jimmarchi1's forum posts 8022

exactly, proven technology refinedfor high performance and reliability... even something like a Dynakit is so reliable and sounds great but is still accurate enough to use to power passive studio monitors.... and if it happens to go down and its not a tube its easy to diagnose and repair

you look at old tube amps and an amazing quantity of them are going strong with minimal service, many for 60+ years.... I've owned and used a few field-coil equipped Gibson guitar combos with the leather covering that were still performing well on all original parts, even the filter caps... you look at transistor technology and the track record is not so good, my Oberheim SEM analog synth module really needs service and its only about 40 years old... parts tolerances are better than ever these days but a lot of these surface mount and miniature parts designed for PCB use since the 70s are just not as durable as the older stuff from PTP, turret, terminal and tag designs... even in high end pro audio, you look at Neve modules that are PCB, but all discreet parts, super well designed, they still seem to need a lot of service compared to old tube gear and when theya ren't working they REALLY DON'T WORK

I am curious to see what a lot of the 1st and 2nd gen digital studio technology does now that its aging in... I know you used to see a lot of malfunctioning Eventide 910s, but I wonder if stuff like the Yamaha SPX90 and the Lexicon PCMs that are so fulla ICs, miniature resistors and caps will still be running as they reach 50... will the original PODs be working right in 2040? how much 'cutting edge' music technology will be happily making music as it rounds another century, because I suspect those old tube amps will be playing fine... plus it will all still sound relevant, whereas the high tech stuff is constantly coming Obsolete. Already I would assume that no one cares if a 1st gen POD is failing. Although in studio processors some early stuff has a 'sound' and never goes out of style... in guitar gear it seems like modern technology just doesn't become timeless like the old tube tech.

by the way, I am so sick of carrying tube amps around, I really want a modeler to come along that can replace my babies.... I am just suspicious as I've been let down so many times by newfangled gadgets... and for the cost I really expect perfection from the Kemper once I profile my amps right

its scary puttiing what amounts to a little computer in place of your ancient tube amps that sue tried and true technology that predates even my dad's birth

let the front of your brain go somewhere else while the musical part of your brain just does what its made to do, which is be part of the music.... everything will follow from there and you will have more fun without trying.... and I don't know about you but I know I play better when I am having fun

fun! with a good partner and a pregame martini? wooo

playing on stage is the same as dancing, you wanna be relaxed and enjoy the music with the audience not sweatin' it, just be one with the band, loose and easy.... all aspects of the performance will happen without effort once you are just comfortable playing as you with people you like to play with... but aside from being comfortable in your musical skin you need to becomfortable being you with people watching you, its like dancing, not wrestling

well, feel is hard to describe, its how an amp repsonds to your dynamics, picking techniques, touch just the finer points... and by resposne that covers compression artifacts, overdrive characteristics (and I don't just mean overt drive like a pedal, I eman something else as most tube amps are creating subtle harmonic distortion even when you think they are set clean, most speaker designs for guitar add some THD too even at 1 watt).... I am having trouble talking about this as its hard to explain. An amp with great feel is like an extension of your guitar.... an amp with poor feel is like plugging into your dad's stereo, the instrument ends at the output jack and you can't play the amp and speaker, it has no feel

on a side note, those guys drive me nuts, total sales people who spout things like 'great feel' because they've read people on forums say similar things and decided to use those words to sell ya stuff... or at least that's my impression of them, at least Rob can play some (though he's really heavy handed when he does anything non metal), the Capt is a truly terribly musician

feel is ahrd to define but hard to miss when you put 2 amps next to eachother.... all 5 of my ac30 type amps have different feel... same basic type of sound but they feel way different so apart from the subtle tone differences from amp to amp I play them differently, I just do different stuff even with the same notes through say the '62 and the reissues and even different still through the arbiter that's way stiffer and aggressive

I am just talking apples to apples here, start comparing Hiwatts to Voxes or something like that and the sound might be similar at times but the feel is way off, the hiwatt is firm, Hifi, bold, the vox is buttery, fast but sometimes spongey, hard to explain

maybe get some very different amps against eachother and just try playing some licks into them one after another enxt time you hit a guitar store..... maybe do a solid state modelling amp, a good Marshall (plexi or 800 reissue?), a blackface fender RI, an ac30 and a modern amp like a mesa or a blackstar....g et the frequency response and levels of gain/vol close on all of em and then have at its and feel the magic

instead of being more aware of yourself on stage learn to be less aware of your body regardless of what you are doing.... want to emote well and never look down at the fretbaord? learn to forget yourself and the audience.... your sub-conscious is playing tricks on you at shows, Boom. Instead of thinking what you are going to do or what you think you look like think about something else or nothing at all. Going to ballroom and swing dancing lessons with a girl I used to see back before I married really got me to just feel the music and let my body do its thing without thinking about it. You may laugh, but just letting yourself follow those steps while thinking about getting the dry cleaning or talking to your dance partner about where you're going to get a drink later really teaches you to be more natural on stage and to just elt the music happen while you connect with the audience.

