jimmarchi1's forum posts 8022

Welcome, our "bass" moderator is Boom, hes not called Boom for nothing. Please make yourself at home, review some gear for us and contribute to some of the ongoing threads in our jumpin' guitar/bass forum!

and justice for all is a heavy duty amount of mesa studio pre driving a marshall 800 power amp thru the FX loop input

similar tones might be achieved with one of the lower wattage mesa caliber heads

you're not new and I really thought you were joking, I always forget you're a folky

but if you want me to be mean to you I can be because I am in a pretty edgey mood today and I really wanna lash out verbally... got some very disturbing news last night.

You can infer the "watch it" in that statement. I am loud, snide and opinionated but also more legitimately helpful to newbs and youngsters than pretty much all the other mods combined. It just might not be visible unless you follow everything I do on this site.

7 strings.... I think you are pretty much looking at the Ibanez Universe in that department, its what steve vai and korn use and when I was a kid they owned 7 string, so they are the be all end all

how low wattage and how high gain?

Do you mean don't wake the baby low and manowar atop a pile of skulls gainy?

I thought he was joking.... I mean, it say what it is right on it!

oh, okay! well then you have a great country

why on earth did I type that? well its true, but damn, state of shock posting

DELETE time,

but yeah, take your time good sir, my world just got turned upside down yesterday so I am slowing down the music work for a bit

I stillw ant to do this track though, totally enjoying how remixing fits into my hectic schedule!

had it, kinda sick of the abbey type beers, they were the hot shit here when I was a 'kid'

so you are not Belgian? I thought you were saying you were Belgian and your screenname has a seriously low ccountries vibe....

I'll take surfing the solar wind.... the synthesized Kraftwerk vocals are a riot. I can have a lot of fun with them kicking it into a different genre.

San Antonio brews some winning beers... I've ahd Edelweise and liked it. I'm just saying, philly gets EVERYTHING. I've been all over this country and only DC came close to our selection at every random store with a license to sell beer.

I'm not trying to trash Texas, you guys have a lot going for you as a state, though I can't imagine living there.... but I am a real metrosexual, cosmopolitan, liberal northerner. And I have a big mouth.... so I can't imagine surviving the 1st year without a gunshot wound.

I live in the import beer capital of the united states.... the rest of the country lives in the brewski dark ages.

Not that the current flowering of microbreweries isn't fabulous too, but hey, the Delaware Valley has more of those than anywhere save the pacific northwest, and every Portland area micro distributes here. I drink a different beer every weekend if I want to thanks to the build your own 6 pack that's becaome so poular ehre that even the local supermarket does it (and offers a damn fine selection).

But I love dark beer too... porters and stouts have a home here. I recenty got really into this coffee stout by Troeg's out in Hershey PA that really does the business with a piece of chocolate cake.... black ale has been rocking my socks lately too with steak. There are a number of good ones brewed between here and Delaware. But with food the fruitier Belgians can be really fun, especially a wheat ale with fish or an abbey dubbel with a more intense wintery meal like a roast chicken. I probably get to excited about this stuff, but I'm a trained chef and also took a somalier class...

Right across the bridge in Cherry Hill where my kother in law lives we have some of the largest winestores outside of manhattan and California.... I have tasted some Bordeauxs that would change your life....

in a pinch the free Martin tuner app works great, even on my cheap phone

if I didn't have an original snark I would get the polytune clip, it looks way better than a regular snark.... the trouble with these clip-ons is I always misplace them, with so many guitar cases around if I take one with me somewhere it takes me forevr to figure out what case its in. A lot of times its faster to wire up the polytune pedal for electric or to open that Martin app

good info... I wasn't expecting the Mopho to be like sequential circuits gear, I am pretty sure Dave does a prophet reissue (Whorse has one I think), I just thought the Mopho looked like a cool synth in its own right, like the polyevolver. To be frank nothing sounds like the old prophets. I had a friend who literally owned every great integrated analog synth (purchased for peanuts from pawn shops in the very early 90s, bastard) and the original SC stuff just had a special quality to it. The saw oscillator shape is really unique when put next to a Jupiter, Odyssey etc... for better or for worse.

