Silber Blog

Okay, so over the past few months I’ve gotten a few new pieces of equipment & tonight is the first time I’ve really messed around with them, so here you go….

Rocktron R10 Rampage – 40 watt amplifier with probably a six inch speaker.  So  yeah it’s a practice amp & it cost me $25 with shipping.  When I first plugged it in it was making a pretty horrible amount of noise, but after twenty minutes it went away (giving a second or two of the noise per ten minutes), so it is probably just dust on the inside burning off (at least that’s what I like to think).  It has an overdrive button which I would think would add distortion to the signal, but actually just seems to make everything (including the noise floor) louder.  The only out jack it has is a headphones out, but it’ll probably make a nice little practice amp & it only weighs ten pounds.

Rocktron Pulse Tremelo – If I remember right Slayer uses this pedal.  It has true bypass & the LED blinks at the speed of your tremelo.  A knob for tremelo speed & one for intensity & switch for saw tooth or sine wave functionality.  Built like a tank.  You could probably kill a zombie with it & still feel comfortable using it at a show.  I think it was a steal at $20.

Behringer Digital Multi-FX FX600 – This was only $20 & I’m not sure how I feel about it.  It sucks volume pretty bad even when turned off.  The LED to tell you if it’s turned on is wired wrong so it lights up to tell you it’s turned off (at least that’s what mine seemed to do).  It’s made out of plastic so durability might be an issue.  It has the most screwed up way to get into a battery that I’ve ever seen (requires jamming two pens to the side of it simultaneously).  The knob to select what effect you want to use (it has flanger, chorus, delay, tremelo, & pitch shifter) strangely just twists like a normal knob (rather than clicking to select) & just changes the sound at a certain point where it “feels like it.”  Also the external power jack seemed to act a little wonky with cutting out. But despite all this the thing is kinda cool.  I got it in the hopes it would be my octave pedal solution, & while it isn’t that, it is $100 less than the Boss Pitch Shifter.  The delay on it is pretty ridiculous & usable for getting some freaky sounds with both knobs on ten, but it does start to go nuts & glitch out with things on ten (good or bad? you decide)).  I could probably pull off a show & get a lot of cool sounds with two of this pedal.  But that’s assuming it’s road worthy, which I’m not too sure about.  Also it has the stereo in/out feature (though off hand I would bet it’s two ins & outs rather than stereo ins & outs) so you can feed it back into itself to use it for its own no input glitcher/tone genrator.  I feel it really showcases that technology is at a point where if they would spend another ten dollars during manufacturing to get this thing true bypass & a sturdy box, you could have an incredible pedal for very little money.  But as it is I can’t really say anything until I know whether it breaks in a year or less.  If you don’t own any pedals, I’d probably say this is worth every penny.

Behringer CT100 Cable Tester – Check the cables to see if they work.  I paid $35 & found two intermittently bad cables.  Probably already paid for itself in frustration.  It also has a thing where it can generate two test tones (440 Hz & 1 kHz) so you can use it for nutty stuff you would need that for.