wrong with that, but I’m usually stuck in the past so opted for a pair of Antiquity IIs.  These are vintage voiced pickups, based off 1960s designs.  The Antiquity Is are 1950s voiced, which are okaaayyyyy but a little too low powered and snappy sounding for my needs.

Single biggest change you can make to a guitars sound is change pickups.  It’s cheap, very easy (well, single coils are) and hugely satisfying once you’ve done the job (ahem).  There are a wealth of pickup options available and I would urge everyone to try a pickup swap at least once.  Get a shitty Squier and do it on that.

Got the ‘pups’ new off Ebay for an absolute song (like, 40 quid for the pair or something).  I got back late after a practice and they had arrived.  As I have the patience of a 2 year old I just decided (around 11pm) to pop them in.  So off with the strings, pick guard and out came the stock pickups.  Biggest flaw with the CIJ Jags are the stock pickups.  With both tone and volume maxed they sound hellishly brittle and thin.  Anyways, Rosalita was stripped down.  I suddenly had a moment of clarity and felt sheer terror.  What had I just done to my favourite guitar?  Must be how dudes who kill their wives feel.

It’s like invasive surgery

Part of the reason the new pups were so cheap was probably due to them not coming with covers or ‘claws’.  These are the metal brackets that Jaguar pickups sit in: part of the design of the guitar was to focus the magnetic field of the pickup using these to allow higher frequency output.  Part of the reason this ended up taking me 4 hours to complete was having to solder the pickups to the claws.  They are steel, steel doesn’t really grip solder.  After an hour or so of attempts to get them to bind I wasn’t really gripping reality.

Eventually they took, so wired up the pups themselves then set them in.

Good tip here: use different coloured marker pens to denote where you’re wiring.  Assembled it all back together, slapped some strings on it, held my breath and plugged in.  Aside from your childs voice, the greatest sound in the world is the first note you play after changing pickups.  It means you haven’t screwed up and you, yes you, are a fucking champ.  Especially at 3am when you’ve got work the next day.

I really like these pickups.  They have a nice thump to them and can deliver a really ‘tubby’ bass sound.  Even with the tone maxed, they don’t even get that trebly.  They take dirt pedals well, and – likely due to the bass character – respond excellently to the strangle switch.  Which I have only used once, not counting the times I forgot I had it engaged.  Hey give me a break here, I’ve got a lot of balls in the air sometimes.

TREMOLO – STAYTREM ARM

The other big problem with stock CIJ is the utterly useless tremolo arm.  The Jaguar floating tremolo is wonderful.  Delicate, articulate and responsive.  It takes a lot of shit sometimes but that’s only cause people haven’t bothered to learn how to set them up properly.  They’re too busy locking their Floyd Roses and putting batteries in their active pickups.  And masturbating.  Then crying.

On the subject of using your good arm, the actual trem is good: I don’t exactly know what type it is, but it is branded with the Fender logo and has the trem lock which implies it’s American stock.  The arm however, pops out of the collet all the time.  It’s loose, spongy and swings wildly.  Just like a…oh, once it actually popped out mid song when I was playing live.  I was so frustrated I spun around and hurled it at a wall, narrowly missing a punters head.  The trem arm that is, not anything else.

Staytrem do an excellent cheap alternative – 20 quid, 5 minute install time, basically just has a screw in collet system.  It also fixes the arm in place making it nice and accessible.  This also makes the trem a bit more sensitive, so a little wobble goes a long way.  You heard.

Staytrem arm

BRIDGE – MASTERY BRIDGE

The most expensive strip of metal in the world

This is the stupidest guitar purchase I have ever made.  It was embarrassingly expensive.  Like, don’t tell the wife and take it to your grave kind of expense.

What it is, however, is the ultimate offset guitar bridge.  One thing that is constantly bemoaned on the Jaguar is the stock bridge.  Now, it allows very fine detail set up and intonation, but any kind of hard playing will pop strings off constantly.  I may have a light touch on the fretboard, but I tend to beat the shit out my picking.  Some guys swear by the stock bridge, I hate it like your big stupid face.

The Mastery Bridge is made by Jeff Tweedys guitar tech, rolled on the thighs of virgins then instilled with magic presumably.  Spendy, but they fix all the problems associated with Jaguar bridges, including ones you didn’t even know you had.  To wit:

 – Deep grooves to hold strings in place

– Easy intonation

– Locking posts to prevent ‘bridge drop’ (where a bridge comes loose and slides into the guitar body)

– Self lubricating (I’m not even going there) for smooth string travel on the vibrato – less string snaps

– Incredibly low action possible without losing string tension

Here’s the best bit though: it angles the strings at the body in such a way that they resonate better.  More resonance means a fuller sound.  It’s noticeable, but still ‘sounds’ like a Jag.  Not sure if it was by accident or design, but an excellent upgrade.

Still not actually worth the amount I spent on it though.

 

PICKGUARD

Wahey!  This was designed by my wonderfully gifted friend Sarah, then subsequently nicked my me.  No magic in how I got it on the pickguard – just ordered it as a large vinyl sticker, cut it to size and slapped in on.  Straight up.  It’s a bit rough around the sides from my cutting and starting to fade a bit near the top.

But no one notices unless they’re looking extremely closely.  And then I’ll be all like “dude, stop checking out my crotch, man”.

Aint’ it sweet!?

Isn’t that some design?  I wish she’d get a website done or something.  Sarah, if you’re reading this, get a website done or something.

STRINGS n THINGS

Currently using Ernie Ball ‘Not Even Slinky’ 0.12s.  Was using DR Pure Blues 0.12s which sound incredible with real pop and snap, but are about as durable as cotton wool.  May make the jump to 0.13s.  Will likely wuss out.

Installed a treble bleed mod into the tone circuit, but took it out.  These things reduce the treble loss you get when you roll back on the volume and prevents mud.  However, it also ramps the treble output of the whole guitar.  And when you add even more treble to an already super trebly guitar…well, people start to get upset and you begin to wonder about your life.

Extremely easy and dirt cheap mod though.  Good diagram over at Seymour Duncans ‘web gaff’

http://www.seymourduncan.com/blog/the-tone-garage/worth-the-treble-a-simple-mod-to-give-you-some-zing/

Future work?  I may install a capacitor on the tone control to smooth out the treble drop.  Can’t remember what that ones called.  Dave Wronski swears by it.  Also, years of bloozy string bending have screwed the frets so it needs a fret job, which sounds kinky but all it does it remove the dents on the board you filthy minded animals.

Speaking of filthy, it needs a clean. Proper rank. I used to treat her like a lady, honest.

Here are some sound samples, very rushed, of me playing it.  Her.  Whatever.