jimmarchi1's forum posts 8022

all of these thigns will have a lot in common because there's only so many ways you can arrange components to make a signal loud enough to clip, and there's only so many ways to induce clipping, especially in a way that a guitarist will like.... it really narrows the options down, you know?

https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ZmxSWqg1_kg/V3_peCj_LdI/AAAAAAAAD5A/-ArwD6S6HY8FeRI99UoOKu0c_sjz9jtFQCK4B/s640/DBA%2BFuzz%2BWar%2BII.png

I think that's the 1 with only 4 transistors which is more of a jumbo tonebender on steroids

it isn't a muff, it only has 1 diode clipping stage and it has 3 more gain stages

Do I need to flip the board or is this enough info to find out which schematic is correct?

LOL, yeah, Michael... you would need to take it apart

know that it has a shit to of gain, okay?

I found a load of schematics that are all a bit different, if you take a pic it'll help me verify them. They all have quite a bit in common though so Ic an guess at you? It looks like 5 run of the mill BJTs ina row into clipping diodes into a lossy tone control recovered by 2 more of the same transistors which are bog standard boring old parts you might find in any discrete audio circuit from a mic preamp to a practice amp

if that's not enough for you take it apart

can you open it and take picture of the PCB?

wednesday, 8am, check! I'm old, I'll be up for hours by 8....

oh thanks, that's awesome, I wish I was in Boston yesterday... there's an undeniable thrill to driving around and hearing something you worked on, especially if you wrote it

they're super expensive now, like 600+ bucks for a beater pair of these rotten bookshelf speakers so if you mess anything up on them its a giant wallet blow... you can buy a pile of really useful stuff for $600.... now I'm thinking about selling mine. If I miss them there's a pair at party HQ and Mike hates them and enver uses them unless I'm there and ask to hear soemthing on them

EDIT: at 600 bucks its impossible to get your money's worth from an ns10, plus you need a really good amp, they're picky and that's serious coin. Minimum investment in mdoern world? 1k.... for 1k you can buy soemthing really useful.... you can get a dynamite or a 610, you can get 2 or 3 BSS 402s, you can get some fake pultecs AND NOS replacementtubes to make them behave.... you can buy a very well serviced like 24+ channel soundcraft 400b or half a toft ATB? Youc an buy a drawmer 74 EQ, stereo FET bus comp or a pretty nice 1176 clone/redesign with money to spare for a couple 522s or a 501.... You can buy a stuffed allison/valley rack or start a 500 rack if you like eurorack style cash sinkholes... oh man, you can buy a warm bus comp with money to spare too... a grand will buy an off brand vintage tape echo in good working order, a stereo spring reverb with way more control than my shitty tapco... if you hit up estate sales you can buy all sorts of weird old braodcast gear that will prbably sound really interesting... you could also buy a shitty car to run into the dirt driving to lcoation recording gigs!

oh and you could buy enough RNCs to peak limit every channel you're likely to need to compress.... you should be able to score 5 or 6 used ones for that G note. I just bought 2 more for a pittance, too low to say lest they devalue, they're great though I would never sell any. I tell every newbie to analog to go buy one

don't actually take ns10s apart though, okay?

are you kidding, i've disconnected the tweetersand sent a shielded cable out of the woofers on these many times for kick and low tom... they need a lot of gain, a lot

Did you continually reassemble them? How does that work?

well, sometimes I want the box to act as an air chamber and sometimes I just want the cone, so when iw ant the box I actually have my tweeters fused to protect them ebcause they're easy to blow the oofer wants more wattage than the tweeter can take so in the process of amplifying the woofer well you want to protect the tweeter.... so if i pull the fuse I can use the woofer as microphone with a box around it. If you just want open, raw woofer you unscrew it and disconnect it from the crossover. This has 2 effects, one you get frequencies above the crosover point wherease the other method your passing through a passive lowpass filter and 2 you don't have any box resonance, the transducer breathes and becomes figure 8... the box method is still tehcnically figure 8 but its recording a wood box on the cold lead and not the actual room behind the drum shell or bass cab.

