jimmarchi1's forum posts 8022

the battery you want is a 9 volt, but carbon zinc (which will never be a full 9 volts new, if its even 8 volts in the pack), check the dollar store.... back in the days of fuzz there was no such thing as alkaline batteries sporting close to their rated 9 volts new in the box, there was carbon zinc or carbon zinc. You'll find it takes a little harshness off your tonebender and gives it better compression at lower fuzz settings. Trust me, I ued to have a ridiculous vintage and boutique fuzz collection before their popularity exploded. Profits were too good not to sell and trade them off (got a whole 80s marshall tube amp for my FZ1 from Sam Ash a few years ago, lol)

that's a lot of effects to me.... I'm at 3 pedals, my poltune and a midi controller for them to change presets and control which amps get to which cabs and it seems needlessly complicated compared to my setup of the last decade which was guitar, polytune, ac30

you have too much stuff inline or you need a bigger pedalboard with 2 voodoo lab pedal powers.... and maybe a whole switching system like a GCX and ground control

I dunno, I think twins is pretty sammin'

OH! give him my congrats.... I wonder if 2 similar sons will be as cool as having 2 similar amplifiers. If one of his sons craps out, the other one can be flipped out of standby and the show can go on....

my sons being boring today, he doesn't handle rain well

how do they sound? I could use another midi programmable dirty boost and rather than going analog with another Nova Drive I thought maybe all those OD, distortion, fuzz and compressor models might be fun to play with.

Where are all you muthafugguhs at? I am off from work, stuck in the house with my son due to abysmal weather (its warm for a change but drizzly and cloudy like I'm living in London)... totally lookin' to do some internet gear yapping, but no one's around!

in Marvel I am almost entirely an x-men guy, so my interest in ANY avengers is purely academic, but Lasso vs Hammer would be kinda interesting to watch.... both Thor and Wonder Woman are godlike heroes with silly accessories and stupid costumes, they have a lot in common. I think most of the rest of the mono y mono pairings between JLA and avengers would be short and dull given that the JLA is just loaded with ultra-badasses while the avengers have a lot of middling guys who rely on their wits as much as their powers to get by. DC is way more into ridiculous, over-the-top super powers than Marvel.

I am loathe to say it, but I think you are right and Wonder Woman would handily defeat Thor, though the battle would be epic.

I am not sure if its isolated, but for a lot of basic pedals like OD it works fine to daisy chain 1 off the polytune, I have done it with mine and had no ill effects.....

if you have run out of power supply outputs though I would posit that you use too many effects and need to play with less stuff for a little to see what you miss (if anything). Its easy to get carried away, but there's no rule that says you have to use every effect in your arsenal on your pedalboard, especially if you lack space or clean power for all that junk. If you drop some effects and find you cannot play without them then you need a 2nd pedal power and a larger board. You are The Edge, and rig design will be more critical to you than practice, so plan your board well and don't allow it to grow too organically lest you have power/layout issues again in future. If you don't miss them, then you are more like me and you can probably gauge down to a little gain/dirt boost and maybe some modulation or delay and be really happy getting most of your sounds with the guitar controls and amplifier(s).

EDIT:

I just looked at your equipboard and I am not sure how you ran out of power supply outputs, I see a tonebender (which should be run on a carbon zinc battery for ideal skronk, really, fuzz doesn't sound right run at its full 9 volts of designed power, we are used to hearing it run on 7 volts or less on 60s recordings because the carbon zinc batteries of the day were total junk that came from the store half dead already), a fet driver and a few other odds and sods like the Lehle for amp switching (good call, 2 amps is better than 1 and 3 is better still). You should be good. What are you using for DC and what's eating up all your power outlets? I would think a Voodoo Lab would do ya...

the curve won't be visible, to measure neck relief you will need to capo at fret 14 and employ a set of feeler gauges while depressing various frets, primarily fret 1 on the high E strings... if you can spot the bow with your eyesthen its out of control and a serious problem.

allparts will be import stuff much like what you have.... the heavy duty bridges come from Callaham.... tonepros are a little better than stock as well, but I think they use vintage style aluminum, so you are not looking at stuff that will hold up under 11s and 12s FOREVER like milled steel.... different sound though, aluminum will be very retro whereas steel is very modern I guess... both Callaham and tonepros will SOUND better than what you have which is likely made from mostly zinc.... I personally do not bother changing parts with Gibsons though I should, but I play 10s across the board, so the resons for upgrading for me are just tonal.

