jimmarchi1's forum posts 8022

in your amp you should probably just use a 12ax7 aka ecc83, put a good current production tube in there, nothing chinese.... it probably needs all that gain to get its sound since its mostly digital and one stage does a V1 input stage and the other is producing modest dirt somewhere in the modelling section before the solid state power amp. You could try a 12at7 aka ecc81, I would not bother with a 12au7 aka ecc82 very low gain and linear The AT7 also has a different output impedance than the other 12__7 tubes so it'll change the reponse of those stages in a tube amp, although in this weird hybrid monstrosity who knows what kidna input impedance there is between stages. I would think that the impedance into the AD converters is so high the output impedance of the tube stages will have a negligible effect if any. There's also the 12ay7 and the 12dw7 that's half 12ax7, half 12au7 but I don't think those have a euro equivalent or I don't know what they are. Anything that's not a dual triode with the correct pin out will fry the thing. If you need headroom try an AT7 or AY7 maybe... although it could be the solid state power amplifier too, at that price point who knows what you get.

Who has more snow today? Jeez!

As someone who has driven a Ferrari, no, they're not. Lambos are where it's at. Better gearing, better shifting, just so much better (yes, driven a few Lambos in my day, too).

Just my two pence.

Shelby

that is all

as an SG guy I really recommend the later T-tops, apart from Cream and the Doors its more the sound you expect like late period Zep and early ACDC, that said antiquities and even the lowly pearly gates sound pretty good for not much money. My favorite copies I've heard are the 70s Dry Z humbuckers by maxon followed by their Ibanez Super 70. Shockingly good. You have to hunt those up. Then there's replicas costing a lot more. Hundreds of bucks per pickup. Which I'm sure are great.... really great. This one company sourced original metal and stuff from the old supplier and owns a bunch of Gibson's winding machines. Throbak I think? Although Duncan owns an original Leesona from Gibson too, so there's that too.

Original PAFs vary a lot but they mainly have a few thigns in common tonally from the typically mismatched coils, so what you're expecting may not be what you get in an original one. They sued different magnet grades and sizes over the years before settling on short A5 for the T-top. I've had the opportunity to play a number of old Gibsons and many are almost single coil ish.... the surrounding components make a big difference too. The caps aren't that big a deal unless you do a lot with your tone knob but they've got 500k pots of very high quality in the old LPs and SGs. Expect to rebuild the whole control cavity or don't bother.

I really think PAF style pickups are better to LP and 335 type guitars. they offer more harmonics for the pickup to accent under overdrive. The SG is great but its a skinny slab of wood. It already has a focused, dry sound. If you decide to go T-top old ones are great but getting thin on the ground. There are a few repros of good quality out there I'm told. Anything with low, matched winds and a short A5 bar will get there. I have T-tops in my SG and they are the most focused and aggressive rock tone going. None of the ghost tone harmonics sizzle and magic of the earlier pickups, but for a classic SG sound they have that thing. They're uncluttered and sit ina band, retain note clarity under drive. Kick like a mule. If youlike proto punk and glam rock like I do these will do that but you also get thatmainstream 70s radio guitar sound too.

For a point of reference my carve tops either have maxon pickups because they're lawsuit 70s guitars or they have duncan pearlies or just regular burst buckers from gibson that came with them. I think i have one hotrod bridge too, its like a coil from a EVH duncan, forget the model with a coil from his 59 type PAF. That's cool for a hotter than vitnage raw sound with lots of midrange craziness, but otherwise I always turn back to the t-tops. They don't sound that special until the whole mix is going, then they just do a great job of putting your playing forward. Old style pickups aren't there to change your sound that much, Seth and Leo were aiming to give back what you put in as faithfully as possible so all this stuff, tis not night and day like the tone cork sniffers will tell you and I'm a guy with seriously nice guitars and amps.

I don't like social media too much ;-)

I'm from Philly, I'm just returning after a hiatus for awhile... before my wife died Iw as pretty much just a hobbysit. I was very active until 2010 when I got fed up and thought I would settle down and do something else. I'm only mixing right now for the duration of the pandemic and I don't build gear for other people, only myself and my friends. I entertained marketing my 50 watt amp design a year or so ago but decided that I didn't want to compete in a crowded market. If you need a record mixed let me know, i have affordable/negotiable rates and an excellent hybrid home post room with a vintage console, 30 channels of sabre converters, racks and racks of outboard, tape etc. I'm booked until April right now. I love to keep busy though. I also do synth patch preset design work for a couple big names in exchange for free toys.

