jimmarchi1's forum posts 8022

maybe they shipped their 'best worst' people over to our site the way NYC used to ship Philly their homeless when I was a kid

the flashback has a great reverse mode

a 50w plexi marshall isn't the same as a bluesbreaker, man.... so I'm sure that your DSL will get 75-80% of the way to plexi or (more likely) metalface 50 land on the low gain channel, hwver I doubt an SS rectified head with EL34s derived from the JCM800 is going to cop a JTM45 convincingly. Apples and apples, but the OP seems more discerning than that.

also, there's a feel thing here.... a good old basic design with a tube rectifier just plays different than a modern channel switcher even if you set them to sound similar

but $425 for any passable 50 watter is a good deal these days

I kinda hate my friend with the Princeton lately, but not because of the Princeton. We really had a falling out and I'm not even sure over what. For a guy who has found countless guitars and amps in the trash and inherited a free house he can be pretty short tempered.

Don't hate me for the Plexi. It served me well and all, but it was so long ago that I got it that $600 was not THAT far below market value for a late period Plexi front.

you didn't sound musically lost, just non-specific... so I picked my top 4 plugins I always seem to open up and at least TRY in a piece of electronic music regardless of style... and at least one of 'em is an oddball that I don't think anyone else uses

I think a lot depends on what type of electronic music you wanna make.

that said, these are my (mostly) off-the-beaten-path indispensable native plugins:

TAL Sampler (if only for the Emulator II mode on the bit reducer section, instant Depeche mode and pet shop boys... great for more than layered pads, layer up lofi snares from bits of live drums, clanging metal in your shed/basement/attic and noise patches from a Moog or ARP to generate some percussion sounds no one else has in their music but with the ability to add a little flavoring of famous hardware sampler engines that make the crazy new sounds sit in a mix in a way that's familiar to a listener... also, it has decent soundfont implementation and there are a lot of packs of free soundfonts drawn from the Emu and Ensoniq preset libraries that can be a useful building block when you want that '85 to '95 kinda thing, especially when you want a retro choir sound for instance)

GRM Tools Stereo Comb Filter (every slider is automatable, think Dust Brothers' Fight Club Soundtrack)

U-He Re-Pro (I use a lot of hardware, but I can't afford an SCI Pro-One and this really nails the sound and the snappy envelopes with a lot of additional functionality.... great layered up with a Moog bass)

NI Absynth (still one of my favorites.... damn did it take me forever to get over the elarning curve, its as hard to program as a DX7, but unlike the DX7 you will get some useable stuff even before you figure out how to imagine a sound and create it precisely through the mammoth Absynth interface, so a must have)

otherwise I use a lot of very standard insert stuff in the box and really exhaust my hardware collection before rooting around my giant library of instrument plugins

I can't help you with Ableton because I just never bonded with it. I got a free version one year from their booth at NAMM (I think the year it came out) and couldn't get into it. At the time it felt very DJ oriented, though I am sure its fantastic now.... but I still can't switch sequencers out of nowhere. Every sequencer switch I've ever made has included years of flirtation with the new product, from 90s, pre-apple Logic to Cubase SX took forever and its taken me even longer to admit that I can take care of everything in Fruty Loops and pretty much abandon Cubase LOL I am a dinosaur. If my old Atari ST still ran I would probably still sequence on her.

you gotta be kidding me Zach.... that tops when I got a Plexi from a pawn shop that was going udner for $600 and is right on par with when my friend found a brownface fender Princeton on the curb in Philadelphia with a someone's trash and it WORKED FINE once he popped a pair of new 6V6es in it

to be fair, I regularly use a '68 Traynor as a doorstop, but tis nto worth that much and I occasionally lay through it too

so did she fire up for your buddy with no problems or did she need a recap?

Jim's is where to start for sure tho. Grab a DI box dirt cheap.

For the benefit of the OP, lemmee state that it has to be PASSIVE (which is cheaper), a powered DI is a one way street for your signal, HI Z unbalanced (1/4" guitar) to LOW Z balanced (XLR mic), so you need a cheap passive like a Whirlwind. They cost almost nothing, work in reverse, and sound fine for most applications.