how can you get the feel of an amp from a video? I don't understand that.... I don't think you know what I'm saying by feel and response.... maybe because you've only played solid state for any extended periods, although you are covering one aspect with your talk about ther perceived 'speed' of the amp versus the kemper

NERD ALERT:

as a tube amp enthusiast and a guy who knows digital technology I don't think that the impulse having a faster response is at all counterintuitive because even in a solid state rectified tube amp the response is governed by a ton of components that supply or pass current and voltage on froms tage to stage none of which will ever be ideal (you can make a tube guitar amp 'faster' with modern hifi parts but you will also sacrifice some character to the sound, its just not done, and even then no aprts are perfect in analog) and these components have completely variable performance based on a number of factors from the amplitude, pitch and envelope of the signal they are being asked to pass along down to normal fluctuations in wall voltage, temperature etc.... sot eh impulse will be more consistent over, say a 30 minute period and it maye not behave exactly the same with the same phrase played thru it as the amp modelled just because the impulse will behave the same way to the same material every time whereas the tube amp will vary a little, particularly in attack/decay/compression character... plus the power amp pumping up the kemper or the direct recording equipment will influence the finished sound as well, but I am nerding out

I actually wouldn't expect a tube amp to be clearer, I think the 1s and 0s can do that fine at least in the limited bandwidth if an electric guitar signal.... but warmth? define that first, because no 2 people mean the same thing when they say a warm tone.... at least that's what I noticed without fail as a studio engineer

If I had 5 disposable grand, I'd buy a Kemper setup.

I still feel a little suspicious, but yeah, me too.... and if it wasn't 100% the bees knees I would return it and but this guy's Kelly for the stable

for the asking price the fucking Kemper had better replicate my old amps 100% (not just sound to the audience but feel/response to each of my favorite guitars) once I profile them.... that's right, ONE HUNNERT PER CENT, YALL

I can tell you that while I was impressed by axe FX2 and Helix they don't hang with the real deal, fine for some purposes and some types of playing I guess.... the asking price is not so high as the Kemper though, so.... they get some slack

if I dumped 4 or 5k into a Kemper with an inbuilt power amp or an FRFR speaker system to do cab modelling I would wanna be able to profile my stable and thin the herd

hahaha, I am well known around here for my pissy commentary

I hear ya.... I remember when I was purging all my old Marshall pieces, I sold everything locally in town because even though I had to deal with some real wankers before finding legit buyers it was just less hassle and I pocketed piles of cool cash.... required a lot of patience though, even the dentist and podiatrist set will try to low ball you, nitpick and guilt you out when you have desirable stuff and want market value.... its like, dude vintage superleads, this is a median price I'm asking, if you can find ones this clean inside at sam ash or somewhere they will cost twice my asking price, dumbass... if you make 10 times my salary you can afford the buy in, man up and stand your ground with the wife or piss off, I'll wait for someone who takes their sound seriously

wow, is the market that good for the Kelly amps these days? definitely too rich for my blood! I own and have owned some extremely desirable old amps but I don't think I've ever broken the $3k mark on a purchase

maybe you should pop her on Reverb.com or talk to a serious amp dealer like Ultrasound.... anyway, best of luck with the sale in this uncertain economy

for those unfamiliar with the Kelly amps they come from the early boutique era, roughly contemporary with the mesa mk1 and Dumble ODS and very much in that spirit... a well kept secret even amongst guitar amp entusiasts until the recent reissues

correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't the Kelly's 6V6 based as opposed to the 6L6 based power sections Smith and Dumble favored?

If I could justify yet another guitar amp purchase I would buy her.... she's probably worth owning just so you can tell people she used to belong to one of the guys in supertramp. Lets face it, you don't have to like supertramp to have fun saying ' here's mah supertramp-amp.'

its a shame, but I am probably one of the only people on EB who would be interested in making this purchase and I just can't justify it having impulse bought 4 amps last year alone...

what are you asking for her?

I can't tell who's joking anymore.

ammunition? 100 lbs? that seems like s lot of bullets.... have you suffered frequent bear attacks?

