jimmarchi1's forum posts 8022

its like rear window meets frenzy on speed...

the kid who borrowed, the student? he co-engineered Under Your Bed and is currently a nashville sideman.... we also were briefly in Suzanne Gorman's live band before things got weird with her... it was super brief. Then I gave up music for a few years and got married which drove me to return to music really quickly, but never again professionally.

I was thinking more like a nicotene filmed PCB

HAHAHAHA

its all true

you coulda edited the family nonsense out

have you ever considered making your cosmetics look like a battered piece of equipment?

https://reverb.com/item/38745307-ramsa-wr-8112-circa-analog-mixer-mixing-board-small-format-console-circa-1980-vintage-as-is

its on reverb.com, anyone from equipboard can get a discount!

as a result of having learned the way I did I always do a sheet like tis before beginning a project...

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1skY9l9upG8D7uytobQYytjuRbc3wFMCaQimcmNVIUrc/edit?usp=sharing

it helps crystalize everything and sets my boundaries.... things can change but its got my signal flow ideas and gar I thik woill be a good starting point. I might use plugins but sorting plugins during the initial balance can be really soul destroying. I have a tendecy to not experiment ITB until the end. Just channel everything up the same and see what I get. Console-wise I do soemthign similar but it was born of nescesity from when I ahd no budget for stuff... 9 times outta 10 your initial ideas work fine.

just a note, all submixes are in the master but there's a main mix in the master when i mix too, its all parallel groups. The master mix is usually fine but has more ush and vibe with the parallel subs. Adjustments are made for level creep this way as you go.

story of this board (its entertaining, get ready):

This board was purchased brand new for 2 or 3 grand by Robert Hazard for his home studio along with two tascam decks, an 8 track, the one everyone had, and a 1/2" mixdown deck. He had dbx noise reduction and some dbx compressors. In the 80s he sold the entire rig to my dad's keyboard player. Or maybe said band member stole it. there was a lot of that from the keyboardist and bassist. If they did tech work and felt underpaid they robbed the dudes. I had Blood Sweat and Tears Princeton Reverb for many years and it came to me with a similar tale. We're at maybe 83ish? The guy looked it all over and sold it to my uncle who was just graduating princeton for engineering....he made a bad pop record on it under the monicker Thomas Mars and proceeded to get a masters. Then he and my dad got a DX7 and a drumulator (which i have to this day) and made a new agey album called "stress break" with this gear. It was meant to be listened to in a waterbed based isolation chamber that was being marketed through sharper image but yuppies in fact did not want subject themselves to MK Ultra experiments so it never caught on. Shit looked like the mercury capsule, it was so cool.

From there the baord went to do live sound for another uncle and the tape machines and outbaord sat around. In the 90s I used this board to record and mixsome poor tape deck band rehearsal space EPs and went on to use it for an industrial EP that used a mix of casstte 8 track and computer for the master. Then I did some techno and DnB singles on it, most of which should never be lsitened to by anyone. I started my first studio job and I lent it to one of my guitar students whow as into recording and made some stuff with it. I purchased a 200b around this time and sued it for a solo record that's best not lsitened to and will remain secret. THe 200b did not make it all the way through that and I went ITB as it was possible all of the sudden but I wound up asking for the baord back to sum drums and EQ some stuff into the recorder.

