jimmarchi1's forum posts 8022

Anything said by crazy band members can be disregarded with impunity. If a digitec is your sound then play it. I own instruments that are just me. If it's my idea to use something else from my collection then sure, otherwise if you don't like my sound call someone else. I'll be at the bar.

Unless it's legit hired work.

Additionally, I saw earlier in this thread that some Slovakian company makes tubes

JJ tubes, formerly Tesla... no Elon musk connection lol

Just a tube/valve update: western electric has stated in the press they are tooling up for guitar tubes in the USA but nothing in production yet. While we were arguing about covid, china quietly stopped tube production. Obviously there's russian militarism and embargoes. So JJ in Slovakia is the only game in town apart from the expensive groove tubes 6L6 GE if you're a 40 to 100 watt fender player.

I was designing another tube amp but I'm not planning on building it any time soon. It's a pretty unique idea with a 6bm8 triode/pentode and small transformer in the high gain channel like a little vox ac4 as a preamp followed by active tone controls into a big, mean hiwatt inspired power amp (like my last amp build) but only ehx offers a 6bm8 now and its Russian. Oh well. The design is going back on the shelf. Switching relays are a pain anyway, I never had the whole switching system bulletproof. I usually do 1 channels or non-switching. Maybe I should design a 400 watt tube bass amp with my 3 band baxandall tone controls1 bassists could use all tube studio grade eq right?

There's a lot of interesting solid state and hybrid amps on the market that aren't your dad's solid state amps.

I'd buy everyone on the site a 40 to 80 year old amp if I could afford it. They literally don't make them like they used to.

Can someone lock this old thread? @Michael?!!

Are you then tracking to a DAW despite your aversion to turning your computer on? Or did you obtain a tape machine or something? I'll answer anyway.

If you want dawless digital multitrack recording, stereo monitor mixing for the performance but you're not tied to a fully analog desk, zoom makes a product with like 20 inputs, more or less knob per function for basic analog mixer tasks, internal flash memory recording and it can also work as an interface. I've heard positive things although I wouldn't expect tip top pro results. I believe it's called a livetrack20?

There's also the new tascam mixers which are all analog. They seem to use a modern search mode power supply though, although the zoom livetrack does too and any small format mixer withour an e CD tonal wall wart or full external supply these days provably does too. I'm not sure how many internal track the tascams record... I think presonus makes a similar product in their studiolive range too. Not sure how much they offer on terms if recording functionality. I know they exist.

If you're resigned to going to a daw and you don't have a lot of outboard I would go pre-eq direct outputs. Your interface us probably equipped with sufficient gain control and maybe pads. Then you can excitement with your monitor mix and record a dry signal. If you have a lot of outboard processors and find a desk with eq you love then post fader might be desirable for what you're doing. But I think pre-eq sounds like your kinda all analog desk.

You'll need to assign note on values to each pedal on the fcb1010 which requires patience. If you need one I gave an fcb1010 in my closet I would gladly sell. I never use it anymore. Nothing wrong with it, but it's not needed here and just sits there.

There's no rule on direct outs or insert points. You used to encounter a lot of direct outs post fader in the days of tape the idea being that you could get the perfect signal to noise that way with your preamp exactly where you want it and the fader availableas trim... and on budget conscious desks based on the trident 80 topology (all the rage in the 80s and 90s, soundcraft being the most notable 80b tipoff company) the inserts would be post EQ. The reason for the insert positioning is also the secondary reason for post fader direct outs: reduced parts count for cost. The last tl072 of the eq section can easily drive the insert output as well as do its job in the eq and the fader buffer can do double duty in the same way, the pan buffer will receive the insert return and the fader amp drives the direct out as well as presenting a low impedance to the summing resistors. Another benefit of this simple a approach is the ability to create a post fader mult during mix down without travelling through the extra aux bus circuitry. But there are downsides too.

But there are other approaches and something like an SSL G let's you tap signal at a lot of points for many purposes. There's trade ups in every topology. Depending on your preamp design it may or may not be able to drive the EQ for cue mixes as well as the direct out without additional op amps... that's without talking about balancing. I could get more techy and historical if you want. I would say its personal preference in any situation and I kinda consider the circuit topology as well as use case when shopping mixers. I'm not sure how much sense I'm making but if you look at some schematics rather than block diagrams I'll make more sense.

