jimmarchi1's forum posts 8022

you wanna minimize that, neck might be bowed (too much relief), or under-bowed (no relief or worse still reverse relief or backbow udner tension).... frets might not be level, if its cheap this is likely.... lots of things can cause it.... or the action is just plain too low. Guys do this a lot on guitars and basses. Never go lower than factory spec. But in general roundwound bass strings will have a little acoustic rattle, you want as little as possible so it doesn't leak into the pickups.

its not easy to play note perfect and gutar tone matched rock covers for a crowd that wants an authentic reproduction of the album at a wedding or a bar at the shore.... but tis a different skill set than being a songwriter/arranger or a member of a big band with charts and improvised soloing etc... they cna of course overlap all of these skills ets, but to o one of them well it reuires core chops and then specific skills for the task at hand. A good cover band player will have great chops in that style and a solid ear and you need that to be a good player in any situation so if the cover band is good they're competent but all their general skills have been focused towards the goal of entertaining a paying audience with top 40 hits... a jazzman learns to read charts, improvise and also knows a lot of american songbook standards.... a blues guy can work the 12 bar with aplomb.... a songwriter knows every traditional song structure from every genre of popular music going back to the middle ages....

no, you have to drill a few holes and wire it into the control cavity to ground, but on a cheap guitar who cares.... I would have a pro luthier do it, its easy to mess up bigsby type installs, the control cavity hole is the easy one whereas the otehr mounting holes need to be perfect for optimal (I can't believe I used that word for vibrola) tuning stability, you may also want to consider a roller string tree or at least some graphtec tom saddles, at the elast upgrade the hardware to really good stuffalong with the vibrola and make sure the luthier deburrs the saddles THOROUGHLY... the work wll probably cost as much as the guitar LOL

schecter was purely custom in the early 80s when they did the pete townshend teles with dual buckers.... if its old it may be a 1 off

welcome, post your user gear photos and check out everyone else's! Its the coolest new feature of EB (in my book)

what bothers me about all this stuff is its not really teaching you.... inevitably like a garage band user who bumbles into Logic, a phone/Bias app guy will want to grow up, there are tablet based multitrack system or maybe he'll get a mac/PC or more frightening he'll thow cuation to the wind and buy a mackie and a used 8 track deck...but the phone app? it'll suck him into engineering/producing land, leave him wanting more, and better sound.... but until now it handled the real work for him so he'll be another guy with PT or Ableton bugging me to walk him through his gain staging errors and routing faux pas for free because his mix 'doesn't sound professional' or 'phat' but heaven forbid he hire me to mix the shit, no no, free advice will get him there, he has the ability, its the software holding him back. Its not years of specialized knowledge and the patience of a saint sweating tiny details in music you often don't even like...

at least the cassette4 track teaches basic recording theory and has no presets

CHIBSON! I'm calling the headstock dept at interpol right now! LOL

yes

I think we're way over-thinking this customer's needs. He needs something super basic, that will take him from start to finish. As in, he can record multiple tracks and bounce them down to a stereo output (like many smartphone apps these days).

just send him to fleabay for a portastudio with the mixer built in, we all learned on those in our day....

I would stay away from anything too cheap, SGs are tricky.... plus you're not faking the patina of a white SG that's seen some smokey clubs and rehearsals

ell him to buy a vintage MCI deck LOL totally affordable.... I eman, its not a 24 track studer, right? affordable LOL

have you told himabout iZ Radar? If he doesn't need 192k the old radar systems arefinally affordable and they're 24 tracks of digital recording that has no visual itnerface but meters unless you want it for an edit (and then you better make it like a tape edit.... then there's the alesis HD24 and similar mackie, those are very cheap and give you the option of pulling the SATA HDD caddy (quaint, I know!) and plugging it into a USB adapter thingie that will let you mixin the computer if you don't have a giant studio to mix in and alls ya gots is a computer and DAW... plus you can tell him that like he probably prefers vinyl to high res digital formats those moving parts HDDs sound warmer than SDDs

he does realize that for any multitrack non-computer solution save a portastudio4 or or 8 track eh will need a descent mixer or at elast a pile of descent mic pres? On tape he may want noise reduction (I like dolby, but dbx has its charm, the companding has a real sound) as well as some snappy compression on each channel to get his signal hot without his random peaks clipping the input (tape saturation cool, clipping input electronics AAAD). -15dbV will not do for tape, hissssssss-city

