jimmarchi1's forum posts 8022

Germany is closer to you than LA is to me. I bought tons of stuff from session guys in LA, shipping wasn't terrible on amps and cabs as long as I didn't do it priority. 5 day shipping usually worked well. DHL is pretty good for international.... I've gotten stuff from the far east before through them. One of my guitars came over from japan using EMS and it was fast (under a week)and relatively cheap (about 100 bucks Tokyo to Philadelphia). It showed up delivered by a guy in his personal car who was super gentle with it. Apparently he licenses out to deliver musical instruments door to door in phlly for this company ... guy was a musician and took great care with my old guitar.

I thought the soul food had a ton of dirt... maybe all your guitars are low output? Even my low output 59 tele copy could get a reputable rhythm crunch from the soul food if I turned the gain up good and set my ac30 up with a clean tone on the edge of distortion... maybe you are a rabid gainiac like most of the young bucks on this site. Less is more, homey, less is more. You want a muscley sound then you don't need gobs of distortion unless you plan to do megadeath covers. Even on leads, less is often more. Its about having a guitar that sustains well already and then getting enough compression going for it to sing, but no more distortion than absolutely needed to get the attack and decay response you're seeking. Keep in mind that you will typically sound way more distorted to the audience than you do to yourself. You are very close to your amp. Plus, if you wind up miced thru the PA then the whole signal chain to get to those PA speaker is adding distortion, makng your sound even crunchier. This is doubly true in the studio as you have both the recording chain and the mix/mastering processing adding bits of harmonic and phase distortion as well as compression (even if none was used in tracking and mixdown it will be used across the mix during the mastering process to optimize the dynamic and bandwidth usage) raising the level of your distorted overtones in relation to the fundamental.

in amps more expensive (in modern stuff) is usually better and the fancier amp is often the keeper, but in pedals? got me???

I have ditched tons of fancy boutiques just like I have ditched tons of mass produced boss, mxr, Ibanez and dod stuff... I recently traded off all my ODs and the one I miss most is the mxr badass modified OD... I bought it 2nd hand in a store for $40, no joke. But it reminds me of my MIJ sd1 with more bass and less self-noise so I all the sudden miss that and kinda miss owning a TS9 too LOL

I don't miss the box of rock, bb pre, fulldrive, distortron, bsiab2, carl martin stuff... they have their good points, but the fancy stuff is very amp dependent and just doesn't seem to play right with an ac30. While it hangs together across the fretboard better than the primitive boss and Ibanez stuff (there are some Pete Thorn videos where he discusses this phenomenon, the upper frets become fuzzy on the wund strings particularly, a reason I eschewed OD and distortion for eyars and just had a dedicated Marshall plexi for heavy drive)and is low noise, there's modern versions of old classics for cheap from mxr/way huge, maxon & dod/digitech and even cheapo brands like mooer.... and the classic designs with minimal mods really sit in a band mix. Boutique crap seems to sound better playing in your bedroom usually. I mostly let my amps do the overdriving so I have trouble keeping hundreds in pedals around. I always sell my dirtboxes. When I liquidated my massive vintage and boutique fuzzbox collection I must have turned $2k in profit over the course of that 2 years of selling stuff off... that's net profit less my original investment in all those fuzzes.

EDIT:

a lot of people really like the boss OD3. Maybe its a keeper and you just need to dicker with it and with your amplifier to get them working together. I only have experience with Boss's OD1 and OD2. I would love to own an OD1 with the quad opamp, but I am too cheap to buy one. Maybe I'll build one. I don't care for the OD2 so much, but other people make it sound okay.

your one thing to worry about with boss, mxr, dod and Ibanez classics is the accumulation of sketchy buffers and the drag on the signal of non-buffered, non-mechanical bypass too... the main thing boutique offers apart from great, low-noise component selection is higher quality buffers in buffer designs like the classic Klon or true mechanical bypass with silent switching like the soft touch lovepedal and fulltone effects.... even with a great hifi buffer you can abely hear working you probably do not want more than 2 in your chain if that.... 1 near the beginning of your chain and one all the way at the end probably in a delay or reverb if you are into that, so the trails will decay after you disengage the effect and also to restore your top end that all that pedalboard cabling will eat (unless degradation is your sound, like Nels Cline)....

I will say one thing for certain, consider getting the same tuner brand and type as your bandmates for extreme consistency between all the stringed isntruments. If everyone else has snark tuners get one of those. If they all have Boss pedals get a TU2 or TU3. In my best band we always did this. Originally with TU2 pedals, then Korg rack tuners when 2 of us ahd racks, then back to the TU2s when the rhythm guy came in and finally we all got true bypass pitchblacks at the end. I swear by my TC polytune because its pretty damn accurate and the poly mode makes it fast to find the offending string between songs and not waste any stage time tuning. I also own a snark. My best friend wears by his snark so I use my snark when we are working on tunes. When I sue the polytune out tuning is not as consistent. Its by tiny degrees but as you go out of tune bit by bit the differences in how you tune and how each different tuner reads that grow cumulatively. Get it?

this one, my longest serving Fender (I think its a '98 I bought 2nd hand while in Boston in about 2002? this guitar has been modded over and over, thrown, abused at thousands of shows)... so here she is in the midst of the most recent round of mods (she was retired for a few years prior to modding while I repaired some vicious heel cracks and yanked rusted hardware off):

http://images.equipboard.com/uploads/gear_photo/image/2529/xl_20150616_112539.jpg

build the BYOC man.... cheap

I think with the rat a lot depends what amp and guitar you are using it with.