1" springs will add a nice tension to a bigsby and make the arm feel nice and stiff.... I generally have used 1" in the past. If you intend to use it aggressively or subtley, 1" rules. Its a spring size that favors extremes. YMMV though

Its possible the sound in question is a bass guitar, EN sometimes uses a traditional bass or guitar (they do live), but many compositions have NO traditional instrument and there is no way to know. Headcleaner has like a dozen versions/movements.... don't question it, just enjoy. Personally I have been more of a "Silence is Sexy" guy these days, but I am getting old and afraid of loud pummeling jackhammer music.

what the heck are you using noise reduction for? The ISP unit is as good as it gets, but if you are running high end pedals the noise should be pretty minimal with the gain maxed and anywhere below it should be dead silent unless your pedal is malfunctioning (although I seem to remember the plimsoul having more self noise than I found to be acceptable in anything that's not a vintage style fuzz, still negligible)

though again the ISP is your best noise reduction option, any noise reduction or gating gadget is eating your tone and dynamics... best to avoid using unless your noise floor is utterly intolerable (as in a hiss, hum or buzz that's almost as loud s your guitar signal)... given what you are runninginto you may not notice the loss of bandwidth, but I assure you thru a better amplifier and some high sensitivity speakers you would be very surprised switching the decimator in and out.... the decimator is for straight up metal guys who play with monstrous amounts of gain and compression that makes their noise floor impossible even for stage work.... the rest of us (sane people) are pretty much good without.... as a rule you want only gadgets that ADD to your tone, anything that's designed to take away unpleasant artifacts is probably also taking away something desireable

use decent quality cables and stay away from cheap stomp boxes and you should be fine... unless you are starting a Morbid Angel tribute band

Justice League, no contest

its so easy to make these analog type synth patches and drum sounds just with the included VSTis in FL that seeking presets seems silly... as far as the synths go you will want to spend a lot of time automating the filters to sweep in complimentary ways. Some of the stock plugins to play with for this sort of music are Poizone,Toxic Biohazard (both Poizone and TBH are pretty much made to be self-contained trance sequence machines if that's your bag), Sawer (great for detuned leads ala the SC prophet synths), Sytrus (great for FM pads and bells in the DX7 vein of course, but also pretty cool for making more digital sounding sequences), and for your kick just try out the fruity kick generator or load one of the bazillion sampled kicks from the included sample library and fuck with it using the sampler's massive amount of manipulation parameters...

if you are looking for presets to do all the patch-creation work for you then you are missing the point of making electronic music of this type. There's not a lot of room in the idiom for compositional innovation, its all about creating cool synth textures/sequences from scratch and the pacing of when they come in and how they evolve via your manipulation in real time of the filters, envelopes and other parameters like PWM. If you just sequence with a bunch of presets you are essentially making someone else's song since more than half the battle is programming interesting, complimentary synth textures.

now my turn to do acquisition, bought an 80s Fane ceramic 12", 8 ohms, not a medusa, not a crescendo, one of the lower power handling ones from the early 80s Laney AOR combos/cabs... I might get an early 70s cast frame Fane POP 50 and a Medusa 150 RI if I like this first foray, but the Pop 50 and Medusa are 16 ohm speakers (its hard to find Fanes, even the RIs, so you kinda get stuck with whatever impedance, which sucks) and I like pairs of mismatched 8 ohm speakers wired in series for 16 ohms, so I'll start with this Laney-era stamped frame and see what I think....

now do I replace the Greenback or the CTS Alnico from the closed-back 2x12? I am thinking Fane/Greenie mix to start.... the CTS alnico has great cleans but a very limited sweetspot when pushed. It gets mushy kinda fast when hit with real man't wattage. I think the CTS is the lower efficiency of the pair being 1 or 2 dB less efficient than the Greenback.... the fane is probably 1 or 2 dB more efficient than the Greenie, so we're looking at a serious sensitivity mismatch if I mix the CTS with the fane; the fane will drown the CTS out

the RC is like a tubescreamer with no mid hump, treble and bass controls and I think they omit the clipping diodes, but technically its kind've a drive that doesn't produce its own grit until you crank the gain to 10.

If you open up an RC, AC or BB you can just look at the PCB and see its TS808/9 lineage. The BB really looks like a TS9 inside, it just jumps out at you. Not criticizing, these pedals sound much different than a stock Ibanez/Maxon. Just sayin'

Not a fan of the Plimsoul, though I didn't leave the store with one to try at home so maybe I am being hard on it (I have a long standing personal loathing of Mike Fuller going back to 1999 when he ticked me off at a guitar show, so I give his pedal designs a lot of crap... which is easy since its mostly dressed up crap masquerading as new ideas).

