jimmarchi1's forum posts 8022

the looper may not have that much fidelity even through a full range speaker but I'm picky

2k is just enough to get you into trouble but not enough to get you the best of everything you want, good luck.... hit up reverb for a used fantom or motif maybe, god it pains me to say that but you need too many things, the workstation is just the ticket and if you get it cheap enough you can swing a used minilogue too, they're cheap used if you don't want the XD version... seems like the lower end motifs are trading for under a grand in this screwy economy and the fantoms are allover the place.... giant preset sound libraries on either including tolerable B3, great pianos etc and also there's built in sequencing

all marshalls made after the JCM900 series are maintenance nightmares, the switching circuits and tube sockets are particular failure points.... if you're not gigging and rehearsing regularly either will be okay for some time for non-travel... if you're planning to gig then look at a less complicated marshall or higher end channel switching amplifier (that does not eman a mesa, those are even less reliable)...

I still prefer classic coke.... although after new coke it never sounded exactly the same

I saw an acoustic mounted to a microphone stand at an STP (or spin off band, forget now) show so robert deleo could play his acoustic intros without taking his bass off. The item appeared to be some sort of commercially available mount (or if not it was made by a serious DIYer) but it was defintiely not your run of the mill mic stand, much sturdier than most stuff you see live, studio grade tripod stand.

that's a rabbit hole of suggestions; discussions about cost, sound quality and programming interface.... what's your hard price limit? how good does the synth engine's sound and editability need to be? nothing but analog will touch analog for synth sounds, but you want piano and organ? well, its digital or an actual piano and organ, dude. You can collect gear your whole life and never be happy with all of it, what are your must have features and how good does it need to sound?

your looper idea is already going to compromise the sound quality of anything with wider bandwidth than a guitar amp reproduces, namely piano, organ, synth.... and the conversion will be pretty sketchy, you're not exactly getting sabre converters in a stomp box

maybe go hella cheap on an all in 1 solution, not sure what that would be, that's not my thing, maybe a used korg triton, kronos or oasys from 10 /20 years ago? new workstations like the motif and fantom lines are expensive and hold their resale for some time.

wait wait, do you actually play the piano? do you prefer hammer action, organ or something inbetween? You get organ action or at best a semi weighted feel in a synth, workstations might offer a more realistic feel but tis generally a digital piano (home level or stage) that offers actal hammer construction but the sound pallette will be limited until you drop thousands

okay, I did follow, so yeah to do that you'll need to mix them down.... it might be easier live to layer into a loop station. It seems a bit weird to loop a midi device whe you could just sequence it, but its probably cheaper than getting a sequencer.

wait, are you playing live? disregard some of that line mixer stuff, I'm not getting the application

the jdxi is so mediocre.... the korg won't do basic piano or organ sounds, that's sampler turf although in my twiddling with the jdxi in stores I realized it has some bread and butter pcm rompler sounds hiding in the digital side (bad string samples, organ, I forget exactly).... but this style of synth doesn't have a libarary like that, its not a library thing, there are presets but you're really supposed to design your patches with the front panel controls, its fun!

frankly I would be looking at minilogue for analog synth, its an analogue synth though the voice count is low and in the 4 voice camp I prefer the DSI mopho x4 (discontinued) or the miniXD and use the analogue synth's keybed as a midi controller for a module running other sounds, lots of good options there on the cheap from the 90s and 2000s. I'm pretty sure you can get an emu proteus 2k series rack for nothing. The organs are above average and great for the era, the pianos are fine to good and the electric pianos are good to great. To do this you may want to spring a few bucks for a little line mixer to send a straight stereo feed to FOH.... in fact, you might as well buy a budget lexicon or spx90 for the rack mixer/rompler rack setup so you can have some classy FX.... the lexicon mx series is a good call here and I straight up use my units in my full blown home studio... soemtimes I prefer them to older more desirable PCM series units due to the ability to chain modulation into reverb on one machine using just one aux send but that's big buy analog post room stuff. They sound pretty darn good....

