jimmarchi1's forum posts 8022

isn't that a poor man's charvel san dimas type of super strat from the 80s? they made a model called a hurricane that's more mustang sized too, right? a lot like that g&l jerry cantrel plays only with a Floyd (of course)....

100 of course, 1 to screw it in and 99 more to explain how they woulda screwed it in better

oh hey, how many guitarists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

he seems to have shaken off the cold in time for his birthday Saturday, thanks for asking

shared EQ though? It might be like the 90s laneys that claimed 2 channels but shared V1 and the tonestack but just added another gain stage for the 'lead channel' like a soldano or jcm800 split channel (likely as there should be 3 triodes for clean mode and a dual triode as a long tailed pair phase inverter leaving 1/2 of V1 unused to act as a gain boost) its hardly important though... do you have the footswitch?

I didn't know you actually bought it.... I thought you were just thinking about it last time you mentioned it

doesn't that have a switchable gainstage for extra drive?

what'd you buy?

that rock highway pedal has more knobs than any of my amps...

don't you need a reliable tube amp? maybe save the money and put it towards an amp in the new year?

all the people I know with mediocre gear and tone who envy my stuff are guilty of buying lots of small ticket items like effects at retail pricing rather than diligently saving for the big ticket items like a quality tube amp or a Gibson

the entire modern gear industry is designed to separate beginners and weekend warriors from their money 1 magic pedal at a time, don't fall into the trap! make sure you have a solid base sound and then start doling out the effects money.... don't eat a can of frosting and no cake when you can have cake WITH frosting

patience is a virtue... there are no shortcuts in life.... you get what you pay for... caveat emptor

necro post! anyone else have a cool 1st guitar and learning tale to tell?

I am going to rant now:

I think my favorite question every college radio DJ asked was "how do you guys prepare for a show?"

it got old staring blankly for minute and telling them we did what we always do, tune up, plug in, turn on and play music (I usually like to get sushi before a show or during studio sessions because it doesn't bloat you up and its tasty, but I also like to get sushi before doing anything physical that's no good on an empty stomach)... after awhile we would come up with some really outrageous answers. Our singer once said she liked to eat nothing but raw meat all week (she's a vegan) and me and the bassist told one girl we liked to get drunk and fight the undead (the bassist doesn't drink and I had given it up for awhile back then).

It just felt utterly ridiculous. Allof it. How do YOU get ready for work every day and why should I care? Playing music is what we do. Its fun but its also a job. Writing songs and performing is mostly about craft and routine. But that's not what Joe Listener wants to hear. There's too much music mythology glamorizing the process for him to buy that. Its the reason Van Gogh is such a huge name in painting. There were other early expressionists painting like that independently at the time, but they didn't cut their ears off or commit suicide. The myth sells. I was always a Van Gogh guy as a kid because I bought the myth, but as I learned more about his life I realized he did his best work when there was no drama in his world. I'm sure he ahd that pent up angst as a source of inspiration to some extent, but the truth was he painted because he was driven to paint independent of the other facets of his personality and musicians make music for the same reason. People's deep, dark souls are more hype than reality. Its good press in an industry that markets coolness. Rock music, but pretty much all pop music these days, is really infected with a huge dose of Wertherism (read Goethe, of course he meant that book as a satire, but no one read it that way).

And as far as song meaning goes, I find that between inspiration and completion a song takes on a life of its own that obscures and even negates the original meaning and often changes the original mood I was trying to set to varying degrees. This is doubly true when a band gets collaborating. When I have tried to share a feeling or experience that's particularly potent in song form, the song is as much as I want to invite strangers in for. If I wanted to tell you a detailed story I would write my memoir. Writing personal songs is more about the catharsis than a quest for empathy and in the end I will always opt to write something more universal that is fun to listen to than to express my experiences with precision for both artistic and selfish reasons.

That unspoken communal catharsis is what makes rock 'n roll appealing to musicians and listeners. Reading your own meaning into a song is what makes it resonate with you. Knowing too much about the lyrics will strip its power. There's such an element of put-on in rock music and trying to "make it" taught me (and I think most of my bandmates) that you have to have a certain pretentious temperament that I just do not have. I can't play the part with a straight face. My sense of whimsy gets me every time as it does most people. After awhile all I could think every day was "oh my god, this is the dumbest thing I could be doing, I can't even pretend I am taking it seriously! Might as well let 'em all know we are having fun."

edit: this is not a shot at the OP, just ranting at the music biz and rock music fans and press in general

its clearly got a segment that's basic instructions for getting up in the morning so maybe that's what its about.... but seriously, I don't understand why everyone on earth is so obsessed with analyzing the bad poetry we call song lyrics.... many songs are not about anything at all... I remember being instructed by a record label to allude to deep meaning in my band's song lyrics on college radio where there was none to "catch the interest of the student crowd"

everything is marketing

I was being sarcastic when I mentioned Rolling Stone.

