That sounds crazy. I presume there are genuine budget-priced phones, though? I think my phone cost me about £100 five years ago.
Admittedly, my phone is first and foremost an unnecessarily large and expensive digital alarm clock, and only secondly for text messaging and phone calls. I guess if I used it for anything else, I’d probably see some value in a fancier model… (or have replaced it after I dropped it and cracked its screen four years ago).
Yeah, as well as disclosing how they got things, SUSD have been really good about downgrading a review of a game if it’s too expensive. And being realistic about whether the public should spend on other objects, such as the gaming table.
(I still want the ridiculous Go pieces, though)
Yeah, I’ve got a second hand 5-year-old phone that was ~£120 for the original owner I think. I sometimes try catching up with what’s available for an upgrade but there’s a lack of info about phones that are sub-£400 compared to the abundance of enthusiastic videos on tech-Youtube about the latest high-end phones.
The other problem in the phone-space is that the market just doesn’t seem to be interested in the same things as me. If there’s a small phone with a very-good battery life that does Whatsapp/Messenger/email/podcasts I’d be happy to pay a bit more for it. Until then I’m waiting for my current phone to give up 
Who wants a tour of some GUITAR PEEEDDAAALLLLSS?
Course you do.
Anyway. Top to bottom. A 385, an overdrive based on a guitar nerd trend for turning cinema projection equipment into guitar amps. If it has a valve in it, you can turn it into an amp! Probably my fav overdrive for a standard always on sound. It just has that nice Lou Reed kinda sound to it.
Then there’s the Luminary v2 octave pedal. Makes a guitar sound like a bass, or a church organ, or get those weird Bends era Radiohead sound. It’s silly but fun.
Alpha Haunt, my modern fuzz sound. It’s good, but I haven’t figured it all out yet.
Lamplighter compressor. It does what it does well.
Data Corrupter - ever wanted a guitar to sound like a chainsaw chopping up a NES? Well now you can. Very fussy with the guitar and volume though. Too quiet, or not the right pickups, and it makes no sound at all. Seems to work better with humbuckers than single coils.
Ventris - my Swiss army knife reverb. Seems like everyone needs to commit to the Empress, Big Sky, or Ventris. I took a punt. It’s good, but crazily versatile. I should use it more.
720 - a looper for when I feel like Ed Sheeran. I can never get the timings quite right, which viscerally hurts my ego no end.
Tonal Recall - For when you need to spend £500 on delay. It’s a delay nerds dream. I’m too bad to make the most of it.
Grand Orbiter - phaser. Sounds good with everything. And I play it with everything.
Warped Vinyl - Weird reverby tremolo thing that can sound like warped Vinyl if you set it up right. Everything else is just warbly.
Deja Vibe - Vibrato pedal. Like tremolo, but cooler. Necessary for those Hendrix impressions.
Brothers - dual stage overdrive. It’s far fancier than it has any right to be. Want to play fuzz into overdrive, or overdrive into fuzz, or overdrive in parallel with fuzz? Well here it is. Why not just buy 2 pedals? I don’t know.
Tyra Kline - A clone of the legendary overdrive pedal that is the Klon. It’s fun, but can be kinda shrill if not used right.
Argo - Octave Fuzz. The other necessary ingredient for Hendrix impressions.
Jonnssus - Modern distortion and overdrive. I didn’t have anything for distortion except the Proco, so thought I needed more.
Dark World - crazy reverb type thing. Does weird stuff.
Wetter Box - this thing is MAD. It acts as a conduit between other pedals, so you can mix different pedals together however you like. In sequence or in parallel. You can even connect the mix to an expression pedal and use the pedal to phase between the different effects. I’d love to hear this used in a professional setting, it opens up loads of possibilities I’m too stupid to figure out.
And then there’s the pedals I forgot about.
Belle Epoch - models a classic delay sound. Less controllable than the other delay pedals, but it has character.
Bender - Clone of the classic Tonebender pedal, made famous by Led Zeppelin. Just arrived today, not tried it yet.
McCoy Wah pedal - everyone loves wah. Leave it half cocked so I sound like dire straits
Expression pedal - got this a while back to see how useful expression is. Should use it more.
…and this is why boardgames are my “cheaper” hobby.
And here are my guitars. But that’s a story for another time
PS I found that Ben Ten toy sitting on a wall after a night out when I was a student. I’ve kept it on my amp ever since.
PPS I do own bed linen. This is in the spare bedroom. A grave to my social life.
Amusingly, the one really fancy pedal I have is this:
It basically does two tremolo effects at once. One is the standard effect, while the other is a square wave, so it’s a sharp on/off effect.