so get a minilogue XD or mopho x4 or maybe a cheap prophet '08 (they keep going down) and a rack rompler with organ, piano etc sounds that you feel ok with.... ashly line mixer in 1u if possible, otherwise whatever's cheap.... lexicon unit if possible, maybe an mx200, small gator or skb rack, done

that's me.... I eman, the ebatles only used synth on a few songs on abbey road, the moog modular was pretty recent and george had one.... his patches always were pretty bread and butter minimoog sounds so a modular or polysyth are not needed

yes, you're a small current producing device and also a path to ground.... but you're only a safe path to ground for small voltages unless you like to risk stopping your heart for a sec... you have very low electrical resistance... and yes you can soak up RFI but that's a different source of noise than what we're talking about, separate the idea of RF noise from line noise and ground loops. I'm not suggesting you have a ground loop, its unlikely, but if you insist on tooling around with it I would eliminate that possibility and then explore line noise. I think you just have normal "not touching the strings noise" which has to do with the overall grounding of the circuit and may have to do with you being a weak antennae too adding RFI to the mix.... although I doubt this, it assumes you're picking up out of phase signals and with humbuckers they're already out of phase, a good test is to let go of the strings with your cell phone, PC(s) and broadband router on, then turn them off and see because with the closest sources of strong microwave interference eliminated it should at least reduce when just your neighbors signals are floating around.... anyway, there ya go

it shouldn't change in level from the source (guitar) although it could just be factor of the amplifier warming up.... in a tube (valve) circuit putting the amp in play puts HT on the plates (in standby or straight from off in a tube rectified design there is only a modest voltage on the heaters of the tube but no high voltage applied to the cathode and anode therefore the tube has been physically heated but is not really doing anything a lightbulb doesn't do until you add that high tension at 200v+) and they take a little to stabilize tonally so they're 'cold' at first and more linear, as they warm up even set clean, they will begin to accent a larger harmonic spectrum and so any signal they're amplifying will become richer as they amplify harmonics of the fundamental to a greater extent. In this case the harmonics ofthe hum will be getting louder as charges build up on the plates and control grids. The harder the amp is running the louder those will become because, distortion! If you're using a transistor amplifier YMMV old school AB designs do take time to warm up and exhibit their own version of the behavior I outlined for tube designs although it tends to be a lot more subtle sonically for various boring technical reasons, transistors are not tubes you know. And I gave you a lot more tech than the average musician probably cares to engage with.

troubleshooting:

The capacitors are probably charged as long as the amp is plugged into the wall. Even when off the caps will draw power and remain charged which is why ina high voltage circuitit is vital to discharge the filter caps before attempting any repair or modification work on an amplifier. Many amps carry power supply voltages that will kill you and they can retain these for some time even when unplugged from the outlet. Bad capacitors tend to make a frying bacon hiss and pop sound. It would be unusual for them to hum. If your power supply hums even with the guitar unplugged its not the components but either a design flaw, unbalanced power tranformer, or the dreaded ground loop. I won't get too deep into eliminating ground loops in a residential building right now, its a real pain and require a lot of patience although a quick fix for a simple system like a guitar, amp and pedal board is to plug everything into the same outlet making sure that the plugs are tight fit so ground is uninterrupted (this is important for safety too, people really don't maintain their outlets like the should and I'm amazed that more musicians aren't regularly fried by their gear) so that they share a ground potential and now ground AC feeds back into the circuit at any point. When in doubt a couple of ebtech hum-Xes will generally do the trick by isolating the grounds via a simple transformer. 1 will you usually do it although you can't hurt things by isolating every wall connection. There's also the problem of dirty power. If all your outlets share a breaker with appliances this could very well be the case and this where a power conditioner is of use.... your hum may be what I first diagnosed or one of these other 2 ground phenomena or even a combination of them. If its bothering you that much try eliminating the home wiring variables with a power conditioner and a humX separately and in combination to determine what type of ground noise you're experiencing. I doubt any of this will do anything though, it sounds like the standard "hands are grounding the circuit" buzzing.

When in doubt always, always ask a sound engineer.

try 41

that's normal, lowlevel ground hum from the complete circuit and not from RFI seeping into your pickups, it was always there to some degree, you probably never noticed it. Remember how you're strings are grounded through the bridge by a wire that connects to your tone controls ground? You're a part of ground and releasing the strings will change the ground potential and can (and usually does) induce some hum. I never used to let go of my guitar neck on stage when there wasn't music coming out of my amp unless I was muted before the amp fr this reason. dimed superlead can spit out egregiously loud,hum when you let go of the strings in a poorly wired room (every venue known to man)...

the guitar and amplifier are a complex circuit that you're meant to be a part of.... when you remove yourself from the circuit it no longer behaves optimally. Its a pretty sketchy system by pro audio standards but its the way guitars work.

if you want to hang out with him, I don't anymore... he got really scary in his late 30s....

the strings you feel most comfortable playing on are the best choice for every application... but what do I know?

Hey all! My name is Paul but most people call me Salty. I live in Australia....

explains the nickname....