JPJ has great groove and contributes fantastic electric piano ideas to songs like "no quarter," he is a great all around musician in my opinion but he's not underrated, maybe even overrated because he doesn't do a lot harmonically on abss or add anything exceptional in his fills

I try not to subject anyone to metal recorded after 1990 unless I hate them... and I love my son.

there's nothing wrong with low output, but the dano RI pickups are not built to old dano spec in construction or materials so they don't sound right

when I built my favorite tele I specifically had pickups made that were on the lowest side of recorded fender spec for early stagger pole tele pickups because the old 58 through 70 teles I've liked best were all very low output.... its a great sound, twangy, chimey and beautiful with the nicest inbetween tone of any tele pickups -- plus, lower output works better with fuzz than higher output to my ear... pickups are like icecream flavors, higher output humbuckers are chocolate, everyone likes it and its a no brainer to have chocolate on hand, but you also need vanilla (the kind shit of all flavors for adding toppings) as well as some cool classics like mint chocolate chip or strawberry...

to me it sounds like you are saying the new dano pickups are wound closer to the vintage DCR which was on the low side whereas the 90s Korean ones sounded too overwound to me compared to a vintage one which got all its oomph from the powerful alnico 8 bar magnet... they can drive an amp better than a stock strat but are very open and chimey in that strat way, hard to describe

I couldn't call that a multifaceted list Narcy, but I just went with 1 guy, so.... hey, enjoy the metal bass playing!

You linked me a magazine article? Subjective, popular journalism as a fact? jeeze, you and my ex-wife would get along. You have the same debate style but you get a pass for being a kid, she's older than me. Next time you should at least use a Rolling Stone article. Its a little more respectable, but in the end these guys are just trying to fill the extra pages that aren't new interviews. At any rate, all bassists are underrated. Its the least flashy, but most essential instrument. That's the unwritten point of the thread.

Wilhelm Kempf

Mike Garson

Herbie Hancock

Bill Evans (!!!!!)

our former conductor in Philly, Eschenbach (love his piano playing for Wagner)

Rick fucking Wakeman

Lalo Schifrin

I could go on....

http://equipboard.com/items/sabatier-8-inch-forged-stainless-chef-knife

I'll put my Shun hand-forged Damascus steel santuko against that lame, stainless chef's knife any day of the week and twice on sunday! stainless is for amatures

I've done FOH, indoors its pretty cut and dry, but outdoors is a whole other ballgame. Especially when doing a live recording.... the drums don't have reflective surfaces to reverberate off of, so you get only the initial attack in the mics and no room sound so they don't sit n the mix well and the whole thing is tricky to get sounding right. You can get it to work for the mains at the show (though it never sounds fantastic), but the recording for an album or TV broadcast is always thin and plunky or muddy with fake verb to try to create a phoney sense of space around the kit.

And you're on Equipboard posting about it, so this is officially an Equipboard baby... meaning it will be born with so much GAS

😁

(couldn't help it. i'll show myself out.)

aww jeeze.... that was bad, man... congrats Liam! Did you get to pull him out and wash the slime off him? I had Lucian glued to me from the second we yanked him out and got him breathing. What did you name your boy?

I really enjoy the sound of my fingers plucking a fender through my HC30 pushed into heavy compression and a little overdrive... try it.... your gut reaction will be "this is so country", but its good for so much more

If you meant the vintage double cut "short horn" made in Neptune NJ in the 50s and early 60s branded as danelectro with the coke bottle headstock or silvertone with the weird 'dolphin' headstock?

No, they were not good guitars consistently. Even a lot of the better specimens have aged poorly because hey had no truss rod. The pickups sound awesome though. I have often considered getting a Silvertone U2 or Coral Hornet with a REALLY warped neck on the cheap and then replacing it with one of the allparts dano replacements that have truss rods. I just worry the new neck won't be a perfect fit for the vintage body even though they are bolt ons.....

