jimmarchi1's forum posts 8022

Hahaha. We're talking 3 db cut across a limited bandwidth that's more harmonics than fundamentals until you're way in the upper register, not a giant 6 or more db death metal smile curve from 250 to 6k. On my desk I would just use the channel eq which is fixed to like 2 octaves on the mid bands I think, sweep to about 3k, boost to refine the center frequency then cut hard and gradually bring it back up so it doesn't sound hollow, which will typically be like 3dB cut. I typically then try boosting the high shelf a little too but that's a matter of personal taste. If it's really gross sounding I'll switch to something with a sound of its own like a neve 1081 where the transformers and inductors help round things off a little when you hit the sweet spot.

My final piece of advice, take it or leave it, is assume nothing and try everything when the mix isn't happening. If something won't cut the mix it's probably not a problem with that track (particularly when it comes to drum samples which are typically very well recorded and don'tneed much eq or dynamics control if any), it's more likely a problem with the overall level/frequency balance and you've just gotten used to it. Very minor tweaks across a number of tracks can cumulatively clear up bandwidth and headroom without taking anything significant away.

And pulsonic cone celestions rock.

Tell me about it. Given my druthers I want to move serious air and try some creative mic placement. I really dig stereo guitar rigs miced in blumlein at a slight distance for example.

I'm not sure what you're getting at with any of that. After the first paragraph (which had to do with your difficulty getting a balance out if the gate) it's a ton of genre specific guitar player talk that has nothing to do with mixing a record because it's part of the tracking phase. The colab track was less abrasive to me than the first one you posted.

My negative response was just one dude's opinion. That said the reason your snare wouldn't cut is because most of a snare's energy is in the midrange where most of the mix is erroneously focused... a couple decibels of dip around 3k covering a couple octaves on some or all of the guitars would've made room. Generally I wouldn't compress a snare to make it cut unless the performance and/or recording is really bad. Before patching up a dbx160 or 1176 I would seriously rethink my balance and make some eq decisions on other midrangey tracks. I'll compress a snare to add perceived snap or bring up the decay using time constants and if it's a bit bland sounding a colorful unit like an 1176 is good to bring some attitude. If its uneven playing I'll automate it a little before resorting to a box that will alter the sound. I compress individual channels less and less every year. I dont always lean hard on spot mics either. Depends how the overheads and rooms sound. These are decisions that should be made early, get the faders up and commit to a drum sound and then start massaging guitar or keyboard or whatever around them.

So the first one is low on true bass and has way too much energy in the upper midrange. That's not due to YouTube. It lacks dynamic range. I can hear the compression grabbing and releasing and not in a good way. When coupled with YouTube's 0playback algorithm it hurts my ears on every playback system. The whole thing is over processed. I couldn't get through it on YouTube. Maybe the master would be less painful.

The second one is less abrasive but sounds like it was mixed by a guitarist.

Both sound flat despite copious use of spacial fx. Flat as in 2 dimensional. That said neither mix is incompetent. I'm nitpicking. I've heard much worse... much much worse.

It's a shame, I like your playing and I'm positive the guitar sounds were nice when recorded. It's not my idiom as a listener so maybe its meant to sound this way but I'm not sure, you tell me... metal is one of the top loudness war genres so there's that, maybe irs a question of taste... but the frequency response is jacked on both and that's not a genre thing. If I worked on it I would crush it if you insisted but the more you crush the more attention you have to pay to the frequency response of every sound. When my ears are robbed of dynamic cues frequency becomes critical for various reasons.

Upshot? Nothing seems to be getting masked on either cut. No mud. I think I'm hearing everything clearly although without a multitrack maybe I'm not. And in its defense I don't know what you were going for. Tje guitar is certainly out front and if that was the brief you achieved it.

And who would want to emulate them? They're easy and fun to play!

just got around to music today, had a lot of comics work to do... do you want an opinion on the sonics or just attention? I listened.

I also have a pitch headed to Dark Horse that's still in pencils adapted from my friend Paul's short film noir story on acid that also has a dose of vietnam flashback, political jackassery and gang violence... Paul also plays guitar and writes tunes in addition to his work as a comic book journalist, editor and ghost writer

I watched sisters with transistors finally... is it sexist to admit I was bored? It's not the subject matter, it was just shit documentary film making... made ken burns seem engaging!

this book gets mapped out in thumbnail at print scale from a tight manuscript and then drawn at 3 times that size 1 panel at a time and I assemble it in my computer for max detail, it's meant to by hyper-realistic and an affront to the senses. Note the amount of detail on the lace part of the stockings... I'm crushing your brain!