This semester, I've been using the plastic bags from the school book store to carry my books. I've been too lazy to find and clean out my old backpack.

just wow... you're like a recycling genius or total bum, not sure which

I always liked the messenger bag format because its good for more than just schoolbooks.... more of a man purse

aww man, patches, that takes me back to the 90s.... I wonder what ever happened to the messenger bag I sued to carry around the city.... it was covered with industrial and punk band patches I would love to see again...

$450 seems high for a musicman, they sued to trade for $100 when I was a kid.... I'm sure they're worth more now, but I would try to keep it under $400 if I was shopping for one, especially one in rough cosmetic condition

they made a lot of them and they never break so I am sure there's more than enough musicman models that demand isn't outstripping supply, $450 just seems steep.... see if they'll haggle down 100 bucks

yeah, its kinda like pontificating that a 59 standard is an ideal guitar to play Zeppelin covers

interestingly there was a time when the tele really went out in country music circles.... the strat really took over for awhile and even now that Paisley brought the tele back to Nashville you see a lot of guys sporting gibsons and stuff

I've been home A LOT, barely left my house since Friday and I think I got stir crazy... and all I've done that wasn't kid related was make music and putter on the web

I'm a crazy person and if I don't interact with other people, just toddlers and machines? I forget how to act and starting talking and typing out loud....

It depends what your are going to use it for... Telecasters are good for more country (Brad Paisley) or rhythm for rock (Izzy Stradlin) Stratocatser are more useful for lead (Eric Clapton, Eddie Van Halen...) I personally have a Stratocaster and you can use it for rhythm but it gives a lot of feed back.

I think my esquire is probably my favorite lead guitar.... could use more upper fret access and the vintage fretboard radius makes it challenging (even with fairly high action you need to be really conscious of how you bend and vibrato), but it just makes you work at it when you wanna go high or avoid the really high shrieking stuff and play more creatively... any time I can get away with a little single coil hum I invariably go for this guitar because it fights me and it has a tough sound when overdriven, the notes just jump outta the speakers.... it basically does 2 sounds, warm but bright and really bright.... no fussing around, no nonsense guitar for lead and it really makes you get creative compared to something like my LPs thata re smooth, forgiving, easy to play and chock full of sounds that don't require playing technique to produce (just start adjusting controls on your LP between phrases its like an FX unit).... the great thing about teles and particularly the esquire is you are really limited to what you can do with just your hands and feet (if you are using FX) and you gotta really play into the fuckers which generally makes for some creative decisions... theya re underrated lead guitars, particularly for rock, but in the hands of a guy who will embrace the tele thing? powerful stuff comes out that the same guy won't give you on a gibby or a strat

Model T is sort of like if Fender made a Marshall superlead (at least one of the versions, there are 2 distinctly different preamps, but the plexi type one is most common).... my teles LOVE gain pedals into cranked Marshalls.... so it will beat you senseless in a good, Fugazi kinda way

when did you get a Model T? seems a bit loud for you LOL

I don't know... I usually don't like to delete stuff no matter how insane it sounds.

everyone stop reading anything I posted this week, I had a little too much free time and felt kinda belligerent about music and started posting all this craziness.... I mean, what I was getting at makes perfect sense, but it was whacky to go necroposting and goading boom

sorry Boom, I had a mental health moment there for a little

is that one of the hybrid ones like the 120? If its the one I am thinking, it has a good clean sound, though its a little stiff. The transistor front end is part of it, but the power amp design is definitely one of Leo's firmest. Definitely in silverface fender turf for feel versus some of the other hybrids of the era like the hybrid Peavey Classics that have a bit more give. But the musicman amps definitely sound better to me, they have a nice hifi quality to the sound, they're just really unforgiving and hard to play into. Joan Jett still tours with one, they're very roadworthy. Come to think of it I have never seen a musicman of that era broken....

well, its good you're getting next to the 90s fender though, I think you just need to change your expectations of it

maybe you can get some insider info in exchange for sexual favors?

we all love Rumble, man.... and link wray is strumming chords.... but to say a song with a lot of interweaving 1 line stuff is devoid of chords is just inaccurate, any combination of notes containing more than a diatonic harmony is technically a chord.... though, in a sense chords don't exist and NO SONGS CONTAIN CHORDS.... and certainly music does not rely on them

I had the day off yesterday and got drunk posting so sorry for being a tool.... but I just noticed this while Lu was napping and was like "WTF"

like, what do most guitar/bass/synth people think about music? because most of the people on this site make zero sense to me... there's a point of view most of the members here espouse that is shockingly limiting, music is a complex set of ratios and confining the viewpoint fro which you try to understand its intricacies seems weird.... by all means write a pop lead sheet to rehearse a song with new people, but .... like.... ummm.... I think I need to do more drinking today to explain myself

ya can't just shoehorn everything into a working musician's box based on what the players are voicing on their instrument on a given recording, a song is bigger than that and I am always trying to put that out there to these younger guys who are really untrained... so I drunk posted when reading your reply 6 months late I was like "but wait!"