I don't know what an IG is, but the soundcloud link on my profile has a variety of my work as an engineer, designer, composer, band member etc from various eras. Its not my whole reel but its got some cool stuff. I can defintiely fit in mix work between maybe April 15th and May, then I have a scoring thing.

I really like this mix and the string stuff and additional tracking I added at the bands behest on keys, guitar and shaker.... yeah shaker. Highly stylized, the band wanted a vintage sound with hard panning for a lot of stuff and some of the drums were tracked with 1 microphone, you get it.

Cheers!

Are you a tech or something?

yes, amp tech, recording engineer etc

yeah, no problem... I mean, also look at his amp, it may be doing a lot of tonal work too and its harder to disguise that being a giant box with distinct branding

wow, that's rough... I don't think you'll ever know what the 1st one is... can yo reach out to the band, a lot of guys are excited to divulge their signal chain if you contact them

Thanks for that, I feel like the first one was painted by the holder and perhaps the pedal itself has no logos on it

I make my own stuff all the time and I regularly make it look as weird as possible... or I build it into a stock pedal box to mess with people... I like to gut bad EHX circuits (black russian muffs, small clone RIs from the 90s, etc )and build my own shit in to confuse the masses

Yeah I’m not here for jokes sorry man, not here for that

got it, super serious.... get some decent photos or try enhancing the 2 you have so things are visible

in the 2nd one I think the middle pedal may be a wampler of some sort but Brian makes or has made a number of amp in a box type things it could be.... and other guys make stuff like that too with 2 footswitches and that X layout of 5 knobs

the 1st photo looks like a homebrew pedal, its a Bud box that's been carved into to make the jolly roger etc.... the second is so poorly lit I have no idea what's there

it was a dad joke, you'll get it when you're 40

did you card the pedals? ask them for their ID? because unless they have forgeries those drivers licenses should tell you.... unless they're not drive pedals, if they can't drive they won't have a license to drive obviously....

in what pictures?

Me too... but, more realistically, we're probably just going to end up giving Behringer $1500 for a clone that's not 1:1, but closer than anything else out there.

I think dickens was actually talking about this era of music gear manufacture when he said "They were the best of time, they were the worst of times."

these are all quality old tubes but aren't used in many if any guitar amps...

EDIT (long, boring version, read at your own risk): the 801 may be an at7 with a german designation, they love adding zeroes for some reason... the phillips 86 may be a disguised Telefunken or Mullard ef86 (aka ef806) an excellent small signal pentode for hifi, broadcast and pro audio that was also used by vox, selmer and later matchless and their copycats but is not interchangeable without modding in any other amplifier. They tend to be mcirophonic and are very susceptible to squealing in combos so dampers are needed. I find the mesh and solid shield Mullards to be the best for guitar amps and use a mesh in my matchless with an EAT cool damper because even in a head if you put it on the cabinet it can vibrate squeals from the tube. The rest of the stuff has me scratching my head. For pro audio I use the telefunkens or 70s/80s pre-JJ Tesla EF806es. Who knows what you have, DW is not usually a signal tube prefix in my experience.

The most common guitar preamp tube european designations will be ECC81, 82 and 83, these are just 12au7, 12at7 and 12ax7es respectively but europe made theirs with different materials, bottle, plate and filament structures so they all sound different..... lesser used are the pentodes, most common guitar pentode is the mighty EF86 followed by the american 6SJ7 sharp cutoff pentode and the 5879 mini. All of these dual triodes and small signal pentodes or variations thereof are also used in pro audio gear and hifi. The 86 pentode, 81 and 82 dual triodes and variations of those triodes in single triode format are very common in condenser microphone designs from germany. You find the 6SJ7 in a lot of limiting amplifiers and varimu compressors but I don't know its euro designation off the top of my head. The 5879 has a low in common with the EF86, as far as I know the designation is a NATO number and is the same on both continents.... the 5879 s in some US recording gear and is in a number of gibson designs from the end of the tweed era replacing the octal base 6SJ7 when everyone went over to minis. Vintage ampegs with the hard to find 7199 triode/pentode as the cathodyne PI and driver can be modded for another socket to use half and 82 and an ef86 or 5879 as the driver stage before it since the 99 is basically those 2 tubes in one bottle. Although there are other similar single bottle triode/pentode workarounds too like the 6U8 if you have a V series amp. I digress.

