Digital Clef

This article was originally written between June and August 2025, but never posted. This is a revised and very much edited version of the original draft. Enjoy! I got a nice little surprise when I took my 5-string bass from the wall to bring to my bass class back in March 2025. Not only were the strings in terrible shape, But the neck developed a major forward bow. But wait, there's more! The truss rod nut is completely stripped (and stuck inside the cavity) and cannot be adjusted at all! Lovely, innit? The borked bass It's dead, Jim! The 5-string bass in question is my Jackson Spectra JS3QV in Purple Phaze (yes, it's a reference to Jimi Hendrix's Purple Haze). It's the mid-level 5-string Spectra model that I reviewed years ago on a previous iteration of this blog. It's cheap-ish at 800$CAD (back in 2022) and performs very well, but the neck is... problematic. When I first received it, it was adjusted perfectly. The neck was straight, the action was good, and I ...

  I'm starting J.P.'s Gear Blerbs because I haven't been able to sit down and write a full-blown blog post in quite some time. These are not reviews or editorial columns, but just random thoughts about gear and whatever I'm working on at the moment. I recently acquired a T-Rex Quint Machine polyphonic octave pedal, and while it's incredibly fun and sounds great (demoed briefly here ), there is one  thing I do not particularly like about it: the footswitch . It uses one of these terrible small-footprint DPDT clicky  momentary off-on footswitches. I hate  dislike them very much. Not only are they clicky (which should be outlawed for momentary footswitches), but their travel is very short, the click happens at the very end of said travel, and it requires way too much force to toggle. They are not particularly responsive either, which makes them unfun to use. Also, why a DPDT switch in the first place? There's only 2 wires going to the lugs! These footswitches are a...