I found my early 80s rat really homogenized things guitar wise for me as long as I was willing to adjust the gain and filter a smidge when switching between fenders and gibsons. it was a definite AC30 type pedal for me. One of the few OD/distortions I could really get into through a vox. It sounded silly through my marshalls and acted more like a refined fuzz through my BF fender amps. Its more amp dependent than guitar dependent to me. It really interacts with a clean amp in a way that seems to color the rat's response in a way that the 3 controls won't compensate for.

I have been missing the rat I used to have and was thinking of building one. They are simple enough and then it would be a fun modplatform like the fuzzface I made.

Listen, you should decide what you want to keep or ditch with your ears. Okay? Don't be a cork sniffer. If that brand new Boss OD3 gets you YOUR sound then keep it. If its lacking and you find yourself twiddlin' the knobs every song? sell her and branch out

look at a guy like the edge who ahs all this fancy shit in an elaborate rack setup with all the midi preset switching... but still uses a plain old sd1, od2 and ts9, no mods.... works for him, why mess with success?

I would say that with a vox night train you might want to use less gain out front and let the amp do more of the heavy lifting in that regard. Particularly the power amp. Play louder.... your amp will help you get the crunch you desire even if its just on the edge of breakup before you engage a drive pedal....for marshalliness I would ditch the fulldrive which is a modded TS9, for something in the bluesbreaker/KOT camp or maybe a jfet/mosfet type thing like the box of rock.... also, sd1 type pedals will have more of a brit rock edge than ts9 type due to a different mid-emphasis and clipping arrangement (otherwise the boss sd1 and Ibanez ts9 are basicall the same pedal). If you like having the TS9 type thing but want more top end cut, consider the cheap and awesome MXR custom badass OD. Wnt more dynamics and adjustable top end crispiness? get a used EHX soul food. cheap stuff to try.

Most of my experience with Palmer is with their peripherals like the attenuator/DI that's been so popular since the THD hotplate and Ultimate attenuator fell outta favor with the bedroom tone cork sniffers... its expensive as those products go, but its a swiss army knife of useful features and its built like a tank. One of my hot plates absorbed so much heat from the ehad it was loading that parts of the fan assembly melted and warped, and the Hotplate was considered to be the ebst and most roadworthy attenuator/loadbox at the time.... the Palmer doesn't have those problems. Roadworthy. If the amp is built to that standard I think you'll be good for a billion shows.

here's my touring musician's guide to American geography... when you drive west past Ohio you start to have fields and clouds.... keep going west and you get the rocks you learned about in school and lots of 'em.... the stages get bigger, the audiences get smaller, the cities look more like towns... all along the way the number of rabib anthrax and metallica fans, anti-intellectual, barfighting, adult former-athletes and mouthy republicans with guns will go up while the overall population goes down, even in the "cities," sandwiches slowly turn intot acos and then burritos, the pizza gets worse and worse... until you finally hit California/Oregon and everyone is crazy in the other direction (apart from the arch-conservative vintners in northern California). Also, you are going to see the amount of cowboy boots go way up as you get west of center until it abruptly drops off as you head out of the actual desert. I recommend buying J toe boots in the southwest where they are cheaper than in Nashville/Memphis. J toes are great for clicking stompboxes.

everything Palmer makes is good sounding and roadworthy.... I am not familiar with that amp though. I am sure its awesome.

never tried the TH30, if its like the AD30 its not bad. A fuzzier, Orange flavored AC30.

I have only ever felt precious about a handful of guitars and even one of those I let go when I needed cash. And they are all nice ass guitars. Decent Gibson, Fender, Carvin... I parted with my precious duo jet without blinking when it stopped serving my music needs and I needed money for Lucian as well as an 88 LP standard that everyone but me liked... a lovely seafoam green 50s strat, an older Japanese 62RI strat in sonic blue lacquer... MIJ paisley tele RI, aerodyne tele, a really cool Yamaha 335 clone from 85... I dunno, tons of guitars, I am forgetting lots.... I've sold and traded a Plexi, JMP superlead, two different JCM800s, a 900, piles of vintage Fender and Gibson amps that would make you cry to see go! Dumped my jimmy page model supro too when I got bored with her... I could go on and on. I would never sell my SG or my 62 ac30, I probably wouldn't dump the old Carvin because of sentimental value... I have come close to trading my strat to my buddy a few times but I always paude. I would probably dump her, but she's modded and beat to shit and not worth much to anyone but my friend.... I am not usually precious about isntruments. They're only tools. Iregret the reasons I sold my LP special that was a gift from my dad, but I would do it again if I needed to pay the rent in an emergency like that or to complete an awesome trade on a better guitar.... I am still bitter because it was my wife's fault I had to raise cash with only a few days notice... the sale was of no benefit to me and if I had screwed her over (which as it turns out is what she woulda done to me) I would still have that guitar.