You can also set whether each one is controlled by the knobs or the expression pedal, as well as how the effects are blended (or if you only want one of them). And it has two outputs so you can have it go left/right rather than on/off.
Other than that, my pedal collection is mostly distortion:
The Danelectro French Toast was my first pedal (note the missing knobs - they can only be adjusted with a screwdriver now). It does an octave up effect as well as fuzz. It sounds nasty and will pick up radio signals if not properly grounded.
I replaced that with the Marshall Shred Master, which I got in a tiny music shop for £30 second hand. Had a few Radiohead fanboys try to buy it off me.
When I played bass in one band, my sound was a combination of these two pedals to make up for our lack of rhythm guitarist. It was nasty. But in a good way.
Unfortunately, the Shred Master hisses a lot, so I’ve retired it. Got the Movall Scorpion as it was the best my local shop had at the time. Then replaced that with the Dr Green Black Death. Still working out the settings I want to use on that.
Other stuff: The Synth Wah makes weird noises. The AC Tone is a pretty good (especially for how cheap it was) amp emulator. The Trio auto-generates bass + drum backing tracks. The tuner is a tuner.
Guitars:
My main guitar - Vintage VS6B. Not actually “vintage” - that’s the brand name 
Just a cheap SG copy. Though it’s solid mahogany with a set neck. Changed all the hardware (and messed about with the finish, as you can see). Added the Bigsby. Bareknuckle Warpig in the bridge position. Built-in overdrive. The neck pickup is disconnected.
Random acoustic that was £55 because the finish was messed up.
Cruiser (budget end of Crafter) bass guitar (Interesting bits: active EQ and a bubinga top).
Cheap Telecaster copy (also by Vintage) that’s made of plywood and I’ve generally used to experiment on.
Cheap Mockingbird copy (I forget the brand) that is currently in bits as I haven’t decided what I’m going to do with it.
Epiphone Emily Strange SG. At some point I’m going to upgrade the hardware on this too. My newest guitar because I never had the chance to get one when it came out, but I found one cheap on eBay a few years ago. Secretly, I’m a 15 year-old goth girl.
Just out of interest - why do people own lots of guitars? Do they actually sound that different or is it just you like the different designs and it makes very little difference to the sounds?
(I understand the difference between acoustic, bass, double stringing etc)
Different sounds (people go on and on about the wood, etc affecting the tone, but mostly it’s the electronics that make the difference).
Different hardware/construction (things like the tremolo arm on my main guitar, or the fact my SGs have 22 frets, my telecaster has 21, and the Mockingbird has 24).
Different tunings (obviously live it’s way quicker to switch guitar than to retune, but generally your guitar will sound better if you’re not constantly changing the tension of the strings).
And sometimes (all the time) it’s just because they look pretty.
So what kind of music do you play? Are you in a band? @KIR2: Either of you?
I’ve been in a couple of bands, but they were 10+ years ago. One was kind of goth thrash, the other was punk with a very angry German singer.
There was also the band that sadly only had one practice session before scheduling and money problems meant we couldn’t sort out another. It was my friend’s idea for doing pop covers in a southern metal style. We worked out quite good versions of Black Velvet (Alannah Myles) and Call Me (Blondie).
Other than that, I’ve mostly recorded stuff by myself for my doom metal “band” (at various points it’s technically had other members, but we never practiced together). But haven’t done anything for that in ages. I keep meaning to write/record new stuff, but instead I just have a pile of vague ideas that I haven’t done anything with.
Ah, metal sub-genres 
I have an idea what doom metal is but can you give me an example for gothic thrash? Because those two in my mind don’t go together… right now I am imagining Moonspell on speed.
German sounds quite angry in general… make it loud and fast and it’s more so.
A few things:
Sound - As bruitist says, mainly in the electronics, but there’s also Solid v semi-hollow v hollow/archtop. And the odd idiosyncratic brands, like Supro, Aerodyne and Danelectro have their own sounds due to the build and electronics (technically they sound terrible, but it’s a unique sound that has its fans). There will be some variation in sound from guitars of exact same model too, but that’s when it gets really nerdy.
Feel/playability - Mainly where the hands are: the shape of the neck, the size/weight distribution, and where the strumming hand sits. String gauge can have an effect too - guitars need to be calibrated to the gauge used, so if you want a range of gauges, it’s just easier with different guitars. Thinner strings take less pressure to play and to bend notes, but also easier to over bend and don’t tend to hold tune as well. Thicker strings take a bit more effort, but feel more controlled, and some say they sound thicker (though many contest this).
