jimmarchi1's forum posts 8022

An eventide eclipse is aging, not vintage... I own tape echoes older than the 1st eventide harmonizer and a few digital reverbs that still work well but are my age

I emailed some trash godz... brace yourself, Tom

Badassery

I'm going to reiterate gain staging. I'm pretty analog over here and I have a lotif interesting processors from many eras. The ability to add a little 70s opamp saturation or overdrive a vacuum tube on your peaks before ever converting to digital is a big benefit of analog gear. Lots of components interacting in controlled ways... it takes a lot of work simulate these little touches with plugins. There are some believable plugins for certain things and a few general purpose plugins that work a treat if you know the exact balance of harmonics you want yadayada, but there's no simulation of the weird, low headroom 4558 opamp input of a 70s univox stage echo.

Did you even open the captor? Itcouldjtst be cold solder joints.

I think you should stick with what you have. Look back at all the posts you've made about your rack rig. You change your mind regularly. You will never he satisfied. Just go with what you have. The problem here is unnecessary rig complexity filor a guy who isn't a service tech and doesn't have a full time guy ou n his road crew because there isn't a crew or budget. Replacing a few pedals with a helix isn't going to change that a lot.

The constant maintenance is greatly exaggerated. If we're just talking synths a good once over every decade is plenty and the rewards of real analog with the ability to set up your gain stages to taste before digital capture outweigh the maintenance cost. Not every old synth has the dreaded juno106 red goo on the filter chips!

That said I have no problem using virtual synths. When I'm using a daw sequencer they're handy for mocking up an arrangement and if the benefits of replacing some of them will be minimal I'll leave them...

There's also workflow to be considered. Knob per function instruments with an integrated keyboard/wheels/joystick are a real pleasure to work with. While my modal us purely digital and something like serum covers a lot of the same ground just as well, the interface is just so rewarding that I would never sell it...

Looking at your gear it seems we're on the same page here.

What part of France?

I sent out an email describing my issue which might just be a bad meter... i can hear it at higher ratios but in GR mode the meter isn't doing much when I can clearly hear 6 or more dB reduction... it makes it hard to dial in for really specific tasks like fast attack peak limiting or shaping a snare from a nuanced (read: inconsistent) drummer. Without a gain reduction meter I have no idea if its calibrated right though. It's not reading a 1k tone at 0dB where I would expect. Maybe if I send it back it'll be less hassle than opening it up. If I have to fix it myself it'll wind up stacked with my old gates units and estate sale Valley 610. Been 'getting around to it's with those units for years lol!

How many inputs are you using? Any aux sends/returns for fx or is it all built into the sound?

I think it's been said before but mods should be able to move posts to appropriate forums or take a new topic where someone is trying to get attention for their new music and turn it into a reply to eyesee's artists if equipboard show us your music topic. And can someone sticky that so he doesn't have to bump it every year?

My uncle wrote this with his college roommate in the 80s. They recorded it as a covid file sharing project and when they were having trouble I did the mix and flew in some drum outtakes I had permission to sample:

Listen to The Causal Attraction of Two by The Bearded Dwarves on #SoundCloud https://on.soundcloud.com/mCAUV

The singer is the guy who bought that ramsa mixer from Robert Hazard.

The passive DI thing is on my list and long overdue. What do you think would be the best bet in Europe for one rackmount with enough I/O? With quality. Perhaps https://www.long-mcquade.com/46279/Pro_Audio_Recording/Mic_Preamps_DI_Boxes/ART_Pro_Audio/ART_4-Channel_Rack_Mount_Direct_Box.htm?

That's a solid option. Art uses good components for a reasonable price. If you want name brand transformers (not essential) look at a secondhand radial with jensens. I've heard they stopped using jensen transformers a few years ago but they made a lot of jensen equipped units for over a decade.

How would you go with my chain for the absolute best possible results when recording?