Even with a tascam casstte 8 track like my old 90s unit in the closet you really need a board and compression. Its a semi pro home studio piece like a budget 8x8 type interface, they assumed you had a mixer and some outboard and just didn't want to mess with reels and biasing... or they wanted you to have to buy whatever the tascam budget mixer was back then. On that note, the japanese were making some really vibey mixers pre mackie, overshadowed by soundcraft and soundtracs in that price class for some reason. I've had a 70s teac (way enormous, bad preamps but great summing busses) and am currently enjoying a little early 80s RAMSA.... might buy the big brother that Endino had at Reciprocal or wherever the early stuff was done for sub pop. You can really get some good stuff going with these guys, prefer them to the teac/tascam and yamaha stuff and in some ways to the 200B I used to have.... that soundcraft never worked all the way anyway and I never diagnosed the issue and sold it for parts with great regret....

Digital mixers for church FOH and mackie's first series with the 8bus murdered a lot of these product lines but i don't know why. yes there's less headroom in theory, but when you exceed the ehadroom on the busses the thing doesn't crap out right away, you have to get excessive clipping in the low frequencies before you get the farting sounds... if your red line is driven by mids or high frequencies you're golden.... just sayin'.... not sure why anyone preferred an early mackie, which were better than the new VLZs and the onyx (have one of those, channels sound quite soundcrafty, summing amps are clean but papery thin) anyway...

I return to point.... what is this lunatic's budget for a non-computer recorded? I mean these days we have hi-res multichannel direct to disc recorders you can treat like a tape machine sans razorblade editing of course.... There's the zoom ones but they probably have garbage converters, its zoom! The cymatic u-track looks nice.... everything else is getting into cheap tape machine territory...

I miss my ST, creator, pro 24... stable as hell for midi... no PCIs like when I went PC.... none of these thunderbolt cables.... although reording audio? fire up the teac 8 track!

I don't have a lawn but the kids today are like "here's a video of me multi tracking to cassette on my retro 4-track" - I swear that showed up in my 'Tube feed the other day :-)

I still have a rackmount tascam cassette 8 track around that my old boss gave me... I seldom use it because you have to print a track of smpte timecode to sync it up. I sued to squeez extra tracks out of my adat system t ne time, also it sounded way cooler for drums than those alesis adats.... the adat is long gone, went out somewhere around the cubase SX2 on xp era....

so yeah, they can get off my lawn too.... or mow it for me, shit makes my eyes itch

And building APIs

I know you're not talking about 500 series gear, but mmmm, API

dabbled with things like Steinberg Pro24 and still own two Atari STs (you may recall they came with MIDI ports :-) and trackers were very much a thing back then. But I mentioned in the bio above I went away to college for a few years in the early 90s and kinda lost track of what was happening in electronic music production, so I never really totally got into software synths or DAWs, and missed out on their evolution.

I miss my ST, creator, pro 24... stable as hell for midi... no PCIs like when I went PC.... none of these thunderbolt cables.... although reording audio? fire up the teac 8 track!

Ableton Live and Pro Tools cost a decent amount, yes, but I don't think FL Studio or Logic Pro are expensive by any measure... US$200 for a lifetime license is a screaming deal, especially compared to the hardware we're talking about here.

live's on sale now with a free upgrade to 11 when it comes out, protools is more of a subscription, renew as needed.... I only mix in PT if I have to, its only worth using for rock bands and really just as an HD system in a big control room.... for the midi junky, everything else is better in a home or project setting... once you sacrifice the zero latency stuff for complex parallel routings and hybrid mixingit doesn't have a lot to offer, all of its groundbreaking features are in every other DAW now and its midi implementation/UI sucks a rat. That said, I am happy to track and mix a rock band in a PTHD environment with a nice console and some esoteric outboard :-) Ask me about my rates LOL

