jimmarchi1's Reviews

okay okay okay

This is a really simple, bare bones, FREE multitracking program with solid editing features... I have it, sometimes its nice to do simple work in a simple environment. Its also not much of a CPU or RAM hog for slow systems.

I prefer this to an actual mesa, LOL

This plugin is designed to look and behave like a mesa triple rec. I do not like the triple rectifier in person, but I do happen to enjoy amplion free. I dig overloading the clean channel a lot. Position the virtual mics on your virtual speaker correctly and you will be surprised what a good job it does of simulating a 60s fender going into natural overdrivethrough the clean channel. You need a muscley rhythm guitar track that is dead dry? Kill the verb, open the master all the way up, set the tone controls to taste and turn that gain up (but also adjust the output to prevent clipping). The high gain channels really don't sound like a real mesa, but I do not like them any better than a real triple rec either. The spring reverb emulation is really not bad at all for freeware. If I need a quick surfy sound that is not going to stand out in the mix I will run a strat DI and use amplion. Really a nice freeware amp emulator with great cleans, verb and pretty believable power tube saturation.

fun fun fun

is this the be-all-end-all digital distortion plugin? NO! but it can do a lot once you get the graphical interface... it actually has a few awesome presets you could never make yourself like the fuzzy stuff or cold biased tubes settings. I use this pretty frequently to make rough and gritty distortions or fuzzy octave effects, especially across a broad frequency spectrum. Its great for getting those Geoff Emerrick "revolution" kinda sounds on a DI guitar track or for making run of the mill drum samples into something hideous and industrial. Want to get an early Al Jourgenson vocal sound? Look no further. The mix control is a nice feature too, though FL has a blend knob built into each insert slot... all in all this is a very versatile distortion VST with a cool, informative interface that takes a scientific approach that I really enjoy.

eh

I was not that impressed with the texas special pickups. They are a very brassy strat set under distortion. I really don't like them thru a tubescreamer and you would think being SRV inspired they would love a TS9 or 808! For similar money you can get a much better hot-strat set from a variety of manufacturers. Texas specials don't sound bad per se, but I don't think they have the classic strat sound, nor do they have the cool early tele vibe of some 3rd party strat pickups. Unless you are slavishly devoted to putting Fender parts in your Fender guitar then you should keep searching!

Not knocked out

I know this is the most ubiquitous modeling delay on the planet, but I really do not like the DL4. I am glad they invented this 4 button format to be copied by companies like TC Electronic, but I just could never get into the sound of this thing when I owned it. It lasted maybe 2 weeks and went out the door! I did really dig that filtery delay model for creating wild portishead HPF repeats with increasing resonance and cutoff. This pedal also seemed to compromise my core guitar tone even when disengaged. I felt it compressed everything and cut my bandwidth some. I hate that. the tap worked well though, and that's good as were the silent switches. Not for me though. I apparently still have one of these but it seems to be broken. Color me surprised.

heavy, gnarly, fun

I love the Sola MK2 professional. It does a great Page thing, cleans up well with your volume control without changing its frequency response AND has the best and smoothest sustain for leads of any 3 transistor, 2 control fuzz pedal I know of. I sold mine for a mint. I miss it a lot. The treble can get out of control though, so if you don't like a toppy sound or have a crazy bright amp then get a MK3 or Burns Buzzaround (or clones thereof).

Most vintage MK2 Pros sound uniformly excellent though there is a lil variation in what sort of excellence they give you. These pedals are valuable and collectable but were made in massive quantities so you can find them. If you want to spend less, there are lots of great clones out there. I was quite impressed with the MJM Brit Bender, though DAM makes the most accurate recreation if you wanna spend a lot.

Not the biggest fan.

I have used a number of different Arbiter Fuzz Faces with silicon and germanium transistors from different eras. I am more of a Vox or Solasound mk 1.5 tonebender guy when it comes to dual transistor fuzzes that react to your guitar's volume and tone control settings. The fuzz face gets lost in a mix very easily and you have to be really careful how you set your amp for ideal tones, especially a marshall. If I am going to use fuzz face parts values I think it sounds best with a mullard or newmarket germaium transistor mixed with a modern, low HFE, silicon bipolar transistor. I also built a fuzz face variant that sports 2 very low gain silicons that just sounds amazing. Great ix of warmth and clarity compared to an old Arbiter. The old ones (even silicon bc108 or 109 equipped models) are very inconsistent as the transistors are not usually well matched or correctly biased fr optimum tone. In vintage fuzzes, Solasound/Coloursound put a lot more care into putting their shit together.

it does its thing

I love battery powered mini amps in the studio. When I was collecting vintage Marshalls before I got into Vox my dad got me a Marshall mini-stack as a gag gift for xmas. thing is I loved the skronky tones it created thru that tiny speaker. I actually recorded it with a cheap radioshack reporter's microphone from the 70s or 80s a bunch of times for lofi parts in the studio. Mostly other people's music,but that mini-stack and cheap microphone are a recipe for perfect lofi goodness with a little noise-gating and high/low rolloff! Get a mini-stack, its fun to have around. Try putting a wah into it... WOW! Total nastiness!

a cool idea

you can use all your IL instruments and effects in Minihost Mod to make a massive, textured modular synth/sampler setup. I am just wrapping my head around this plugin. So far I really dig it. It really streamlines the way I layer/combine sounds.

so fun

You can do some crazy volume manipulations by drawing with your mouse in gross beat... there are so many ways you can combine the dual volume LFO on board this thing and it even has some really useful or wild preset LFO shapes. This plugin is fantastic when you just want to get silly. Great for sidechain stuff too, though I seldom use it that way since I am very traditional and hardware oriented with 'normal' tasks like that. I should probably start using this effect for some more tame tasks, but whatever! Its a blast.