I start with composition usually. I may also screw with the argon8 while writing on piano as it can do things.... you know, things. The sort of things you compose into not compose for.

I mean 90% of reviews here are "BEST. X. EVER. Nothing could be more awesome than X. (end of review)" at least now I can get a little more context as to how/why this $149 to $399 new thing could be responsible for so much delight.

okay that makes sense

You're a JBL man... I dig that. I've never met a pair of JBLs I didn't like.

I've really just gotten into JBLs recently but they're eating up a lot of floor space because they're rear ported.... that end of my room is a mess and I want to tame it soon. They also have a little crossover notch in the upper mids so I have to cross check when deciding if those fatiguing 3k frequencies are overbearing. I also recently got those dual woofer IK room correcting guys and while light on bass I really like them as a direct field reference that's hella flat at mix position. And they're TINY. I got them on a dare from a fellow engineer who was curious what I thought of them in a covid home studio setting and he subsequently purchased a pair and also likes them. So there's that.

Absolutely nobody, myself included, followed the old review guidelines of stating your style/genre/context... this is a much better solution.

I really don't have a style for a lot of gear, I never really grokked this whole idea of style.... I guess in the studio there are context pieces but instruments? If something is pigeonholed in a style I'm going to want to use it outside that context and if that isn't cool then I don't really like it. Even a sample library like BBCSO I'll sue for anything where acoustic orchestral sounds are appropriate. I think the best music gets made when someone has been told you shouldn't use an SVT for guitar for example but they just go "why not?"

wait, where are you seeing the alphas in stock? I'm more interested in the shape or barefoots with that weird bass reflex thing

Not my area of expertise, but I'll try and get the ball rolling here by proposing it may be an early 80's Fender Champ II.

it does look like a champ II

an old friend of mine once found a 50s gibson GA77 ona curb and a late 60s blackface princeton non-reverb in a dumpster. I'm not suggesting you dumpster dive, I mean, why was he looking ina dumpster to begin with? We don't really talk anymore. But deals are out there, I've never paid market value for a 'vintage' amp. They're so ridiculous now that I'm more into building things if I want something.... but i hardly even play anymore.

the sound cities are wierd, a 200+ is a mk3 or mk4, active tone controls, very odd.... hard to get a sound from but POWERFUL, poweramp is hiwatty though. migs are good beginner amps, not worth mentioning here, pretty amrshally.... the Klipp is very well made, sabbath tones all day... Matamps vary, the recent UK ones not so well made, old ones very well made, US ones from before the change to Green and Black or whatever? very well amde, all somewhat different, depends what you're going for. Sleep used them, Sabbath always used Laney apart from Paranoid footage with oranges (matamps or modified knockoff matamps depending on era) and some footage from I think Swedish TV? on that show everyone used house gear, all oranges.... you can see Paul Kossoff using the same amp in the right footage. Matamps are weird, they have a very lofi (for a 100+ watt amp) cathodyne phase inverter (hiwatt used this in bigger amps but with a pentode driver, not a triode).... the sound city will use a hiwatt AC coupled fixed ias long tailed pair and the ohter amps are bassmans so they use the classic fender/marshall/vox long tailed pair for big amps, DC coupled, cathode bias. All very different feel and different power amp breakup. Hiwatt the inverter is very hifi like a macintosh hifi amp actually and it will add the least distortion at lower grunt levels getting very crispy and thumpy at high volume levels, the mig/klipp is medium and the matamp is going to breakup before the preamp drives itself and before the onset of actual power tube distortion, it will add color and even overt distortion before any other part of the amp reducing the effective clean wattage of the amp.

well, ptp is different than handwired.... you have got to be so organized to point to point a complex amp with proper lead dress, most are a mess unless you start gluing stuff to the chassis which is not a great idea, but handwiring can be logically organized on a nonconductive board with turrets (marshall), eyelets (fender) or terminals (vox/hiwatt).... but you still run actual wire under or across the boards and flying leads for non board components like controls, inputs, outputs, tube sockets and filter caps.... a good PCB should still run those offboard components off board due to heat or replacement concerns but there are few high quality PCB tube amps left. Its boutique level where you see a double side mil-spec PCB with flying leads where needed for durability.

the digitone is really cool sounding but as Kenneth pointed out its not an easy sound engine apart rom the added filters. I was tepted to get one at one point then the opsix came out and also I have all these FM synths already.... inf act, the argon 8 also can do a form of FM that's really interesting but that's a whome ther thing

my other problem with the digikeys is that its got the interface all on one side, and on the bass hand no less....