I need to process all of that, maybe doodle up a block diagram but first I would read the spec sheet for every pedal, compressor, channel strip, synth and eurorack module etc. and get the in and out impedances logged on 1 page (notepad app file etc). Older studio designs will sometimes list the impedances on the back with the connections. Of course really old designs that go back to the era ofmatched I mlm pedance will use the bell telephone standard of 600 ohms in and out. Your art pro channel probably has a 600 ohm mic input setting too though the more common 1200 should've an option. These are very low impedances.

I think I could do something like synth into 2x Pro Channel 2 preamp, some comp/eq, and driving on that unit... that could go into Stam Pultec stereo EQ into ART passive DI, into pedal processing, into eurorack, out to 2x 1176 and then into 2x Klark Teknik EQP then into Art Pro VLA2 before it hits A/D. Some units like extra compression or maybe an enhancer might be somewhere in between. In euro I have a lot of preamps, VCAs (of specific build that I use to add color), analog filters with huge headroom and internal gain staging, mixers, etc... etc... just not enough space to work with all of it at once... that will surely change soon. I was thinking also about using Octa mk2 purely as a mixer as that has completely balanced I/O.

Balanced isn't essential but it helps with long lines or lots of tangled lines, particularly if you live near a phone tower.

I also had some GAS yesterday... so Strymon Starlab, Carbon Copy Deluxe, Zoom MS-70CDR, Strymon AA1 Level Shifter, and a second WA76 will be joining me shortly. It would be a shame to not have WA76 in a stereo pair and they even agreed to hook me up with a brand new one as a replacement for my first piece because it wasn't working as expected sadly.

My wa76 has been a bit wonky lately and I haven't been using it because I have other 1176es... I should email them!

I got IPAed out when I lived in DC at the height of the American microbrew IPA boom but yards brews number of pale ales from mild to hoppy... I drank a lot of good ones at the time but I've lost my taste for them. Mu favorite used to be dogfish head 60 minute, but occassionally the 90 minute was good like at a session or a band rehearsal where I wasn't looking to drink more than 1.

Oh! Check out smuttynose brewery. Everything they brew is gold!

Are you a scotch or bourbon guy?

Good point. Any recommendations? Or I should be fine with Warm and Roland?

My biggest recommendation is to get some passive DIs. There are a lot of rackmount 8 channel options. In pro studios I worked at we usually interfaces synths to the muc preamps this way. The 1meg load gets a brighter signal to the recorder and the transformer will add a subtle heft while providing a little natural high pass filtering in the inaudible sub frequencies versus a straight ic line input. The tamed level allows you to really gain stage a synth correctly and if you have some preamps with character and pleasant distortion you can get creative with texture. Synths are allover the map in output level and impedance. I do run some of my modern stuff into the line inputs of my interface but they're purpose built to be synth friendly. My vintage gear prefers a di box or a guitar input in th he interface. The di approach will benefit in line fx pedals too which even when in true line impedance range are really optimized to drive a high sensitivity 1meg guitar amp input. You also will get galvanic isolation and hum bucking from the transformer which block a lot if ground loops and cancels noise plus when the balanced line hits the differential mic input any cable noise us cancelled and you have a much stronger signal when than unbalanced due to the summing if the hot and cold conductors. If you're happy with your sound then it's right, but it never hurts to acquire some useful tools to try out! You'll use them. The passive di can also be run in reverse as a re-amp to turn recorded audio into instrument level signals for distortion pedals and guitar amps etc.

The art T8 or a similar isolation transformer box is a useful item too. This is a passive system like the above mentioned di but has no impedance conversion. It will provide balanced to unbalanced or vice versa as well as busting ground loops and cancelling noise... in addition the T8 allows the use of all ins and out at the same time so it's also a signal splitter much like a passive mic splitter but designed for a wider range if levels and source/load impedances. They're no name, zero mojo components but have really flat, broadband response and zero measurable distortion from what I can hear. A spectrograph confirms this though I've not compared their output on a sine wave to a straight up sine on my oscilloscope. I have 3 and plan to get 2 to 7 more... they're cheap used. If you plan to run any line level rack units after a pedal for example then the t8 is the ideal interface if you want each unit to perform as designed. Before a pedal I would use a reverse DI into my rack gear.