Then it went back to the original uncle who was archiving multitracks into cubase sx. I helped him bias his machines and he tried the ramsa but wanted a dry sound as he didn't want to mix at the time. I was in dog and pony at the time (the loudest band in thehistory of philadelphia, it is known) and had been given my friend's teac 24 which we cut the record on at the main studio Iw as working out of. We were out in the carriage house behind the main building... anythign with a lot of pieces or hella loud got cut there. I know for a fact that that was the only record I cut on there thatw asn't mixed through it too. We went to another studio me and the bassist worked at and used their SSL room. I think that was also cut to Alesis HD24, I really like that machine. But Under Your Bed's first demo was cut through the teac although it may have been summed through Mitch Levine's similar Tascam 16 track because I used his home studio control room and it was a great excuse to hang with my favorite old man.... we shall never see his like again! Miss you buddy. From there the UYB demo was at studio 4 and was polished up by Phil Niccolo who fixed all my deficiencies as an engineer and some deficiency caused by the bad treatment in mitch's control room and overlarge 3 way JBL speakers. The Teac did good service on those 2 personal projects in that 300 year old carriage house! There it stayed where I cut many record through it for years forgetting all about the little ramsa that could. The Teac moved to under your bed's rehearsal spaces forr awhile and then wound up stored at another uncle's and he sold it out from under me without asking for 200 bucks. If I didn't lvoe him I woulda killed him. He ditched that massive teac on his 'old junk' theory.... the same theory that caused him to give me a princeton reverb from 64 as my first guitar amp in 91 or 92 (another instance of the keys and bass duo from Woodlands boosting gear from scheister live sound and lighting clients and using my uncles as unwitting fences). But he sold that teac without the power supply which I still have LOL. I believe he also told me to just get a 16 channel mackie if I needed a mixer. Beause they're so clean and all. So if ayone has a Teac Model 24 and no powersupply? I;m your guy!

Meanwhile the ramsa was with "Thomas Mars" and there it sat until he tried it for a band rehearsal and found he couldn't remember how to work the routing so he asked me if I wanted it back this thanksgiving and I said sure. He gave me some extra faders and when I got around to using it I made that one mix and the next weekend i lost the 2 channels and threw my hands up in the air. I've been inside it back in the day and just didn't have the time or energy to disassemble the thing. Being non-modular and built like a tank its an undertaking to get to the channel cards and get them back in properly. I could do it but its distracting from music to have stuff taken apart allover your control room. So the Trash Godz and I found this 400b that's been srviced and upgraded and I ahd it delivered Saturday. Guy's son drove it from Ohio for me, nice kid. Thing lit up and performed flawlessly day 1.

the other side of the wind was epic.... I love John Huston.... ever see "Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean" ???

on Herman scores, I decided to wtch Depalma's sisters yesterday and Heman's score still kills it.... he id like vertigo and day the earth stood still at the same time with a weird orchestra and a moog modular! plus watching it again I relize that the seen in Kill Bill where Elle Driver is in the nurses outfit with the split screen and all the pit instruments and whistling is SO 70s Depalma/Herman. Rza nailed that part with the split screen

YEAH!

the soundtrack for Mank was the jam, all period music in the style of Bernard Herman....

I loved the movie too, but I;m a film buff, i lvoe Kane, I love Orson and I love that script.... it invented a whole investigative flashback style that's the most immitated film format... you don't get to quentin without it

but there is something especially pleasing about the sonic quality of this recording here. If this is the only recording on your SC mixed/summed on this old board, then it is indeed a very effective pitch for what this thing can do.

it is, I haven't mixed on a ramsa since the late 90s I think, maybe early 00s, and that was probably this one as it changed hands through my family a lot... I had another one at one point before I got my original 200b 16 input 4 bus frame around 2003 I think. I wound up using that a lot for front end as it needed work and I wasn't up to it at the time.

Its not so much the specific board but the mindset of mixing through a console and exploiting the electronics to the full, hands on gain staging with real voltage and not 1s and 0s as virtual decibels against full scale. meh

Speaking of, when can we expect the next Trash Godz to drop? XD

soon, I'm wiring my patch bays for a larger mix of more complicated sessions... I graduated to the 16 channel 8 bus soundcraft 400b which is an even more euphonic console with a similarly pillowy EQ and fatter summing amps, smooth treble etc. Its a very good sounding desk that I know reallywell. There's still a lot of wiring to do, I'll be mixing this weekend I expect.

I believe theres some other mixes from my old teac 24 on soundcloud, most of the electronic is ITB though... mainly acoustic stuff on the teac, it had very round line amps and a similar EQ again to the panasonic, limited so you couldn't fuck up a good thing. I went console-less for awhile due to space constraints but decided I can't deal anymore. This little ramsa came into ym hands randomly, I di one session, didn't even finish, and lost 2 channels and was so put out I bought a serviced and upgraded 400b from the same era. Before the Teac I ahd a soundcraft 200b so I know the console, its just a mroe sophisticated version with some mods. Trident and Soundcraft are my favorite working man's boards.