I just don't get the RG for anything but shredding even though a lot of punk kids bashed them when I was a kid because they were cheap and the guy from suicidal tendencies had one. Is it a made in Japan one you got? Those are the only Ibanezes of the modern era worth a damn.

When I have a amp head I shall gather up my gear and make a trade, got a few pedals to trade, a guitar and some other random shit around the house that I might just trade at the pawn shop for cash. Though the RG I just have to have really. I have a few pickups I don't want that I will trade too

I am not sure why anyone would be lsuting for an RG but okay.Is it at least an RG prestige?

I would get the LP fixed and take her too... take it all and get 1 serious guitar... the more brand name stuff, even low end brand name stuff, you take the less you will have to spend out of pocket or if you have a good amount in your wallet you can get a nice-ass guitar.... screw the pawnshop, go to a retail establishment known for its excellent used but non-vintage inventory. I don't have anything like that in Philly anymore, the big box stores pushed those places out, but other places I've lived had those sort of stalwart guitar traders. The UK is small, I am sure you can drive to a store known for lots of used stuff and fair trading practices. If you are going to buy "good enough" gear its unwise to be precious about any of it because it takes a lot of good enough gear to equal 1 piece of professional grade kit. Unless you have some serious income to play with you oughta be ready to dump everything you own to move up to the next guitar and amp when you're young. I am still not precious about most of my stuff and will sell and trade it at will. I have a few regrets her and there, but overall nothing major. Its mostly gear and guitars I have sold to deal with my marital issues.

Why don't you just open the probuckers up, cut the original leads and replace them with some nice solid core, clothcovered wire? Then you only need a set of pots. Fuck the pushpulls and stuff, just get some good CTS or Bourns 500Ks and 2 Sprague or Mallory .047 caps? If you do all the pushpulls you can't wire the tone pots and caps up 50s style and you are losing some of the Gibson mojo. If you ahd 2 Gibbies I would say wire one up 50s and one up with all the bells and whistles, but given that you have the one go with vintage spec, man. So in short order a spool of white and black 50s fender wire, .057 caps (I tend to use mallories anymore because I have a lot around and they sound better than stock) and 4 decent 500K pots and just get it done man. Your total cost going the basic route, replacing the pots and caps and wire but keeping the pickups you like will be LOW. Seeing that you just put a downpayment on an Ibanez you should go cheap anyway. Aslo, don't sink a lot of money into a guitar with poor trade/resale.

Either that or just fuck the RG, get your money back. Take the money and all your busted guitars and any effects/amps, whatever you don't use (or bought becaue you wanted or needed something NOW instead of getting something you loved once you had the money) and plop it all down as trade on a used LP Studio or LP "classic 1960" from the heyday of those models, which was late 80s thru late 90s. Bingo, done. You will be happy as a pig in shit. Honest. And pigs apparently love to be in shit, okay?

EDIT: Also the Les Paul studio doublecuts are still affordable. They are amazing guitars. I am flirting with buying one. Came close at the last Philly guitarshow. If you don't mind a wraparound bridge then they are really amazing guitars for the cost which is around $800 to $1k. Plus they used to be worth less but have been appreciating steadily for the last 5 years or so, rising faster than 90s singlecut studios. You will have fantastic resale if you decide to trade up again. But you aren't gonna do this, are you? You should though.

I just looked at the schecter and it not the guitar I thought it was LOL. Not "nu metal" at all. Its the model that looks just like the 80s Gibson ES335S "firebrand", which is a neat shape. My buddy has a 335S deluxe in silverburst. Cool axe, but hes beat it to hell over the years. Hes the same guy who blew up my 1962 AC30 when I lent it to him.

So what do you use the FX loop for on your ac30? My 2 don't have them. My HC30 does, but its not very useful for much because Voxes don't generate a lot of drive before the phase inverter and when I do generate my rive that way I wind up overloading modulations and delays I put in the loop :-( I pretty much just use it for Leslie simulation as my old Ibanez Flanger does a pretty good clean leslie sound in the effects loop as long as I keep the channel level low enough not to clip the flanger.