EDIT: For instance my desk is an inline desk and I use it almost exclusively to mix. I have post fader direct outs but they're all looped into the tape returns of my monitor section via my patchbay which is then merged to my 2 bus which is the source for my 2 track outs and monitors. This allows me to control the level of 1 signal post eq and insert processing to a subgroup and the master with 1 fader but with a second level control and pan into the 2bus for parallel group processing and other tricks. That's a very specific use case but post fader outs was one of my imperatives along with an inline/split format with 8 groups when i was shopping for a new desk. But my desk is also very trident inspired in component selection and implementation so it lends itself to post eq inserts and post fader outs for the shortest signal path to the groups and master despite having a longer path to the direct outs than an A&H live desk like a GLseries. So YMMV.

YOU ASKED AN EXCELLENT QUESTION... now let me ask YOU; how do you plan to use your mixer? Synth jams is pretty broad ;)

A heads up to people reading about the availability of cheap 6n2p Russian dual triodes; any qualified tech should be able to rewire tube sockets with flying leads to utilize these Russian tubes. I'm pretty sure you can buy adapters to try them out before committing to a modification or if you are in the unfortunate position of playing an amp with PCB mounted sockets. The heaters run on 6v AC. As I recall It's just the wiring of the plates, grida and cothides that's substantially different.

FWIW I would be cautious about buying these tubes from dealers that didn't acquire them prior to Putin's invasion of Ukraine. And I wouldn't ever purchaee them directly from Russia or a sympathetic nation. I wouldn't want to be indirectly funding the war effort. I'm not being jingoistic, I don't want to knowingly fund any war of agression if I can help it. Certainly not over a luxury item like a tube amp. These are Russian military surplus parts. If you're buying them the Russian military may have seen a few rubles for at some point. It's for you to decide how that squares with your ethics.

But you can try them out as a cheap alternative to the 12ax7 and ecc83 hi mu dual triode we all use with adapters or better practice us the minor, reversible mod I mentioned first.

Another option is the 6eu7 high mu dual triode which is a 60s 12ax7 internally with a different pin out. Same process to try them. The pinout never really caught on and the only amp manufacturer to use them was Gibson. You can obtain the sound of coveted NOS preamp tubes by purchasing some of these. RCAs go for about 40 bucks retail versus 100s for an RCA 12ax7 from the same year that has the same plate and grid construction. They also last FOREVER just like their usa made 12ax7 cousins. People are catching on already hence why the prices have quadrupled in the past 20 years. Buy bulk now and hit your tech. Make sure you're getting NOS and not what they now call ANOS which is a used tube that tests good. 40 bucks is too much for a used part.

But I'm frightened of a world without new production tubes. I have a lot of studio gear that will be unusable in that world abs my beloved #1 ac30 will eventually be a paperweight... classic solid state circuits keep improving though. Quilter is doing cool stuff. Digital keeps improving. There are other options. I'm being cautious about how much I use my legit amps. I'm not firing them up just to noodle around. When it's time to record a take that's one thing, but im not burning up tubes and sucking up electricity like I used to. It's not responsible in the modern world.

EDIT: And Drake, regarding your power tube situation, the 5881 and all its relatives are just a 50s version 6L6. Like the kt66 they are a lower max plate voltage, lower dissipation version of the 6L6gc. If biased properly a JJ 6L6gc can be used at high and low plate voltages and can sub for any 6L6 family member including and uLtra-robust 7027a in ampeg v series amps running on a good 600v in the 2 power tube models. The tibe us not the most toneful when pushed but it has a suitably bold beam tetrode sound and lasts forever at typical fender voltages.

I can't speak from personal experience but they're well regarded pickups.

The wide range doesn't have a distinct screw and slug coil sharing a bar magnet at opposite poles. The screws and slugs ARE the magnets.

If you currently own a fender with wide ranges and its not a custom shop, artist signature model or AVRI then the pickups are not actually wide range buckers. They're regular paf type humbuckers with the screws and slugs split between coils which are epoxied into a wide range housing. The coils are not oversized, the single magnet is an alnico or ferrite bar and the screws and slugs are steel. If that applies to you and you like the sound then you can put any 4 conductor humbucker with similar specs in there and get splitting although a new pick guard will probably be required to mount them.

If you need real wide ranges look up Creamery. It's a boutique shop so I'm pretty sure if you ask nicely he can make you a custom set with 4 conductors and 12 cunife screws for a small upcharge. I would definitely want adjustable poles on all my strings when using 1 coil. Or all flat poles, but then why use wimpy cunife magnetsover alnico rods?

Here's some detailed info on the Wide Range:

Seth Lover was a genius

A couple years ago I switched to a couple new motu interfaces that have my roundtrip really low, midi latency is usually negligible when playing a plugin, I cant even feel it. Although my audio roundtrip latency is still noticeable if I plug a guitar or hardware synth in and start piling up plugin processing, close but I can still feel it if I monitor from a daw while playing by hand, but fir just playing midi in the current generation of interfaces are so good that your host is the only bottleneck and not much of one at that.