UPDATE:

I've been getting into using the scratching on this as well as the flanging lately.... all the time I love this guy ore and ore.... the control wheel becomes really fun if you use like your turntable with a junk record on it as a control voltage into something that takes CV to MIDI like a lot of the new school analog gear does. I love being able to turn anything into CV and send it to this guy over USB cable. Modern technology is a blast.

great guitar, not me

I briefly owned a USA made Jackson RR flying V. For reasons that must have defied logic and denied my very nature I wanted to get in touch with my metal side in the late 90s. Turns out I don't have a metal side. This was a wonderfully made instrument. Set-neck (or maybe it was neck thru), pointy as all hell, I think mie had Dimarzios in it... and it had a Floyd and locking tuners.... I just felt so silly divebombing that floyd. I got it just for that purpose and then every time I did the Floyd thing I felt like a total poseur. Alas, I could not bond with my RRV and it traded right back to Sam Ash... I heartily recommend this (or any) USA made Jackson t anyone who enjoys this kind of guitar playing and style of guitar. If I got another Jackson it would be a Performer or maybe a Dinky.

I can't help but like this pedal.

Everyone knows that the soul food is Mike Matthew's cheap knock-off of the Bill Finnegan's fabled Kon Centaur. Its in a smaller enclosure, is machine-made on a PCB, the buffer can be disabled internally via dip-switch and doesn't have the unobtanium, err, I mean germanium secret sauce clipping diodes to ground that produce the distortion. Otherwise its the same TLM107 op amps and everything. It could use a little more low end to sound perfect through my ac30s, but this circuit sounds really good for 70s classic rock kinda sounds and doesn't color your base tone too much. Your amp will still sound like your amp with your settings, your les paul will sound like a les paul and your strat will remain a strat. If you need to fatten a fender into a fender for syrupy solos try a TS9.

I have not played an original klon in ages nor have I tried any of the fancier alternatives. This pedal sounds a lot like like I recall the klon I tried sounding back in the 90s. The klon was too expensive for a drive pedal then and its way too expensive now that its discontinued and collectable. For all its innovations like the dual ganged pot, fancy pants buffer and charge pump, the core concept of the klon centaur is just diodes to ground clipping the peaks off your signal like a rat, a ross distortion, mxr distortion+ or a DOD od250. Nothing special. What Klon did was nothing different than all the guys still fine tuning tubescreamers. The EHX price is just right for this little beastie. Someone should combine the centaur's amplification and control arrangement with the clipping diode arrangement from fulltone's OCD (which is just stolen from an old voodoo lab design, so don't feel bad). That would be a really dynamic and interesting take on the original distortion/OD pedal format.

Not bad.

This condenser microphone can handle acoustic instruments and voice (which is all tis designed for being a podcast product). The on board A/D conversion sounds okay, the microphone sounds basically like a poor man's at4040, its super easy and convenient... it would be my favorite in-a-hurry or on-the-go piece of kit if only the good folks at AT had included a 10dB pad before the A/D conversion. Its way too easy to overload this little wimp.

Gotta love the unique sound of the small stone!

The Small Stone is a great fet-based phaser design with the MXR phase90 'like it or lumb it' single knob that controls rate as well as depth. There is also a switch that changes the voicing, I believe by changing the number of stages of phasing. I am not 100%.

Mine was a 2nd issue from the 70s. It was not true bypass or well buffered and was a real tonesucker when not engaged, so I modded it for true bypass. When I did so I found that the smalls tone suffered the classic 70s modulation stompbox volume drop. It was easily remedied with a few a tweaks that also improved the way the smalls tone interacted with the amp so that the upper harmonics at the top of its sweep would REALLY pop. I don't know if the current issue Small Stones are built this way, but if not they should be. All the right parts were in mine other than a DPDT footswitch.

The Small Stone is just great and has an instantly recognizable sound that is totally different than a Phase 90. Its hard to dial a bad sound in with the Small Stone with its 2 lousy controls. I just can't say enough good things about this pedal. Everyone should try a Small Stone against a phase 90 and a decent univibe clone. All 3 iconic tones and all so different.

Great basic flanger that can handle some chorus duties!