After Matchless went out of business in the 90s their co-founder and lead engineer at the time, Mark Sampson? He went over to Bad Cat and did a tweaked version of the DC30 called the black cat for Bad Cat and then designed a bunch of variations on Matchless amps. Meanwhile a former Matchless employee bought the Matchless brand out of bankruptcy and resumed production. Only the Spitfire, Lightning, DC30, Chieftain, Clubman and Superchief are original Sampson designs from Matchless. All the other designs came after he was already at Badcat. But they are nonetheless good amps! I like everything Mark Sampson designs. He likes to do Brit amps with an American twist. Love it. I have one, so you get it! The buy in I is STEEP.

is your schecter one of the Korean ones? those were nice guitars if a little "nu-metal" looking. The invader is a ridiculous sounding humbucker to my ear, but they were very popular when I was younger. Everyone put them in the bridges of their fat strats back then. I'm not sure I would class the Schecter Diamonds as a serious guitar though. They are phenomenal student guitars like the similar early-90s washburns. I guess that's open to interpretation. I was just thinking of guitars that are vintage or high end. That first purchase that you cleared your savings account out to make so you could step up your game!

What about serious amp/effects purchases? My 1st amp came to me through my family for cheap even though it was a legit 60s Fender Princeton Reverb, but when I was 18 (I think) I invested in my first big amp head and cabs, a channel switching Marshall 800 that didn't do it for me at all and a 70s or 80s straight front Marshall 4x10 with the tan grille that I used off and on for a good 15 years (I liked it so much I bought another straight and a slant a few years later in the classic 80s black/white/black that I used on stage with fender heads for 2 bands... the split channel 800 went out pretty quickly for a 2204 single channel, a plexi RI, a 900SLX, Laney GH50L among other things, but I was so into 4x10 cabs for awhile). Well, prior to that there was the ac30 solid state from the 70s. What was I thinking? She lasted a whole week before going back for the Marshall. Then I borrowed a cab for a bit til I could afford that first 4x10. I slung a lot of Lattes t starbucks and stamped a lot of hands at nightclub/venue doors to afford that stuff. Ah the memories!

If you're not a guitarist, what was your 1st serious synth, bass, drum kit etc?

I really like 1 knob anymore... on my HC30 I keep the click tone control at the brightest setting for a closed back cab not to get too thumpy, leave the cut wide open for max chine and disable the MV (this control is just a frequency selectable HP filter that achieves its sound by carrying the stage 1 coupling cap values), then I just turn the amp up until I like the tone and use my guitar from there. I just use her like a 1 knob amp 90% of the time. If I want clean I set the volume low and run in 30 watts. For drive I do 15 and crank her up past 5.

I got some info on Taylor Swift's guitarist from a friend who bounces between here and Nashville.

His name is Grant something-or-other.The core of his sound is Matchless or BadCat amps. Matchless Chieftains or the Bad Cat Wid Cat 40. The chieftain is like mutt between a 60s ac50 and a hiwatt, sort of. The preamp is very Hiwatt but the power amp is more voxy utilizing a pair of cathode biased EL34 tubes and GZ34 rectifier with no negative feedback. The Wildcat is awesome, I have used the Wildcat at Miner Street recording here in Philly extensively. Its got the top boost and EF86 'click' channels of the Matchless C30 amps (love my C30) stapled to a chieftain style power amp. Unlike a Matchless the master volume is not a global post-phase-inverter design, its a JCM800 type control exclusive to the EF86 'gain' channel so you can use an A/B box to switch between clean top boost and overloaded EF86 tube tones. I didn't love the master volume drive tones on this amp, but they were useable. Pretty cool for lightly driven british invasion sounds or, guess what? POP COUNTRY! The Wildcat is spankier and more articulate than the C30 or Classic Cat but still very voxy in a mid-period beatles way. The chieftain is punchy and spanky like the Wildcat but has a much more Hiwatt sound than the Wildcat to my ear. They are similar as heck though. Its an apples and apples comparison. Both are loud as hell through a pair of celestions.

Live Swift's band hasrun cab-less for more than 5 years. He runs his amps into palmer loadbox/cab sim/ DIs, then into rackmount processors. He used to use the TC G force but may have moved on to a more recent model. The stereo output from the processors go straight to front of house and he uses in-ears to monitor. He also has some pedals out front of the amps for compression, overdrive and boost that are operated by a midi switching system. I don't know what models. He probably switches up. Being a Nashville guy I would expect he uses a lot of off the shelf stuff like the Nobels overdrive, TS9, dynacomp etc and maybe Wampler's boutique effects too. Wampler is a big deal down there because of his relationship with Brent Mason and Brad Paisley. The folks in Nashville love his Ego Compressor. I believe Taylor's guitarist is a Les Paul guy but also plays a Dusenberg. Most of his tone is amp based and the pedals and processors are just to help tweak his base tone to reproduce the album sounds.

I think Katy Perry's guys are fractal axe FX endorsers, check their site. If I can get you more info from any of my aquaintances I will. No one I've chatted with lately knows anyone from Katy Perry's band. Based on concert footage I've seen it sounds like they mainly build their patches around the Marshall Plexi amp models. I could b talking out my ass though. Her band just has a really vintage Marshall sound.

