The latest (and probably last) guitar arrival is ... yet another Stratocaster. This is another partscaster, made from a Jeff Beck Strat body with a US Standard neck. Pickups are by The Creamery - a Baby 71 humbucker in the bridge and Alt 64s in the neck and middle positions.

The Baby 71 is the reason I wanted to build this guitar. It's a reproduction of the old Fender Wide Range Humbucker, a really great-sounding low output humbucker with extended highs. Works beautifully with single coil pickups, something like the Fender Shawbucker but with a chiming character all of its own.

This video was shot as soon as I'd thrown the guitar together so the intonation wasn't right and the strings were choking on a few of the bends but you get an idea of how good that bridge and middle sound is.

The Baby 71 and Alt 64s are available from Jaime at The Creamery and highly recommended.

I still haven't finished putting the pedalboard together, I keep having ideas about an Arduino-based switch unit to select MIDI clock signals either from the Master Control unit or from external MIDI. I'm probably going to have to go ahead with it because the Eventides sound great on guitar but even better on the analogue synths.

The reverb ruins it though, I had way too much wet mix on that preset and Eventide's Blackhole isn't ideal on that setting. Maybe I'll do another pedals video with the Roland synths sometime. I'll add that to my ever-expanding to-do list.

Only about half a dozen people will know where this riff comes from. Recycled from my old indie pop band of the 1990s, embellished now with analogue synths, baritone guitars and drums that stay in time.

Oh yes, and a quote from Wagner's Gotterdammerung at the start because I'd been watching Excalibur that day.

I never quite understood the term "Berlin school" synthesis. And President Kennedy's famous declaration translates as "I am a doughnut". So maybe this is doughnut school improvisation. Anyway, it's the modular synth doing its thing while I remain only nominally in control of the sounds it produces.

I have been known to occasionally provide guitar for my brother's outlandish space rock project, Brotherhood of the Machine. Strangely, I go far more crazy apeshit on other people's recordings than on my own.

Turns out the JD-XA's sequencer has two channels of external CV and gate for modular fun and games. Unfortunately there's no clock output or modulation CV output but you can still have bags of fun sequencing the excellent Frequency Central System X modules from the keyboard. So here's a quick and dirty one-bar sequence as an experiment.

A lovely new synthesiser has arrived in my studio, the breathtakingly brilliant Roland JD-XA digital/analogue crossover synth.

Very impressed with this synth. The analogue voices combined with Roland's Supernatural digital engine and the comprehensive effects section make for some stunningly beautiful sounds. Most of the common functions are right there on knobs and sliders on the front panel but if you want to dig deeper, the level of editing control is very impressive. Since it arrived I've spent most of the time working with the arpeggiator and sequencer (which also have two channels of CV and gate out to drive the modular). Works brilliantly alongside my other workhorse polysynth, the Dave Smith Prophet 08. Here's a quick run with both - the JD-XA is providing the warbling filter effects.