I assure you the soundcraft will outperform the ramsa, though the ramsa is no slouch and has a certain magic to its EQ that's not exactly british, but I have a couple of pultec clones now fr that inductor midrange thing, just retubed them with NOS today and Ill change the transformers if the stock ones are blah.

But really its not thelittle details of the tools, as long as I have the right feature sets I can do this sort of thing. The trick is working in real time with both hands and mixing with th the computer monitor not showing the waveforms as you playback. People are visual and you will ehar with your eyes if you have visual feedback, all you need is meters and that's just a voltage measure, its not a "this si too ho, its wrong" its mroe like "that's a lot of voltage into that opamp, its going to saturate on the next big transient, do i want that, is it pleasing?" There's just soemthing about the old way that's best.

Sorry rambling

there's about a year worth of trahsgodz material on a drive in my control room. You wuld be surprised how scrappy these recording actually are, they're tracked to cubse sx2 on a machine running xp through a behringer live mixer that feed a mix to the live feed and sends the dry multitracks to the xp machine to give to me later. I don't engineer those although I've made suggestions they take very seriously about rms levels of the signals, mic placement etc. Ive fiddled with the rig and its frustrating for me. Hard to make it behave with the digital phone app itnerface, too many features to weed through on that GUI. It works for the Godz.... I've also traded a lot of gear with them and we loan eachother shit all the time.... they turned me on to the TOA tripe delay from the 80s and I turned them onto the transmisser and afterneath.... lots to tell really. More soon, lots more.

the 5'1" little girl who used to front one of my bands went out guitar shopping with me and we got her a japanese mustang, it was SG thin or thinner

I've purchased from Plugin Boutique and similar. I like the concept, like the experience. LOVE that you're going to put your own spin on it!

I love the boutique and the alliance, mostly solid stuff

what about a gear emproium?

here's an excerpt of a fast mix I did of this live triphop shit my buddy and his friends created at the big studio on new years day.... its all board EQs and summing, I used compressor plugins and not hardware except the master bus because I was still wiring stuff up that week... in fact I'm still wiring stuff up now in the home studio LOL its brutal in there!

https://soundcloud.com/james-marchione-1/trash-godz-live-20210101-excerpt-ramsa-rough-mix/s-kft2y2nqJn6

got 90 bucks and want to drive to philly? I really wanted 150 or so, but hey....

I need the floor space in the studio. if I sell it for good money it'll probably get parted out which is a shame because its got a nice sound and great stereo width...

make me an offer! seriously, as long as its not 2 digits I'll consider it. When working they go for $300 to $500 these days due to the low channel count.

EDIT: email is jimmarchi1 @ gmail.com no spaces

LAST CALL before reverb listing

I just saw this, congrats.... got any wonky old broadcast gear around? Like Orban stuff or Texar? CBS audimax or volumax AGCs? I'm really n the market for old federal levelling amps or those weird commerce department ones from the new deal and war period.... or gates solid statesmans, I know in the south and midwest this stuff never gets thrown away when its replaced.... up here it was all trashed which is a shame, its neat stuff

if you get anything crazy, contact me immediately

CORRECTION! the model of the board is WR-S412

don't know why I thought 112. What would you do with a 12:1:2 configuration LOL

This is good info. Cheers!

I have a soft spot for Soundcraft, my first mixers were those smaller Spirit mixers from the late 90s... I have zero doubt that a real, non-budget mixer made with fewer cost-cutting ICs would be a nice sonic upgrade, but I just never seem to get excited-enough about consoles to put down the $$$$.... one day!

