Miscellaneous - Gary Mullins - Professional Guitarist

Blues Junior Rebuild

This month I spent a couple of days rebuilding my poorly Fender Blues Junior with the chaps at Vyse Amps in Pinner, London.

The amp has been my go-to combo for 8yrs, and being 12yrs old and seeing a lot of action, it has had a lot of heat cycles through the solder joints which is the root of the problems coming through. The power amp valves’ solder was beginning to crack, and the tracks on the PCB were lifting and ultimately breaking.

The solution to this – which would become endemic throughout the rest of the amp in time – was to remove all of the original components, and replace with a new circuit built in an old-school ‘point-to-point’ fashion which would enable me to make modifications or replace any faulty components much more easily for the life of the amp.

Since completely changing everything except the cabinet and reverb tank, the amp has taken on a different character, but is a beautiful alternative to the Blues Junior I knew and loved. It’s now got a Celestion G12H Anniversary Edition speaker, and in conjunction with the up-rated electronics is more articulate as a result. I’m still getting to know the amp, but can’t wait to see how it performs on gigs and shows as they come in!

Recording at Barnicott Studios

July 23, 2014PermalinkMiscellaneous, Recordingbarnicott, barny, chatham, mandolin, recording, studio Leave a comment

Over the last couple of days I have been recording at Barnicott studios for an original pop project with Kevin Hall, Stewart Sibley and Gayle Fraser and with Simon Barnicott. It was a wonderful experience working with ‘Barny’ Barnicott in such a beautiful location with some truly fantastic musicians, and it was a privilege to be involved with the project.

Barny’s credits include Arctic Monkeys and Kasabian, as well as Coldplay, and to see how he worked was really interesting. He has a very no-nonsense approach to recording, and especially with timbre and quality of sounds. He’s good at making quick decisions about whether something will be sonically appropriate and if it will work in the context of a piece of music, and has an altogether efficient approach to recording.

In this case I had to play a mixture of electric and acoustic guitar parts, but critically some mandolin too, and I thought that the parts sat really nicely in the early mixes. There’s still much to do on the tracks, but I’m very much looking forward to seeing how they come together.

I can highly recommend the studio. The location near Chatham means leaving the city and getting some clean air, and the views in that part of the world are truly exquisite. There’s comfortable accommodation on site, so multiple days of recording is an easy decision to make, and it made a big difference to be able to stay over on the Monday night start afresh on the Tuesday. The live room is spacious with many genuine vintage synths and keyboards lining the room, and the control room is a thing to behold – containing a beautiful SSL desk running with a Pro Tools HD rig. And boy that guy knows how to use it!

Check out Barny and studio at barnybarnicott.com, and I’ll keep you posted of how the project is going!