Hi, I'm Jeff, and I love fuzz
Haha, well, I don't know about that, looking through all the stuff you've done it seems to me like you do a good job showing uses (conventional and otherwise) of the stuff you demo. I think you're doing well.
I want to emphasize that recording the Pipe Amp clip was absolutely zombie-easy. Anyone with a mic and a preamp could do it. It was literally as simple as just putting a mic somewhere over the grill and hitting record. I really like amps with small speakers, because they tend to be extremely easy to get a nice, representational sound miked without a lot of footwork. In this case, using an SM-57 style mic, the diaphragm to amp speaker ratio is something like 1:3, making for a really simple job recording it.
The Pipe Amp sort of makes a 4" wide outward "cone" of sound above the speaker which is around 3" tall and basically follows the shape of the speaker and wave guide. Anywhere within that area is the "sweet spot" for this tiny fuzz machine, and as you can hear (or, in your case, as you know from personal experience since you have one too) it has an amazingly thick and defined character for its mechanical characteristics. In this clip, I did mic it somewhat off axis to get a little more of the "chunk" of the sound. It thins out very slightly dead center. gets brighter and more cutting and loses some of the mid-bass frequencies which sound so nice. But unlike a conventional amp with a fuzz pedal, there's no difficulty finding just the right spots (plural, because I typically advocate using two microphones to record larger amps in order to capture a more thorough representation of the sound). It took me all of two minutes to set up the recording gear for this, and that includes uncoiling my mic cable. I could have put the mic in several other places and got similarly nice results.
I could have done more to the track to mix it into a really comfortably fitting clip, but I wanted to show what it can do without any studio magic beyond adjusting the level and throwing a peak limiter on to make sure nothing digitally clipped (I wasn't hammering the limiter on it, by the way, no "loudness maximization" super compression here, it was just there as a safety precaution to ensure a pleasant listening experience without digital clipping since the backing track I used was not ideally recorded). If I had taken a parametric EQ to the Pipe Amp track, used a multi-band compressor on the whole project and followed it up with some more precise limiting, I feel like I could have very quickly had a professional quality recording and clip. Even without those tools (which I would normally use without hesitation in my own projects), I feel like the end result is really flattering to Pipe Amp. When I opened the shipping box to get a look at it, I never would have imagined how well it would record.
On a less esoteric note, It's a pleasure to play, too; the particular "gating" action on notes in the higher gain mode inspires a very precise playing style for me, making sort of precise licks that play around with the meter a bit really fun. I did two recordings after jamming with Pipe Amp to get to know it for awhile. I threw the first one out as being sloppy, but the second one was fine and I felt it represented the results any user can expect from the little dude pretty well
I imagine this post might just fuel the GAS flames higher, but if you do like what you hear on the clip, it is 100% what you will get with the Pipe Amp in person. I think Tom did a hell of a job putting this one together, and I look forward to hearing what other people think of it when they get their hands on one.