I cut my teeth on a 90s spirit studio 16:4:2 that was a distinct cut above the mackie 8 busses that were in every project studio at the time. Still, the Delta series was the real successor to the 200s, 400s,600s etc. A delta is very much an early 90s 400 series with some thoughtful upgrades and properly balanced ins and outs isntead of sorta not so balanced ones... however they're not as rugged, so getting an odler 400 or 600 or the mighty 1600 or 1624> good call. If you wanna balance everything you can do it with ISO transformers from jensen, hell you don't have to do it itnernally, you cna buy boxes of them from jensen or radial and run short elads from your ins and outs to a box or rack unit which will isolate your signal and send balanced to and from the recorder... I've never had a problem with noise in my home studio, its small, lines are short, but I do have a radial twin ISO and I think I hear an improvement in clarity and heft through those 2 jensen 1 to 1 transformers. Plus my master bus is always sporting the warm audio comp now, even if tis not engaged the discrete line amps and cinemags are in line. All that iron is tasty. I digress...

What I maant to say is almost every IC console design uses cheap TL071s and TL072s for a lot of the stages throughout the board. That opamp was a game changer for console design. Soundcraft, allen and heath, crest, AMek/TAC etc etc... You think discrete for neotek and mci, but not entirely, the mic and line amps are, but they're discrete in my 400b there too, man. Malcolm Toft jumped right on these ICs with trident's 80 series and you can pay 3 grand for a new Toft ATB and get a board full of 71s and 72s, they're cheap ICs, sure, but they're a quality multi fet opamp in there and are really as good as the supporting componentry and circuit topology. If you wanna get fancy there are some drop in upgrades these days from cork sniffer companies like burr brown. There are some OPAs that will supposedly improve your 71 and 72 stages. Cheap modification. I might try it on some spare channels and busses I have for my 400b. I don't expect a big improvement though. Budget ICs are no biggie. If you want a discrete baord that's fine, but even SSL isn't all discrete. That's old school shit. Neve, API, sphere, calrec etc.

its really the sum of all the components, their quality and application, mackie cuts lots of little corners and focuses on headroom and it adds up a certain way.... there are other approaches to putting the same basic parts together and choosing where you cut costs that provide more vibe for the end user. But I'll tell ya, a mackie 8 bus is a headroom champ! It needs to be, if you clip it you know the bus is clipping and you wish it wasn't! Some distortions can never be unheard :-O

allen and heath hasn't made a reliable small format board since the venerable mix wizard.... honestly the difference between an onyx and a zed is really sonically negligible. The summing is better on the zed, but the EQ is dead similar as are the line amps.The "perkins" EQ isjust a copy of all these trident 80 derived brit EQs from A&H or soundcraft.... soundcraft has been riffing on the same design since the model 200 replaced the series 1! A&H seems to think their sound is like if Mallcolm Toft tried to make an SSL LOL

Its not like the CR rack mackies versus the rack friendly Mix Wixzard a ew decades ago.... although I really like the crest X series over the mix wizard in that era

mackies never die, never.... they always sound just as mediocre year after year.... when we're gone and the cockroaches evolve a culture they will mix their music on ancient mackie 8 busses and onyxes...

TO ALL: If there's no takers soon the Ramsa goes to reverb and then fleabay if no one there has a use for it.... I would rather see someone who needs a punchy little summing board and some nice EQ grab it and put it to use, maybe get it fixed... it would be sad for it to become a parts donor since its admirably musical. The thing has beena round the block.

SRV did this, look it up, his tech ahs written articles about this shit over the years

I'm going to bump this once because after today it goes up for auction

Don't you think that the cover band is a complete wreck and just losers

Reading this again, I think you should put your talent where your mouth is if you're so great. What have you ever done that you can talk shit on coverbands? I know a lot of players who avoided dayjobs by playing weddings as well as doing original music. THere's no money in originals, half the time its pay to play to get started and now there aren't even venues anymore! Facebook banned live streaming music now, I mean, c'mon. A player's gotta eat and playing covers is less like work than digging ditches. Maybe its the language barrier but you're either really young or really obnoxious.