Sometimes I really miss my Boss BF-2 Flanger pedal. I bought it for $20 in highschool from a kid named Frank who was really into the Red Hot Chilli Peppers. I think we made the deal on a school bus.... so it must have been about 18 years ago! I used it sparingly, but devotedly for a decade and now I can't remember what I did with it. I wonder if its in a box somewhere with my Boss SD-1 overdrive....

update, found it

Anyway, the boss has a passable buffer and their usually sturdy build quality. Featuring controls for Manual (LFO sweep center point), rate, depth and resonance (regeneration), this little analog flanger sounds exactly like you would expect. At low resonance and depth settings it can do cool chorus sounds like the Cure's use of flanging. Get extreme and slow the rate down to achieve some cheesey Heart sounds for covering "Baracuda". Lots of great sounds inbetween. This pedal will not get as extreme and filtery as an electric mistress, nor does it sound as smooth and good as an A/DA or Mutron Flanger (oh to have that rare Mutron foot-flanger back from the junky who loaned it to me... I hope he didn't sell it for less than a grand). The BF-2 is capable of pretty solid Ibanez Jet Flanger tones with the Res knob cranked.

My biggest caveat with the BF-2 is the fact that if you want to run a distortion effect like a TS9 or Tonebender Fuzz into it (instead of after it, 2 VERY different sounds), it is very easy to clip the input stage of Boss's internal buffer wether the flanger is engaged or not. Also, this flanger is NOT stereo, but frankly none of the best sounding flangers ever were as I recall from my youth when they were hella popular. This is a good meat and potatoes modulation effect that does a good job of well, everything flange!

The ubiquitous Tubescreamer in its most common form!

Who hasn't owned a TS9 Tubescreamer? I had an Maxon-made original issue TS9 before I got sick of tubescreamers. It sounded like a tubescreamer should.

The TS9 is a bit gainier than the 808 that preceeded it, but a little less gainy than a TS10 or the reissue TS9. If you really listen while staring at your gain knob settings you can barely notice the difference! From what I can tell the TS808 and TS9 were copied from Boss's OD1 only with a high-cut tone control added and the diodes switched to symmetrical clipping (because Boss supposedly had the asymetrical clipping idea pantented at the time). There are a few other component differences that give this pedal slightly stronger bass and a mid-hump that favors the lower, rather than upper mids. The clipping and mid-range bias really suit Fender single coil pickups and Blackface fender amps, but a TS9 sounds cool through a marshall or a vox as well (though I prefer the Boss SD1 for this application usually).

Here's a little tech for those of you who are curious. The revolutionary idea in this whole family of overdrives was putting the clipping diodes in the feedback loop of the dual op-amp softening the clipping substantially compared with the diodes-to-ground approach fro the DOD OD250 camp that preceeded it.

I could say more about this classic pedal, but we all know about it. Its a tone in and of itself and if you play a Strat through a Blackface Fender amp you are basically required to own one or a boutique derivitave. These days I am more of a Boss SD1 kinda guy, but they are almost the same pedal as a TS9. When I played a Fender Princeton Reverb or Showman all the time the TS9 was my go-to dirty boost for leads. If you haven't tried one of these you should. Its a classic like a Telecaster; sure you can improve on it from an intellectual standpoint, but its been doing the job in its own way for so long that tampering with the formula is really creating a whole new tone and defeats the idea of having something classic. Really, you need to appreciate a stock TS9 in a loud, electric blues band situation before you knock it -- it thicken single coils even with the gain at 1, can produce a good amount of its own distortion into a clean amp, has a wollop of output to hit the 1st tube in your amp and helps single notes cut the mix instead of getting lost. 'Nuff said.

handy!

when the sampler channel in Fruity Loops won't cut it because you want to trigger different samples based on velocity or pitch (and Reaktor or TAL sampler are over the top), Direct Wave is your jam. You can split up piano samples all over the keyboard or make velocity controlled drum patches. You get the idea. I really like having layered velocity controlled percussion samples where the blend of say, a snare ring or some white noise? will increase or decrease based on velocity while the other samples in the layer will change completely. The one bummer is that if you build a whole kit in it you get stuck just running all the sounds thru 1 bus for effects/eg/etc... IL's drum-specific samplers and drum machine emulations have this same issue. Unless I'm missing something, but I don't think I am... its a shame, because along with FPC I really like this bad boy. At least this one, unlike FPC, has some cool built ine ffects, but it still doesn't cut it for drums much of the time.

fun

If you stay way from the presets you can do some neat things with this synth that is a 6 oscillator additive/subtractive hybrid. The built in effects are kinda superfluous, but I know its trendy to add them these days. The built in EQ can be handy though. I don't use this a lot, but once in a while I will dial up a patch so I don't feel like I wasted my money on it.

ugh

every once in a while I'll use the 'hardcore' stompbox sims as a gag, but these are some of the weakest VST guitar processing effects... honestly I usually want to process guitars in the computer with effects that aren't readily available as hardware... these plugins can be kinda fun for doing tb303 lines too, but they aren't... what's the word I'm looking for? RIGHT! they aren't right.

supposed to be a bass guitar I think...

If you process BooBass the right way it sounds a bit like a bass guitar. Really handy for making fast rock demos when you don't have a bass or don't feel like playing it. Also handy for your demos because programming a part in the piano roll or playing it on piano gives you a great, no-brainer reference for writing the part out quickly for a bassist later. Handy plugin that basically does what its supposed to.