you can also do this during mix down with the pair and it can be hella interesting. Power one on a send with the tweeter un fused then face the other one with ltos of gain as the return.... then you do a trick where you make a highly resonant EQ peak at the thud frequency to create extra thwack on a boring, flappy kick recording.... you would also then notch your bass guitar or synth at that peak to separate them and maybe, just maybe duck the bass a hair if its really busy ;-)

EDIt: when you pull the woofer you need to be really careful with it, you can't mount it to a stand ina way that could bend the frame and its easy to damage these crappy cones, really you have to be careful as hell.... you can do this trick with like guitar and bass cab speakers too they have a sound, or you can take a wrecked speaker and grab the transducer off the frame (hopefully, some can't be disassembled easily) and use it as a contact mic on anything that's resonating. That's essentially what a plate does. its got atransducer vibrating it and one picking up, both in contact.

are you kidding, i've disconnected the tweetersand sent a shielded cable out of the woofers on these many times for kick and low tom... they need a lot of gain, a lot

Here's his manifesto. Do you approve?

I've bought from them, they're on the up and up

I don't remmber the guy but I;m reading his manifesto now and I love his sneer at fancy overhyped hifi and studio equipment.... stuff like magic cables and the magical mustard capacitors LOL, I get him

at the moment I was thinking of just buying the whole system.... so its not a plugin on ym master bus or anything, the iLouds auto claibrate and you can adjust flat or bass/treb cuts or what have you, ttis all hosted itnernally, although the bummer is I'm dependent on their converters on either end of that amplifier, but I do have other monitors up, I just want something quiet and fairly flat that Ic an lsiten to real close, lie DIRECT field monitoring while I dial in my main sounds and get that balance going, then I'll probably kick to the A or B setup, tannoys or JBLs (or something, I'm still feeling weird about the JBLs at the moment they're a bit tubby like all JBLs and they have a dip I can fucking hear it).... these are a smidge cheaper than similar genelecs and they work sideways which will allow me to have stuff above them if I want whereas the genelecs are inferior in the lows and taller when upright as they're designed to be used. 600 bucks is a good size investment on an untried company so I keep chickening out

I'm not sure why you would want anything to sound like an NS10, its the way the glued paper cones in a sealed box produce transients that makes them good to mix on and you can't emulate that. Its a physical thing they do when powered the right way... the actual frequency response is grating. I pretty much stopped using mine this year LOL. In a treated control room I do like them to dial in my midrange and dynamics really well on certain instruments but I can't use them for extended periods of time or I get fatigued. I don't really use my mix cubes anymore for the same reason. I 'm convinced that even at the very low volumes I monitor at these 2 sets of workhorse, industry beloved speakers are murdering my hearing.

I'm trying to get something that's really flat in any room, sounds best quiet and is small enough to sit on my meter bridge at arm's length from my ears so i can listen even more quietly and hear everything and avoid ear fatigue for longer... save the bigger boys for finishing up a cut and maybe move some air right at the end

Dude, Tom, off topic here but speaking of recommendations what do you think of IK's ARC system? I'm eyeballing a pair of iLouds with the dual woofers and ARC mic for my meter bridge, I was thinking genelec but these are smidge cheaper and can fit my space without having to change a lot of stuff around because they can go sidewise, yada yada

do you find that ARC software genuinely fixes your sound issues in an untreated room? How bad is the latency?

my home studio is untreated, the loud JBLs are a bit much for it beyond a check here or there, I like them to track synths and stuff, but that's all... my tannoys are my tannoys, they are a really specific sound and they're kinda bulky for a passive.... I'm retiring my NS10s

I've been trying to modernize my monitoring.... I'm so set in my ways, its time to shake things up

I'm on a quest for a really characterful rack reverb, maybe spring.... so I'm asking folks on another site for recommendations and one guy is like "multi tap delay, you should get this delay unit blah blah.' So I start posting pics of my delay collection and he was still going. I mean, i have multi taps with phase control, I have 3 tape echoes, I had BBD, I don't need more delay. I need less pedestrian hardware verb.., but the transmisser and afterneath are mono, a bit lofi and over the top a lot of the time when you have delays running INTO THEM on an aux.... guitar pedals in the mix are a cute trick ONCE IN AWHILE