I've done some time in seashore coverband hell LOL It was a lot like when Iw as an adult contempirary sideman, that felt like covers for me ebcause I was accompanying the artist in an album-note=-perfect way. She gave me her records and I elarned every song she had, charted them out with the bassist. They were her originals of course, but the feeling of being in a cover band and being a hired gun for a solo artist is the same, takes the same skill too. Which is a lot of fucking skill.

AGAIN what have you done that's so great? Are you even a real person, or maybe is Michael posing as a Russian troll for laughs????

nice little 12:4:2 board with good 3 band EQs, very musical, sweepable mid, summing amps are based around 4558 opamps (yes that one from the ubiquitous green dirt box), sounds nice. Not as lowheadroom as they say but not mackie levels of headroom however the thing has great saturation in the red, not crunchy until you're really driving everything. High headroom mic amps and line amps, very detailed, direct reording outs on every channel... Panasonic built these really well. About 45 lbs in weight, heavy but 1 person can move it no problem. If it were modular it would be perfect, but hey.... you cn't have it all.

currently channels 2 and 10 are down. 2 Is motorboating and 10 is intermitently cutting out. Both could simply be the gain pots going open on 2 nd grounding out on 10. I gave them a good cleaning but its not dirt. YMMV if you wanna deoxit them to. I have no desire to fix it or even put another minutes effort into it as its nonmodular and I'm lazy, PLUS 12 channels didn't cut it for me so much... I also have a soundcraft 400b that's well serviced.... my loss your gain. ANY OFFER OVER $150 WILL BE CONSIDERED but you will have to come get it or pay ACTUAL shipping on top of purchase price.... even at 10 channels this is a fine intro to OTB mixing, a decent summer/router or a suitable donor for a larger Ramsa WRS that's ailing! Most of it works flawlessly.... I have never serviced this byeond cleaning, could be nothing. Will come with some extra faders, the rest is up to you. Service schematics and manuals are readily available in PDF EDIT: weighs 45 lbs

additional pics available on request although I don't want to open it up, its not modular. If I wanted to open it I would fix it.

This is a small, high quality board to learn on, vastly superior to a mackie, even the onyx... like a slightly less well engineered Yamaha PM1000 ;-)

Its been offered here but I plan to list it on Reverb Monday.

EDIT AGAIN: this is the series of board and era of board that Nirvana's Bleach was recorded on by Jack Endino. That was a WR-T820 with double buses and 20 channels, same circuitry though. If you like that reciprocal records 80s to early 90s sub pop sound? sound this'll help get there if you have a few dbx 160As etc. Those records are all skill and enthusiasm, nothing fancy. "All you need to make a record is some magnetic tape and a microphone. And maybe, just maybe, some bad reverb." -Conrad Uno

I produce electronic music from '80,

I don't remember 1980, I was young , like 1, but I was there.... it was a while ago....how do you get the music to go back to 80 and then return to 2021? flux capacitors in your console ? ever have it get lost in the wild west and the cowboys hear it emanating from the plains ang say "what in tarhootin'?! A ding dang doo!"

Bingo. It’s a bit like picking a DAW - you guys seem to use several because one doesn’t seem to cover All The Things. (I wish someone would write the definitive comparative guide to DAWs)

good thought, will attempt

Read the graphic novel in my teens but what I really loved about the recent TV series was the great work Reznor et al did on the soundtrack (movie, TV and game soundtracks are kinda my thing).

that sound track was pure gold, especially nun with a motherfucking gun

Ha! "Can you draw this turtle?"

that's what I was thinking of! catch the alan moore reference though?

I didn't, sadly... but isn't it Pyramid Transnational, not Transglobal?

(I don't think I would have caught it either way, though I love me some Watchmen)

I'm pretty sure it was transglobal in the comic, but I could be old.... its been awhile

Ha! "Can you draw this turtle?"

that's what I was thinking of! catch the alan moore reference though?

it was the way of our people back then. But is Ajaik even looking to record live singers and instruments, or is it all hardware synths and ITB sounds?

same skillset.... once it hits the input it voltage baby... and knowing about recording live singer and instruments helps you as a mixer and depth and width to your DI signals, it gets you outta your comfort zone and gets you thinking about phase relationships etc that really help you when making itneresting mixes.Everythign electronic today is so bright and flat and this is why! its not essential to learn all aspects of recording to do DI and ITB at a certain level in certain genres like really tacky genric EDM I guess, but a real education in all aspects of recording will put you where you wanna be because "more knowings makes more betterz at the everything music"

why get lucky when you can get confident? why master one angle of the mix and flog it to death like a deadmaus when you can master all the tools and techniques and apply them to problems where they're not the obvious solution?