Its been a slower year for audio work so far but visual art has been jumpin'!

Following the untimely demise of the 'zine that ran the SID strips a full blown comic began to coalesce... the first story arc predates Richie and details SID's exploits on the late 80s with David Lynch and Kyle Maclachlan

Sitting home on a Friday... BUMP. Lets get some plugin heads arguing!

One of my close friends is a mastering engineer. He and I worked together to mix this record. Having said that, I don't think I'll be using the Mesa IR for leads again. Mesa IR's (or any other V30-only IR's for that matter) tend to be aggressively scooped in the mids that they tend to get lost in the mix all too easily.

I briefly owned a mesa IR/reactive load box and sold it off. Very underwhelming. I'll check out your mix later when I'm in the studio. Of course, YouTube's compression algorithm will mangle it so I won't be hearing it the way you and your engineer did, but if you want my general thoughts let me know. There are mastering guys and then there are MASTERING GUYS. That's where the wisdom to do nothing but get the peaks loud without intersample overs to a cut that's basically ready for repro at off the 2bus separates the men from the boys or girls from the ladies in the case if the lodge... personally I'm a peerless man and will drive up to boston to work with Jeff any time he's in the budget!

I've decided to change plans. I'm ditching the solo route, I'm forming a trio band. Full-on band is gonna cause a lot of problems with more unknown factors to worry about, and a solo career just isn't viable anymore in today's economy.

Preach on! That's solid thinking.

I've just recently recovered from CoVID actually. Once my body has had a chance to fully recuperate and regain its energy, I'm gonna continue writing my debut album.

I finally caught covid in February when my 9 year old got it a 2nd time from school. I was only really sick for a few days but the brain fog made my life hell trying to fulfill music and art comissions in a timely fashion and my finances suffered as a result. If your bank account isn't on the line, don't push yourself.

As of now I'm focusing on the studio tones a lot more. The studio environment is where the payoff of my stereo rig REALLY shines, because this way I can hone in on the effects that work well with the guitar tones for the mix.

I would be having you capture the dry signal and time based fx separately if I were working for you. Its always nice to have some control as a mix engineer. What sits in the monitor mix may swamp out the final mix when you're gradually reducing the dynamic range to 6 or probably less dB as is common practice in these dark times...

Remember that upper mids are not your friends, 3k is ear fatigue city even though it has a lot of richness in tube gear... and like 250-500hz is mud city but if you have a canyon there your record can become hollow.

Your studio tones will only be as good as your monitoring accuracy. I get a lot of things in where the client is hearing something great but they're listening too loud in a small untreated room and are mostly digging the sound of harmonic distortion and phasing added to the recorded signal by pushed monitor speakers exciting room modes and whats actually there is a subtly or sometimes drastically different proposition.

As a YouTuber, I do offer session guitarist rates as part of my Patreon package actually. So far I haven't gotten any clients yet, but only time will tell.

Good luck with that. I'm not a youtuber, (people always try to talk me into it... no thanks) but I've seldom picked up work as an engineer or musician through the internet and the times I have it's been very difficult to collect on that invoice. You can't gauge a stranger's commitment. The patreon model will help with payment since you've already gotten money in your hat through virtual busking, but I would say building real relationships is still the best way to market yourself for recording work and gauge people'slikelyhood to follow through pursuing their vision. Even then, a lot of records, most even, will never see the light of day or will disappear into a sea of indifference and your hard work will not spread the word. You get material to add to your reel for future prospective clients and hopefully pay some bills.

And don't forget that if you finish tracking a record I have low mix rates and a well equipped analog/digital post room in my house. I mix at least 4 records/singles a year in a really wide range of genres. You cannot do what I can do with my racks of outboard and desk using your daw. Only 2 daws I'm aware of provide comprehensive latency compensation to do this kind of work in hybrid (which I also will do when max dynamic range and a clean clean sound is best) and only a full protools rig is truly reliable to do it entirely in the box when you start laying on lots of 3rd party plugins that may not consistentlyreport processing latency to the hist. Everything else on the market, even Harrison mixbus, will likely cause phase anomalies as soon as you get too creative with routing and get busy with you plugins.