Sorry but I come from a school of sound engineering where we were passable electrical and acoustical engineers at least through experience. I know how stuff works, knowing less is uncivilized. A more practical buy would be a budget neve clone. Great mic pre, plug a DI in and you have low end for bass with the thru jack hitting a miced amp, put a guitar into a boost into the hi-Z jack and gun everything up and get revolution tones straight to your DI (a compressor and/or pad might be required too).

I just looked up that schematic and the broadcast really is pretty close to your typical early transistor radio console input right down to a transformer coupled output (you don't need one on the input for guitar. It uses 1 IC in the power supply to step 9v up to 24v but unlike a lot if 60s and 70s studio gear it appears to be a unipolar supply, so it's about 12v peak to peak swing so it should gave half the headroom of say a 1073 mic preamp meaning it'll break up earlier. It uses germanium transistors like the earliest solid state mixers which are inherently less linear than silicon. I'll bet Hudson has to sort huge batches of those transistors to get ones that are in spec, germanium are notoriously inconsistent. I can't believe he's keeping the cost under 300 bucks.

I had always thought Boss's asymmetrical clipping was patented and exclusive to the SD-1 so I've been a bit surprised to see the MXR and Wampler overdrives boasting of asymmetric distortion?

Mike Fuller skirted it by using mosfets configured as diodes with an additional germanium diode in series with one of them and I think someone else skirted it with 2 red LEDs and a germanium. Some time into the boutique explosion boss let the patent lapse. That's if there really was a US patent. I've never seen one. That's just the lore. I'm sure roland had a patent in Japan but that might be all they were referencing in the marketing material. Sometimes a lawyer sending a cease and desist letter citing a 'pending' patent that was never actually filed is enough to scare competitors off for decades. It's weird that in the od1 they innovated asymmetrical clipping as well as putting the diodes I the opamp feedback loop but only suppisedly patented the asymmetry... leading ibanez to rip them off with symmetrical diodes in the loop of a jrc4558 in ts808.

Mike fuller double lifted the OCD. Look up the video labs overdrive, not the sparkle drive, the straight od.

Which Custom Badass do you mean? you say 3 controls so I guess it's the 78 Distortion you mean? I like it

Nope, the ugly gold one. Does the business. If it offends you the green rhino mk2 or higher is the same thing with symmetrical clipping in the feedback loop. It's a very practical design. The 78 is a ds1

My granny smoked parliaments or as. P-funks as we call them in philly... so I can get past the gold paint. Plus I can always find it in the 'talent enhancer' drawer.

Don't discount the mxr custom badass. Bad name but it's got sd1 asymmetrical clipping diodes and a switchable mid boost with a different and very effective 2 band tone stack. The bad monkey is a true baxandall which is an elegant active shelving circuit whereas the badass retains the typical ts9/sd1 treble bleed tone control but adds an active wein-bridge peaking filter like on mixer with sweepable mids fixed at 100hz. Those 3 controls together have made it a desert island pedal f oi r me as it can be matched to most amps while retaining the classic grit of that whole family of drives.

The od1 and sd1 are my favorite soft clip style overdrives. But I play mostly British amps. If you're using a british amp it's a wise change up. If you're getting a boutique that does both camps then it's a win/win.

Just don't wait too long. God knows how long creamery's cunife supply will hold out and how long it could take him to get another shipment once he's out if polepueces! I can't even by a 5 dollar voltage regulator from mouser anymore. Everything's backordered.

If your sole goal is coloration with even order harmonics galore then an Ampex based mic/line amp is for you. Expect subdued high end until hitting full bore overdrive and rounded transients. If you want more subtle coloration and monster punch from your transients for percussive sounds a couple api 535 line amps and a 500 series lunchbox may be in order. If you need bass girth look at the many affordableneve clones which can work very well with a cheap passive DI box between a synth and the mic input. A neve clone and DI to the mic input is my go to for bass synth, bass guitar, live and drum machine kicks. In the case of the bass synth and bass guitar I often use the through Jack to feed an amplifier with a microphone out front. If compression is needed, varimu or opto can be printed tothe direct signal and vca compression is good for a speaker with a microphone in front if it. Like a dbx160 etc. Allthis c as n be fairly subtle though. It's all just a little bit more than what your affordable mixer amps will deliver on their own and there are in fact trade offs. Well implemented IC IC circuits have very good fidelity in the audible spectrum and with a decent amount of current on demand will track transients veryaccurately but they're not really adding anything. If you're happy with your sounds already your money us better invested in dynamics and EQ.