As a guy who has owned plexis and JMPs before becoming a Vox fanatic I am really familiar with that 4 input Marshall sound and what simualtions of it (analog or digital) sound like. There's a crispiness in the top end and creaminess to the midrange as you drive the phase inverter and power tubes that only Marshalls, Parks & the old Laney Supergroup heads can produce and that's the #1 thing plexi style overdrive pedals and modellers try to approximate. Mater volume Marshalls don't have the same thing. They are similar if you open the master up to 10, but its not the same. Much less dynamic in how the later Marshalls crunch out. The better plexi simulations tend to carry off the harmonically complex and dynamic crispiness and the howling sustain. Tht's the key thing in the mix, the way a distorted 4 input Marshall has an evolving overdrive texture that changes as notes and chords decay. Rather than being a fat wall of grind with a buzzsaw crunch in the treble frequencies a plexi is more like an evolving synth pad. Hard to describe and I am wasting a whole paragraph waxing poetic about it.... its true of all the older british amps though the way the sound changes is different for each brand. On the other side of it an overload 60s fender has its own distinct wall of power tube grind that's more static but also very appealing. The lower gain fender preamp and phase inverter cause the amp to produce distortion in the different stages of the amp in different proportions than the higher gain, tweed style brit preamps. I could go on. You just need to collect some amps. FYI, Matchless and Badcat are 100% in the british camp tonally even though they are American made.

I don't know who Ellie Goulding is, who plays for her or anyone who knows them.

The main thing you may be noticing is that in pop music all the monitoring is done in-ear and the stage is elft uncluttered so the star can prance around like a trained poodle and summon a bunch of idiots in leotards on stage during sections with no vocal to amuse the audience. So no cabinets live. Whether these dudes run analog or digital the cabinet sound is simulated. I did one pop-country-adult-contemporary gig briefly and I took my HC30 and a marshall 4x10 and while they loved my sound for the gig the artist was trying to get me to PUT MY CAB OFF STAGE... ugh! In the studio its whatever sounds good, but live these divas just do not want you cluttering the stage or making a bunch of noise that affects the FOH mixer's ability to create an album-likre mix using PA power exclusively. No stage volume is the norm now. As in NONE. I hate it.

What was everyone's 1st serious guitar? I'll start! when I was 15 I got a 60s guild Starfire 1 for jazzband. It was in the cool, greenish guild burst and had a single guild humbucker at the neck. It was actually a bear to play and had feedback issues, but for a while I loved her!

I got my kid a onesie with a picture of a fender amp knob that goes to 11 LOL

be careful with silverface twins. If its got a master volume its probably a full 100 watts with an ultralinear output stage and it will not sound the way you expect it to. Also, Twins are LOUD. SOOOO LOUD. You basically can't play a small gig with a twin, its too loud. In order to get a nice full clean tone you have to turn her up loud enough to make the soundman angry. If you're going to look at silverface amps consider a silverface bassman (not a bassman50 or 100, a straight bassman), a Bandmaster or Bandmaster Reverb head or a deluxe reverb. Stay away from 6L6 based silverface fenders with master volumes. Those amps are the ones that give silverface a bad reputation. Many are ultralinear (hifi style power amps, unflattering for guitar) , have gobs of snubber caps stifling the sparkley top end and harshing up the mids, and have other circuit revisions from 60s spec that just did not work out. Some of the changes were cost-cutting measures, some were attempts to add marshallish features, other make no sense at all. None of the changes play well together. That said, even the most bastardized silverface verions still sound pretty decent though. Heads up, the only amps that survived the 70s virtually unchanged were the deluxe reverb, Princeton reverb, Princeton, champ and vibrochamp. The bandmaster and bassman heads with 'drip edge' metal trim around the front grille are identical to their mid 60s cousins too but are generally a few hundred cheaper than blackface ones.

I don't know why everyone is so obsessed with the twin. Its not fender's best circuit and its deafeningly loud at 3 where its starting to sound really good... I toured with a dual showman (non reverb twin in a head) and it was stupid loud, but I needed huge clean volume because we played a lot of theaters and 300+ seat clubs. Large audiences in decently big rooms but not always with a quality sound system (or soundman) to mic up a small amp. It was a bit much at small clubs and I ditched it when we started doing smaller venues regularly. That amp and my buddies Showman were used extensively for overdriven rhythms on UYB's record and let me tell you that even with 2 tubes pulled to lower headroom and work into a 16ohm TV cab that the SPL in the tracking room were pummeling.

EDIT: I think we wound up knocking the showmans down 2dB with a hotplate because they were overloading the close mics on the cab. LOUD... the 2 plexis were louder at full power, but the fenders were less compressed and even set quieter the punchy transient response is like a jackhammer. Especially as you wail away on chords.

If he wants a full 30 watts he could get the Laney 30 watter from the 90s. Very AC30ish with a marshally gain channel too. Made in the UK I think. They are affordable secondhand and I think they sound better than the custom classics after a speaker change. They're similar to your 15 watt Laney combo.