So, I have been remixing for everyone on equipboard this summer.... any chance you wanna pick one of your tracls and hook me up with some stems, loops, samples and let me have at it?

oh! that explains it! there was a point in my early 20s where it was my favorite UK beer and I walked the dog regularly... then one day it just didn't taste the same

thanks for the info!

you little, foreverinmy debt, jesuslovin', heterosexual motherfucker!

you are a discount vox ac4 without the speaker! I totally shoulda made you perform zzzexual favors for the price I cut you on her, but I'm not very gay, so.....

just remember you owe me.

I wasn't asking YOU!

http://www.secretly-important.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/2001-a-space-odyssey-ape.jpg

if I have a question about a Texan beer be sure I will hit you up... until then,

https://cdn.meme.am/instances/500x/51443674.jpg but disregard the bottom part.... dunno what they mean by that.

For the record, when my toddler is being a toolbag I tell him not to be a "dangus"....

boom is right, I have spent thousands of dollars on microphones back when I engineered professionally (I claimed them on my taxes as a business expense ;-) and I always broke even selling them when Iw as dne with them.

If it means anything, I have an AT2020usb and it sounds decent enough for my purposes, sampling, demoing and podcasting. And I have discriminating ears and have owned much better mics.

the only CAD mics worth a damn are the back electret models that predate USB, the equitek series, the rest have no character, sound tinny and generally suck

if you want a copy of protools or a shitty control surface call Avid, otherwise fuck those guys!

best USB mics are the BLUEs and Audio Technicas (BLUE makes a thick and fat sounding capsule, AT makes an airy and open one... in the cheap seats of condenser mic that USB inhabits its a marginal comparison, but if you wanna spend on serious mics and do your conversion downstream after a good pre the difference is seriously noticeable... the BLUE will sound fat over simple arrangements like acoustic guitar and voice, the AT will cut a dense mix well with less high end EQ but won't ever have the low midrange juice of the BLUE, depends what kinda vocal you like and the tone of the voice you are capturing), then there's the blue ball mics thata re a world of their own because some are dynamics and I think one is even a dual ribbon and they all have their own sound, but we are talking condensers.... I think rhode makes something but I've not used it, however I have owned piles of rhode products and every single mic has kicked ass from NT2 to NTV to NTK to NT5 overheads!

DLed at 5am, but I won't have a chance to really listen to it until later today... thanks so much for lending a fresh set of ears! I am sure your master will rock my socks the fuck off.

welcome Ray!

http://equipboard.com/forums/general/topics/the-hello-thread-please-allow-me-to-introduce-myself

you have a mopho? I am always tempted to buy one but they're pricey.... worth it? And how do the new roland juno and JP stack up against the old stuff I cut my teeth on? I still use the shit outta my MKS for juno lines....

welcome, I have a question! how come Newcastle ale doesn't taste the same as it used to?

I'm not a big twin/showman fan either even though I toured with an early blackface showman as part of my wall of amps for years, but I just needed the power and headroom. I really like most of the smaller fenders from the 60s a lot better.

If you played that gig with a silverface twin or reissue that may have been part of your entirely negative impression. There are twins and then there are TWINS, and CBS stopped making TWINS around '72 and fender still hasn't recovered the formula. But the four 6L6 blackface sound is just not that great. It gets a lot of hype for some reason.

BRING ME YOUR STEMS AND FL11 FILES!!!!! I SHALL REMIX YOU! We can rebuild your track, make it stronger, faster....

https://youtu.be/HoLs0V8T5AA?t=42s

tastier

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/564x/17/64/58/1764581694c5047f132ada1d67d67dcf.jpg

https://youtu.be/C-1mYXVP1Ok

GUITR/BASS FORUM!

unless either set are noiseless then I would think its just a difference in wind and maybe wire gauge/insulation and/or magnet grade, and in abss that's pretty subtle, especially if you are not running a top shelf amp that will deliver those nuances from a bass instrument like maybe an eden, ashdown or vintage portaflex or a hwatt 200/sunn 2000S

even then, changing between flat, burnished and roundwound strings in different comninations of wrap/core materials and experimenting with approaching the notes differently, mixing up fingers, thumb and pick? that makes a much bigger difference to a bass sound in the mix than pickup selection! Its not like guitar. Although going active is a big sonic change but it also changes the interaction with your amp and any effects in line before the amp input....