I think that spending on high end cables without addressing impedance and level interfacing between planet synth/stompbox and planet studio is perhaps backwards. Best to have great cabling with solid interfacing though. Of course ymmv as modern gear from both worlds is pretty tolerant now... I still tend to start by optimizing levels and impedance in the whole system using transformers that eradicate noise rather than start with fancy cables that have lower noise and higher bandwidth. If unbalanced a cable can never better its noise performance in your space unless shortened, balanced and terminated to a differential input. And superior capacitance and resistance specs are situational because cables are affected by the source and load. Those specs are nominal, the cable us part if a complex system.

But speakers with a sub 98dB sensitivity rating will also help... incorporating an attenuator knocking off an additional 2 or 3 dB will hrlpeven more. You'll still be loud of course, but no one will whine about it if you crank ups 100watter and shave off 5 ir6dB with speaker selection and a squinch if reactive attenuation between the head and cab. Hide the attenuator behind the can so people don't know it can go lower lol! Too much attenuation will take the speakers outta the sweet spot and the tubes don't like it so much... even a reactive losd isn't the same as abox fulla speakers... a small inductor is a differe transducer and a speaker motor without the cone doesn't behave the same... anyway. Hope thise suggestions help. I always had decent tone on Marshall's with a 16 ohm hot plate. For speakers trygoogling. I like the old g12s but there's lots of low sensitivity options with good sonics

Haha, Jim. Tell me. Got any US beers to recommend btw? I am kind of stuck between trusting BeerAdvocate and reviews. But before you taste it you never know. I get your point. I am trying to minimize travel in connection paths as much as I actually can. I think it doesn't matter if we make a couple of small mistakes on the way. It's a journey after all and a very enjoyable one to be quite honest.

Ohman! I'm from beer city, Philadelphia. Yards brews some spectacular beers here in town. My favorites are philly loyal lager and brawler pugilist ale! Their founding fathers series is great. They're brewed from original recipes created by American revolutionaries. George Washington porter, Jefferson ale etc.

It's a lovely track and the mix/processing breathes. That's my humble opinion. I actually like it and I don't listen to this genre much. Maybe I should delve! Much better than the crap they put out these days.

Oh thank you! It's a hybrid mix from the artist's cubase project file. I flew in some outtake drums my friend performed years ago, replaced a labs cello with bbcso pro solo 1st cello close mic mono and then setup my typical brauerize 4 bus structure in the daw with external processing sending and returning on sabre ultra32 converters. My latency is so low it's nothing for cubase to compensate those 2 or 3 ms. I just mix into that for a little and tweak the compressors and eqs after calibration and that allows me to use a lot less insert and channel processing to sit everything in its 3d space... mostly corrective measures for recordings from difficult spaces and some dynamic and eq subtraction or coliration from vanilla DI gear that's too broadband to sit with microphones and fails to pop when it needs to... I do less and less at the channel level every mix and have gotten really holistic in approach.

I don't really worry about genre, music must be balanced to stereo fir the end listener and I like making that happen so I'll work on whatever I'm offered for a flat rate unless its seriously jacked up! I do everything from jazz and singer songwriters to industrial noise funk. Whatever.

I have bought DM-2W yesterday too. To add to my ever-growing delay chain. It's a very solid unit. 800ms of time on that circuit is great and the repeats are quite well-defined. It doesn't get so muddy as Carbon Copy or Deluxe Memory Man.

I love the old dm2 and 3! Great to hear the waza one is up to snuff or better... I really dig the waza dimension pedal. I should use it more. Stereo to stereo is a luxury in that form factor and it really sounds lovely especially into a 1 meg load.

I was thinking about Warm Audio SSL clone as well actually. They aren't making bad stuff. Cinemag is exceptional to my not-so-special ears.

I'm sure your ears are fine!

