This is a tale of good equipment gone bad.

I was actually working on this piece for last month and couldn’t get it done.  I thought for sure I’d be able to finish it this month.  Then my POD xt Live crapped out.  It still worked but I swore there was something wrong with it.  The tones were all different.  I thought it might have been the guitar because all the tones sounded like I had rolled back the volume knob about 1/4 of the way.  If you play electric guitar you know just what I’m talking about.  It wasn’t the guitar though because my older POD sounded fine and so did one of my stand alone pedals.

I messed around with this problem for days which means days of lost recording time.

Line 6 had come out with a new version, the POD X3 Live and I had been thinking of upgrading so I thought now would be the time.  I bought one at the local Sam Ash because I didn’t want to wait for shipping.  I got it home, plugged it in, and started playing through the default preset and the sound cut out in a few seconds.  I changed to a different preset and the sound returned – for a few more seconds.  Turns out many of the presets, particularly the high gain ones, would only play for a few seconds at a time.

I went to the Line 6 support forum and I was not alone.  Apparently a small number of users were having this very problem and Line 6 claimed to have difficulty recreating the problem.  Buying locally saved me triple time  though in that I didn’t have to ship the defective product back, but I did have to wait for the weekend before I could make the trip back – more wasted time.

At the Sam Ash I told them what the problem was and they said they had another one in back if I wanted to exchange it.  I was afraid they all have that problem so I said I would if they’d let me play it in store for a while, which they did.

This one seemed fine.  I took it home and played through it for a while trying all the most ridiculously high gain and distorted configurations I could think of to cause it to shut off and it didn’t.

Problem solved?  Not really.

I had a song about 3/4 recorded with the old POD and now I had a new POD and it sounded different and not a lot of time to tweak.

I selected some similar tones and decided to re-record all the guitar parts, but, since I’m not all that good, I couldn’t out do some of the performances I had already gotten down, particularly in the time remaining.

So, I pieced this together from stuff I had already recorded and new stuff I could get recorded before the end of the month.  It sounds like an audio collage of guitar tones.

Also this piece does not have the fit and finish of some of the other pieces I’ve done here because of all the technical glitches.  The drums and bass are more repetitive than I’d like and the piece more falls apart rather than ends.  But that’s what I got.

The piece itself was started from a short melody I recorded in a hurry over a year ago.  Now’s a great time to release it because it feels like I feel every spring when I start to anticipate the summer and getting to open the windows and wear shorts and put the top down on the car and sit on a patio with drinks in sun.  It’s the upbeat piece I promised last month when I delivered that down beat piece.

It’s a basic rock band setup guitar-bass-drums.  Of course only the guitars are real.  I set a new length record for this site, just over 5 minutes.  I think that’s a little long for a song generally but I just couldn’t find a part I wanted to cut.

Happy Listening: Anything but Bored