Just remember that assembling the perfect toolkit is not an end in itself... it's silly until there's a job to do.

I got where you are but with vintage amps and effects 20 years ago when deals could still be had and my apartment was more like a museum... with no actual furniture apart from a few chairs, a futon and a computer desk. I liked to joke that my house was a real life pod but it was nutty. Im still discovering junk in closets that's moved with me multiple times that I forgot I even owned... then I try it out and usually liquidate it.

Your uber midi rig isn't that wacky but it's a big financial investment if you're not performing regularly at venues where your tone could be appreciated thru a good foh system by audiences that actually care.

You've complained in the past that guitar rig stress has been bad for your health and there's a fight club line that applies: the things you own wind up owning you. I'm showing my age there.

What's the endgame with this carefully selected, well integrated set of tools besides inspiration? It's great to own an expensive table saw but what are you going to make with it?

That's rhetorical.

Edit: I have a lot of affection for my 62 ac30 but I've been watching the prices steadily climb for 25 years and when they break 5 figures for player grade examples I might sell it. It's an impractical old amp for a single dad who is at best a part time musician and occasional guitarist. With around 1k into it, even adjusting for inflation a 10× return on that initial investment is pretty tempting. Not there yet for boxes of this era that aren't dead mint, which very few are. It's designed to play loud on big stages and maybe it should belong to someone who will use it that way again. I probably will not.

That is simultaneously amazing and comical! I love that you have a t8, a midi distributor in my studio rack to break out 8 midi channels of notation, click and CC msgs to 8 synths, just sitting there splitting program change and clock! This is so spinal tap now that I've seen the pictures. On the other hand, if you're ever playing larger theaters as a sideman for an established solid artist, your rig is perfect! You're ready to cop just about any album tone but guitar straight into vintage tweed or vox tones.

Pop filter. You can make one from a stocking and a hangar to save money. But 6 inches is a minimum distance for any condenser on vocal. There are no rules but unless you're whispering further away will produce a more natural sound due to the pronounced proximity effect of cardioid patterns and the excellent bandwidth of condensers.

You have decades before you have to worry about a cheap electret losing charge. It might not ever happen. High quality piezoelectric material has become a lot more affordable. I was just sharing information.

Bad monkey.

The audio technica 2020 I'm sure you're referring to is a fine mic for the money. I've never used it for vocals apart from the usb version just to demo acoustic guitar and voice on the go... or to do a zoom meeting. It's got a very forward top end like the 4040 but not as pleasant. It's a very solid mic for the money and if you managed to find better for less money I'm surprised.

Edit: I googled your czech mic, it's an electret and that's why it's cheaper. I like electret condensers despite their bad rep, but depending on the quality of the piezo material on the backplate it could lose charge and slowly lose output from the capsule vs a true condenser that charges the backplate with wires from the phantom line that powers the internal amplifier when plugged in. It's probably fine though. Even cheap electret capsules are good these days. It used to be just shure, sony and CAD equiteks that got electret right.

I can't speak to the current crop of behringer pencils since they moved all manufacturing to behringer city china. Older behringer mics were just rebadged chinese mics from the factory that made studio projects and mxl among other brands. They were pretty hard on the ears, particularly into budget interface preamps. The current large diaphragm condenser sounds substantially better than the pre-city version so I'm guessing that they've improved their small diaphragms too. I wouldn't put a microphone in this price range other than an oktava on a lead vocal, but it may prove to be fine for instruments.

Speaking of oktava, I forgot to mention that the mc02 pencil is a world class small diaphragm condenser for peanuts compared to a Neumann. It compares very favorably to the km184. In fact I kinda like it better.

And I wasn't being snarky either, trust me, you'd know.

But go read my text block if you want some watered down physics and electronics.

I again recommend kirlin cables for longish guitar leads for the reasons stated above. I am not an employee or endorser. I paid retail for my dozen or so kirlins which I'm also known to use coming out of my synthesizers, particularly live where breakage might be a concern. I cannot hear any coloration from a kirlin and the shielding us superb. I build cables with better specs but the cable I use is for telecommunication systems install and not durable when it gets yanked on. The sonic difference is negligible.