Interestingly the owner of Xotic used to work at Fulltone wiring up Fulldrives.

what about a blackface fender amp for your pimsoul and Xotic booster... fulltone and xotic stuff is very blackface fender-loving (another reason I don't like any of it, it tends to try to UK-up American amps and can be way too middy thru actual british mps (which is basically my whole arsenal of amplifiers... the new ones Canadian in origin, but its pretty much an early Hiwatt circuit, BRITISH).

I'm going to totally blow your mind here and ask you what you're boosting with the AC? I mean, you don't have a tube amp, right? Why boost a transistor or Modeller's DSP chip? You could just turn the amp level up.

You are kinda missing the point of boost, its not just about levelling up. Its about slamming the 1st triode stage in your amplifier so it compresses and distorts in a way it wouldn't if you just turned the volume up to 10. If you don't have a triode out front in your amp's pre its like "why bother?" at least to me... I have heard tales of people boosting pedals into other pedals and talking about how great 'stacking' drives is or whatever. But a good investment would be a good tube amp you REALLY like the tone of when set pretty clean with the volume below noon. If said amp has as much gain as a JCM800 you will find you don't need a ton of dirt effects anymore. Maybe the RC boost and a fuzz.... if its more of a 60s fender thing with the later, non-cathode-follower tone stack, the world is your oyster. Chain up the effects, most pedals of all types are voiced to sound good through that classic '62 preamp with the sparkly top, thumping lows and slightly scooped midrange.

well, unless the neck profile is slim I would expect she can handle 11 gauge strings, you just might want to tighten the truss a 1/4 turn in the next couple of days and then reset the intonation.... in the long term, the main problem I see with LP type guitars running 11s or 12s is that the modern hardware doesn't handle it as well as 60s and 50s hardware... the heavy strings tend to wear the saddles down and bend the center of the bridges, especially affordable copies... the guitars with thinner necks have tendency to twist under the wound strings too, but thick necks will easily take 12s or 13s... the LP design is from the era of heavy gauge flat wounds and the design should be stable under pretty heavy strings. Your worry is proper maintenance (more is needed with more tension) and also whether your hardware is up to the challenge. If your hardware takes a crap and you are really attached to 11+ gauges then call Callaham for a steel bridge/saddle and tail set... steel sounds really good in addition to being stronger than the zinc alloy you run into these days, the callaham stuff is stronger than vintage and clearer sounding to boot (if you like that)

nah, you don't look like an idiot, you and the Swede look sharp together in a Weezer sort of sense

welp, I translated to the wrong eastern language, shouldn't have gone with Mandarin I guess.

You are probably going to want to take about a 1/4 turn of relief out of the neck to hold up to the heavier string gauge. Maybe less, but I wouldn't do nothing with the truss when gauging up. The factory setup was probably with 10s or 9s. In the next couple of days I would expect the neck will bow in a little bit which may or may not effect playability.

far east humbuckers tend to be very high output for various reasons. They tend to wind them a bit hotter because they think that's what humbucker fans want. They also usually use poly insulated wire which seems to engender a little more output per wind. And you usually get ceramic, alnico 8 or (if you are lucky) alnico V, strong magnets that give more output than the ever popular A II.

Some pauls are heavier than others.There's literally no standard for a standard. In non-weight-relieved LP style guitars an ideal weight seems to be ight around 8.5 lbs, too much over 9 lbs seems to sound 'blocky' and lifeless. I would be surprised if she is heavier than 9.5 lbs. Its the rare paul type guitar that weighs more than that and most of the ones that are have multi-piece backs or are 70s pancake bodies (particularly the pancakes thata re more like sandwiches, with a sheet of maple between 2 slabs of mahogany). I used to own an '88 standard with completely traditional 50s type construction that weighed in right around 10 lbs. My silver one is barely 8.5 lbs but is not weight relieved (not that I'd care, I don't believe some subtle weight relief effects tone). Point is there's just no rule.

forest green... kinda gretschy with the bigsby... speaking of the bigsby, try replacing the spring to tighten it. Its a motorcycle part (or should be) and the length of the spring directly effects the response of the mechanism. I like a very big spring for stiff response (that sounds dirtier than it actually is).

you gonna get a picture of yourself playing it or what? do we have to beg?

her name's Yan-Pin'gelico

I had an amp show up via FedEx a few weeks ago at 8pm.... depends on how busy the driver is and where his route takes him before he gets to your neighborhood.

SOS is writing about mixing recorded music. Live sound is not the same principles.

spiffy, how do you pedal guys reach the buttons in the back without getting distracted from playing.... you get your LP-alike yet?