The preamp in question is based on the modular record-head amp from a series of Ampex decks that's a popular candidate fir mic amp conversion because they made a lot if those tube Ampex machines in the 50s and early 60s so they used to be easy to come by on the cheap and they had great transformers. They can sound pretty good in a slightly lofi way with very few modifications. If its very true to the original it's a good sounding preamp that colors the signal too much for my taste unless I'm shooting for a vintage style vocal with maybe a ribbon mic or older EV or something like that... but ymmv. It could also be used as a saturation/distortion processor for line level signals which is how I typically used racked Ampex tube preamps in studios that had them. I seldom printed them until mix.

I remember the marketing from warm asserted that Ampex made the best tibe microphone preamp in its day and I chuckled a little. I would definitely take any 50s or 60s german broadcast preamp with an ef86 ptoviding gain over a modified tape head driver. The telefunken v76 us pretty famous and rightfully so but there's a whole bunch of related Siemens and student amps that also smoke these as Ampex units.... to say nothing of Bill Putnam's tube amps t j.g at were in every stage of the 610 consoles...

But I still prefer solid state fir microphones and line signals... lol

What, the Ampex tube preamp from warm?

Necro post, but this reverb listing for bad monkey packaging is cracking me up!

Late seeing this, I feel like you're a few rhymes from a great industrial lyric and I'm awaiting a pounding noise/electro-industrial banger on the topics you got banned from other forums for discussing. Put a beat to it.

Hello, Am I the only one to experience a problem concerning gear pictures? I've tried to upload a few of them through Insta and not only it failed but to work but now I have 5 blank squares that I can't get rid of? Is there a way to fix this? Thanks!

First I've heard of that but I'm too old to be into Instagram... the gear photos are the one thing on equipboard that worked great right from roll out... sorry for the late response. If you're issues not resolved.... michael @michael

That shouldn't be happening with Instagram posts and not for a month.

There's a non-aesthetic issue with gretsch pickup housings versus Gibson. Gretsches expose some bobbin which disrupts the RFI shielding of a metal pickup housing. Not a big deal in 1960 but on the age of smart phones you need all the shielding and humbucking you can get. A pickup coil is an excellent antenna. If the H part of pickup cover has more metal and it's just decorative then fine. I think its ugly but it's still rejecting people's tweets. If there's exposed bobbins then you're sticking a air of little smart phone tower in your guitar and relying on the phase cancellation between the coils fir all your noise suppression... which is only so good. The traditional covers absorb more cell phone transmissions and shunt them to ground.

24" is just too small for me... otherwise I would own a jaguar.i don't know how you're playing on it. Kudos!

Don't do the gretsch style pickup covers, they always bother me on PAF sized pickups and you should make sure your guitar doesn't bother an equipboard moderator! Lol

Be really careful with the cunife pole pieces, I've seen them chipped on vintage teles from people tweaking the heights aggressively. Once that slot gets broken you're stuck with the height it broke at.

Is this model a 24" short scale like a mustang?

Aren't those music masters or Broncos or whatever? The stang has that wonky vibrato system.

Proper wide ranges are really cool. I'm a sucker for weird magnet materials.

It is the way.

"No it isn't!"

I came here for an argument, you're just contradicting me.

of course there is ...but life's too short - 12 transistors though, from glancing at the comments.

12? A bunch if thosemust be buffered switching. Because you can get mild fuzz from 1 (dime a range master into a clean amp some time and prepare for fuzziness... the lpb1 will produce its own dirt too with a hot humbucker driving it, not linear at all lol)

I didn't expect boss would use the fz1 designation for a new circuit. Huh. Just to he clear, I don't think you can have an original fuzz design. The whole idiom has been explored pretty thoroughly at this point. Even the weird ones from zvex, devi and death by audio are like broken versions of 60s designs, most typically a screwed up fuzz face. I think the most interesting design of all time is probably the the mosrite fuzzrite. It's not always that useable but it really is it's own thing, especially the way the tone control works to change the character of the distortion rather than being a 1 knob eq. It really changes the tone, which is a wild idea even today.

Anyway, reading the description for the fz1w I'll bet it's a fuzzface/tonebender3 circuit. Mode 1 is probably a silicon fuzzface and mode 2 probably engages the leaky input transistor from the tonebender 2 and 3 for that gnarly zeppelin boosted singing fuzztone. Does the tone control work in vintage mode?

