Photo by Cornel Putan Alin.
Madrid, Spain (February 27, 2014) – Guitarists and devotees of flamenco music around the world are mourning the death of Paco de Lucia, heralded as the greatest flamenco guitarist of our time, at age 66. De Lucia reportedly suffered a heart attack while playing with his children on a Caribbean beach resort in Mexico and died at a local hospital on the evening of February 25.
Born Francisco Gustavo Sánchez Gomes in 1947 in the Spanish port city of Algeciras, de Lucia began playing traditional flamenco guitar at an early age. His father and two brothers also played flamenco guitar, and the four of them accompanied another brother who was a flamenco singer. A child prodigy, de Lucia made his radio debut at age 11 and recorded his first album at 14. At that time, de Lucia took his professional name to honor Lucia Gomes, his Portuguese mother.
For many years, de Lucia devoted himself to traditional flamenco music and became recognized as a master of the genre, following in the footsteps of Sabicas, the great flamenco guitarist de Lucia first met as a youngster. Sabicas became de Lucia’s mentor and friend, and eventually de Lucia was widely acknowledged as Sabicas’ successor.
But de Lucia’s restless musical curiosity and interest in jazz and Latin music led him to explore new sounds. Through collaborations with John McLaughlin, Al Di Meola, Larry Coryell, and Chick Corea, de Lucia introduced the fiery rhythms and lightning-fast runs of flamenco to rock and jazz guitarists around the world who—until hearing de Lucia—had little familiarity with traditional Spanish and Gypsy music. Released in 1981, Friday Night in San Francisco, which featured de Lucia, Di Meola, and McLaughlin, sold more than a million copies and is considered one of the greatest live acoustic-guitar albums of all time.
"To have worked and played music with Paco is one the greatest blessings in my life,” says McLaughlin. “In the place where he lived in my heart, there is now an emptiness that will stay with me till I join him."
Though guitarists enthusiastically embraced de Lucia’s “nuevo flamenco,” not everyone in the flamenco world endorsed this new sound. Like Ravi Shankar, who brought the melodies, timbres, and rhythms of sitar and Indian classical music to the West and was decried by traditionalists for doing so, de Lucia had critics in Spain who saw the marriage of flamenco and jazz as diluting the pure form. But also like Shankar, de Lucia never lost his heartfelt connection with his musical roots, and his stunning technique, impassioned improvisations, and artful compositions always honored the music he learned as a child in Spain. De Lucia will be remembered as flamenco guitar’s greatest ambassador and one of the finest musicians to ever hold a nylon-string guitar.
Revv G3 Purple Channel Preamp/Overdrive/Distortion Pedal - Anniversary Edition
The Revv G3 revolutionized high gain pedals in 2018 with its tube-like response & tight, clear high gain tones. Suddenly the same boutique tones used by metal artists & producers worldwide were available to anyone in a compact pedal. Now the G3 returns with a new V2 circuit revision that raises the bar again.
If 3 Were 6
With six times the controls found on the 1 and 2 versions (if you discount the original’s on/off slider switch,) the LPB-3’s control complement offers pre-gain, boost, mid freq, bass, treble, and mid knobs, with a center detent on the latter three so you can find the midpoint easily. A mini-toggle labeled “max” selects between 20 dB and 33 dB of maximum gain, and another labeled “Q” flips the resonance of the mid EQ between high and low. Obviously, this represents a significant expansion of the LPB’s capabilities.
More than just a booster with a passive tone, the LPB-3 boasts a genuine active EQ stage plus parametric midrange section, comprising the two knobs with shaded legends, mid freq and mid level. The gain stages have also been reimagined to include a pre-gain stage before the EQ, which enables up to 20 dB of input gain. The boost stage that follows the EQ is essentially a level control with gain to allow for up to 33 dB of gain through the LPB-3 when the “max” mini toggle is set to 33dB
A slider switch accessible inside the pedal selects between buffered or true bypass for the hard-latch footswitch. An AC adapter is included, which supplies 200mA of DC at 9.6 volts to the center-negative power input, and EHX specifies that nothing supplying less than 120mA or more than 12 volts should be used. There’s no space for an internal battery.
Power-Boosted
The LPB-3 reveals boatloads of range that betters many linear boosts on the market. There’s lots of tone-shaping power here. Uncolored boost is available when you want it, and the preamp gain knob colors and fattens your signal as you crank it up—even before you tap into the massive flexibility in the EQ stage.
“The preamp gain knob colors and fattens your signal as you crank it up—even before you tap into the massive flexibility in the EQ stage.”
I found the two mid controls work best when used judiciously, and my guitars and amps preferred subtle changes pretty close to the midpoint on each. However, there are still tremendous variations in your mid boost (or scoop, for that matter) within just 15 or 20 percent range in either direction from the center detent. Pushing the boost and pre-gain too far, particularly with the 33 dB setting engaged, can lead to some harsh sounds, but they are easy to avoid and might even be desirable for some users that like to work at more creative extremes.
The Verdict
The new LPB-3 has much, much more range than its predecessors, providing flexible preamp, boost, and overdrive sounds that can be reshaped in significant ways via the powerful EQ. It gives precise tone-tuning flexibility to sticklers that like to match a guitar and amp to a song in a very precise way, but also opens up more radical paths for experimentalists. That it does all this at a $129 price is beyond reasonable.
Electro-Harmonix Lpb-3 Linear Power Booster & Eq Effect Pedal Silver And Blue