Vintage necks are like a baseball bat cut in half, modern necks often have a changing profile from one end to the other. Maple versus rosewood/pau ferro/ebony fingerboard has a slight different feel to it, but again, very nerdy level of detail. Scale of the neck (how far apart each fret is) also has its effects on string tension. Some people swear different headstock arrangements even affect the string tension… but that’s a ridiculous level of detail. For example, PRS guitars have some mathematically perfect arrangement of tuners so that each string is on the same tension. PR rubbish. Most guitarists play somewhere between 9 and 11 gauge strings, though metal guitarists often have heavier gauges to allow for drop A and other low tunings.
It’s surprising how much these things can affect a guitar. When I was first learning I struggled to play other guitars because they didn’t feel like mine. After a while the differences are negligible, and it’s easy to naturally adapt. A bit like the difference between driving different cars I guess!
Collectionist mentality/aesthetics/history - They’re pretty.
Different tunings - not really a reason to own more than a few guitars, but it’s a factor.
I’ll write a run down of my guitars later. They each cover quite different areas.
The closest I can think of is Type O Negative’s first album.
It was basically a weird combination of our singer’s goth songwriting on top of whatever riffs me or the guitarist (who was where the more straightforward metal elements came from) came up with. So sometimes it was basically sped-up doom metal 
Thanks to music streaming I can listen to it I’d come to a concert… you need to tour Germany though.
I only saw Type O Negative once many years ago at Wacken and it was mostly memorable because they kept stopping because the singer had to go backstage for what we thought were more drugs…
Well, I’d first have to find out what the rest of the band are doing these days 
2007? I was there too! 
I picked up the special edition version of their last album specifically because it came with a DVD of that show.
Yes That was my last Wacken (we’re now going to festivals closer to home and Wacken is too big)
2007 was legendary!
2007 was actually my first! And speaking of recordings, there’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment in Overkill’s set where the camera is zoomed in directly on my face.
I went to 2008 and 2010 as well. 2010 was the last time I went to any kind of festival. It was actually my “holiday” after spending the previous two weekends “working” at High Voltage and Sonisphere here in the UK (the sum total of the work I did was about 45 minutes of DJing at Sonisphere).
We’ve been making progress in getting more art framed; we now have one bedroom wall as a mini-gallery for some of it. And we have our final new bookshelves set up (the ones that hold the graphic novels). Now we just have to figure out what goes on top of the shelves . . .
Okay, guitars!
In order I got them:
Martin D15. My dad got me this for my A levels. My brother wasn’t doing well in school so anything above a C was plus money, everything below a C was minus money. Then it was my turn, and the rules stayed the same for equality. Swept up! At the time this was the cheapest solid wood Martin available, but now mahogany is ridiculously expensive with the trade limits, it was a sound investment! It’s covered in notches from where I accidentally banged it against the desk at uni.
Epiphone Dot. My second electric guitar (my first I sold to a friend of a friend). It weighs a tonne and I don’t play it much. I think I either need to sell it or trick it out.
Reverend Double Agent (Anniversary edition). My first mid-tier electric guitar. P90 + a custom humbucker. It’s nice, but I don’t play it much anymore.
Mexican Stratocaster. I didn’t have a strat, and it’s one of the staples. So I figured I may as well. Play it a bit for that strat sound, but it isn’t one of my main guitars. Just good to have around. Strats feel different.
Powercaster. A special edition fender guitar. Feels very grunge. I love it. Want to swap out the pickups and get a tortoiseshell pickguard in. Shortscale neck so feels like a great throw around guitar.
Martinique. This was designed when fibreglass was a new material. A guitar made out of fibreglass was the height of technology. Fibreglass kinda resonates, so a guitar made out of fibreglass must sound great!.. They sound terrible. Great with fuzz though. Similar to the sound made famous by The White Stripes. I probably shouldn’t have bought this one, but it was on sale and I was weak. Everything about it is cheap, and the neck is so chunky!
American Jazzmaster Original 60s. Jazzmaster was always my fav guitar and I always wanted an American fender. Worth every penny. One of my main guitars. It’s so beautiful and the jazzmaster pickups just sound completely different to everything else.
Telecaster Pro. Another standard I always wanted in the arsenal. Saw this limited edition colour and couldn’t resist. My current main guitar. I just love it. So comfortable to play and sounds punchier than I expected from single coil pickups.
Wow, that’s impressive. The only thing I know about guitars though is that there wouldn’t be metal music without them. So there’s that. 
So, same question to you? What music do you play? How do you have time for boardgames?