Giullio's really thinking this one over.

its good that someone's dead? this is a language barrier thing, right?

this was really a bummer, although I didn't know him myself he was a mentor to some of my friends who are a bit older than me and everyone's quite bereaved

My computer experience pre-dates PCs - my first computer was with an 8bit (BBC Microcomputer). Eventually got a dickless PC with a single builtin floppy disk drive (no hard drive). You had to boot with a "system" floppy disk which you then ejected after its loaded to put in your application floppy disk to load an app.

I remember that boot disc.... the ataris and amigas felt like a vast improvement

I doubt many people will remember Steinberg Pro 24... :-D

I remember it but didn't switch over from logic until SX... my PC wasn't fast enough. I remmber going PC and I traded my alesis quadraverb to a bandmate for his license to Acid which he couldn't figure out and I also go fruity loops 1 around then as a sampling beatbox solution to make my own loops for acid and really fell in love with it (I still don't have a piece of hardware for that kinda stuff, back then my MS1 still worked but it was 1 channel sort of thing and had more isnteresting uses). I remember getting SX because fruityloops could be a plugin over rewire shortly after SX got going and the whole loop stretching thing was feeling lame, apple was acquiring logic I think, I tried cakewalk sonar and it was okay... Somewhere during SX2 my PC burned out (thanks Scott, long story) and I had a sojourb with mac and started using protools native because that became a thing and I knew it from my studio jobs... then i got pissed off with mac and went PC again and started trying everything out there. During that time I also had a free limited copy of ableton live v1 I got at NAMM and didn't like it but its a beast now, I admit it. It still has the weakest latency compensation of any DAW for hardware processing in a hybrid mix though, very underwhelming.

memories, in the corner of my mind, misty dot matrix memories of the way things were

It's worse over there the amp yakusa demands entire circuit boards be etched on your back. Lmao.

one time the amp yak kidnapped my son and made me repair a pile of old univox amps, it was hell.... I almost let them keep the little beggar! tube amps should not be built on circuit boards... or if they are only companies like tone king and soldano should do it, everyone else cuts corners these days. I blame the amp yakuza....

I somehow deleted the post you were replying to so i forget what i was rambling about.... I have no idea how I did that.... so in answer to your querry, no, all of that gear is expensive. Mixing analog is costly. I don't even know how much money I have tied up in my home post-room and I don't have an varimus. You could try either an art VLA which ahs low plate voltage tubes that sound very thick driving a solid state optical comrpessor. Has an extremely 'cheap vintage' sound like some old AM braodcast gear, the gates stuff for example, that's on the lofi, midrangey side so may give you some of that glop you want, plus opto is slow compression so improper settings are unlikely to destroy your transients or bass. It excels at turning live drums into when the levee breaks for example. Hard to screw up. The VLA is cheap and quality, I have 2, a mk1 and mk2, both are good at what they do. I've never tried them into an amplifier or anything though. Then there's the 1176, perhaps my favorite compressor. Its based loosely on the earlier 176 varimu by Bill Putnam but modernized to use FETs. There were a lot of revisions. There are a lot of clones. I have a number of clones and modded versions and I wouldn't go into the cheap seats for bass, fine for snare etc, not bass. If you're spending under $500US don't bother. I quite like my black lion bluey, they also make a modified version that handles bass well, I think its called the seventeen.... the purple audio is very good and if you want to build one you could buy a hairball audio kit in any revision. I would read up on these guys, I defintiely use it on bass guitar on occassion when I want to have overt compression or use the output amp to really color the sound as none of the revisions are wht you would call transparent, although A and B are the funkiest with a good weight, lots of harmonics and a mid-forward aggression when hitting hard, even at unity gain (later revisions you actually might need to run the amp output hotter than your input to get the thing to give up a really pronounced thickening effect). As a studio rat I also own a lot of getting the job done type gear though. You don't always need to ehar the gear working and in that department there are lots of excellent options. But you don't want that.

all this said, for live purposes that hybrid head you use will be a real limiting factor, I've had so many bad experiences with the non-tube ampegs, and I'm not too sure how well any of this gear is going to do in tis effects loop, plus if you wanted to use it out front you probably want a quality DI box to get your signal in at a nice low impedance, if you're trying to go live you're creating a really goofy use case scenario for all of this dynamics processing as the stuff you like is not intended for this purpose... if you just want something for the old home studio? Well collecting compressors is a rewarding hobby and then you get to play with them all. Long ago I realized that I don't love music so much as I love compressors and EQs, they're so cool... best of luck. If you can swing about $1500US you might look at wes audio's altec clone which is well regarded and half the price of other mono varimu designs, but I ahd an original altec back in the day and I don't get the current hype, in american tube units I vastly prefer the gates stuff.