I'll have to hit the bookstore today and pick up a copy. Its time to buy some new toddler books anyway.

the gigrig is the way to go, but its a lot of money... for this kinda scratch you can get a G system or helix with lots of digital effects built in and I think 4 programmable loops for pedals and pres and such. For me the digital delays and modulations are appealing and I only need a couple loops, some for amps and maybe 1 or 2 for the analog pedals I have kept like my favorite fuzz. I really like the idea of a programmable gadget that has onboard effects as well as loops for my analog stuff.

that's like $1200 to $1400 in our money, right? I paid approximately $800 for my HW, but there was trade going on so the store probably made a full $1200 in the end, which was where it was marked on the sticker I think....

brass versus steel saddles is a surprisingly big deal in tonal terms.... early 50s teles had brass and are decidedly thicker and less twnagy (though the pickups contribute) than the very early steel saddled esquires and later steel saddled teles... gibsons have chrome plated brass, tis their thing... Fender pretty much went with stamped or diecast steel since 54 or 55 on most models... I am currently trying a brass rather than steel sustain block on my strat and a mix of brass and steel saddles... I have brass under the plain strings to fatten em up and tame some treble (its a 50s style strat underneath all my modding, maple board, alder body, BRIGHT unplugged). the effect on the strat has been ahrd to gauge because I made a lot of other mods...

but my buddy had owned a Gibson Studio AAA flame top model and he swapped from the crappy stock bridge that was zinc with the brass saddles to an all steel Callaham ABR1. It vastly improved note definition on overdriven chords, but it also thinned the sound, de-gibsoning her a bit, especially on single note leads played on the plain strings.... with the steel bridge/posts/taipiece but stock brass saddles under the plain strings it had clarity and single-note girth.

B. Dineyland's in California, DineyWORLD is in Florida.... Dineylan was walt's 1st attempt at a theme park but he didn't buy enough land to realize his vision so he started over in Orlando FL. Dineyland is basically the same as the Magic Kingdom section of Disneyworld. I went to World twice as a kid and Land as an adult with the former manager of the band Garbage, Shannon O'Shea suring the (wait for it) winter NAMM show one year.

D. 12 hours is not that far, especially when the ride is interesting and scenic.... and anyway, I could buy a plane ticket if I didn't want to drive. My ex-wife moved over 8 hours away from my home and now my son covers 16 hours roundtrip a month to spend time with both of us. You Brits come from a tiny piece of rock in the north atlantic and don't know what it means to raodtrip or plan a serious tour for a band. Its hard and tiring to get exposure for your band here, in the UK its easy.

E. I have never done much with multiFX either.... I've flirted with various units from my home studio used in a guitar context and 2 dedicted guitar fx rack units (the quadraverb GT in the late 90s and more recently a TC G-sharp), but I usualy just create a doubling/detune/un-chorus effect between 2 amps and maybe do a little slap delay or subtle plate reverb simulation.... I am really interested in bing able to call up a ton of different simualtions of stompbox modulation and delay as well as a lot of rackmount studio type sounds and save my patches for easy recall.... the distortion pedal and amp modelling I will probably not use much, but I am really into having the option to use the simulated cabinets with my head on a load-box for silent recording at home. If it weren't for that I would just get a used G-system for $500. It has enough styles of delay and modulation to satisfy me, great AD/DA converters and the same I/O flexibility as helix. I dunno. I want to sit and try a Helix and develop an opinion. Its like triple the money of a secondhand G system!

I just scooped up a new loadbox to try out (the hotplates had a great lineout but a mediocre sounding load while my weber with an actual speaker voicecoil sounded great as an attenuator but the lineout was crap). I am hoping the Mesa one will please me. People seem to like the loadbox part but have mixed feelings on the cab sim bits, but you don't have to use the cab sim and I don't usually plan to so who cares? for $200 I am sure I can resell if I dislike it. I am starting to chicken out on the Kemper. It models pretty well, but FX aren't its strong suit. Though I use effects sparingly I am spoiled by 1st rate stompboxes and need my simulations to be Axe FX or TC quality, not an afterthought like they seem to be on the kemper. Plus all the metal guys favoring the kemper really freaks me out.

The plan is to load down myac4HW (because it has righteous drive tones when cranked into full bore saturation) and put the whole amp, from input to loadbox line out, into a true bypass loop of the G system or Helix for overdrive. Then I can add a little EQ before or after to shape the drive as well as add pre and post gain effects if I want... in 2 other effects loops I was thinking I would put the 2 preamp channels of my HC30 for cleans using the amps inputs and the power-amp sends. Add effects to taste there too. Then the output for the whole unit could be returned to the power-amp return on the HC30 giving me a punchy 30 watts of sorta-Class A tube power.... if I wanted stereo I could build another HC30 poweramp and feed another 2x12 I guess. I kinda wanna get back to a wet/dry/wet rig, but with more options than my old one and a multi-effects with the ability to incorporate a few true bypass loops of analog seems like the easiest way to accomplish the whole setup.... obviously the dry amp would be an actual AC30. my HW or 62, set for a just breakin' up tone. It would be cheaper to go TC G system here. Save me a good $800 I could invest in going stereo if I want.