At home I have Cubase (need to update to 11, begruding the fee LOL), FL studio 20, Live 10, protools and mixbus 32C.... I have a tendency to mix in mixbus for ITB and use whatever the project dictates for hybrid.... the mixing I was doing yesterday was MIDI heavy and not recorded to grid having been tracked live with an ancient Drum Kat as master clock to a squarp pyramid to everything else and live guitar/bass and shit too so I wound up in FL studio for its import friendly piano roll and of course the hand tuneable latency per track compesation on plugin chains... because I'm pumping out 16 channels of individual mono tracks and stereo sub groups (some in parallel) into an analog console with some parallel diode bridge compession on a bus, drums slamming another bus as a submix, kicking those opamps into submission, then summed @ the master and back out through my warm bus comp into the DAW's master with a little brickwall via BX limiter for safety and to allow me to record at -15RMS or thereabouts to get the msot from my high end ADCs. Fun. I recommend this approach but its expensive even with my mediocre hardware. This mix sounds noticeably better than my ITB pass, but maybe not thousands of dollars better. It was also fast, but no recall.... handwritten recall sheets for a lot of shit.

wait, what were we talking about?

WARNING! rambling addendum below:

I can see the irony angle, but I think Arturia's (and IK's, Ableton's, etc) hardware play has more to do with how difficult it is for companies in the MI space to grow past a certain size purely on software revenue streams.

THIS! also, in the ahrdware market, especially analog, it was all high end and korg until arturia stepped up, which kicked my boys at Novation back into gear, they hadn't done analog since the bass station (still have a BS rack).... Bob and Dave were back, Roland sold you plugins in a keyboard essentially.... ummm, you had your waldorfs and nords, nuff said about them. Every time I think I like a Nord this guy I know shows up to jam with his lead3 or whatever and while it has sound design potential he can't do it on the fly beyond bread and butter patches, menus you know.... then I fire up a vintage synth or soemthing new and lush like the prologue and I just swallow his sound completely with one note.... back to what i was saying. Apart from spurring novation I think Arturia spurred IK into the arena too and of course Behringer, would Uli be cloning if he hadn't seen Arturia go toe to toe with korg in the heap seats?! Arturia learned a lot about synths modelling classics assuming they're honest about their supposedly uber detailed component level modelling, withthe low end analog market totally dominated by the big K it was a great move to make the minibrute when they did. It blew them up as a company.... it was a great idea for them to make the spark itnerfaces too, I'm told they're major contenders against focusrite scarlet ad presonus in that class, particularly the 1u 8 pre format one....in bus powered stuff SSL has murdered everyone at that dabbler price point.... its sizable jump into UA, MOTU, Antelope etc and not all of them are bus powered if any (I'm not even sure) that sort of conversion horse power is hungry... but that arturia spark 8 preamp one should be kicking some ass. Probably is, I know people who have it an love it.... major contender there, build quality is supposed to be a cut above focusrite or those damned steinberg itnerfaces...

they are very wise business people at Arturia, they probably took a hefty loan and decided to apply their engineering skill to untapped markets while maintaining their stranglehold on planet plugin by expanding into FX.... another good move. I have their FX suite that just came out and it was well worth it. They ARE 'plugins I ACTUALLY use'.... mostly. The dbx 160 is very faithful and I prefer to the waves one, the otehr compressors keep up. The standalone synth filters are just smokin' I should use them more on live audio tracks.... the plate got me hooked when it was a freebie, its so right sounding in a mix... biphase sounds very close although its not incredibly useful.... the mxr flanger? yeah baby and the creme de la creme is their dimension C rack simulation.... although behringer makes a clone now and the admittedly digital waza craft pedal does pretty darn well in its rack and pedal modes if you don't mind printing it to the track. I digress, arturia knows what's up! I certainly want a polybrute and I'm sure I'll talk myself into it eventually when theyturn up used.... at the moment the prophet 10 is the enxt giant synth purchase, sorry new guys, its Dave. SO\ometimes I wish he was my dad...

his bassist (and jackson brownes and warren zevon's and everyone's), Leiland Sklar has been showing his basses on youtube as he reminisces about his favorite sessions too....