I will say, the OP psoted the song 'without chords' and clearly he was thinking about the larger contextual music that arrived at the finished arrangement/recording you are focusing on so hard... I suck at explaining music in words, its frustrating

you're such a sweetheart

necropost, but I got bored and decided tos ee what I missed last year

what the fuck are you talking about, Boom? jazz is fulla chords even if in some jazz idioms no single instrument is responsible for the full voicing in a given arrangement, the chart in jazz denotes all of the changes above the other score elements and there's room for creative license, but man do I love when guys with no jazz background say things like 'jazz chords' or 'its just jazz noodling'

just wtf? some of the thing people say?

look, there's no such thing as a chord anyway, chords don't exist and they are not part of a song musically or even legally speaking.... they are an academic construct of potential harmonic movement around melodic and contrapuntnal bass elements...if pop/rock/electronic/whatever musicians would disabuse themselves of some of these rockist notions about harmony then music would be so much more interesting again

I talk about chords as a convenient phenome for disseminating harmonic ideas to instrumentalists... this is not pure music, its convenience once the pure music is coming into existence

wait? people are down on the pro08? I think she sounds great and I want one! Not an old 5, but way more stable and compatible with a modern setup.... she has a lot of the cut of the original from my store-based noodling... polysynths are just weird beasts anyway. Much ahrder to reissue an early poly design with modern features and stability and maintain the sound, yet all the new analog polys have great sounds to my ear and people should shut up and embrace a new instrument for its charm like you are doing.... not knock on it because its not the same as the older synths in the lineage.

Your sample there sounds great, maybe a little less complex than an old SCI poly, but 1) who can afford one (even in the late 70s upon release of the 5 we were talking about a costly machine)? and 2) who can keep one in tune? My friend had one and we would have to sample little loops because the drift would go from 'thickening goodness' to detuned bullshit in about 90 seconds... this sample sounds at least as good as a Jupiter 8 or 6, and that's high praise.

oi, here we go again guys

studio standard, treat them gingerly, they are not built as well as the competition

the pro is really a strat/tele (especially tele) amp because the 15" smooths things out up top whereas the super I think of as the humbucker configuration, though a les paul and a pro is fine, you just might need more treble and the lows will have a looser 50s blues quality versus the tighter sound from the super that's more out and out rock

its a complicated 1st build man, really complex.... have you ever built a champ? or even some pedals?

anyway, you need to TRY a pro or super first to make sure I am not barking up the wrong tree with this, but I think one of those 2 combos will get your rocks off pretty good....

how ya making out with that 90s fender combo?

some time I'll send you the ultra-long review of the handwired AC4 reissue I wrote for EB that Michael and Gchiaren rejected when I couldn't find anything I was willing to cut! I just couldn't take a word out, I felt like it was too sparse on info in the form I submitted LOL

apparently I am not cut out for gear journalism, I write a book on every circuit before even discussing performance of the model under review

yeah, I have problems.... I get the gist and then realize I forgot some details.... or I come up with another train of thought. Especially with amps, its a very complicated topic if you wanna be picky.

yes, the mojo kits are very nice, a distinct cut above the webers... my pro is a mutt, real fender reissue cab (not sure what happened to the amp), some mojo bits, some stuff the guy who made it used from his stash of old parts, weber 15" alnico, fender transformers.... I have it lstied as a reissue, but its a mix of kit stuff and god knows what vintage and RI stuff assembled by a lunatic tech... I would have to get a hold of him to find out what is what in her

so I have a semi-mojotone pro copy

dude, what are you talking about....

also, I dumped more info in your amp thread

I give everyone the benefit of the doubt anymore as I mouthed off to enough members last years LOL I'm trying to be nicer to people who maybe inadvertantly disrespect our behavioral guidelines when they're new. But another bot like post and I'll ban 'her' from the forum.

so, if 'you' are reading this because you're actually a person, don't spam the forum again, girly...

anyway, I need to draw a picture of a strat fighting a tele like a couple of anthropomorphized guitar pugilists and upload it for this thread