I will look into the PWM. I can confirm that VLA Opto is a great choice. Even using it as a mono and then running that mono into the other channel and setting a good balance between the two can give you great compression effects, solid movement on quite a lot of sources and the sound is awesome. Drawmer was used by BoC and they achieved very warm music that I am fond of. RNC/RNLA... I know. Might be better then than TransY comp. I want to make the most out of this.

I just did a weedy pop lead vocal on a ballad in parallel with an RNC peak limiting after some spl de-essing and gentle dynamic eq in the box which then fed 2 sends 1 to the vla1 in auto attack and release 5:1 for max 6dB reduction, and plenty of makeup to get some saturation from the output tube... other send was a summit tla50 set pretty squashy and dirty medium attack slow release...

Update:

My uncle who I did the mix favor for actually posted it. Nice!

Listen to The Causal Attraction of Two by The Bearded Dwarves on #SoundCloud

https://on.soundcloud.com/yGqmm

For quarter inch balanced and unbalanced at +4 in and out of the console, patchbays and interfaces I've got procos mostly in discrete cables and db25 looms... unbalanced inserts are looms I got from a distributor in I think Georgia. No name company that services live sound install. Good neutrik jacks, super sturdy cable that's plenty hifi in and out of the desk when properly gain staged. Lots of slack if I move stuff around and low low noise even though my inserts are the unbalanced single jack type. I wish I remembered the name of the company but the looms aren't marked. They're probably made to order because there are a lot if length and configuration options available. Price really decided. I had 48 inserts to deal with and needed looms of 8 to 16 with enough length to reuse them if I move my mix room to a larger space and want to move my patchbays. I maybe went overkill on the distance as I expect the patchbays will only get closer if I make this move I'm considering... other gear will spread out but I'm really not sure why I thought I might want the patchbay further from mix position. I musta been drinking that day!

Got links to you and your setup in action? The recent stuff like the 30 minute arp improv?

I don't know if any of my clients have posted my mixes yet or where to look... I'll have to ask. I am totally putting off bouncing stems for a rock band who can't afford me now that drums are done... I should actually do that soon. Ugh.

I have the warm bus comp and really like it. With transformers disengaged and 5534 opamps the warm is very SSL. The components in an SSL g aren't special. It's just a good detector circuit. With the discrete amps and cinemags its different, quite nice. Cinemag is an excellent transformer company on par with jensen as both have roots in the old electradyne, quad8 and sphere family of recording consoles which also are related to the later api through a shared opamp designerand mci and harrison consoles thru jensen and hardy and their branch of discrete opamp design from the original electradyne amps. I could talk component manufacturer history all day. Anyway... I tried the transy fet. Sent it back. Art's good dynamics units are the VLA optos and their pwm limiter if you need hard limiting without coloration. Based on the old disontinued mxr stere rack limiter popular in live sound for decades. Drawmer makes some cool, affordable bys compressors including a fet... you can't go wrong with an RNC or RNLA either.

one thing to keep in mind with what you hear from all these low capacitance and resistance snake oil cables is the improved specs are less audible with proper impedance connections. While synths and some modern pedals are nominally line level they're not +4dbv and while low impedance capable of driving a typical 100-250kohm line input they're not always 50-100 ohms output so the cable specs take on greater significance. By the time my synths get to outboard processingthesignsl is 50 ohms at +4 and the difference between a mogami and even a hosa is leveled out considerably.

This could be a great mod actually. I will look into this thank you humbly for this lovely tip! I want to make my setup as bulletproof as it possibly gets right now.

I think gligli ir kiwi will have a mod for you. Hit up google.

I quite like the wa cables by Gotham but I have mostly proco stuff in audio cables and the odd mogami loom where critical... instrument level cables are kirlin. My favorite guitar cable is a spectraflex I bought when I was like 15. I do have some warm mic cables that are quite nice supplementing mogamis. Patchbay cables and eurorack are a mix of stuff. Anyway, for balanced +4 lines driving modern impedance over 600 ohms I don't feel the cost/benefit of slightly lower capacitance cable is worth it. I can hear a tiny difference but unless I were doing mastering or doing an old style matched impedance connection at 600? Meh. I can deal.... of course any permanent install cables that aren't looms or db25 I makemysef and typically use terminal blocks or Phoenix connectors and then I have some spools of really well specced cable from the telecommunications and broadcast industries.