Edit: When I'm talking about noise reduction I'm assuming people are already using well shielded cables. I mean, even the plastic jack Hosa interconnects i use on my unbalanced patchbay and sometimes between pedals have great shielding. Being short, capacitance and resistance arent an issue. Those are pretty damn cheap.... no reason to spend more on 1' or shorter cables. I'm not sure how cheap one has to go to find ineffectual shielding but I have no doubt there's someone selling a product like this on amazon.

Im not sure if thsts sarcasm because I didn't watch the video.

Here's my hot take. Cable manufacturers spew a lot of snake oil but lower capacitance is usually good. Long cables have more capacitance so it's really important for long lines. High capacitance cables, either through length or poor materials, cause treble loss. Their capacitance when coupled to a resistance from any input becomes what we call an RC filter (resistor-capacitor). Higher capacitance moves the filter's cutoff into the audio band. You can find piles of RC filters in your gear that have been placed purposely to optimize headroom by suppressing inaudible frequencies... guitar gear has pretty extreme filtering because guitar speakers have a limited bandwidth and you can goose a lot if gain from preamp circuitry this way and then the power amp can focus on just reproducing what the speaker will reproduce with extra power on tap. Rc filters are also used in all power supplies to remove ripple caused by rectifying AC to DC. The other thing to look for in cable is good shielding that doesn't up the capacitance. Thus if course helps with RFI. In off the shelf cable in current production for guitar I find kirlins work for me with good enough specs and a good cloth braid outside like a spectra flex. Spectra flex had better Jacks, but mildly inferior capacitance specs... depending on your signal chain the capacitance may not matter because all it takes is 1 piece of gear with less bandwidth than the cable and the cable 'sound' is masked. Good noise rejection is more important... ir you might want a tone from your cable like Hendrix and the coiled cable between a bright guitar and piercing amp...

That's how it works on paper though, everything else is bullshit until you start looking at solid core cable.

The shield is the mesh surrounding the insulated core wire in a guitar cable. The end will be twisted into something resembling bare braided wire and soldered to a flat surface on the body of the jack whereas the conductor for signal will be soldered to the terminal that goes to the tip. It's easy to tell which is which even if you've never opened up a jack before.

Edit: And no problem. You may want to invest in some books on acoustics and audio electronics or at least hit up your local library. I dispense free info but there are handbooks for all of this and its nice to be able to just look up a problem in the index and page through relevantinfo... or for your generation I guess you would search the ebook! This stuff isn't well covered on the internet, everyone talking recording on youtube us trying to sell you something or agrandize themselves... and most know very little anyway and you're safer ignoring them.

I hugely regret letting myself be talked into a piezo pickup & EQ for an octave mandolin I had made in consolation after a painful breakup. It's a lovely instrument, with a medievally sounding jangle reminiscent of a lute or oud. I still slap myself over the electronics though; I didn't need it, it sounded pants and the nasty looking control panel ruins its beautiful lines - lesson learned.

I've been to too many folk festivals where the sound of piezo'd singer songwriters pinging through the PA never fails to drive me away to the beer tent!

I'm not a big fan of piezos for conventional uses like that though I have been known to use contact mics to key analog drum gates/expanders plus they make fine dampers on ringy heads. The best use of piezoelectric material is in electret condensers, which are highly underrated. In fact, almost every shure condenser uses piezo in the backplate, unless it says true condenser in the documentation it's an electret and they sound great.

Let's reverse the order of our Followings and Gear Pictures so that recent additions appear first instead of last.

Whoa. Okay, why not... I feel like the site needs a full overhaul, but who would gave time to do it swiftly?

Hello to 9 months of new people! I need to check this more. Sorry for the late/cold response.

Back on topic... anyone have any cool guitars or amps to talk about? Throw me a frickin bone here, I can't be the only dude with cool stuff!

The cable method is probably best for a guitar signal, a lot of hum eliminator gear is rated for 600ohms which presents a line impedance to your pickup, too low. Just be sure to put colored tape on the end of the cable you lifted to remind you which cable is lifted and which side (sometimes this trick only works in 1 direction). You can also try a HumX AC chord isolator. It looks like a little wall wart you plug your 3 prong AC chord into and is just a transformer that blocks ground current from sneaking back up the line from an improperly grounded outlet with too much resistance. If the issue is the grounding in the building you're in, this will help. It's really cheap but it won't help with improperly grounded gear, only improperly grounded outlets. It's stupidly cheap on amazon. Theres one outlet in my home studio that needs a humX.