No problem. If I were you (and you seem to like the Slö), I would try to find a workaround. I mean, it seems this FV-1 chip is all the rage.

its veyr easy to program custom algorithms on and it likes low voltages.... I know guys on my DIY groups who are doing 1 offs for themselves with bizzare reverbs and delays etc, it can really do any time based DSP but its limited by its AD/DA.... which may be the source of the hiss if set up improperly or if its not getting the imepdance it wants, dunno... or it could be a garbage buffer or soemthingor a faulty jfet in the input buffer? but in a boutique pedal I would expect the former, for this price a junk buffer is a non-starter and QC should weed out abd parts before building and if the aprt is damaged during construction QC should be good enough to ID that before shipping it out. Even Uli Behringer can do that!

gate and guitar, ugh.... gated reverb though? gate it hard, make yourself Warrant or Poison!!!

EDIT: also, a boutique pedal should NOT hiss.... unless its a high gain fuzz or a CMOS 'dube sound fuzz' type distortion like the red llama, SCOD etc where the hiss is inherent to the semiconductor style.

This pedal seems very similar to my EQD transmisser and depths, sort of between the 2 maybe, I would consider changing up, both those EQD pedals run very silent. just a squinch of background noise on the, its not even perceptible to me through a guitar amp, only DIed when I'm using them on synths

diogo alexandre NARCISSISTO?!

I think we can do better than this, jokewise and high road-wise.

I don't ever take the high road....

I'm sure they had a bin of them and grabbed a few and used the best sounding unit.... there was no QC on these, not like the echoplex at all, the insides of the 2 I had were awful, I rebuilt one it was so messy, took the noise down and swapped out a bad transistor for an NOS TI, the germanium TI transistors in there used to be available. I probably still have a few if anyone needs an FZ1 or FZ1a that needs help...

diogo alexandre NARCISSISTO?!

I must think deeply about my studio and how it should be categorized.... the equipboard categorization of synths and things? leaves a lot to be desired! It never occured to me to mention it. I'm still fixated on getting a compressors category in signal processors, really... I eman, comrpessors get a stomp box category and that's nutty, they're not a must have.... but who has a rack of 19" effects and doesn't have one compressor? Its more essential than outboard EQ!

maestro FZ1s rarely sound like that.... you have to have the blessed unit with a non-leaking Q1 and perfectly gainstaged Q2 and Q3 (this is doubly true of the FZ1a).... they just threw those texas isntruments transistors in there, no testing so they vary wildly and err toward funky faux brass rather than badass cello.... for that get a tonebender. But a Tonebender mk1, the elusive one that ronson used on ziggy...

I was never sure why they called the blackface series 2 'the twin' the evil twin apart from the fact that they seems to break a lot.... its ntoe vil really. Just a stripped down, cost cutting twin reverb, kind've a showman in a 2x12

EDIT I totally forgot they called that the evil twin.... I never heard it until into the 90s when the actual twin amp evil twin was currently in production though so it may be confusion

the maestro vibrola 'lyre' tailpiece is an awful design... beautiful but terrible.... It also changes the sound of the SG which was meant to be a tune-omatic/stop-bar or all-in-one wrap tailpiece instrument to have more of the break point and also sound of a trapeze tailpiece.... there's a reason the trapeze 335s are less desirable than the stop bars, cool as they may look.... SUSATIN. A solid guitar or centerblock wants strings anchored into it with some pull from the bridge to really get the motion transfer. I would NOT keep a far east vibrola on my guitar, I doubt it'll ever hold tune, vintage ones are a bitch. I can only imagine the korean version to be markedly inferior.