The Radial "Voco-Loco" to match levels/impedance etc. & plug in all your pedals just how you like & give your house sound guy the output XLR cable. Fun to fuck with things real time if you want too. Oh yeah, it has a phase switch & phantom power too. Think $100ish (way more than a DI)

I've not tried the Voco Loco, but if its as nice as the Radial reamp, active Radial DIs and Tonebone ABY then I am sure its worth every penny if you can spare the money. $100 sounds reasonable to me, but I allocate a lot of budget to gear since becoming single again.

An aside on distortion-I've kept a regular Marantz cassette deck wired in for years now. Love hitting it hard for a different kinda distortion. Cheap fun & I've had a bunch of people over the years ask me how I got "that distortion/compression madness". From my home stereo.

last time I made a rock record we made a lot of use of an old Wolensac 1 track 1/4" reel to reel with tobe electronics. A $20 pawn shop investment that made a fabulous vocal processor for varying degrees of compression, distortiona nd loftiness (not the ebst designed tube front end for fidelity on these cheap old recorders).... if you find the right one it will have built in speakers with their own tube power amp at about 5 watts a side. Interesting sound from the inbuilt speakers, but if you break out your soldering iron and hack it at the output transofrmer you can drive a guitar cab with it! It even ahs an intersting sound on guitar itself to overload the tube preamp, overload the tape and get the record heads hitting the little power amp and your speaker cab.... Marantz, Wolensac, 3M all made these things in the 50s and 60s and one in good nick shouldn't cost more than $100, probably less. They turn up regularly on fleabay these days.

you don't have a $20 passive DI? jeez, I have so many I could mail you one... handy utility box. I just assumed everyone had one. I am not talking about a ncie DI like a Radial active or the classic Countryman. We are talking those cheap boxes by Whirlwind and Samson that you find next to the XLR cables in big box guitar/gear retailers...

you can regularly find better passive DIs like the Groovetubes unit for under $20 used on Ebay, I know you can because I bought a passive GT DI for about $15 shipped last year when I was unhappy with the sound of my active Radial and my long-serving Whirlwind passives for taking a line level signal off the speaker out of one of my guitar amps, --NERD ALERT-- but the groovetubes ahs served me well for a lot of other applications, especially in synth world where I might want to patch an effect into a semi modular but I need to switch impedance, convert to and from unbalanced and have some phase flip available before the channels trip I'm recording into.... its also been good to me using the EF86 channel of my Matchless as a standalone tube isntrument preamp taking a balanced lineout off that channel's effects loop while the amp is on a dummy load to protect the transformer.

--DOUBLE NERD ALERT--

What I am suggesting is super low cost and gives you a relatively hifi, noise-free signal (well, as noise free as your stomps are with a guitar plugged in, anyway). Mixing and matching impedances can have a negative inpact on how your effects perform, particularly dirt boxes (maybe it'll be cool, but for a few bucks give yourself some options) and willy nilly going from balanced to unbalanced connections can introduce ground hum if you so much as breathe the wrong way. Want to piss off a soundman? Give him a highly driven vocal signal with a bunch of mains hum! He'll take your vocal outta the mix for spite. An XLR to unbalanced 1/4" is not decoupling pin 3 the same way as a transformer based device. Its a tiny investment to give yourself somewhere to go if your setup is underperfoming. By all means, do whatever works, but if something is working creatively but failing technically one should have the tools to address the problem when they are this cheap.

ask a nerd a question, get a technical answer

another suggestion, can GChiaren program me a random comment generator so that when I can't think of anything snotty to say I can just click 'random' and get something appropriate, like "that's a better paperweight than a guitar amp," etc?

yo

Vintage Guitar

ah!

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/h6S94DIdyKA/hqdefault.jpg

electrical face palm, ya dangus

w/o lsitening to your clips which are studio recordings and could eb all manner of things treating the vocal track, let me make a general budget-friendly suggestion;

if you already have guitar effects in the styles you need, you can try running your mic into a passive direct box backwards to get a HI Z, unbalanced signal into your effects chain and then run that into a line input on the PA or console/interface, this is a fast and dirty approach to interfacing guitar gear with studio and sound reinforcement gear, but it works well enough for what you're talking about attempting... I've done a fancier version of this in the studio, slapping recorded vocals back through a high gain guitar amp or an old tube tape machine driving a PA cab using a radial reamp but I also shared a bill with a band a few times who used a cheap, whirlwind passive DI in reverse as I described to put the vocals into a Proco Rat and DD3 for a dirty slapback sound that suited their style. They just sued the stage mics provided by the venue too, just yanked the vocal mic outta input 1, stuck into the DI and gave th engineer an unbalanced line return from the effects to an unused channel allowing him to leave the channel 1 vocal sound up for bands like mine with a conventional vocal sound on stage.