That's some classy outboard you're investing in! Great choices. For drum buses let me recommend the drawmer 1974 eq to follow stere fet compression or matched distressors. I've been using a overstayer stereo fet here lately with spanky results.

That sequencer is all digital apart from the PSU which is why I focused on that... in that realm everything in the early midi era relies on z80 processors. Your synth might have a bad z80 too... or the programmer. These things go. They were being pushed really hard in these machines. Gligli has mods that replace them with more powerful chips that will never be taxed and the mod adds functionality to the synth with new firmware that takes advantage of the increase in processor performance.

I just have hundreds of Hosa midi cables and toss them without regret when they go bad. My policy is to always have at least twice as many cables as I need for any application, even stuff that stays hardwired. Once my spare stash dips below that number I order replacements in bulk.

See my last post for other ideas. As for hum, anything made before 92 should probably be recapped now before a catastrophic failure that could take additional support circuitry with it if the caps are polarized or decreasing in value. Even 90s gear us getting old enough where only the nicest electrolytics will have a lot more life and that life could be off spec performance.

It could be from a dead voltage regulator IC or Z80 processor chipif there are separate chips for midi and sync. Z80s are obsolete but readily available. Voltage regulators have been hit by the chip shortage.

Update: Thinking it over it seems like its sending cc messages over midi with note data. Which is odd because I didn't think the msq could do anything but note on off? It's been awhile since I've seen one lol! Old tech.

Either that or its something wrong with the synth where it's not holding all of the programmer data when not receiving programmer messages.

I assume you've tried different midi cables to eliminate that possibility. I would open her up and see if the midi out jack has any lifted pcb traces on its pins to start (assuming its pc mount, I've never seen one with flying leads but only the bell tone yeam would know for sure, those guys have seen it all). It can happen when pcbs start pushing 40 and have been exposed to temperature swings. Next I would think about any capacitors in the midi path. If there are electrolytics in the midi circuit or in part of the PSU that's only for powering midi functionality they wear out eventually... and polarized caps can reverse polarity if they get old and have gotten too warm at the end of their life which is really bad for supported circuitry. Midi power rails would be supply branches at 3.3v. Humming isa bad sign for PSU stability.

Ever fix this?

Do some drop tuned beatles songs... maybe some sludgy hank williams covers lol. I think I want to hear that

Lower sensitivity speakers help a lot too. For rock with British amps I strongly recommend the 60s and 70s celestion g12s. It's a less efficient g12m greenback. No longer made. The early ones have pulsonic cones but the kurt Mueller cones sound great too like a black back or 90s greenback reissue. They have a smaller magnet than the M size but larger than the S size ferrite magnet that tends to produce a somewhat weedy tone. These speakers will attenuate your level a good 2 or 3 dB. If you also use a power attenuator you can get a pretty reasonable level with the amount if power tube distortion you want without under driving the speaker.

The captor X is a really nice product but I've not used it outside of my home studio for anything but demos.

Personally I prefer to be oppressively loud whether I'm playing guitar, keys or bass. I've been in more controlled bands where I had to tame that a bit. I still want to be as loud as permitted, it's part of the experience. Rock music is loud. How do I get away with it? I've been as round a long time and no FOH mixer would dare touch my gear because I've worked at all the venues in town when I was younger. Get to know the soundman at the beginning of the gig and talk to him about your need for stage volume to do your thing! These people do thus because it's fun. Make the FOH person complicit and try to work within any nouse ordinances he's aware of while having enough spl for feedback manipulation and a big smile on your face at sound check.

Juno6. I have other, more capable vintage synths but I wanted a juno since my childhood and I finally got the first one a few years ago... so it's the juno6.

