For the bank holiday weekend, the Mrs and I went to Glasgow and had a bit of a mooch around, visited a distillery (that we've drunk a lot of whiskey from, so was good to see it... and pick up a couple more bottles!) and ate a battered hamburger at 3am, lovely! So whilst there was a shopping day, I went to Guitar Guitar and had a bit of a look round.
Guitar Guitar Glasgow: Not quite as good as the Birmingham store, just didn't seem to have the quality there. I don't think the cavernous size of the room helps as they have to have the instruments stacked 3 high on the walls to make it not look empty. Downstairs was quite cosy, but I didn't like the Tyler I tried, it felt really cheap compared to the lovely tele-style one (with a V neck) I played the brum store a couple of years ago.
So I decided to try out a couple of pedals-- MXR Badass Modified OD and the Akai/Biyang analogue delay. Was given an out of tune guitar to use, and there was no tuner in the booth... guess i'll be tuning it myself then.
The MXR was way too gainy for my tastes, to get an overdriven sound required the gain to be way down, and there was just too much going on, sounded a bit spikey through the amp (a DSL), and not really a pedal that i'd be using to kick in a bit of a crunch.
The Akai delay was quite surprising-- I think it sounds really great, the repeats have this nice darkening to them, it sounds fine, I find myself having the mix knob quite low, and a low amount of repeats. Personally I have no use for 1.2s of delay, so the switch will be staying in the 0-600ms mode for me. For £50 (with a years warranty, part of my reason for paying for the Akai rather than an eBay Biyang), it's well worth the money... i'd like to check out some of the others, but we'll leave that for another day!