I would have to look up all these tubes and see what their US designations are to tell you what they're actually meant for, but its probably not guitar amps and maybe not even audio. A lot of tubes were made for radio frequencies or TV use. Some can be repurposed for music use with a careful design, but generally not, RF and TV tubes are too prone to squealing at the top of the audio range when exposed to even the tiniest mechnaical vibration... this tendency wasn't a problem in video reproduction and could beignored in broadcast assuming the thing wasn't in the AM amplifier circuit.

if you're thinking about it this hard you need more shed time... when good things happen all the time without thought then you have achieved what the japanese call wa

https://equipboard.com/gear_photos/9617

a big, heavy, vintage soundcraft one

Someone needs to do a 1:1 analog replica Jupiter 8. Too nice of a synth to only be available for $15k and up.

I would kickstarter at least a grand for that

Firstly, I'm an Uppicker so I prefer picking with mostly up-strokes. I was practicing a few weeks ago and was wondering, if I practice Downpicking will it "adapt" or "reprogram" my arm muscles and make me worse at uppicking?

first and foremost you should do what the song calls for... really most of the time you should circular pick because its the most efficient use of energy. But its case per case from a creative standpoint, so you need to have all the skills or you're Billy Joe Armstrong (which is good work if you can find it, big money). Work on hammer claw, Pagey style. Get circular, refine your upstrokes with pinch harmonics... Going one direction slows you down, not being able to use your other (right hand) fingers limits you to one-line parts and or strumming and also limits your ability to make cool new sounds without hitting a stomp.... use your tone and volume controls while practicing. Mastering other techniques won't hurt the style you already have, it just puts different tools in your toolbox. Watch Jeff Beck's right hand some time.

okay, I'm done. Don't let me expand on this.... I'm all stir crazy from covid and blizzards.... I just drone on and on.

there's a lot of 'what the pros use' but not always much why or how at this point... which is tricky

oh man, I just got a valley dynamite in the mail that my friend got me... now I have all their stuff part from a commander or two

we need like a tech tips corner.... it could range from soldering technique to pedalboard power supply selection to mixing tricks.. and analog corner, forpeople who think a computer is just the new tape machine? maybe not.. kepex expander/gates and why they're cooler and more fun than any plugin? you and your patchbay, the routing romance.

Thought the OB6 was fried on Monday, bout lost my shit. Had moved it to a temporary spot & it was off its regular surge protector & I forgot. Freaked the fuck out

Oh man, that's the worst feeling.All of those microprocessors for the MIDI and memory are delicate. Glad its okay.

yeah, something like that where there's a downloadable PDF manual

I mean, who would forge the manual to a 70s compressor? c'mon, no one is that low

This a very good idea. I have a similar idea in mind for old ads.

this is great, before surfing the web a person could just go into the EB Ad section when looking to verify an endorser

I think we need a manuals library... sometimes old gear manuals disappear into obscurity as hard copies are lost by owners and websites are rebuilt by businesses so if someone has a PDF we should host it.... even new stuff we should store manuals if its ok with the manufacturer because when that gear is discontinued who knows how long the manufacturer will host the PDF manual? And software too, sometimes you open an old plugin you like, hit the help button and you get a dead link. Developer is gone. Domain cancelled, manual lost forever.

Really great stuff stays in service long after the creator has moved on.

I don't do anything by halves. The spouse thinks it's a side effect of the ADHD. I get involved in a thing, then I go all out. I'll look into the Minilogue for sure, like I said, my kid is showing interest in sound synthesis, and if I can get them interested in making music, then I've won a battle I've been fighting for since they were born!

it'll happen, my son's into it, piano lessons, messes with my synths, writes little 1 minute songs, and I might teach him to engineer. He seems really fascinated with the home post-room and the plethora of contrlols and lights. Someone from his generation needs to learn to do it with real gear right out of the gate to replace dinosaurs like me and a lot of my buddies. PMTLuke on here also ahs a kid who is hella into music, plays guitar and keys and is very young. If you show them what it does they're going to get sucked in. I hope. Also check out google music lab . Its an online midi sequencer/piano roll for kids that actually exports. Teaches notation, circle of 5ths... It has oscillator shapes, hamronic generators and just teaches ages like 5 to 10 all about basic theory, electronic music and the principles of recording a bit too. Its super hands on but really educational. I can't believe all the stuff my son has learned about since his school music teacher introduced it to us. Now he's like "oh that's a since" and I'm like "test tones are always sines, if you want to calibrate soemthing to respond at a certain frequency you use the since wave at that frequency" and he's like "that makes sense they don't have harmonics."