EDIT: my internship was all DI, or mostly apart from the odd vocalist, techno guy as a teacher.... but eh kew how to put up mics and adjust gain staging man.... and I did a lot of running cable at my enxt gig, but shortly following that I worked for a jazz head with a small studio and location recording business. The studio was scrappy at best then but the location biz was jumpin' so I added my gear to his collection and was the location guy for gypsy music, jazz combos, school big bands, choirs, acapella madrigals in tin roofed churches.... gospel church music, rock bands in auralexed bar basements, DJs in clubs with with additional feed of vintage synths and drums machines and on and on and on.... different challenges every gig, limited setup and break down with the remote rig, sometimes I'd be doing FOH at the same time, usuually my mic positions were checked with headphones while setting up.... long stereo extnsion cables a must, broke them regularly!.... soundcheck? a number of jazz clients didn't 'believe in them' and just came up nd you better be rolling, you checked during the first number and hoped it nothing went wrong! You do that for a few years and the force will be strong with you! Then I went to some more elgit studios and did less and less location work but those skills and my speed and my sense that "this can or can't be used in the mix as is but the problems if corrected will or won't be correctable without artifacts.... or if I can't correct them they could be a highlight f the mix, like the loud crappy hihats in raw power!" That wasn't a sentence, but it helped, even on DI stuff, even when Iw as just doing virtual everthing on my laptop at lunch after I got fed up with politics, diplomacy and non-paying clients and got a day job to support my family!

Speed and decision making I learned.... much fear I sense in guys who only learned ITB with VSTs! undo? afraid they are. Fear leads to 1dB fader moves. Nonlinear they are, mmmm! Factional and 1dB fader moves are inaudible outside the upper reach of the fader and fader creep leads to the digital clipping or overcompressed stereo bus.... a dark path the undo button leads you down.

and everyone needs to lay off the presets, even as a starting point.... me and my buddy are going to do a gag show about rpesets where we pose as old soviet era soundmen extolling presets "You need to make the guitar sounds like the guitar? you get the waves SSL channel and look in menus for "guitar" and then you have guitar! Is easy! In Russia when we learn, remember Yuri? we need EQ so week before the mix we cue in the line for the EQ. Then days later we get the EQ box. We plug in to the board and sound goes in but it doesn't come out! So we open box and its empty. No circuit! So we see note inside and it tell us where to cue up or EQ circuit to put in EQ box! You sue the plugin, they very good, SSL very popular in capitalist west so you get the SSL and you hit guitar and it makes the decadent british guitar sound. Is good!"

Ive found it hard to find stuff about mixing that allows me to learn at home at my own pace...

Seriously? I just Googled "mixing and mastering courses" and got hit after hit of courses consisting of on-demand videos + downloadable materials. Who is even able to offer in-person mixing courses in the US right now? It's all virtual at the moment, and some of those virtualized classes are at your own pace.

sounds like correspondence courses from my youth.... learn to be an architectural draftsman from home with this easy 4 week certificate program! YOU are an artist, unlock your gift with an exciting course from Pyramid Transglobal, send your check or money order to...

in ym day there were actual studios you could call and beg to intern at.... failingthat you went to someone with a minor dance hit and slaved for him and then parleyed that into an assistant/receptionist gig somewhere more commercial.. I liked the apprentice system a lot, I learned more that way, even by seeing what NOT to do LOL Books helped but for isntance I'll never forget the first time I tried to set up overhead mics myself on a paying session.... ah the mockery, there are thigns books don't teach as well as hands on screwing it up with a boss who will tease you about it for months on end

read about electrical engineering and acoustics, this is applied science.... everything that's not dictated by the science is personal taste. The best way to learn is to assist someone you respect for a year or two because the application of all this science and math is really situational.... and tastewise its good to see when a seasoned engineer throws it all out the window.... and then there are guys who barely even rspect the meters and just have good ears and trust their gut and win grammies...