Adam X (he can be a jerk, but he spins a great, minimalist hard techno set), T1000, Frankie Bones, Front242 (Iknow, they're kinda industrial, but they are heavily tied to more mainstream dance music), Josh Wink (Philly represent!), Mike Pickering, Jack Dangers with or without Meat Beat Manifesto, Future Sound of London, Alec Empire... I could probably go on.... I am trying to focus on people who are traditional DJs as well as electronic musicians... I've been away from the club/rave scene (if it even exists anymore) since its heyday, so I have to think back.... I seldom listen to techno and related genres anymore, but I still have a ton of cool records in storage. I still enjoy listening to original 80s techno and electro like cybotron and the undeniable awesomeness of Afrika Bambata

its also hard to deny the English rock/acid-house crossover acts of my youth like Primal Scream and the Mondays

why are these some of my favorites? because I grew up partying to a lot of this music of course... go 90s

Produce doesn't mean that in the music biz, which is an offshoot of entertainment in general. The producer manages the money, makes schedules and keeps the creative people focused. He sets the tempo and contributes creatively in broad strokes generally unless he is also the engineer or on a film the director. I mean sure these guys "produce" music in the Oxford English dictionary sense, but as far as the job description goes, they don't precisely fit it because they make music that requires very little personel and there fore doesn't need a producer to manage everything. Vangellis and Brian Eno were huge pioneers in the electronic genre but they're composers, artists.... no one called Eno a producer unless he was filling that role as well as contributing as an artist like when he produced talking heads but also arranged, engineered and played a little. Its confusing. I would not hire Skrillex to produce an album with live musicians, but I would trust a more traditional producer like Flood to produce my electronic album if I needed to use a commercial studio.... although there's this thing since the 80s where no one knows what the producer on a major label album really does anymore, LOL. But I think it was covered pretty well in Dave Grohl's film "Sound City."

Can I just say I hate this term? well, I do... as a solo electronic artist you are a composer and an engineer, but you really have no producer when you're working alone at home.... there's a very broad but specific role the producer fills in the recording world and once commercial studios are out of the equation and there's no dedicated tech staff to manage? well, I dunno... its a redundant credit! even bands who produce their own albums did so by being in charge of the budgeting, booking, schedule and artistic direction like a 3rd party would have. This term "producer" is so over and misused. In movie terms a record producer could be seen as a mix of executive producer and director and the engineer is like the cinematographer. As a former studio cat it drives me mildly nuts to hear the way amature electronic musicians who can't even handle the engineering technicalities if they're not using softsynths in fruity or live bandy it about, putting on airs. I guess you guys are kinda producing your albums when you do a full length, but when you're just pumping out individual tracks from your bedroom I fail to see how anyone is filling that role because it is not needed. I guess its part of modern parlance though.... when did this happen? When I got into electronic music we didn't use this term the way its used now by EDM guys....

you know, until my ex-wife got me some issues of guitar afficianado (which I manly like for the gear porn alongside good wine and cigar reviews) I ahd never owned a guitar magazine issue of any type, LOL.... it was over 20 years of playing before I wound up with those Guitar Afficianado issues

y'know, I think this year, 2016, is my official 25th anniversary of serious guitar playing... where's my prize?

don't bring my toddler a real steam engine.... he'll kill us with it by mistake

that's a cheap ac15c1, get it.... it'll do for a while

I gotta tell ya, if I had to go out and buy my 1st tube amp today I would dump a pile of cash into 1 SERIOUS amp.. either an 80s Marshall, 90s Laney, ceriatone 18 watt, 36 watt or handwired 800 clone, silverface fender, 2nd hand vox handwired or if I HAD to have switchable channels I would try to score a ceriatone silver jubilee 2550 handwired clone, a jet city of some kind, a mesa dual caliber in my wattage from the 90s or just maybe a 22 caliber with a master volume on the clean channel... or maybe I would break out the credit card or apply for financing to get a Soldano Hotrod 50+ or tone king imperial... just overpay in interest over the course of a year

as for a JC22H for me? I am hovering... its not on budget this week, but they are so cheap I might buy one in February to dick around with.... it looks really fun to me and the not-so-clean channel and uber-gain channel would be a nice contrast to most of my stuff! I'll bet she would sound muscley as hell through my sealed frontloader with the modern G12Ms.

are you playing a Hayseed by valvetech or his channel switcher? His hayseeds sound great. Very JMI. I've been eyeballing a frenzel bassman/800 pre for a few months myself. I miss my marshalls everyonce in a while but don't want anything bigger than 20 or 30 watts these days. Kinda want the option to slap it into a small poweramp....

great studio shots on that last link.... your park looked sexy atop the basketweave slant cab ;-) Bet you could peel the paint off the walls with her!

a 900 and a park branded JMP? interesting rig

Nothing to do? Build a time machine, man! Remember, you have to put all the crystals in for it to work right.

Also, I'm not old, you're just impossibly young, hahahaha

I don't keep up with all the spruced up demo releases for guys like Buckley, Cobain and Elliott Smith. I accept they died young and respect the output they ahd during their lives. I don't know that any of them would want their demoes fixed up in ways they might not have intended and released. Havingamde lots of demoes and atual finished records I can say that I would not want my demoes added to my discography without my permission.