I digress

yeah, peeps be recommending some non-related shit out in the interwebs, its weird

manual, its very detailed and reading it front to back is advised, this is not a mackie

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B0OygRJuBFFvcXVGX0ZOdjdKU1E/view

1. Mods can delete for the time being. However, this is just the initial phase of this feature. Eventually, we want voting, tagging, etc which will make recommendations more useful and will dilute any bad data.

that's cool, both the deleting right now and the voting later

The mixer has arrived! All channels but 10 are outputting signal, but only 1, 11 and 12 seem to be doing so optimally. The rest are rather quiet.

as I mentioned it needs service. I suspect it needs new gain trims and it'll be fine... did you test the line amps as ell as the mic amps? they're actually separate circuits on a switch, not just padded down, there's even a different impedance load. If the same problem is true for both modes then its the gain pots. If the problems are different then its something else. My brief testing indicated the issues were common to both the mic and line amps before I sold it but that's as far as I went. I decided to shop for a bigger desk instead of pulling my hair out... I don't typically hire repair people, its against my relgiion. I encourage you to do so though.

I do have a few questions.

• What's that white tab thing under effects send 3?

I have no idea, its always been there and I never opened the box to look. Its some sort of stand off but what tis purpose is I can only speculate. I've never seen another ramsa with that

• Are the yellow marks at the gain trims for channels 11 and 12 optimal settings?

they were probably optimal for my purposes in line amp mode for a specific project 15 or 20 years ago I would guess.... or someone's, but I think I drew those on and left them for some reason. Although maybe robert hazard drew them on, all this stuff is ancient history. I usually use grease pencil so maybe they're not my markings. I would defintiely never mark a microphone gain position as its so variable, but I regulary mark things in mixdown if I want to ensure recall beyond what ic an do with a recall sheet

• Why did you send me spare faders? They all seem to be working fine.

I had them and my 400b uses longer throw penny and giles faders, so if one acts up go ahead and swap it, but they were all fine when it left. The pairs are never going to be perfectly balanced but that's pretty typical of these mid grade consoles and even my soundcraft isn't DEAD matched like a higher end piece. I'm trying not to horde spare parts as much as I used to. Its crazy to keep parts for gear you no longer have. Put them in a drawer.

I'm still impressed you got your college to buy you a small mixing desk... I mean, you don't get to keep it, but by the time you graduate you should also be graduating to a bigger desk

nope, I read about it in my friends guitar worlds back in the damn 90s, Cliff

somemight be 44.1k depending on how the godz recorded them and robotrippers and under your bed will be mastered off at CD 16b 44.1

I need an email address to share drive links

These all sound awesome! A CD would probably last the longest and be a source for WAVs/FLACs. On the other hand, WAVs would be easier to send. How about we start with some WAVs?

so waves at 16bit 44.1k quality? or 24 bit 48k youtube quality?

I'll take it all. Trash Godz, Under Your Bed, Dog and Pony, anything. If your friends have anything, too, send it this way.

do you want CD format? high sample rate 24 bit wave file? Reel of 1/2" tape? Cassette, 8 track (j/k)? We're not doing vinyl yet but will be

I'll get you a trash godz mix if you have 2 uninterrupted hours to broadcast LOL

but seriously I'll radio edit them because the Godz would want to be on... I think... do you want me to link you to something or like send you soemthing. I want you to have the most hifi mix your station can play safely, right?

What do we do here because i want to promote all the bands from Party HQ (the main 'live studio')? its all weird, underground music.... I dunno if I should give you my music which is less weird usually then the guys I work for

non related but the Party gifted me a working EP3 echoplex yesterday... I gotta reamp into it for mixing, but I might have to try it with ym ac30.