The grounding on my street is a mess with various houses tied to 1 ground point, its nuts... you don't even want to know about my breaker box. It's literally unsafe and below code, but I'm not sure how to fix it without gutting it and building a new one, cutting all the grounds that run up the street and staking my own ground in the yard to tie my house grounds to! Since I don't own the joint, that's right out. So I've come up with every possible safe work around the past few years and there's not a hum in my (well equipped) studio nor have I ever been electrocuted. You cannot imagine how much stuff I have in my racks. If I can sort all that out you can lift a cable. If you have a pen knife and some electrical tape to wrap up the shield you're good... it doesn't hurt if you have heat shrink and a bic lighter either.

Oh ok thanks! Yeah that's what I have been doing so far (pointing the condenser at the neck joint, much in the same way as I would for an acoustic guitar). It captures the overtones, but not perfectly, if I want it to sound perfect I often need to double-track. However, I could try what you suggested, using both a dynamic and condenser. I could also try the stereo width VST you mentioned, I have a very basic free one that came with Ableton which I sometimes use.

Just remember you need a true stereo recording of 2 mics with 1 source to get anything useful from a mid side type stereo width processor. On a mono signal or a double tracked pair of mono performances you won't get anything. XY near coincident is a classic stereo recording technique for an instrument like this and while its usually done with a matched pair of condensers there are no rules, it's just harder to check phase with unmatched mics. I've definitely done it with 2 disparate mics for creative reasons... lack of mics is another good reason to mix it up. You could also invest in a couple pencil mics. I'm an sm81 guy... dead flat response, dead flat off axis rejection, 2 pad setting and 2 high pass filter frequencies. Relatively inexpensive compared to a c451 and more versatile. There are some cheap Chinese made 451 clones out there too. I think you can get a pair of golden age project pencils for the price of one sm81 now, but I cant speak to its quality, it looks like a modded MXL to me and that basic mic was so mediocre they used to give it away. The rode nt5 is also excellent bang for buck in pairs, got great results from them for many years, but no bells and whistles and the internal amp is low enough on headroom that the lack of pad can be an issue.

So back to the bad monkey, I've had some friends show me some highly speculative pricing (up to a grand asking price!) But no one is buying at those prices so I expect the clown show will be ending soon... we should do over under bets on highest completed bad monkey sale price!

For the record I have never owned a sitar and don't even like the sound they produce usually... however, in a past life I had to record one when tracking some Indian classical music at work.

Okay. I had to look up what sn oud was because hell if I could remember. It's like a lute. Not a full sound hole so a lot of body and neck overtones.

Don't mic it like a sitar, dude i was way off base! I thought it was a bigger necked instrument you play like a cello for some reason. You just want to try pointing your condenser straight at the neck joint. If you have a figure 8 pattern you could try that too. More proximity effect but itll get some reflections from the room and sound more like what reaches your ears while playing.

Alternately you can do an XY near coincident unmatched pair for stereo. With your dynamic and condenser I would setup the 45 degree pair again centered around the neck joint. The condenser would be pointed towards the neck and the dynamic toward the body, standard 45 degree angle. Really line up the diaphragm as well as you can visually. Record a sample passage. With both tracks panned center flip the phase back and forth on one of them and make sure you don't hear phasing like a phasers pedal. If you hear that adjust one mic to eliminate. When one phase position cancels a good deal of the signal (as in thins the sound substantially, these are 2 different mics though so ymmv) you're optimally positioned for a decent stereo image when hard panned. You can move the panning inward on either side to pan the whole oud one way or the other or oan both sides in to create a natural stereo width when centered but this might damage the center image... a more effective way to treat it is with a stere width plugin with panning. A1 stereo control is a fine free vst option if your daw doesn't have this feature. As with any stereo tricks, mono your control room monitors frequently to check for problems.

Also, experiment with both your mics doing close and distant channels in different positions to hear if there's anything interesting you can capture from the oud that way.