I can't remember the last time I gutted an existing live sound setup. Its just a question of laying out the stage wisely and using what you have in the most productive way possible. Like putting an expander/gate on the vocal mics even if you have to do it as a stereo bus because you don't have more than 1 decent gate. There's a certain breed of sound guy that cheeses me off. They think the musicians exist to serve their dream mix, an unattainable fantasy, when the sound system and FOH mixer are only there to serve the music and therefore the musicians who mak it. A good musician is fine without a PA and sound man, but a sound man without music and musicians to make it is just a bump on a log.

or what, you'll punch me thru the web? I'm just trying to help you out, kid... you have sound problems and you were thinking of trying to solve them by wiring up some gear that would blow the channel on your sound guy's mixing console. I coulda just let you do it and laughed at you behind my computer monitor.

But yeah, I am always joking about everything but physics and engineering. Then I am deadly serious. Your objection to my constant sarcasm is duly noted.

!

That sounds like a lot of lazy soundguy BS

You avoid mic bleed thru proper mic selection and good placement. A little bleed is even desireable andhelpful as longas its all in phase.

But stop buying stuff. Try having the electric guitarist turn his cab towards the back or side wall. And mic it.

Although if he has too much noise it doesn't matter if hes direct or thru his amp. Noise is noise. He should track down the offending pedals and ditch them.

and you? you play acoustic, all you need is a DI for your piezo and/or a microphone.... your job is to strum in time with the drummer in a way that reinforces the beats that the bassist isn't accenting (or sometimes to lock with the bassist), you're just a tonal hihat.... you should be easy to mix in right

EDIT: I am about to buy a plane ticket and come out to LA to fix your sound just because I am tired of hearing about problems that are common to every small venue situation.... a classic church solution is to either tape off the 1st 4 or 5 rows of seats or put a sign up that people who are offended by music that's louder than speaking voices should sit further back to avoid getting a faceful of praise and worship band.

I just can't imagine being this broke and whiney.... I get off my butt and satisfy my ears.

you know what music is post-rock? more classical:

https://youtu.be/UCbLHfYkiwg

Indeed. Its quite funny. If i had been older when I listened to priest i probably woulda guessed it, but hell if an 8 year old could pick up on that stuff.

You look young in your user pic but not too young to ge t a J-O-B, man. I started building my gear collection in my early teens.... with money I earned WORKING.... working HARD

my ex is really nice when she wants something, and unless you live with her she is always working you over for something whether you know it or not, HA

its really just their EBM, rivet-girl aesthetic that made me see my ex. At 2nd glance this girl is a lot younger than my ex-wife.

oh god, keyboard players.... when it comes to the mix out front you want to hear the keys loud and clear but not the opinions of the guy playing them. Keys players are all nutty. They bitch that we guitarists need stage volume to get our tone and play our best, but they want all the bandwidth in the PA. I know their instrument covers a lot of octaves, but its rare for them to use all that range in the context of a pop ensemble. Any non-piano sounds they use can really be shoe-horned into whatever frequency range is available in the mix anyway. You can cut a lot of frequencies from anywhere in a Rhodes sound, B3 tone and especially from synth textures and still have them sound darned good in context, whereas a guitar HAS to have certain frequencies or it will not be heard no matter how loud it is turned up.

I am not suggesting it. I am straight up saying it. Thats how you do live sound for a band with drums guitar and electric bass in any venue less than 4 or 500 seats. Even in big venues they didn'talways put a ton of my plexi and showman thru the pa everyvenue. My buddy at the troc here in philly liked me to play without attenuation so both amps were ripping loud anywhere in front of mix position. Then when the venue would fill up it would absorb some of the massive Volume and treble so he would push my mics up thru the pa to compensate during the first song. And thats a big venue, dude. Got a balcony.

Put a guitar and bass amp on the floor. Line the speakers up with the front of the kick drum to get everything physically phase aligned if possible. Mic the guitar amp but mute the channel unless needed, get a di signal off the bass and eliminate the top end at the channel. Compress it. Get your lows kicking there around 80hz. Mic kick and snare. Give the kick some boost at 100hz. The rest of your pa power is vocals, acoustic guitar and whatever else. Horns or castinets or whatever god has available at your church

Wait. I thought your guitarist had a tube amp?

pretty much all metal lyrics but particularly Iron Maiden and of all Maiden lyrics the songs on Number of the Beast make me giggle the most.... a lot of Judas Priest's songs are funnier now that Rob Halford I out of the closet. "Hell Bent for Leather" has taken on an extra comic dimension for me ever since Halford's revelation that his Leather Daddy look wasn't an 80s metal coincidence (and that he in fact likes to spank bears).

impedance is critical.... proper impedance loads effect the response of your pickup, effects and amp. with your guitar and effects an impedance mismatch will just adversely effect your tone, but with an amp (even a solid state amp) running outside the impedance parameters outlined by the designer will blow the amp up.