YMMV though

A quick google search for "frog" pedals offers the Shoe Pedals Frog, an octave fuzz that gets its name for sounding ribbity sometimes, but you're probably wanting a pedal that sounds more consistently like a frog.

a fuzz that sounds ribbity would be close enough like me, but I have synths and samplers.... I could play a whole melody in frog samples, ferris beuller cough style, if I wanted.... which sounds fun actually

it really sounds like you need to get a synthesizer or 2 and a symphonic library! let your bass be a bass

use a roland ready strat LOL

the red knob isn't the evil twin, that's the "twin amp" .... at least around THESE parts its not the evil twin... nicknames of everything, even sandwiches, are regional in the USA

Impressive display, Mr. Marchi1. I doff my hat.

thanks.... that's just to the ebst of my knowledge, I don't know that the mass market VL80 is exactly the same... I know its the same basic guts, but there could be some secret kratwerk preset on the kraftwerk version for all I know. What's weird is I don't remember WHY I know this.

great for driving monitor speakers

EDIT:

okay okay okay.... the 70s polytone, JC120 (etc) and old yamaha twin-alike solid state G series amps aren't too bad for guitar.... I actualy own a polytoneminibrute head.... and I have this little quilter 45 class D amp that's not too shabby. I wouldn't play hard rock through anything solid state other than the quilter. But I've had a yamha, used jazz choruses at times (sparingly, just for the chorus, you know?) and for 80s new order type stuff these guys have charm.... for jazz the polytone is the king of solid state amps. It does that post-wes sound well and little else. Handles pedals well, but sounds like a solid state amp with a tubescreamer infront of it LOL. I'm told DV Mark amps are the successor to the minibrute but I've not tried one since I have a polytone.

these were allover the Philly scene 10 or 20 years ago, the showmans and twins, every stoner doom band had one for some reason... cleans are inferior to blackface, but not bad, preferrable to say an ultralinear silverface twin (unless you play ska, then the silverface, its THAT sound)... think mesa mk3 or later, or a lonestar maybe. The loud lonestar, not the special. 250GBP is like 400USDish? Its a little high unless its been recapped, its an expensive recap job and it WILL need fitler caps soon. Its a 30-35 year old amp. Retubing isn't expensive really. Maybe $200 US if you're picky about preamps. I would just get a JJ or TAD retube kit for a twin and if it needs an extra preamp for the extra distortion or whatever then buy one tube, maybe a tested new sensor Tung Sol reissue for big, round grunt.

If your VC30 died its similar construction to a bassbreaker or a blackstar and that'll eventually die under whatever stress you're putting it under.... it culd be a PCB thing (probably) or underspec transformers, a lot of new prosumer grade tube amps suffer from both these problems and need to be babied! assuming there was no user error like running without a speaker load, the red knob series should provide better life, it was the last fender series to keep tube sockets off-board as I recall, so tube heat and any tube malfunctions won't take out a PCB. They're msotly still running, right? Its still a mediocre spec PCB though and is susceptible to warping, trace lifting and cracking due to extreme temperature swings. You shouldn't bring it in from the cold for instance and immediately fire it up. It has to warm up slowly. This is good for your tubes and for the PCB. Load in well prior to sound check in the winter. Pretty much only high end marshalls of yesteryear like the JMPs, 800 and 900 series hold up well. They all have off board tubes and also very high grade double sided mil spec PCBs. Fender always cut corners when they went PCB. These days mainly boutique amps like tone king and soldano feature that kinda PCB construction. This is the handwired mojo.... construction stability! Its less consistent amp to amp, but any handwired circuit will be more road worthy and easier to repair on the off occasion something does go wrong. Now the thing the red knob twin ahs is excellent schumacher transformers, same model and spec as the 60s and 70s twins as far as I could tell last time I was in one. This changed in the evil twin. I don't know if schumacher still makes them the same or at all. The only better twin transformer is the triad from the blondes/tweeds and the early dual showmans.

the amp I'm thinking of is the fender super 60.... had to google it. Best red knob amp hands down. Better cleans for some reason, able to get some reasonable power tube dirt in clean, and superior gain circuitry. Spiffy 1980s rack case.