The old bridges are really crappy as well.... and they're not intonatable. Just look this crap up. Its easy to learn about vintage and modern guitars these days. When I was a kid it involved hangig out at stored and guitar shows and playing everything and scrutinizing stuff.... memorizing details.... and generally pissing off your girlfriend!

yup, you know me and Nick Grooves play the piano (him better than me, but I am not bad for being mainly self taught)

I am pretty sure there's an army of electronic musicians on here that started with piano lessons as children.

he's not really sick, just sniffly and low on energy.... he's taking another short nap now, hopefully that'll fix him right up, but thanks

because the pathfinder sounds pretty weak? its cheap though.... if you feel so confident building things why not get a 5F1 champ kit and build your own tube amp? Its an inexpensive kit, check out triode electronics' version with the nice turret board, decent transformers and low, low pricetag

I am probably just cranky because my son seems to be coming down with a cold and his birthday is the end of the week...

yeah but you pretty much blew off everyone's advice, thi is starting to be a pet peeve with me on gear forums, I'll shut up now and justs tart ignoring newbies asking for opinions.... but shouldn't a 5 watt hiwatt be called a lowatt?? Anyway, all single ended el84 amps sound pretty similar, some are better made than others, but they are all pretty close from this hiwatt to a vox ac4 to an epi valve junior... generally the more you spend the better the components will be and the tougher the build quality.... that's it though, they are all very similar because the design of the power section imparts a huge stamp on the tone of a tube amp even played clean;;; the cheap "hiwatt" you linked to looks like a Chinese made PCB amp like the ac4tv I recommended. It probably sounds very similar, but like I said, they all sound similar.... personally I would go with whatever one has better ventilation for the tubes and chassis, tube amps get hot and cheap Chinese PCBs warp and crack or the traces can melt if the amps don't have enough ventilation... one of the great things about the vox ac4tv and epi valve jr is they have been around FOREVER now and there's tons of upgrade kits with easy instructions available for them not to mention lots of easy DIY mods available for free online

what I will say against the hybrid micro terror amp is that It has a fairly convincing gain sound, but no clean tone to speak of, just sterile, stiff cleans.... that's a deal breaker for me

I don't even understand this thread.... why did the OP ask for opinions on tube amps when he already pretty much decided he was buying a hybrid? Why are we trying to explain stuff to a guy who already made up his mind anyway. How did he go from a 300 euro budget to "I wanna buy a hiwatt." Good luck with your hybrid Orange or the marshall solid state amp you are thinking of overpaying for by 100 to 150 Euros. If its not fully tube it has no resale value nd when you are ready to upgrade you will not be able to trade up.

are you a teenager? and they're teenagers? 'underrated by my idiot, pimpley friends' is not the same as underrated by rock n roll fans everywhere.... I' sorry your friends don't get it, you could maim one as an example to the rest..... or make new friends.... or accept that while no one in Zep is underrated by the world, zep is not everyone's taste

I have always loved queen and particularly admired brian may.... I was pretty much flying solo in school, but that doesn't make Queen an underrated band... in reality they have sold more records than the Beatles and are just as popular..

is it made in China? if its the chinese shorthorn reissue I saw everywhere a few xmases ago for around the $300 mark then I have to say it looked chintzy compared to the older U2 reissues from Korea... reminded me of the Coral Hornet 'reissue' from about 2006(?) which was a total piece of crap so I didn't actually pick the shorthorn up... shoddy finish work always turns me off and the shorthorn dano reissues I saw looked like they were shot with black rustoleum spray paint by a blind Chinese convict with 1 arm

maybe they improved the finishes and maybe the guitars play fine.... the hardware looked nice compared to the Korean ones, but who knows how functional it was, the 90s dano reissues played well and looked really nice ike they were assembled and painted by slave laborers with a little attention to detail

have you checked out eastwood guitars? people really like those copies of 60s cheapy guitars over the dano reissues and they are very affordable

you just called John Paul Jones underrated! by who? toddlers? everyone knows john paul jones is a great bassist and keys player.... how is a living legend "underrated" LOL

there's a preset select/tap switch opposite the bypass switch

but I was thinking of running it in the loop of my HC30 and getting a cheap midi board to access presets...