on an Indonesian or Chinese squire I would just stick with stock and not sweat it! concentrate on playing

and so my work here is done:

one can never go wrong with the blue MXR BC108 fuzz, just a classic bright 'n splatty silicon fuzzface with well matched transistors so it cleans up to a chimey OD when you roll back your guitar volume a hair....

you might think its too bright for the extremely toppy AC4, but I think germanium fuzzfaces have a tendency to mud up, even my homebrew silicon fuzzface is a little muddy when hitting an amp that's breaking up

if money's no object the tonebender mk 1.5 ciruit is the god of fuzzfaces to my ear, the vox tonebender and original arbiter borrowed this circuit with a few tweaks (vox brighter, arbiter darker).... if you can find a good clone with proper Mullard OC44 germanium transistors its a fine thing... real ones are rare as hen's teeth

the MJM 3 knob Brit Bender sounds great thru little ac4 type amps as well and the brightness can be tamed.... really for small amps the holy grail is a arbiter rangemaster clone, turn it up full so its distorting on tis own as well as pummeling your amp and you will be rewarded with some amazing fuzzy, cocked wah midrange ass kicking. Well kept secret, super amazing.... remember that all fuzzface, tonebender and rangemaster type devices must be placed directly after your guitar to operate correctly... they can act all weird if they aren't the first thing your guitar sees!

wooly or cutting depending... its a bright amp and does well with the fuzz face and 3 knob tonebenders

if you are talking about big muffs I don't care for them usually so YMMV

I harp on this a lot with guys new at electronic music, but developing a multi-layered sense of front to back space without relying too heavily on artificial reverb is KEY to a great track... reading up on psychoacoustics, particularly how we perceive distance thru treble roll off and/or phase shift at specific frequency ranges can go a long way. This is intuitive recording live performances with microphones and is built into your mix if you have half a clue, but in electronic music one must resort to more trickery than in other idioms.

Go Dads!

welcome.... design any of your on equipment?

good morning,

prepare for a long but EXTREMELY helpful reply from a former professional recording engineer and experience tech/repair man who started on 4 track and reel to reel and was apprenticing when ADAT was everywhere at the start of the DAW explosion (so I understand how all of this stuff works, ALL OF IT)

this is applied science in the service of art, even at the 4 track level, respect it and be disciplined because one cannot make art without knowledge and the ability to apply that knowledge wisely which is what you will hear people refer to as 'craft' or 'technique'... even a DIY punk like Howard Devoto of the Buzzcocks had an enormous amunt of discipline to get from 4 chords to self-releasing "Spiral Scratch"

so take a time out and boot camp yourself, then come back and start over

okay.... there are no dumb questions and I am sure there was a time in the early 90s where I just didn't get it either, but I seem to remember cassette 4 track being pretty intuitive! of course I read a lot about everything I was interested in as a kid and wouldn't dive in without grounding myself at the public library (there was no internet then)... so if you are legitimately this confused GET A BOOK, fuck web guides or forums, that's no way to learn an entire discipline.... pick a night to stay up, drink some red bull or pop some amphetamines and read a basic book about recording back to front and then go back and reread any sections you had trouble following

in the interim before you GET A BOOK, try going online and finding a PDF f the manual for your 4 track and READ IT

here I did it for you http://tascam.com/product/414mkii/downloads/

in answer to your query about plugging your JM straight in, you are not meant to plug your guitar directly into a mixer's line input or into mic preamps using only a TS 1/4" to XLR adapter cable, its an impedance and voltage mismatch ad in the case of the adapter cable it does not present a balanced signal to the preamp.... it won't hurt anything, you can record that way if you like the sound, but....