If your guitarist is using a line 6 amp now why doesn't he just use his actual amp then? Oh wait, you said hes using it as a DI, This is all just madness. He has a tube amp. He should grow a pair and play through it. Jesus loves guys with brass balls. Look at Simon Peter. He would never plug in direct when he had an amp and if you said he was too loud he would deny it.

I think your sound guy is playing games with you young guys to see how high he can make you jump. Hes probably laughing his ass off before bed every night abut all the shit hes making the electric guitarist do. Hes busting your balls changing your levels in the mix every day for sure.

I did live sound to supplement my income for the better part of a decade and I can tell you that no matter how many instruments there are, if the electric guitarist, bassist and drummer will just get balanced with eachother in the room and you get the cabinets in line with the kick drum, then you can use most of your PA power on vocals and acoustic instruments and just push a guitar mic, bass DI, kick and snare mic up enough to reinforce these already loud sources. I did church music. The key is to work with the amps and the kit, not fight it. The PA doesn't need to do all the heavy lifting in smaller rooms like this. They used to call live mixing "sound reinforcement" because apart from very quiet sources the PA is just REINFORCING sounds that are already pretty good in the room and just need a little help to reach the back rows with the vocals. I know from my uncles' church escpades that pretty much all church sound guys who are church members and not contractors like me are basically morons who like to control everything and push musicians around even though they aren't good enough musicians themselves to get up in front of a congregation to play or sing. Your bad should have a pow=wow (at least the rhythm section) and confront the dictator in a diplomatic way.

she reminds me of my ex-wife is all... just taller.... and probably less evil

who's the girl?

you were probably hallucinating

every cable changes your sound

I always keep a sack of straight and L end switchcrafts around as well as a mile of low capacitance coax and make cables as needed. Though i still use the same spectraflex outta my guitar that I got for christmas in 1994. Its ugly and green... and never tangles or knots up. Allows me to dance and jump, hop, shimee and jig. In my old band everyone said i was boring to look at at our first few gigs so i went to ballroom and swing classes with a lady friend (and had some fun back at her place too) and all that groove made it into my pkaying and now i can't hd stil when i amfeelin' it. I tried wireless and i hate it (even the line6 cable simulated one), so i have to use 6 feet of 90s spectraflex.

Narcist had asked me awhile ago if i could do some youtube hand technique videos. Would you be interested too? He was specifically interested in a vibrato tutorial and some demonstrations if ways to combine pentatonics with modes for more interesting solos, both subjects i am really qualified to teach. I can replicate anyone's vibrato and my youthfulbig band experience made me a singularly modal rock soloist.

you have a lot of stuff on your board... another distortion is probably overkill, expecially when you have an amp with a gain channel (vintage voiced though it may be, ahem, as if that's a bad thing.... one day you will see that nothing good has happened to guitar tone since the introduction of the matchless DC30)

nah, I like comp before distortion too, its one of my gripes with Nova System.

okay, dude, the 44 magnum is an AMP not a PRE-amp. Its meant to drive a speaker cab with 44 watts of mosfet power. If you run it into a guitar amp or a mixer your will fry the input of whatever you are feeding. Your sound guy will kill you when his sound board blows up. it would still need to be DIed and padded down to feed the PA directly. You really need a DI to give your pedalboard signal at proper impedance and voltage levels to a mixing board. There is not a way around it unless you wanna invest in a basic tube preamp like an Alembic FB-2 or Tube Works Blue Tube maybe. I think they both send line level and are good, bare bones Fender style preamps with NO power amplification.

I would seriously just get a Radial DI. The Stage Bug is cheap. I'm sure it sounds just as good as its big brothers. A quality DI will get your pedalboard into the mixer in a really uncolored way and then the sound guy can shape your highs and lows to sit in the mix at the channel strip. They didn't invent the DI box for guitar for no reason. The impedance matching is critical.

for MIDI controlled dirt you are basically looking at modelling or the Nova Drive, so its pretty limiting if you are really into dirt pedals. I'm not. When I use effects I mostly like a subtle echo or some modulation to widen my 2 amp setup. I can do more stuff with my rig, but I primarily use it very subtley.