SO what now? I defitiely can bring many bands to you inluding the mighty trash godz

one of my friends had an alvarez for years, it played pretty poorly even after we worked on the nut etc.... but it wasn't UNplayable... it sounded great

by the way, I want your explorer, its so awesome

just a heads up, when you talk about combining items in guitar rigs or the studio, that chaining stuff? you should just put my formulas up LOL

HOW WOULD JIM USE THESE? follow that and you're solid j/k

Instead of wading through 7 gear slutz threads from various years, it would have Equipboard's relatively modern design language, list out the relevant products, each "upvotable" by the community and each with little speech-bubble type comments from anyone who wanted to chime in a personal experience, kind of like when you're reading up on movie reviews on Rotten Tomatoes:

https://i.imgur.com/LyRWLWN.png

I love the 'rotten tomatoes' angle we could get reviews thtat are for junk gear that sounds incredible like the alesis 3630 or whatnot.... instead of the cork sniffers weighing in on specs we could have like 2 review types between owners and non-owners maybe, like the critical and popular scores

EDIT: or balance user experiences versus collated magazine and blog reviews???

Also, I just bought a new five guitar stand. I was trying to find a nitro safe stand. I went to sweetwater, GC, Amazon, manufacturers websites and found contradicting information. It was infuriating, and I spent longer than I want to admit finding a simple studio stand that wouldn't eat up my Gibby's finish. I emailed my Sweetwater rep, who finally told me I was good to go. Which is cool, I found my stand, but now that info is lost to the ages. If I could, I'd quickly make a nitro safe EB page, throw my stand in there for the next bloke and posterity.

yeah, I'm always on the phone to my sweetwater rep, I liked my old guy, Jim, but Alex is the man with this stuff, but everything he does for me is just info in MY head and his, it only helps his clients and my friends

tangent, sweetwater's customer service is incredible, they school vintage king which is high praise. I have new guys for cabling now, man the dudes at Elite Core in Arkansas are the snake and interconnect lords.... they overnighted me new insert snakes at no additional charge, I'm so happy with them

Maybe a filtering system could be added so people can pick which items they wants suggestions for?

Yes, exactly. I think this is why Equipboard's current category pages suffer. I may want a particular type of reverb, but filtering is not possible. I think the more granular we get, the better the info will be. Imagine if we could use make stuff like show me [reverb pedals] for [indie rock] or [low watt amps] for [blues].

DUDE! like, in studio effects reverb, delay, EQ, compression are ALL lumped together as signal processors.... the site is so guitar centric at that granular level its goofy. I have lots of instruments I need to deal with when I'm doing professional work here. In roder to look up say a style of compression, maybe stereo VCA? You need separate compression categories there. Stomps get them, c'mon!

Michael I totally grok it now and this makes a lot of sense... it would allow lots of people's experiences to be at your fingertips rather than trolling google for days to make an informed purchase on a budget. I gained a lot of my encyclopedic knowledge first hand by buying stuff, lots of it and discarding stuff... repurposing other stuff... modding stuff. Plugging every piece of gear in at a studio where I'm working just to know what everything that I've never used actually does and what its good at. Its not an ideal situation as it gets expensive and makes you look like a hoarder between sell-off cycles and using a studio's gear colelction to the full is time consuming and runs up the bill too... I wish I could just look at one place with all these thoughts on a piece. The EB member reviews really influence my purchase decisions these days. If I've never used something I see how enthusiastic and lyrical people's reviews are and I see how they say they use the gadget or instrument.... but if I want to solve a specific problem and don't know what to do I buy a bunch of pieces and weed through them! which we could cut down on in your knowledge sharing and centralization scheme. I bought a drawmer bus EQ recently and its a shot in the dark, they're always sold out EVERYWHERE and I'm on a waitlist so I'll bet I'll love it but my gut was saying "just get an API or JDK, you know those cold even though they're not exactly what you want viz a viz mastering grade stereo matching and Q control." I let my sweetwater rep talk me into it. Its crazy to do thigns that way when you have a specific need.