I recommend you start by reading the handbook of acoustics front to back twice, slowly, and take notes the first time when you're confused so you absorb the material the second time through. Also read the manuals to your gear, no one does that. Get an electrical engineering basic textbook from the 70s or 80s too, lots of good ones.

I'm an amateur, I know some dudes who have built way more stuff

boosters, distortions, drives, fuzzes, a really sketchy compressor that has a certain vibe though.... ummm.... oscillators, a CMOS inverter based filter in a pedal for guitar to get wasp/bassstatin filtering on anything... some mic preamps with a friend (he made the PCBs) that I wound up letting him buy mine because they were too american for me being based on this old green altec mixer I used to have back in the day that he bought off me too because I fell out of love with its overcolored sound.... I know I've built more stuff but I'm at a loss for some reason.... I've made modded/bespoke champs for people outta parts but I'm not a champ man so I never made one for myself.... I've modded tons of 57s and okatava 319s, alesis 3630s, symmetrix preamps etc... I'm probably going to mod my soundcraft eventually...

EDIT: I've restored tons of blackface and silverface fenders, a 5c3, vintage ampegs, marshalls (and modded them if they're anemic), supros, little no name 50s combos.... gbson tweeds and two tones sometimes modded for the weak models... and I restored and now lovingly maintain my 62 ac30... I lovingly maintain my stable of vintage synths as much as I can without help, parts are getting scarce... I've rescued hundreds of ailing effects units and stomps...

I really enjoy inventing stuff that's just for my very specific uses, one trick ponies that have 1 or 2 controls and solve one specific issue perfectly.

he doesn't like them that much and missed my marshall plexi and univox tone from 15 years agos.... I think he wanted me to use his modded selmer tnb mk3 but it sounds better when HE plays it and I didn't really like my tnb mk2 after the honeymoon wore off and had it listed on on the JMI years group (lotta selmer and watkins ehads there too).... so I made this amp to suit my needs/wants and as a homage to the tones of the great pre-zep/sabbath trios like the who, cream etc... it was fun

oh fine, i was being funny...

https://soundcloud.com/james-marchione-1/jim-watt-mk1-demo-solo-and-band

here's my amp, its a highly modified hiwatt platform built on a traynor PA chassis with those giant 50 watt 60s hammond transformers.... it utilizes a choke in the pwoer section unlike a hiwatt which uses an RC network for that stage of fitlering, the pwoer supply is my own thing entirely really. phase inverter is hiwatt/macintosh AC coupled but with a master volume AFTER it that started as phase cancelling type but beause it makes the pweor amp brittle at low volumes and high gain settings I also used a dual gang pot so introduce extra resistance against the feedback loop as the pot is turned down making the dirt looser at lwoer levels and also there's some shunying of frequencies to ground via RC networks when you turn it down and this helps with the consistency of response.... it has my own loosely voxy treble and bass controls with my own voicing that's dead flat at zero so only the amp's other voicing component values shape your toneand the mid is in a whole other stage as a notch filter at about300hz center... and a presence cribbed from old PAs that is pre-power amp so the feedback loop cna be used in the master. So this presence is in my tonestack recovery, midrange and pre-poweramp buffer stages nd utilizees a potentiometer, a cap to ground on one side and then a wire to one leg of the bypass cap of the first half of the recovery/buffer triode so it removes the bypassing with resistance creating a darker tone while shunting very high treble to ground at low settings but creating a high shelf with a high avalue treble bypass cap on the cathode at high settings which soudns better than the fender/marshall rpesence to me and elaves the feedback loop untouched so it can be varried when the master is in use o maintain the right amount of corrective negative feedback in the pwoer amp for any preamp input level....

bored yet?

its not just guitars LOL, thanks