Updates

We're on closing eve, and if all goes well we will find ourselves sleeping in our new digs tomorrow night. Not a lot has happened since the last update other than the incremental process of buying the house. We've already purchased our appliances and scheduled all the utility/etc. transfers as well as house/carpet cleaning for the rental we're departing. Every move seems a bit more tedious since we have been mostly moving to bigger places with each move which means we have more room for stuff. On that note, I did buy the Port City OS 2x12 cab I had been discussing. Daniel Klein from Port City had traded a few emails with me when I had asked a question on their website so he contacted me when he had a show demo cab that he couldn't sell as new and offered me a decent ($125) discount. I knew I was most likely going to get one of these cabs this year, so it seemed worth it although I really wanted to wait until after we moved. I like the cab, but I've been having mixed results with the AxeFx. I think there are probably a finite number of amp heads that are ideally suited for the cab, and the patches probably need to be created from the ground up. I'll be working on that in the new house. 

After we close tomorrow the plan is to pick up a uhaul truck and self move the essentials as well as the fragile/expensive stuff we don't want to put in the hands of the movers. The real move will be a week from tomorrow, but we plan on living in the new home starting tomorrow night. We will load up the king size bed, as well as most of our clothing and kitchen items. I'm also going to be taken all the home theater gear as I need to re-wire the theater and it will give me something to do this weekend after we've moved our essentials. We've done some of the minor needed repairs to the rental (patching & painting drywall). We're hiring a house cleaning company as well as a carpet cleaning company to come through once we've had time to get all of our stuff out. I'll need to give the lawn a final mow/trim/edge probably the day before the movers come. 

Gear Planning

I'm making some more gear changes, the most recent and significant were the bequeathing of my Mesa Stiletto 4x12 and my Radial Tonebone Classic distortion pedal as well as my TC Electronic VPD1 Pre-drive pedal to my nephew Chris.  He's been making good progress and his band has played a few gigs and seen some early success. Since I think he'll get some use out of it, I feel it's a worthwhile investment in his musical future, regardless of where he goes with it.  While all three are good kit, they had been lying unused since I got my Fractal AxeFx in 2010. I felt it was more valuable, albeit altruistically, to give them to him versus selling them on Ebay.  

With that in mind, the removal of the 4x12 has made way for my eventual purchase of a Port City OS 2x12 cab that I've been considering for a few years.  While it's ostensibly smaller than the 4x12 it's replacing, the great advantage to these cabs is their innovative design that aims the speakers differently and includes a port that results in a much fuller and more three dimensional sound. Most people who play them say they sound bigger than 4x12s by virtue of this design.  This will still be bypassing all the available cab sims on the Axe, so in that consideration, I will most likely replace my current Atomic wedge with their new CLR technology.  I haven't decided on a wedge versus cab yet.  The only other near term plan is to replace the pickups in my Suhr. I just can't get the EMG-Xs to sound the way I want. All of my other guitars are so much more dynamic and responsive to touch, but the EMGs seem permanently stuck at 11.