I like this new idea of yours. I woulda come here and got the real dirt from guys who KNOW

this all sounds great assuming I understand what you're driving at... like the tagging I'm not 100% sure what you mean? but I get the motivation

also, how's that talisman treating you, Michael?

ISO transformers and lift on the console output, moved the console and rack wall grounds around the available conditioners and outlets until they stopped buzzing with a lot of helpful suggestions from my buddy who was a journeyman union electrician every piece has gorund continuity on my meter so it should be safe... god knows what happens when i add in the rest of the gear! This is just the basics.

So i was doing a mix using mine the last couple nights spreading a mono guitar out across my stereo field.... don't even bother trying to replicate this. It literally ate every other processor in the mix for breakfast to the point I want to buy another one for stereo

I'm going to solo this guitar cut and post it up here and bring the sre555 in and out because hearingwill straighten you out and make you start a patreon to fund a legit real tape echo/chorus/reverb

being a middle aged dude is great in one regard, I got all this shit for peaNUTS

that is all

Anyone ever spend a week chasing a ground loop around the home studio? I got it now with the help of an electrician friend, but damnit Jim, dat dang gremlin was on the WING, on the WING!! It wasn't super loud but I knew it was there and I couldn't make music until it was gone, my console is so inherently quiet

here's to gremlin slaying!

My advice would be to buy an Acoustic around the $700-$750 range (I belive that would be around £500 in your currency), I belive you shouldn't cheap out on Acoustics because you can buy a $180 Electric and plug it into a good Amp+Effects setup and make it sound great, while with an Acoustic, you can't alter the sound mutch, what you have is what you got. So I would recommend buying a nice Acoustic with good tonewoods (there are no bad tonewoods really, it just depends what you're looking for).

Everything you said is spot the f__k on Cliff

It's a shame to hear that Ibanez are let down by poor QC on the lower value instruments as all the models I've owned previously have been great guitars.

its mainly the acoustics, the electrics are a bit spotty but they're generally better QC... I don't wanna rag on Ibanez in general, theya re still value for dollar (or quid?) but there's a reason no one says Ibanez when you say 'quality intermediate dreadnought'... they just don't put as much effort into their grandpa guitars as their pointy super strats

I always say this, get a used 1998 25th anniversary Epi dreadnought. Should be a 300 quid (?)

Or get a Seagull, every model is great and affordable. The mini jumbo has a great Bowie campfire rhythm sound for recording at a concert size... portable and big. Fun to play.

I also like old Takamines but they're getting less affordable. Don't get a new one unless you cna play it in person which i don't recommend in this viral situation.

Ibanez quality control on budget acoustics is garbage, they're rapacious.... everyone from Philly has worked for them as their USA headquarters is right up the street from my house. They will pass ANYT GARBAGE through an inspection if its going to retail for under $500 USD. They patch it up to seem okay and send it out. This is true in any country, caveat emptor. Hoshino is a business and they don't even make these guitars, never have. No pride in their product.... like modern Takamine, play it in person.

if you're not spending more than 250 pounds or whatever money you guys have? be careful or go old.

on the Dimarzio PAFs, I don't know about his new stuff, but his old PAF clone while a good sounding pickup, was not a clone at all. Brass baseplate like his Super Distortion for starters and they don't sound like an old one. Its an excellent sounding pickup if you just want an upgrade from stock, but its not a PAF.

New ones? I don't know I stopped paying attention to dimarzio in the late 90s. I guarantee you they're great pickups, I think he knows what he's doing, but don't think he's as concerned as Duncan, let alone Stephens or Throbak with making legit replicas if you want a replica. If I were getting something 'in the tonal spirit of' but not accurate I would look at bareknuckle. They make great stuff and I should get a set...

Also: On the subject of suggesting pickups, does anybody know where I could find some CuNiFe Wide Range Style Pickups (like they used in the 70's Teles) for an affordable price?

yeah that's not going to happen... I know a guy who makes them for fender prices and of course his are obviously better because I know him.HAHAHAHA.

EDIT: you do know the reason they're so expensive? cunife is a bizotch to turn into screws.... alnico its impossible but cunife its still hard