I keep hedging between buying the H9 regular or something else like a nova system

its mainly in the tuning, I think its in DADGAD (or maybe you already knew this).... otherwise live he just used his usual stuff, tonebender mk2 pro, hiwatt dr103 with a gain boost function, orange or120 or a marshall plexi modified to use kt88 output tubes...

in the old days he usually played it on a danelectro shorthorn modified with a wraparound bridge, I think a leo kwan badass bridge, not sure if that's part of the sound you are seeking, but probably it is since the dano pickups have a distinct tone and the dano formica bodies have a peculiar resonance

then again, yu posted footage from the reunion show and he played it on a Gibson that night, right? he also was using different amps than he did in the 70s... still sounds just like himself, doesn't he....

sounding like page is an elusive thing, there's a lot of tone in his hands.... he used to drink heavily before going on stage, so a good place to start is with jack daniels..... also, the jack will take the sting off when you fail and wind up sounding like yourself... the old guys like page are not effects driven, they are all technique and stage volume

edit:

I omitted the fact that Page has always performed with his amps cranked up pretty damned loud whether its little supros and vox ac30s in the studio or marshalls and hiwatts live, the man is all about LOUD as are most of his classic rock contemporaries.... the tone just comes when you get loud, ears hear loud noises differently and microphones capture them differently, your mic pre will need less gain for loud sources too.... everything gets different with volume, you drive the speakers harder and start getting speaker distortion as well as amplifier distortion.... but this whole school of tone came from an era when PA systems were weak and had to be used for vocals only so guitarists needed their amps to move a lot of air to fill up large venues and be heard... page definitely knew about scaling his amps to it the application, but he was definitely about loud ass tube tone, so start there and try playing your tube amp turned up really loud tp the point where the speaker(s) sounds like its being pushed to its design limits (his favorite record is still Link Ray's "rumble" so you know he wants to hear his tubes being overworked and speakers on the edge of breaking)

in short, get drunk, play your guts out in DADGAD tuning and make sure you are so loud that its a little uncomfortable standing in front of you amp because the sound pressure level makes your teeth rattle a bit

all accurate.... I kinda like MV sometimes, but they fall down with their parts that rely on electronic manipulation... if it won't come off acoustic and its critical to the song, then you messed up...

Brian Eno might think otherwise, but he's a Musique Conrete sort of guy... love him, but we would never get along

this is the guy from mars volta? I hope that's his real name and he didn't go all hipster and change his name TO "Omar" lol.... but seriously, guys like him are the reason we used to call effects pedals 'talent boxes'

there was a brief time when The Edge was transcending the effects driven thing, but he stopped setting a real mood through guitar texture alone a long time ago and hes just another effects driven guitarist now... Daniel Ash used to be a real effects innovator back then too, but everything he did sounds tame now nd these days he seems to just get down and play the damn guitar instead of futzing around making guitar soundscapes

I take it "Omar" and Jonsi are your guitar heroes?

it doesn't have to be an H9 max... and used the regular H9 and H9 core are only like 250 to 300 in US dollars... for all the crap it can do and the ability to store tons of presets it feels like a bargain... the proprietary Eventide AD and DA converters alone make it worth more than other multis

I know they're all really playing, I've been to see them once.... also, most of Nigel's guitars really belong to Christopher Guest... Shearer is a multitalented guy... he originally was a radio host way abck when, hes done it all

I love his transgendered character in "mighty wind"

if you want a modern guitar with modern playability and durability but all the dano vibe, try a jerry jones..... JJ retired, but his dano inspired guitars live on in the used market. Though the buy-in reflects the wuality....

you may not care so much about what dano reissue from the east you get since you already play epi LP that doesn't appear to be Japanese and those Korean, Indonesian and Chinese guitars have been nothing to write home about since the early 90s either (I am being gentle)... if you can deal with that, any dano will feel okay to you and, just ike your epi, will get better and better with every electronics upgrade

Necro-post! Did you ever buy an amp or guitar, dude?

It seems like the forums is full of young people who talk about buying stuff they never actually purchase and review other than a few of us who are die-hard collectors and players.

I'll second Zep and Jack White for most overrated.... I am a huge fan of Neil Young, but he's hugely overrated too. I am surprised you didn't throw his Canadian ass on your well-thought-out overrated list.

Good call putting spinal tap and Shearer on both your positive lists.... nice! sometimes fiction is better than reality when it comes to 'heavy' bands.

oh god, my son discovered my microphones... I think I can spare a whole day to redo the 1st 4 demoes nicely as well as record 2 more tunes right before the holiday... that is if any of my microphones still work now that Lucian has thrown them around