At the end of my band's run we started taking a small rack with a channel strip and some processors to get our vocal sound consistent and we borrowed this other band's approach giving the engineer our singer's sound to mix in on an used channel as he saw fit, but with all the effects presets dialed in to sound like her no matter how small the shows (the shows ahd gotten pretty lame at the end).

HEY BOOM!

wait, are Dinosaur Jr NORMALLY lurking at the end of your street?

I want to make some Heisenberg Uncertainty music that is a different song depending on how you listen to it.

check check check

I am free to work on music today and I have awful writer's block on all the half finished material I have sitting around, I wanna scream

we could do this all day, but I am going to break the cycle of gear jokes! wait, cycling gears, shit....

jazzmaster singles are totally their own sound, nothing like them being big, flat coils with polepiece magnets versus the usual tall-boy type of single or a P90 that's big, medium depth and uses a bar magnet underneath

your humbuckers may distort too easily, but there's a wide range (no pun intended) of outputs in bucker world... Guild and Gretsch buckers are generally much lower output than even the weakest Gibson buckers of any era, much loser to a tele in output.... the PAF copies in my Greco are very humbuckery in tone, tight and controlled, but are no hotter than the early 50s output bridge pickup in my esquire, totally drowned out by the T-Tops in my SGs whicha re not particularly hot when compared to a lot of modern buckers and are way weaker than the smokin' hot output custom/hybrid pickups I've been using in my LP and Washburn for thick lead tones... so you may just wanna try swapping out for something weaker before you rag on buckers! I ragged on them for a decade but once I played a lot more variations of bucker I found a number of designs I like for different applications and finally came around to some really hot ones again in those 2 guitars I mentioned above. But most of my gibbies range in output from 50s tele to low wind P90 and do great edge of breakup sounds.... if you also miss the single openness, varying degrees of coil mismatching in a bucker gets different balances of single coil openness and humbucker focus. We live in the second golden age of pickups, there's something out there for everyone in every form factor.

https://youtu.be/yCF90x1oKwQ?t=50s

but even my fast metal-y songs feel like they are in a different.... wave or something. Your music makes me feels slightly rushed and uncomfortable. I'm not knocking it, I just find this very interesting.

I was trying to figure out what you meant by this and after thinking about it all morning instead of doing anything productive I am assuming you mean that my writing style is 'tense and urgent', that's how I would generally characterize my goal when writing songs.... tension, urgency (even slow numbers).... I am always trying to pull the listener along in a way they aren't going to be 'happy' about (this has more times than not been a financial mistake, but I can't help myself). There's plenty of happy music and plenty of straight mopey music.... plenty of evil doomy music, but I always want to be subtle where if a song is menacing or mopey its not overtly so and doesn't employ stereotypical motifs to create the mood. Makes people more uncomfortable.... or hopefully it does. I dunno. I coulda just read your comment wrong anyway.

There's a Beethoven sonata I really like, the appassionata, and I am always trying to get that kidna urgency into pop tunes without overtly copping the master.... as if I could get close to this shit with my meager skills, but hey, can't spite a failed rockstar for trying

https://youtu.be/UCbLHfYkiwg

I get all misty eyed about some gear.... certain pieces are like ex girlfriends you remember fondly but probably wouldn't date again.

here's a really big piece of gear porn:

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/c3/51/ab/c351ab4b9db84d85a8d4f2796c32caba.jpg

its all a bit hazy, I really want to think I found the site in a random google search just trying to figure out if anyone famous was playing some piece of gear I had recently acquired and when I looked around the site I was really taken with the member boards as a way to catalog all my gear... sometimes I forget what I have, but now I can look at my equipboard, which is nice! Being able to look at that long list of junk ahs definitely made me more frugal towards new gear, though is till go through bouts of purchasing once or twice a year. The main thing I remember was being impressed by the whole site and the mission to make am easy and accurate visual reference of what all these successful people use.

wow, I can't remember!