Put some money into the amps too because you'll always use your amps & effects (bands that used rally cheap guitars or smashed their guitars usually put more money into the amps to keep a good sound too).

this.... and in this case they don't always make them like they used to, no siree... a vintage fender blackface could possibly still eb running with no service since64.... no joke, the quality of components is way down these days, even boutique amps suffer from it. I don't mean audio quality, I eman longevity. TOlerances are pup, parts are consistent, but lifespan is down. Sure that old twin has lots of out of spec drifted resistors and caps that were lucky to be 10% when new! But they're still going after 60 years! That marshall 800 from 82? well the reissue is pretty good but try getting a 50 watt version. Ugh

anyway, dumping money into an amp is a good idea, and don't spend on features. Every feature is a potential failure point at a gig. nd lots of features raise the price where you want quality to push the price up.

define good.... the red knob twin and showman have a sound.... I prefer them to the the later "twin amp" aka the "evil twin"... they're a service nightmare, like the evil twin.... ummm, they're very affordabe and provide some fenderish cleans tht hold up if you're the only guitarist and a drive section that's like a lesser known grunge band all the time? red knob twins and showmans are very heavy, very very heavy and they can hold doors open.... replace the speakers immediately ina twin, they have awful drivers... reverb is not fendery despite being an F tank in a fender amp.... ummm

how cheap is it? in america they trade for about $300 in good shape, recently serviced, or they used to.... haven't seen one in a decade! They're almost as old as me so expect to replace the filter caps soon unless the previous owner has already done so. Those electrolytics are a good 15 years past max life expectancy... and there are a lot of expensive capacitors in any twin

I would opt for a showman head, same amp, less weight... another option is that crazy red knob rack amp that's like 60 watts I wanna say. It was a gorund up new design and sounds shockingly good.... and you can rack it with an FX processor in the loop. Huzzah.

its a custom casio.... its actually a VL80 mini synth/calculator circuit in a different case, because a crappy pulse wave synth that's also a calculator is funny, but a pulse wave synth that LOOKS LIKE a calculator is pure genius.... if you want the sound of it get a casio VL80 with the plastic calculator style keys laid out in a keyboard pattern, remember that one? I do, but I'm getting old. Other than this one off I'm unaware of a casio calculator that's also a synth, just the synth that's also a calculator.

if you snip the diodes out its fuzzing (and it'll have stupidly huge output unless you modify the output stage transistor to have a couple of resistors as a voltage divider to ground before the volume control) , but the 2 pairs of interstage clipping diodes obscure the fuzziness entirely.... so I guess fuzzstortion. EH themselves always called it a distortion/sustainer and that's very accurate. Imagine a couple fuzzfaces strapped together.... cloer to a traditional fuzz you have the jumbo or supa tonebender which is essentially a big muff with different transistors and only one set of clipping diodes so its like a distortion that then gets fuzzed by an extra transistor stage that's overloaded.... or its a fuzz that gets diode clipped at the end. I actually forget where the diodes are in the jumbo tonebender path, I'd have to look at the schematic. What really separate the muff from say a distortion plus is the use of discreet silicon transistors versus every distortion that came after that utilized IC opamps which were a new technology for audio in the 70s. Oddly, my old bassist's Dad wasinvolved in the development of the IC in the 60s and 70s. it was the only thing worth talking to the goon about. He has since tucked into his coffin for the big dirt nap....

edit: you're thinking diodes, hmmm, what about the foxx tone machine and univox superfuzz? those aren't distorting the same way, they form a rectifier to create octaving.... on the foxx they have their own footswitch so you can get just the fuzz and on the univox, welll they're always on, but there's an itnernal trimmer that can lower the threshold to them from the main fuzz circuit so they don't full wave rectify and just pass straight signal back to the output stage... at least when I had the pin and blue one it had this trmmmer and you could add or subtract octave based on what sound you needed. With a lot feeding it you could roll your neck pickup tone down and get purple haze tones but back the trimmer off and use your bridge straight and it made live at leeds fuzz...

my 3 favorite fuzzes.... although my mk3 was a burns buzzaround

the big muff isn't really a fuzz, it an early diode clipping distortion like the dan armstrong blue clipper, jordan bosstone etc

just try the mxr BC108 fuzz.... its a tweaked silicon fuzzface....it gets the job done and its readily available and cheap. Think Dark Side of the Moon fuzztone

agreed

well, you get a lot of guitar for the money in epiphone compared with how much gibson you get so the answer is to spend mores moneys on these gitarrzes