GET A BOOK

by pin the levels I meant for you to open up the fader on the channel you are recording until the TAPE distrorts but to have the gain trim low enough on the preamp that your source is NOT clipping the preamp.... like running a marshall 800 with the gain pretty low and the master wide open so you are clipping the power amp but not V1 and V2.... just get a book, there is so much to know that I literally do not know how to answer your questions because you are not grounded in the basic terminology

just kidding about the amphetamines, don't take any drugs, just read a book

once you have read a beginners book and you are applying that info on your Tascam and maybe on your computer too then I want you to get a copy of this:

https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=O9ioBAAAQBAJ&source=productsearch&utm_source=HA_Desktop_US&utm_medium=SEM&utm_campaign=PLA&pcampaignid=MKTAD0930BO1&gl=US&gclid=COHe3uiQm84CFcWQNwodtNoE_A&gclsrc=ds

read a chapter every night and keep it with you as a reference

also check this out:

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=3&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwiK847ckZvOAhXJLyYKHfOjCGQQFggoMAI&url=https%3A%2F%2Fmsu.edu%2F~dougl126%2FElectronic%2520Projects%2520for%2520Musicians.pdf&usg=AFQjCNEy6tsNdK8N3aXN2lyAbvXMeMBN9Q&sig2=wtjtJb1hgc6HjShYOdSufw&bvm=bv.128617741,d.dmo

read this: http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&cad=rja&uact=8&sqi=2&ved=0ahUKEwjK0vD4kZvOAhUGHR4KHUgsAKcQFggiMAE&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.audiomisc.co.uk%2FElectronics%2Faudio%2FBasicAnalogue.pdf&usg=AFQjCNGpQAdypgWS05s4Q2QjDf4II1kGyg&sig2=FmBebtef0x3qCRGY3CHJLg&bvm=bv.128617741,d.dmo

just read up, there's a lot to know but tis not rocket surgery... its just a little basic applied science and once you start to get a general understanding of how sound waves become electrons in the form of variable voltage or 1's and 0's and then turn backl into vibrations you can listen back to and enjoy you will find this all to be a lot easier!

also, remember that the only way you get good at anything is to do it every day, so buy up tapes and make as many bad recording as possible, get a free DAW and work on your PC too, learn everything that's not specifically in the books you can by recording every day

are you familiar with the term learning curve? you're on it, get leaning, the basics will be reading, then it will be hands on and you will demo some songs, then more reading, etc etc.... its a lifelong chore if you want to go deep, but you can stop at any level and work at that level depending on how much of your music you are willing to outsource

do you have decent levels coming in? Like you set up a nice hot gains tructure (with tape, especially rinky dink, noisey cassette) you really can't be too hot, you just want to avoid clipping the preamplification circuitry, the harder you hit the tape the more tape-ish it will sound and also a consistently hot signal has better signal to noise....

Does the MK1 hav any metering? can you check with headphones?

It sounds like you are doing everything right and that your record or layback head may be shot, but I dunno w/o touching your machine.... have you tried putting the tape in a regular cassette deck to determine if tis the playback head? one or both sides should play (2 tracks out of 4, the portastudio splits the width of the tape between 2 tracks and then repeats that on the opposite side to squeeze as much bandwidth as possible from the skinny little cassette tape)....

so try testing the playback on a vintage Walkman or tapedeck first and foremost.... if there's nothing on either side of the tape, pop it back in, arm up to record, PIN YOUR LEVELS and see if you get any sound. If its nothing then I suspect the record head, if you et a faint and distorted version of your performance then its likely the circuitry preceding the tape.

A playback or record head is an easy fix, just buy a new one, they still make them... otherwise? get a new 4 track.

sounds... TAME

hurr hurr hurr

I've been kinda rediscovering Richie Hawtin...

https://youtu.be/OUl43l71rEM

and actually discovering his post-rave super-minimal stuff which I failed to notice at the time.

https://youtu.be/LYyRTvxDRMo

https://youtu.be/FGSsQDvfb4I

styed up late, wound up with this:

I am really into this... on second thought though I am not sure I can remix this one. No idea what I'd do with it. Its so cool the way it is my brain is just not hearing a syncopated variation like on Everything I Had.

Which one of your synths made the primary 'rising' pad that goes through the song?

The Prophet????

yeah, there's a forum for this.... why don't you delete the one in general?

a guitar... plugged into 3 AC30s or 3 DC30s or a hiwatt 50 and an early orange with the dual kt88s.... or a fender super reverb or, or, or....

or an accordion plugged into a 70s hifi receiver riving a subwoofer but no speakers?