I've always had this love/hate relationship with the rat. It's a jack of all trades, master of none. I wouldn't be without one but it never quite satisfies me either even though I always come back to it. I want to sing its praises but the sound also totally lacks sparkle through a good tube amp, which is a drawback of all those early diode clipping pedals like the distortion+ and od250, ds1 whatever.

Adrian of Portishead uses a proco rat for a lot of those weedy 60s fuzz tones, at least live.

Edit: the old fz1 circuit is like 75% lifted from the univox superfuzz. The transistor based output stage of the univox is replaced with a dual opamp which if I recall correctly takes over output duty and has a baxandall 2 band eq between the 2 inverting opamp stages. Either that or it's set up non inverting as 1 output stage and the 1st opamp stage is used to drive the octave section. I don't have the schematic in front of me. The whole fuzz generating part is the same as the superfuzz although I don't think it uses the same panasonic transistors which are really generic soundingdespite what anyone may tell you. It still has the same diode full wave rectifier to produces that signature octave effect and is really a gainier descendant of the Octavia with a more elegant octave generating section... not unlike the foxx tone machine. This type of circuit never goes out of style as it gives you the fuzz and octave in one box as opposed to the individual pedals Hendrix used...

Moderator has spoken. This is the way. 😂

It is the way.

Kids, there's no end to this but acrimony so please stop vying for the last word. I believe punk rock has demonstrated how much can be acomplished without resourslces or even knowledge. On the other hand there's been many a guitar virtuoso with a great rig out there showing us all that great tools encourage a player to great heights.

Peace.

Rubbish. Squier's Bullet Series can never be topped in value for money. £150 and worth every penny.

Depends on the year. In the early 90s when they came out they were pretty bad for a little. By 95 the line got ironed out. I was around in high school punk bands then. I remember those guitars... and not fondly.

I've got what I gather is the single worst Fender Telecaster ever made (Korean '91, Silver Logo,, plywood body with lots of wood filler in the headstock where a tuner split the wood), but heck, it was $100 USD

The switch from MIJ to MIK budget models was a dark time at fender. That's when I was learning and i remember the enormous quality difference between my first guitar, a japanese squire branded strat bought second hand and a friend's brand new Korean bullet series. You could literally feel the difference just holding one and then the other. Night and day.

I mainly agree here. A good rule of thumb on fender type guitars is that if you can't build a parts caster that cheap its probably too good to be true regardless of reviews.

Edit: No pickup is more prone to a ground loop than another. That statement belies a fundamental misunderstanding of shielding and grounding. Don't electrocute yourself.

https://www.fralinpickups.com/2018/11/12/understanding-guitar-grounding/

https://www.ranecommercial.com/legacy/note151.html

Firebird himbuckers are unlike any other vintage humbucker. The wire is wound right on alnico bar magnets that are then potted inside the pickup cover. The construction method is most like danelecrto 'lipstick' single coil pickups and vintage tape wound designs like theburns trisonic pickups made famous by Brian May.

Edit: a filtertron is basically the same as a PAF, the difference being dual pole piece coils versus steel slugs on one coil and of course size. The filtwrtron is a smaller diameter but taller having been based around the classic Dearmond Dynasonic that Chet Atkins suggested as the benchmark for Ray's bucker. Seth Lover at Gibson was trying to make a dual coil p90 and settled on a couple of melody maker bobbins... the rest is history.

Interestingly Seth Lover and Ray Butts invented their humbuckers at the same time without any contact between them. Both pickups were awarded a patent in the USA despite being very similar. Doubly interesting is the fact that the filtertron was not designed by gretsch employees like the PAF. The filtertron was designed by a top player and the inventor who built his amplifiers (look up techo sonic amps some time). Gretsch then licensed the design from Ray and Chet and I'm pretty sure ray butts got a royalty on every filtertron sold until he died. I'll bet the beatles era was good to him!

That tele with the duncan firebird pickup was on my wish list for years and I never bought one... so envious! Congrats, man. Those hit rods are fantastic guitars.

I see you're a fellow 1201 fan. That processor is a total fluke... its cousins are pretty bland budget boxes that don't compete well against the lower end lexicon's and TCs ofthe 90s and early aughts, but even stock the 1201 is loaded with some really unique effects you can't get anywhere else and the bre as d and butter effects have a lot of low rent charm.

Currently learning "Yesterday" by The Beatles :).

A lesson in chord progression and song structure! They don't write them like them like that anymore... can't remember the last time there was a top40 song with a chord progression subservient to the melody and lyrics (check out the change under the word suddenly :-) and a refrain to turn the song around instead if verse chorus verse. Learn all those Lennon/McCartney ballads. And Harrison tunes too!