Form & File

Current Setup

Guitar: Late 70′s Tokai SG

Amp: Early 90′s Marshall JCM900 Model 4100 head, Marshall JCM900 1960A Cabinet with Celestion G12T-75W speakers.

Pedals: Boss TU-2 Chromatic Tuner, Electro-Harmonix Holier Grail, Boss BD-2 Blues Driver, Rat 2.

This is my set up. The guitar is my pride and joy, my favorite possession. My amp I am more than happy with. I get a tone that I’m really into. I read some guitar super nerd ramblings that were calling for a JCM900 holocaust, but I dig it. Freaks are freaks I guess.

Guitar:

I bought this beauty sight-unseen off of this sketchy ass dude in Chelsea, via Craigslist. Takes him an hour to come downstairs from his apartment, he puts the guitar on an electrical box on the sidewalk, I hand him $350 and as he walks away and says: “don’t want the girlfriend to know I got money coming my way!” Uh, all right.

The paint on the body is completely stripped off except for in some spots on the back, the wood on the cutaways is pretty damaged as well. The neck is still the original cherry red all the way from the body to the headstock. The headstock also has some weird heat damage or something under the lower string tuners. When I opened up the back to check out the pots and the channel switch, there were thumb tacks next to all the pots. Not sure what they were doing there, they weren’t holding anything in place really. But I did have some problems with the treble pick-up, kept cutting out or getting real quiet. I had to solder some wires in place and whatnot, but I eventually just had Paul Mouradian clean up the volume knob on the treble channel and that seemed to work fine.

The sound of this guitar is what makes it so perfect though. Something about it gives it a nice rumble, it’s got a very Black Sabbath tone to it. The one modification I made was to the pick-up switch, I just turned it so that the switch points to whichever pickup it’s on.

Unsolicited Opinion Sidenote: Bands, if you want interesting tones, please play on more than just the treble pickup. It’s ear-piercing half the time, and most guitars are made to do more than just that.

Amp:

Head:

I bought this as a stack from my friend Carl Williams. The genealogy of this head is pretty interesting too, Carl bought it from Greg Kell who got it from another Guns Up member and now it’s mine. Glad to see it’s making it through the generations.

The head had a crackle at first, there was a wire hanging out of the front and the reverb tank is busted. I brought it to Bob Dettorre who runs a custom shop out of his basement to have it cleaned and re-tubed with some new Svetlana tubes. Pretty stock.

Cabinet:

The cabinet I bought was a Craigslist find. Met him at the York Ford dealership in Haverhill on 97. The tolex was all sorts of fucked up and the grill still has a ton of wax or some shit on it. So, I stripped and sanded the exterior and stained it a nice red mahogany. Pretty stock components as well. Other than that, it just has a nice little rattle to it. I can really push it.

Pedals:

I’m not really into effects, but I found I could dial in my distortion if i just ran the clean channel of the amp and had two different pedals. The Blues Driver is more of a cleaner distortion, while I use the Rat for absolutely blown out distortion with a real grainy texture. Both of these pedals focus on the low end due to my head having such a love for the high end. The Holier Grail is just to replace the broken reverb tank on my head, I run it on the long room setting for a pretty subtle reverb, but it makes my amp feed back really nicely.

Oh, and I built this neat little pedal board out of a scrap piece of wood and some velcro.

Thanks, that’s all. More to come

<3 TJ

Working, writing, living, playing, moving, yadda yadda.

Summer’s been fantastic, so fantastic that we’ve been slacking on updating this. Keep your eyes peeled for a few good updates I have drafted on here, including some gear nerd talk and some other cool shit. If you’ve been paying attention, we’ve been playing almost every weekend and it’s been great getting to meet so many new people. We’re playing one more show this summer at Rad Skatepark in Mendon, MA, and that will probably be the last time seeing us for a little bit. But don’t fret kids, we’ve got plenty of things in mind for the future.

Here’s a live video of a set from July 30th, filmed at the Democracy Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts: