2022-09-24 22:13
I'll warn you now, this is a long one. But if you're sick to the back teeth of those Jag history articles that cite Fender's most awkward six-string as being used by "Cobain, Marr, MBV and… Read More
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Planet Botch Blog
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Informative general interest site. Music and instruments, free VST software, blogging and social web analysis, and lots more.
2022-09-14 19:08
Are you ready for Planet Botch - the cult guitar mag?... No, neither am I, so this is only a mock-up cover, made with apologies to all who are now sick of seeing my '87 Rickenbacker 330. But… Read More
2022-09-10 19:05
The definitive 1991 production model of the Jeff Beck Signature Strat sitting pretty in Surf Green... Nice.
If ever an early 'nineties dream could end with the phrase "...and then I saw the… Read More
2022-09-09 20:40
Tracing back the history of music technology, you'll find a period in the second half of the 1970s when the phase-shifting effect entered its heyday. It may seem odd today, but at that point… Read More
2022-08-27 14:54
Vintage Strats look as good as they sound. But don't ask Victoria Druggs to pose with one unless you wish to hear an extended repertoire of Phoebe Buffay songs.
It's the musical equivalent… Read More
2022-08-20 10:58
I wouldn't say I was glad to see the back of the 1980s, but the decade had a lot to apologise for. Gated snares, chorussed toms, washes of plate reverb, poodle hairstyles, four-stage gain… Read More
2022-08-18 18:09
In the land of Rick it's not black and sunburst - it's Jetglo and Fireglo. Everything about these beautifully-crafted, cellulose-finished Rickenbacker 330s is individual, but they do not tic… Read More
2022-08-16 17:13
Feast your eyes on the above picture. How long does it take your thoughts to wander into the territory of available funds? Less than seven seconds?... Does your partner have to physically re… Read More
2022-08-10 22:19
When the market for vintage electric guitar replicas set light around the end of the 1970s, manufacturers of retro-spec Telecasters were faced with a serious dilemma.
For over a decade, Fe… Read More
2021-06-02 18:47
Yes, it's whammy time, as an early 1990s monster of rock pops its three-tone sunburst above the parapet for a heavily overdriven trip down memory lane. If you don't remember the first Fender… Read More
2021-05-09 21:38
Showing the model code 10-0909, a Fender USA '62 Vintage Reissue Stratocaster inspection tag from March 2nd 1990.
How obsessive are you about guitar collecting? Do you insist on as-new inst… Read More
2021-04-25 14:05
Well, we're here. This is it.
This is the distant future that the 1980s guitar magazines talked about. The point at which the guitars we were buying brand new back then, would have fully ma… Read More
2021-04-01 20:26
Is there a warmer finish anywhere on Earth? Candy Apple Red in all its glory on a Stratocaster, complete with the 1960s fashion statement of a matching headstock.
Many a 1950s Stratocaster… Read More
2021-03-11 19:12
I'm sure you recognise them. But do you call these partners in crime the '60s and '50s Stratocaster reissues, or the '62 and '57 Stratocaster reissues? And which reference is correct?
As a… Read More
2020-12-06 20:55
“Fabulously well made”... “Always a joy to play”... “A sound and sustain more like that from a Les Paul than almost any other Japanese maker's offering”… Read More
2020-11-21 19:46
Ohhhh yeahhhh! As Gibson themselves put it in 1970, the 1958-1960 sunburst Les Paul Standard design really was the “Daddy of 'em all”.
The vintage reissue. Ideally a faithful re… Read More
2020-11-05 15:58
If ever you find yourself staring at a seemingly bog-standard Korean Squier Telecaster with a CN5 or CN6 serial number, you may not realise it, but what you probably have in front of you, is… Read More
2020-10-30 23:22
TBX tone controls, Lace Sensors, bright yellow Strats, birth of Fender Korea, rebirth of Fender USA, death of Squier Japan, complete decimation of the Japanese Fender Contemporary range, and… Read More
2020-10-07 20:51
With huge success, in 1989 the long-time rock guitarist and singer Gary Moore made a dramatic decision to dump heavy metal and pitch head first into the genre of blues. The stark contrast in… Read More
2020-08-28 14:23
In some cases, an audio cassette is expected to sound dull, muddy or woolly. Some tapes were manufactured to a very low budget, with an unsophisticated ferric-oxide formulation. And one of t… Read More
2020-08-01 21:08
THE CONTENDERS
A vintage Gibson ES-355. A lavish, high-spend product, made in 1972, and sitting at the top end of Gibson’s range of thinline semi-acoustics. Wearing the archetypal t… Read More
2020-07-30 16:11
Planet Botch VST tonewheel/clonewheel emulators are a bit like buses. You wait eight years and then three come along at once. Yes, hot on the heels of an analogue K-type emulator, this is a… Read More
2020-07-11 23:09
The aesthetically-pleasing Fender Contemporary Stratocaster, introduced in 1994, sat at the epicentre of Mexico’s bid to capture the Japanese stronghold in the middle of the brand&rsqu&hell…Read More
2020-07-08 19:33
A Photoshop installation CD, back at the dawn of the century when it was possible to own a copy, and the main distribution means was the high street retailer. Within a compatible environment… Read More
2020-06-22 17:02
Even the promotional giveaway audio cassettes from Total Accuracy came with a high quality chrome tape formulation. This 1993 promo features jam backings that include Rock & Roll by Led… Read More
2020-06-15 19:41
Daphne Blue was one of three finishes available on the first Squier Affinity Teles to hit the UK market – the other two being Black, and what was described as Butterscotch Blonde, but… Read More
2020-06-07 17:04
Spending too much money on your electric guitar(s)? Going through pickups like there’s no tomorrow and finding you still can’t nail the perfect tone you wanted? Wondering how gui… Read More
2020-06-05 19:32
The Internet is heavily driven by populist themes. So if your interests have often strayed outside the mainstream, you may have struggled at times to find detailed coverage of those fascinat… Read More
2020-06-02 18:46
You don't have to browse far down Fender's Twitter timeline before you're met with a tweet proudly showing off some brand new but considerably distressed vintage replica. A Relic. And anothe… Read More
2020-05-29 20:25
"Don't touch it Mr Di Bergi... And don't point... No, don't even look at it!..."
You may be surprised, given my shameless interest in Squier Strats of the 'eighties and 'nineties, that I've… Read More
2020-05-27 19:38
Fender Japan's 1992 Aged Parts '62 Strat reissue in Sonic Blue. It also came in Sunburst, Black, Vintage White, Candy Apply Red, and later, a range of inauthentic finishes based on the Foto… Read More
2020-05-26 13:08
If there's one element of the Fender company's history that can be described as romantic, it must surely be the brand's variety of solid colour finishes, which peaked as a concept in the 196… Read More
2020-05-24 20:12
The Fender Broadcaster may have been a beautiful blonde bombshell, but for decades it sat at the centre of guitar history's greatest myth.
Don't you just love a good guitar myth? Well, if my… Read More
2020-05-21 18:16
Yesterday, I was discussing tight manufacturing budgets on low-priced 1970s guitars. Today I want to stay with that theme, but delve even further back in time to the 1960s, when most manufac… Read More
2020-05-20 17:29
In some ways, the 1980s ruined the Fender copy market. In the 1970s, even the sub-£100 guitars were made in Japan. And working on their own initiative, Japanese copyists tended to have… Read More
2020-05-18 22:32
The wonderfully simple single-pickup Fender Esquire, in its early 1950s format with butterscotch blonde finish. Why did this one-pickup guitar get a pickup selector switch? Brace yourself… Read More
2020-05-16 20:37
The late 1960s period was a fascinating one for Fender, and particularly the Telecaster. Heavy rock was emerging from the blues boom and the transitional tail of white mod music. But there w… Read More
2020-05-13 17:46
The Clonewheel VXK. Unbeatable simulation of that early 1980s analogue clonewheel sound.
If you remember seeing a live Squeeze performance in the early 1980s, the sound of this VSTi will bri… Read More
2020-05-11 08:52
Neon Pink Cellophane was one of the standard finishes for DiMarzio Strat bodies and necks in 1987. The Shock Wave pickup set and active jack socket power module was designed to produce singl… Read More
2020-05-08 20:30
Inspired by some of the most sophisticated analogue combo organs and synth-organs of the 1970s, The Vintage Ultima is a freeware VSTi packed with powerful features and almost endless sound p… Read More
2020-05-07 15:50
Problem... On an electric guitar with multiple pickups, the vibration of the strings is greater above the neck pickup than it is above the bridge pickup. And greater vibration means higher v… Read More
2020-05-05 13:46
The Undercult is a VST organ model inspired by the Vox Continental Super II. It’s the first in a series of FREE public releases from a formerly private and exclusive collection of all… Read More
2018-03-09 18:00
Above: an image of the very beautiful Yamaha E45 - an ultimate home organ from the analogue era.
In 1980, what would it have cost to equip yourself with an analogue synth, string machine, a… Read More
2018-01-05 19:59
Recording and mixing a musical composition is often underestimated as a task, with the emphasis placed on the musicians rather than the recording process. But anyone who heard the unassuming… Read More
2017-11-24 21:42
In the finest of music biz stories, there comes a point at which the hand of commerce takes over, the essence of the initial excitement goes out of the window, and the hardcore fans head for… Read More
2017-11-18 23:02
Any UK dwellers old enough to remember a mid 1980s alt comedy show called Who Dares Wins, may recall a clever and well played sketch in which a motorist is stopped by the police at night. In… Read More
2017-09-27 23:35
Ah, that enduring slogan… How much can you remember? Was the BPI’s infamous anti-piracy campaign a ’70s thing? An ’80s thing? Was the slogan really as ubiquitous as… Read More
2017-09-21 21:47
Is there really something special about them? Does it actually matter, when you have two pickups directly sensing the vibration of metal strings, if there’s an acoustic chamber in ther… Read More
2017-05-28 15:45
Last week, I took a look at the moderately retro Adobe PhotoDeluxe image editor of the late 1990s. But now it’s time to draw a deep breath, rattle a few more loose knobs on the time ma… Read More
2017-05-23 06:08
If you’re one of the forward-thinking souls who started working with digital images as a consumer in the 1990s, chances are you’ll remember Adobe’s Photoshop-derived editor… Read More
2016-12-31 14:19
Zero Guy. He’s the one who pops up in your Unfollowers tab on Crowdfire. He followed you, then you followed him back, and then he unfollowed you again. Oh, but look, he didn’t ju… Read More
2016-12-30 19:04
Whilst, through history, there’s been a tendency for some musicians to look down on reggae, the style remains one of the most difficult for those brought up on American-influenced rock… Read More
2016-12-16 16:52
The adverts have gone, the homepage is aspiring to impersonate Twitter, and mobile users can’t find the landing pages. What on earth is going on?…
It’s all part of the bi… Read More
2016-07-03 18:36
Okay, so you’ve probably seen the title, suspected it was empty clickbait, and taken a look just to marvel at the audacity of the post. But actually, this is not empty clickbait. It&rs&hell…Read More
2016-06-19 18:32
Watch an old live rock performance from the 1970s, and in the backline you’ll see amps. Just amps; no effects. Right up until the end of the decade, this essentially remained the case… Read More
2016-06-17 18:25
Back in early 2013, I wrote a post about Flickr’s attitude to its own ‘licence’ categorisations. Flickr had confirmed to me that the official Flickr API, used by third part… Read More
2016-06-12 15:26
Those cupboards you never look in… They’re full of stuff like this… Well, they are if you’re a beyond-help hoarder whose floorboards are struggling to bear the weig… Read More
2016-06-11 22:57
Whether or not punk rock’s guitar style had a definite beginning is open to lively debate. And for good reason. The punk genre might have had a cultural singularity of birth in the yea… Read More
2016-05-31 11:00
Before the market for music tuition was revolutionised by free options online, it was possible for many local and decidedly average musicians to make a good income from private teaching. Yes… Read More
2016-05-29 16:47
The Fender Stratocaster's vibrato system is remarkable. Not just because it’s graced, and even defined, some of the most important recordings in rock ‘n’ roll history. The… Read More
2016-05-25 16:44
Introduced in the early years of ‘modern music’, Fender’s Jazzmaster (b. 1958) and Jaguar (b. 1962) guitars have a similar look. They share the same body shape, and have tr… Read More
2016-02-12 13:35
Despite the love/hate reaction that Zoom effects tended to provoke when they stormed the market from the start of the 1990s, I think they’re a fascinating example of music tech marketi… Read More
2016-02-10 20:40
Churn. It's the practice of calculatedly following and then unfollowing on Twitter - purely to build an audience. Churn is something in which a lot of small-time marketers have at least dabb… Read More
2016-01-06 17:15
If you dabble in web design, you’ll know it’s now a prerequisite that your work accommodates visitors using small devices. But what if you discover that a significant proportion… Read More
2016-01-04 00:02
You don't want speculation, rumours and tales. You want answers. Which is good, because that's exactly what you're going to get in this, the pro guide to working out who's been buying Twitte… Read More
2015-12-31 12:33
Direct injection (very frequently abbreviated to DI) is the apparently simple practice of sending the output of an electric or electronic musical instrument straight to a mixing desk or reco… Read More
2015-12-30 19:16
Have you ever experienced a situation in which you’ve had a “flash of inspiration”, envisioned an almost complete musical idea out of nowhere, and developed the idea into… Read More
2015-12-29 23:38
When you start seeing Twitter users with 100,000, even 200,000 plus followers coming up in your inactive friends list, you really do get a sense of the site’s growing worthlessness as… Read More
2015-12-27 15:32
“Am I really doing this?”, I asked myself, as I swiftly unplugged and gathered up jack leads, then set about packing away the tower computer system that’s been the focal po… Read More
2015-12-24 19:15
Today, Fender Stratocasters made in the 1970s are generally regarded with affection, and have become sought after by many guitarists for their historical interest and vintage kudos. But it w… Read More
2015-12-20 21:13
Planet Botch’s new Ensembletron VSTi serves only one purpose, but it serves that purpose extremely well, in an eminently user-friendly manner. This is a virtual analogue string machine… Read More
2015-12-17 15:39
Tumblr makes changes on a fairly perpetual basis, and I'd be among the first to express that some changes have been a big improvement. The revamp for images in Text Posts, for example. The p… Read More
2015-12-13 20:55
I thought this quick addendum would make a useful follow-up to my previous post, which explored the formative years of direct injection in electric guitar history.
I’ve recorded a sho… Read More
2015-12-07 19:53
Cunningly promoted in its 1993 release year as “The Korg Disguise Kit For Other Keyboards”, the 05R/W synthesizer module was unleashed unto a world in which MS-DOS was still Micr… Read More
2015-12-05 11:06
The Boss ME-5 was a superb quality, pioneering guitar FX unit, with a very simple layout and, chiefly, analogue processing. It incorporated some of the finest pedal effect technology of its… Read More
2015-11-30 09:45
Chorus. What is it? Where did it come from? And how does a musician make the best of it? The chorus effect progressed from being completely overlooked in most facets of popular music, via a… Read More
2015-11-24 17:24
If you’re a guitarist, chances are you’ve been bombarded with advice on how to work with overdrive. But if you want an overdriven organ sound, you probably haven’t been qu… Read More
2015-11-21 12:49
Just as video killed the radio star, digital killed... Well, what did it kill, exactly?... Some elements of pre-digital music technology are clearly still alive and well, and I'm sure certai… Read More
2015-11-19 21:54
Over on Twirpz, I’ve done quite a few articles about Twitter and its out-of-control ‘marketing’, and Twirpz is where I normally keep my Twitter-related analyses confined th… Read More
2015-11-14 15:04
We all get stuck in a rut at some time or other, and let’s face it, there’s a lot of advice on how to dig yourself out. Unfortunately though, many of the people giving out this a… Read More
2015-11-14 15:03
If the title of this piece was based purely on anecdotal evidence, I wouldn’t need to write another word. The number of guitarists who’ve switched a full set of stock pickups for… Read More
2015-11-14 15:03
Boasting 21st century technology as early as the 1980s, the German company Shadow powerfully marketed a range of guitar-related products through the era of spandex and headbands. With a rang… Read More
2015-11-14 13:21
It’s a really good question. Why does a budget guitar cost so little, whilst a range-topper, which may well ostensibly look the same, cost so much? Just how different are the two extre… Read More
2015-11-14 13:20
The Fender Stratocaster is the world’s most popular guitar design, but how did it all begin? This piece looks, in a broad sense, at the Stratocaster of the 1950s. It’s not meant… Read More
2015-11-11 20:59
If you’ve used Tumblr recently, you may have noticed that when you upload an image to a Text Post, the picture ‘stretches’ to the full width of the post container in the Da… Read More
2015-11-11 20:59
Okay, so the title is a metaphor, but this is an issue which needs a lot more attention than a conventional title would likely bring. I’m using a motor vehicle analogy, but this is rea… Read More
2015-11-11 20:56
If you recall Tumblr prior to spring 2012, you’ll know that once upon a time the site had a Block function. You didn’t want anything to do with a user? Fine. You simply hit Block… Read More
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