I would love to hear what you've been writing and I doubt I will be bored. I have my own aesthetic.... as we all do. Which is what makes music fun.

I appreciate your kind words.... my approach to tempo is fluidity. Every piece has a tempo at which its most fluid and I experiment until I find it. In the case of my old band much time was spent locking in general tempos in pre-production, about a week of continuous work in a big rehearsal space with lots of lsiteners to lend opinions.... but when recording we were not slavish, if the song wane to speed up during the drum sessions we faded the click down and elt the drummer go at it....

I buy a lot of old guitars sight unseen too, usually with good reults

on alternate tunings, I think this is my best drop D song, where I think I wrote it on piano and in standard and then took it to drop D with totally weird open voicings

there's also some very cool guitar sounds in the electric parts.... a dual showman, a regular showman with the trem engaged, a 50s Magnatone 'mother of toilet seat' 1x10 combo that has a real distinctive ring from the 6SJ7 pentode in the preamp.... an old supro aginst a top hat portly cadet in the bridge.... probably a 60s original or 90s reissue plexi or my purple JMP for slide, maybe a tweed bassman, can't remember, probably a plexi and not my hot rod though.... I think there's a marshall 18 or 20 watter in it too... guitars were a new LP TV special, a 90s tele, a 70s LP jr, a couple of older LP standards, my 80s carvin thinline and of course an old Madeira acoustic

I was always thoroughly put out by how Elissa's lyrics collapsed after the 1st verse.... it started s strong, but she refused to revise a word even though it gets kinda dumb, progressing from dopey in verse 2 to idiotic in the bridge and 2rd verse

I just bought beer. maybe alter I will try your 'flatted 5th' drinking game....

a decent selectrion, throw in some odler stuff that everyone from every generation knows knows.... there's tuff I like on my lsit but I left off a perennial bar gig favorite, 'Brown Eyed Girl' Them/Van Morrison.... easy to play, loved by everyone, and Van is Irish and soa re you

I'm thinking not Woody, man.... he reminds me of Jeff Baxter of Steely Dan and the Doobies a bit too, but its not him either

anyway, a good overview there for general uses of the old tritone

link?

well, for guitar purposes a diatonic harmony is a doublestop, so my chord approach is often to couple up double stops, often just a pair of them will do fine... they move independently and form denser, more emotive harmonies but can easily resolve to a triad.... the more advanced power chord guys are doing something similar, but only half of it, allowing the bass and the elad to make up the 2nd diatonic group that at its best will be simple counterpoint in the top and bottom

a good way toa ttempt this approach is to begin with the bass and extreme high part and then when they counterpoint nicely to harmonize each separately and then find chord voicings that allow you to whack through them as chords easily, usually it can be done very easily... it will help if you have a solid draft of the melody when beginning the harmonization

well, no need to piss yourself, you can just get a book if you are that interested, class helps with the finer points, but books are good for people who already have some grounding

its funny, when I jotted down those chord changes for that song you like, I ahd to think it over because in classical we don't do the chord naming thing and its something I stopped thinking about after I stopped playing in a big band where its the linchpin of the guitar charts.... on piano or guitar I build chords through basic counterpoint, a more classical approach, generally using 2+ moving diatonic harmonies to generate the chords or having a melodic top, bassline type bottom moving with a less busy diatonic or triad middle

I always have to backtrack and remember my jazz years tow rite a pop lead sheet, fortunately I remember the chord naming conventions, but while those terms generally come from classical the more complex naming and the symbols and stuff come from jazz/blues and its a real Americana thing that grew out of the need to improvise as American music diverged from European folk as the 20th century began --- and most musicologists will tell you that improvisation was born out of the demands of drunken dancers looking for longer and longer tunes with hotter grooves at the end (or whatever they called it back then)... totally un-clasical

I thought the drinking age was lower over there.... he should be legal for beer at 16, right?

speaking of which, I could go for a beer.....

I don't mean to be obscure, really...

hahaha, I wasn't accusing you of telling me mah business yall

I find myself needing to tune down sometimes too for the same reasons you do. Especially with acoustic guitar parts as they just have THE SOUND in 1st position.... sure I can find other inversions, takes 2 seconds, but sometimes only campfire chords will do... this is doubly s o when I am writing and arranging on my piano and not a guitar