Hey, why not just wind your own oudbucker and ROCK!

Same issue, itll only pickup the harmonics generated closest to the pickup. Maybe 2 oud-singles in parallel rwrp well spaced. He probably doesn't have a drill press anyway.

;-p

Oh. That was a joke

Edit: now that I know what oud is I bet you could stick a piezo in the bridge if you're into that kind of sound

Thanks :D yeah the DI almost always solves the issue, if I plug it into my Scarlett interface when recording (with the exception of my strat for some reason, but it could just be that the strat has an extremely strong single-coil hum and I'm getting the two confused).

Very possibly... if you're running a computer monitor it can induce 60 cycle hum in pickups through the antenna effect I mentioned. Move away from it, angle your seat until it stops.

My amp doesn't have an input for a DI box though, so I'll need to solve that somehow. I still have no idea where the hum is coming from, my cables are all pretty new, and as for pedals, some of my other guitars are fine even if I have all my pedals lined up. It only ever happens with 3 of my guitars (one is the strat, the other two are a Les Paul and a Höfner style bass, both of which have humbuckers so it can't be single coil hum). That said, the bass will only do so with certain amps, and the Les Paul is very unpredictable (sometimes clean as a whistle but sometimes the hum is very noticeable)

DI stands for Direct Injection, a nickname given by 50s studio owners to the practice of plugging electric instruments into the microphone inputs of mixing desks. As all pro microphones became low impedance balances lines and with the telecommunication industry having standardized balanced line level at 600 ohms (or less as unmatched systems took over, that's another topic but know your highest line input is maybe 20kohms, way low for a pickup with a useable number of wire turns) the comparatively high impedance with voltage between low mic and very high line levels of a guitar pickup became incompatible with mic and line inputs on mixing consoles.

The solution? A 12:1 transformer with dual secondaries. The transformer steps the impedance and voltage down to mic level. The primary presents 12 times the mic amp impedance to the pickups to prevent loading and the dual secondaries step down the voltage144 times and balance the line with a differential of the signal on pin 1 or ring depending on the cable used to provide hum bucking across very long cables when paired with the preamps differential input. Transformers consist of 2 or more inductors and inductors provide electrical isolation so in addition to other essential benefits the transformer provides serious blocking of non signal currents in the circuit formed by the pickup and preamp for your signal. Add a heavily shielded box to prevent the transformers acting like antennas and boom.The direct or DI box was born.

Your amp has a 1megohm input, a load your pickup can drive, and gain appropriate to a -20 to -30dbv output signal swing. No need for a DI input. Its s high impedance unbalanced device. An iso box or hum eliminator (lots of trade names) would be better here. It's a 1:1 transformer. Or just cut the shield loose from the sleeve of 1 end of your cable to create a signal ground lift cable. As long as all ac powered gear has proper electrical ground via the chassis and ac chord, signal ground is just filtering noise captured by the cable shield to ground and not into the audio circuit for amplification. The shield really just needs 1 ground point to complete the circuit safely. Never interrupt chassis ground to the outlet unless you can directly ground all your gear straight from chassis grond points to the building's grounding in the foundation like on purpose built studios and better venues.

It's good to know this stuff.

More anon

Theres a lit to unpack and explain here my young friend. I'll run it all down for you when I take a lunch break.

You need to use 2 microphones as a non coincident pair for mono. I'm assuming an oud would be similar. Try a dynamic with solid bass response and no midrange hype like an md421 or even an re20/pl10 or just maybe a ribbon on the body... then you can pickup overtones with a pencil condenser like an 81 overhead (find the focal point of the other microphone's diaphragm and measure the distance, then place the OH the same distance ar approximately 45 degrees to minimize phasing... oan together or group them blended together to taste on your mixer and record that so you don'thave to stress panning)... if you dont mind some room on the source you can also try recording it in stereo with a blumlein pair assuming you own matched mics with figure 8. Of you could do mid side side... but blumlein can work for sitar if you Jimmy it enough to get a good center to your stereo image because the overtones will be drawn from the room by the backs of the mics as it reflects off the surfaces of the room. It requires 2 ribbons or 2 multipattern condensers.

Okay. Done advising for awhile. Gotta get my kid to school

Here. Every Rane manual has a section on interconnection with a huge ground loop diatribe. It's mostly about balanced lines but the basic rules apply to tip/shield instrument connectivity if not the grounding rules for pin1 and pin3 cold/ground stuff.