Any time you are in philly you can drop by and I'll give you an original Buckley pick if you bring my son a new Thomas the Tank toy. I actually have a lot of really cool memorabilia from the 90s and early 2000s around my house in drawers and boxes. I keep finding it as I sell off processors and pedals I don't use anymore... its like an archaeological dig finding all my gear to hock and mixed in you find Smashing Pumpkins tickets, NIN backstage passes, promo copies of famous albums like pottery shards under Constantinople! You would be welcome to my picks and ticket stubs. I don't know why I keep this junk.

yeah, well the 1st channel is the soldano channel 1 in crunch mode permanently, not clean mode, so when you couple that with the 20 watt power amp its hard to get a boe clean tone. Even the Soldano Hotrod 50+ that has a apir of 6L6es but the same channel topology as a jet city has trouble going dead clean. Its got more of a brown, tweed fender clean with channel 1 gain set low. Even a SLO100 with channel 1 set to clean has a warmer more 50s clean that I enjoy. Mike Soldano didn't try to make it steely and scooped like a twin. The tone controls have to be implemented different for that so it would preclude a shared cathode-follower tonestack. Frankly that tweedy thing with gain 1 around 1 or 2 is clean enough for me on a channel switcher. Its a GOOD rock 'n roll clean sound and I will take that over the piss poor clean channels on most affordable amps that try to do channel switching with dedicated clean, crunch and lead. YMMV though.

The Peavey is a VERY similar design to the soldano SLO100 and hotrods. For a bit EVH used Soldao SLO100s with his plexis. He had his modded to be rounder and less bright overall (Warren Haynes does this too). He them went to Peavey and had them tweak the design further into their 5150 amp. Then he wanted separate treble and bass controls so it became the 5150II, then he jumped ship and made her a 3 channel amp with a dedicated fender-style clean channel (made for his brand by fender). The rest is history. So the current 6505 amps are very much soldano descendants with even more gain added to suit the metal guys who favored the original 5150 models. Its a Soldano with more features and inferior transformers and parts throughout. Though they added just enough voicing stuff to the 5150 to make it work for a lot of guys without cluttering it like a Mesa recto. Fair comparison, Peavey to Jet City though.

12au7 would probably neuter the Laney in clean mode because the gain is really low on an au7... and due to the lack of compression from thsi very linear, hifi twin-triode would probably give it a weak distortion sound coupled with a really pokey top end on note attack, maybe an AT7 or AY7.

You are making me want to add a high gain amp to the collection. I see I can get a JC22H for udner 400 USD... wow! if I want to shell out an extra 40 bucks I can get one with extra voicing switches on each channel. Tempting as all hell....

now you get the magic of a properly built Vox, eh? You should try an old one.... and a Matchless DC30.... the fawn HW amps are pretty good and all (I have 2), but they're not even the be-all-end-all in Vox style sounds. They're a nice middling version that's attractive, affordable, roadwrthy... and best of all easily replaced on the road if you're touring and yours gets dropped or something and you don't have the time to fix her!

Just buy whatever it is you like best in your price range. But don't complain if it breaks ;-) I hate saying "I told you so," but I always end up in those situations when people ask for advie they have no intention of taking because their minds were made up already. If you weren't planning on gigging I would say the Bugera is fine, but I wouldn't dip any lower than a tiny terror or jet city if ou wanna be in a band and take it rehearse every week and gig. I used to just leave my touring amps at my rehearsal space back in the day to save a little on wear and tear transporting them and keep my smaller amps at home for practicing. Every car trip is putting stress on an amp. Some are road warriors and many are not :-(

Having grown up with old tube amps, reel to reel budget multitrack tape recorders, cassette 4 tracks and the Yamaha dx7 I know all about swearing at recalcitrant pieces of gear. Certain gear fosters a very love-hate relationship that you wouldn't usually have with inanimate objects.... programming a DX7 without software to help will certainly make you suspect the thing is full of angry gremlins and not electronic components!

Nah, you should not keep going beyond a hobby level. Stop making dance music and stay in school! Become a lawyer or something. Then buy all the gear you want and enjoy it between cases.

Welcome... you will find that its difficult to be truly great as well as respected in electronic music. If you can be both it would be great, but then you're probably Brian Eno and have better things to do than post to EB.

Also, talking to objects in your studio can be helpful. Sometimes yelling at your rackmount 80s DCO synths that lack adequate knobs for tweaking can really help you blow off a lot of rage and finally get that patch just right on your MKS or Matrix without having to wire up a phatman... "why won't you work you antiquated piece of junk??? FUCKER! oh wait, there we go."

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I don't feel like I spoil myself with my guitar/amp collection when I look at the collection of awesome toys I set my boy up with. We both have outrageous setups for our hobbies. In guitar rigs or train sets the rule is the same... GO BIG OR GO HOME!