Each Muff have a different unique sound, you must experiment to find what pedal is the right for you because all muffs are versatile with the correct settings. The big old classic big muff pi is a little difficult to handle with settings, noise etc but when you find it is a keeper. The Green Russian is my fav for now for darker, bass sound it gives. You can play a lot of diffent genre for sure. And the Op Amp sound is a simulation of broken amp, :) nowadays is like a signature pedal for Smashing Pumpkin stuff, so is perfect if you want to simulate that sound.

Necro reply: trust me, I've tried a wide gamut of muffs and muff alikes and boo-teeks like skreddy and stomp underfoot (dude made me a 1 off like 15 years ago) going back to around 92. I'm a middle aged pawn shop era player. Pre Ebay I used to just pick up old ehx stuff for peanuts at society hill loan and Bob's rt13 music... the idea of a vintage pedal with premium pricing didn't come about until I was an adult... well, fuzz faces, ts808s and certain vox wahwahs commanded some coin when SRV worship kicked in hard. But mainly old pedals were treated like trash.

The opamp is not a simulation of anything, it just replaces the discrete transistor amp stages with IC stages to cut costs and changes and even removes some support circuitry to accomodate the 4 self biasing IC opamps. That might be the one with the tone control on off switch too, I forget now... it does sound the most different from the discrete muffs... but the signal topology isn't a departure, it's just modernized

The glove is more or less a fulltone OCD... which itself is lifted from a discontinued voodoo lab drive.

I can't justify the expense right now as I'm barely using my synth collection lately. When I get back to my own music the obx8 is probably happening. Its more tempting than the the prophet 5 and 10 'reissues'. I've got a prophet600 that gets me close enough, but an oberheim? When I was shopping for one I couldn't find a beat up example at this price.

I'm not really available to fiddle with stuff anymore. I'm swamped with work and always feel behind. This is the first full day off I've given myself in months and it's only because I'm too tired from a 10 hour session in another city to do anything productive apart from make dinner for my kid. Sorry, but when I have more than an hour of free time lately I'm too frazzled for anything but tv... to the point that I would be happy to step down as a moderator because the current job is too intimidating for me being a single parent who has wound up freelancing in creative fields since the peak of the pandemic. It was great at first to get away from my day job but the current economic situation is making it less fun.

I also really think the current gear submission system was a bad idea and never made any bones about it. Sure the prank submissions like sex toys have stopped but at what cost? I suspect a lot of the mods are frustrated by it even if they appreciate why it was implemented (and there were really good reasons that I won't bring up unless the admins want to discuss them publicly). The moderation staff is a mix of working professionals and college students and knowing most of them pretty well I'm sure we all have a lot on our real life plates lately while the job has been made 10×harder with the submission system. Like most forums our mods are volunteers but the responsibilities are different and have become daunting.

I'm only speaking for myself here in the previous 2 paragraphs while spitballing as to where we've all disappearedto. It's not an excuse, just a reason. I still love the admins, the other mods, many of the users and the core idea behind equipboard. Okay, my brain hurts. Peace.

We should make that a category.

Do you find that the pedals you make compare to the ones on the market? I've toyed with that idea. I've made a treble boost from a kit before and I was surprised to find that I liked it quite a bit.

Yeah, I like my OD pedals just as little as I like anything else. If I need an OD I'm fine with the sd1 style and prefer the mxr superbadass. Its really cheap used, I think I have 2 and never paid more than 30 bucks... and it has that cool bass gyrator control which requires an extra opamp to build... it's cheap enough its not worth cloning. Good enough, readily replaceable gig day if it dies...

I don't think I even own any ODs I made but I have my favorite fuzzies and boosts and I'm very happy with my work on the off occassions I have more in line than my echoplex.

I prefer not to use a big muff unless I'm trying to sound like siamese dream. And I'm not a heavy player exactly... usually there's nowhere one would use a muff that I don't prefer a tonebender or rat depending on what im doing. Or maybe a superfuzz. Usually I just turn my amp up and boost out front if needed.