This is when you pat yourself for never sliding on redundant back ups.

I know, mother nature is trying to stop us working and possibly even damage our gear.

I'll start. I think the community gear photo gallery is amazing and criminally under-exposed. We quietly added the ability for gear photos to be tagged, and it looks like most folks have been using that so now we can tell what's a pedalboard setup, what's a studio pic, etc. We can use that to disseminate those photos on more portions of the site. You're looking at Billy Corgan's Big Muff? Tycho's Virus synth? Cool, how about some beautiful pedalboards and studio setups from the community further down the page where you can admire and learn what other gear people are using with their Big Muff & Virus?

I haven't yet made purchase decisions based on the gear photos but tis coming.... I have made layout and wiring decisions. Its a great way to get ideas about ergonomics when your space was maybe thrown together and sloppy before you saw how tidy and well thought out other people's working environments are.

EDIT: some people's home studios really shamed me into cleaning up my covid-space.... and also has me hounding my best friend to cean up the mess in south philly, not just the video-studio section where they shoot live streams.

bump... you should sticky this

they can... it depends on the conditions and the formulation. This ones a smidge yellowed.

I googled eventide digital delay 1972 and got this:

https://www.eventideaudio.com/blog/aagnello/50th-flashback-21-ddl-1745-delay

they were there 1st, then i think it was AMS and Bel in the UK, Lexicon was in there too but was leading the pack in algorithmic reverb

look at this monster....

https://reverb.com/item/13000347-cvpa-cvplate-analog-stereo-plate-reverb-brass-stainless-cold-rolled-steel-preorder

nah, I thik eventide had the 1st digital delay unit before I was even born.... maybe 72ish?

I've got a bunch of lexicons, later ones, not the creme de la creme.... I also always have a yamaha spx90 or 2 around because, well, they're awesome at lots of random stuff. I've got an old tapco stereo spring and I'm trying to talk myself out of buying a new plate, there are these guys making a really nice 'small-ish', stereo plate setup.... but its like 3k to preorder one

we're used to it so we don't have the problems our boys in Austin are having. They got blindsided. I've got massive surge/conditioning for my gear and a few UPSes too so ina heating/electricity crunch i can run a few hours of battery to power space heaters and tube equipment. Its not going to happen though. Bad things happen in Philly so we're always prepared.

Gritty gets mad when he can't charge his phone....

there's a lot of this on the used market if you look it up. there's this japan one I was eyeing a few months ago tbh.

tbh I would not pay anything like current asking prices for one of these... its a sinkhole of time and money, which is probably why my oldest friend gave it back to me! every time you fire it up you want to open the top and make sure nothing looks displaced and the tape looks like it won't tangle or catch, then you turn it on and make sure its behaving and then you cross your fingers. And that's on a serviced one with good motors, fresh tape and new pinch rollers etc

for a while these were getting sold broken and the flood of them on the vintage market is guys who bought them up, fixed them up and now can't find buyers because they won't budge on their prices because if they come down too far they won't turn a profit. There's a lot of fiddly mechanical parts that go out and they add up.

I remember when Eventide came out with their first rack mounted digital delay. And then Boss started making the affordable DD series pedals. Digital delay was and still is awesome. As is analog. And the tape delays are great, too. Fortunate to have all these great options.

I've been using a lexicon PCM41 since they went up for sale used after the 42 came out and I really like TC's digital delays, no gripes with digital delay. Its really a golden age of cools tuff, most old stuff can be serviced or is still going strong these days because of tank like build quality and new stuff can be fragile but the prices reflect that versus in our day where things were expensive, really expensive or.... y'know, alesis?

I wodner if the OP ahs considered something less purpose built too, like an HX effects? I thought the models on that thing sounded pretty good across the baord (pun intended) when I tried it before covid. The tapes were pretty decent and you also get things like the biphase, ADA flanger.... they sound pretty nice.

I was thrilled when I got El Cap. Gave me the ability to create those gradually deteriorating tones that i always wished I could get when I had my Space Echo.

mine's pretty hifi, I keep fresh tapes around and its always been maintained. My buddy had it for awhile and he tore it down and replaced the pinch rollers and recapped it and stuff, so deteriorating bad echoplex tones are not its thing anymore. It has that natural tape shrinkage where a copy of a copy is less full than the original, but the fidelity is pretty good for a dictaphone tape until you start overloading it and saturating the bandwidth.