I think its page 14 in here: SM82S Manual - STEREO LINE MIXER - RANE Commercial https://www.ranecommercial.com/legacy/pdf/old/sm82s_manual.pdf

By the way, don't buy an sm82s... the original 82 and 26 are through hole and easier to maintain and mod than the S versions which use SMDs. That's if for whatever reason you need a super clean and quiet stereo line mixer or line mixer/splitter. If you do I own a mess of 82s I got from a radio station and would sell one.

The lpb1 is a great choice too... I think that's just 2 transistor as well. If you staple 2 together in 1 box the right way you get a Muff Fuzz and can fo Aladdinsane covers... like panic in detroit!

No sitar.. denied!

The joke here is that sitar us one of the more irritating instruments to mic up. Hard to capture all the weird overtones. And the sound is irritating to boot.

Edit: And now I made a waynes world reference l.

A transformer blocks ground loops to a certain extent. If you have a DI it should have a ground lift and typically that will kill a loop. It breaks signal ground.

The ground hum is probably not from your guitars, the culprit is usually a piece of gear that had improperly wired inputs or multiple chassis ground points. If a ground point in your guitar gets lifted it generally won't send signal lol

It's really worth learning this stuff. Get an iron and go for it. If you record then its doubly important... I had to do a revolution type DI sound for a band I'm working for yesterday and I wound up using a boost I made to decimate a couple knockoff neve 73s into fuzz... I went ahead and changed out a resistor when I wasn't happy with the sound it was kicking out to the 73s. Worth knowing how to do. I think I settle on a ranagemaster, DI, 73 and summut tla50 in the end but hey. It's funny though, no one will ever hear this record, why do I bother? Makes the clients happy though.

I've known Liam through equipboard literally for years. He's not goin' wet dry wet.. an audience can't heat it anyway. I've done enough FOH to know what a waste of time it was when I fooled with it. If it makes you happy then go for it. I know I really er enjoyed my stereo and WDW setups on stage when I had a helper... not so much without Roman the Roadie. I don't think you need to keep pushing o tu her kids into irresponsible spending on digital gear that will lose resale once strymon releases improved versions... and despite having not done so for a decade or longer they will have to eventually... capitalism. That's how it works. I mean, Liam's a dad.

That also sounds amazing! I wouldn't know where to start with assembling a pedal...

You start with a bill of materials, a schematic and layout. Most of these circuits are really simple to understand. The main obstacle us getting good at soldering PCBs without burning traces. Getting a temp controlled iron with different tips is a help here. Novices to soldering could start with a point to point circuit to gain confidence like a battery only 1 transistor boost of some kind. I like the range master... a brian may silicon transistor version is cheaper to gather parts for.

Shielding is for radio interference and while single coils acting as antennas will have a strong 50 or 60 cycle hum component depending on your country's power standards a ground loop has to do with the termination of the shield on your cable and occurs when 2 pieces of wall powered gear gave different chassis ground potentials. These are 2 different noise sources with different solutions.

For RFI shielding only helps so mk ych. The bigger the coil of wire the stronger the antenna.

Predictably monkey prices are up and Josh made a fake (I think) reverb listing for a pile of overpriced BMs. I always thought it was a fine pedal with characteristically unreliable dod/digitech switch. It looks like a boss housing but the switch is a soundtank style tack switch, not up to frequent hard stomps. Fine for me as I rarely use overdrives.

I'm not sure where I'm going with this. I worked for a guy who called ALL pedals 'talent boxes' and I agree... in the sense that having those toys in line often gives the talent confidence and a confident performance always sounds better than a timid one. As a performer I'm always helped by pants flapping volume, even if I'm in the control room... horses for courses.

1. You shouldn't need a gate unless you play hyper gained up extreme metal. If you're getting audible noise address your signal chain from the guitar to the amplifier. Something is generating hiss that's being amplified at various stages. If its a hum that's steady you have a ground loop. If you're gating single coil hum that's just silly. It's still there when you play and the gate opens. As fast as some gates are (and I've never encountered a pedal that's as fast as a drawmer or kepex) you're still damaging your attack using a gate.

2. No sitar?