EDIT: I should also point out that your use case scenario isn't actually abut dynamics control, the raison d'etre of compression, you're actually seeking artifacts.... artifacts are like side effects of the compression circuit or line amps, they're actually design flaws but we happen to like some of them...

anyway, if you're looking for studio use I guess you could send me a recording of your bass nd I could let you hear it through a few of my nicer compressors of various styles which may help you out. It would only take a sec. Although you will also be hearing a little of my mixng desk which has some color of its own. I'm still confused about your use case scenario though I think because you're confused as well.

I know the guys at novation, focusrite doesn't interfere with them at all, Dave's getting pretty old and he probably thought the brand wouldn't survive once he passes... interestingly, focusrite is owned by the guy who founded soundcraft and presided over its good desks before harman took over and h then saved focusrite after Neve's quest for perfection tanked it. They came up with a more reasonable ISA desk first then made modules available as outboard, did the red and platinum range trading on the neve rep and then the interfaces came in. Hopefully they don't change their business practices when their CEO passes or retires because he's gotta be old, soundcraft desks go way back. Mine's the same age as me and its well into the second generation.

first amps, later beatles you had fender all tube heads, bassmans of various eras, he defintiely owned a blonde one and a a silverface one, 2 very different amps I might add and mid to alte there was a selmer trebl n bass mk1 or mk2 which is like if a marshall and a blonde bassman had a baby.... wings and beyond you're looking at either fenders early on or the notorious mesa bass 400, a real contender against the all tube SVT although the one he used is very expensive to maintain, imagine a number of bassmans chained up with an optional graphic EQ, less deep sounding than an SVT tube head but more syrupy? hard to describe, I briefly owned one...... there is no compressor in line, the compression would be in the studio across a recorded microphone signal

go read about what a compressor does and the different ways it can do it, there are varous types of 'tube' comrpession but msot are really just tube based line amps in and/or out versus what is called varimu compression which uses sharp cutoff pentodes aand/or the bias point of some of the tubes to change the volume envelope of the signal base don feedback of the inputsignal to the bias circuit etc. the buy in on a good channel of varimu is about 2 grand usually, and up from there... also bass frequencies have more energy electrically than treble therefore a compressor tends to thin bass, yup

compressors that don't include some varimu tube designs, better optical designs like the LA2A and LA3A by urei, the symetrix 501 in peak mode, rms sucks bass... the 1176 but it depends onthe clone if you're going clones... the cheap ones are not as bottom heavy, you would want something like a black lion bluey or their other one, the black one, that's got decent bass...

what do you mean by thicken the tone? do you want to saturate your sound? do you want to even your peaks? lengthen your sustain? Are you tlaking about something to use on recordings of your bass or to put in an effects loop? A varimu or optical compressor might tickle you but I wouldn't be lugging those around to gigs. What era of Paul's sound interests you? Live or studio?

uhg... well there's one reason to go with the Korg 2600M.

Is the korg mini even available?

I have everything but logic. They all run together for me when I use them like a tape deck but once I'm sequencing or treating samples ableton and fl studio shine above all. The output routing on fl is annoying in that everything is stere. For a straight itb mix nothing beats Harrison mixbus32c. For hybrid cubase and protools have the stellar latency compensation for hardware hooked to an interface. Cubase has a lot of facilities but the workflow isn't intuitive... I've been mixing trashgodz in it and taking their midi click and trying to apply a simple sample to it to clock an analog sequencer is a nightmare of superfluous windows and drop downs... this would take 3 seconds in fl studio or ableton... protools is obviously next to worthless for midi and such. That's an afterthought but you sure can lock that pesky drummer to grid and remove all humanity from a performance with ease...

Wow this thread lol

I tried to put it back on track once but after I started the derail I couldn't get control of the train....

1. Like gear submitted to pro artists, these will be editable by everyone, and they will have versioning to keep track of changes (and so there's a paper trail).

Step 6 is now live. Steps 4 and 5 are coming very soon.

step 6 should help with the whole 'dunlop hendrix branded gear' thing people are periodically on about

alas the behringer is not springed :-(

I wanna buy that ghetto 2600, closest I'm getting.... when I went to drop my prophet at bell tone synthworks they had an original for sale, lets just say I couldn't swing it and I was sad.... I was seriously debating clearing my savings for a fewminutes... it was a blue marvin