jimmarchi1's Reviews

goddamn

do I ever love me a silver guitar and I love Jrs too, they have a certain caveman charm.... can I get it as a double cutaway? How much!?!! I kinda resent Mr Greenday for getting into Jrs. They were already pricey for vintage ones, but now even historics are pricey. Might as well just have a silver one made for me.

Sorry this isn't a review, but I was just drooling and got to typing. I would seriously have a silver sparkle 335 too...

Nice sounding Back Electret.

This is a large diaphragm Back Electret style condenser. I forget what makes it different than a 'capacitor' style condenser like a Neumann or an AKG. Look it up if you care. This microphone has a really even response and good dynamics. Not my 1st choice for a lot of things, but it can be useful for convincing a track to sit back in the mix. Great signal-to-noise specs too. Pad and low rolloff are handy. Anyway, I am not sure where mine is right now, I should find it and start using it again.

I use 'em

I have a couple of these ProCo XLRs laying around that were the 1st XLRs I bought in the 90s. They work. You can literally hear better sound quality from an AKG or Mogami. Nice connectors.

Great cable.

I had one of these. It must have been pretty good because someone snatched it while I was packing up after a bar gig in MD along with one of my homebrews. Has a tendency to tangle as you prance around. Fine on cramped stages with limited prancing space hence why I took it to a bar gig.

I've had these since 1998.

I have had the same 2 ProCo midi cables since the late 90s. Never broken, no worries. I love ProCo.

this cable works and sounds good

The mogami silver is adequate for most purposes. I think I can hear a slight difference in the top end from the gold. I have and use both. Neutrik jacks get the job done and never seem to break. No complaints.

I make these myself.

My buddy is always buying big spools of this low capacitance, shielded 2 conductor cable and I trade him pickups and stuff for smaller spools. Its meant for Pro Video purposes, but has great audio specs for transmitting high impedance, low voltage signals like, say, a guitar signal. Its very light cable and has a tendency to tangle and is easy to break. I typically do not use one of these coming out of my guitar for that reason, but all my patches from tuner-out to amplifier input are this stuff with whatever jacks I have laying around. I usually do L ends. I like them for amp ins.

Apart from the awesome treble response, dynamics and signal-to-noise I make these cables myself because I can cut each one to be precisely the length I need. The cable pictured is meant to daisy chain 2 ac30s together (for when I want to get an old school 2 amp sound bridging 2 different pres). Plus its cheaper than purchasing cables. They're free really. I get the wire in exchange for stuff I'm not using anyway and I tend to use jacks I have laying around from cheap broken cables I am always scooping up when guys discard them. "You're just throwing that cable away? I'll take it!"

I have one, its okay.

This is supposed to be some fancy cable. Sounds like anything else. It has a real tendency to tangle. Also, the jacks are a little larger than a standard 1/4" and if you use it enough you will want to retension your ins and outs periodically so switchcraft and neutriks will make good contact.

not hifi, but so awesome

My 1st cable was a grey coily cable from radio shack.... wish I had it for posterity. THe bullet cables are much nicer and they have these cool shell-casing jack covers.

Its hard to break or tangle up a coily cable and they kinda attenuate some of your extreme highs in a good way. Not great if you run a big FX rig without buffers or just use long cables or whatever, but they work well for me from guitar to tuner. If I want all my top end hyper-sparkle I use a spectraflex usually. I recommend these cables to srat/marshall players. They're like subtle EQ that will allow you to run your plexi flat out without a bunch of harsh in the bridge or quack positions.

they don't break

I still have a long, green specraflex around from the 90s... it has never broken. Cable sound quality is pretty good though there is better stuff available these days with lower capacitance etc. Nice switchcraft straight 1/4" jacks. If you don't like coily cables still recommend a spectraflex to go from your guitar to your pedal board (or in my case, tuner). THey don't break when stepped on and they tangle less than cables without the fabric coating.

this VST is really fun

What can I say? Its a more-than fully featured vocoder with its own built in carrier tones. You need to experiment with the vowel filter and all these other wild features to really dig deep enough to enjoy this plugin! I really like putting this on vocal echoes to mud them up a bit as well as tune the carrier signal to match an interesting guide tone in the song I'm working on. Its subtle but it really is an interesting thing to do with ambience! Heck try it before a reverb plugin on a send, then add an expander to get the verb to pump with the drum groove.... but I digress. Super fun and super useful!

gets a job done

when you need a low cpu-usage Wurlitzer or Rhodes sound that will go thru and amp simulator and sit back in the mix there is just no need to get fancy... this plugin is the jam! Its also fun for making detuned and broken catholic school piano sounds! She's not hifi enough for you? Embrace it! Bit crush her until she turns completely evil.

I owned a 77 key Rhodes. Nothing comes close to the real deal. Just use an easy plugin and make the mediocre simulation a merit of its own!

two words....

two words... comb filter! If you get nothing else with GRM tools then the awesome stereo comb filter plugin just makes it. I cannot begin to describe how much I love this set of plugins.... the pitch delay was way ahead of its time. Its just pure gold. I keep using them and using them for anything and everything. This is the greatest source of unique textures in the whole VST universe. I can't give a more detailed review, it would get too long. Just get GRM Tools and get creative!

Gets a lot of jobs done in Fruity Loops

I love Image Line's native filter plugin. This was one of the first plugins that they included with FL (me and FL go WAY back). Fruity Free Filter has got every type of filter on the planet with very reasonable sound quality. The no-frills interface eats up like ZERO cpu power. You can use it for all the typical electronic music jobs, but its also handy as hell when you just need a notch, peak, low or high shelf or to fully low or high pass a track that was recorded with a mic. I really like to use this to high pass ANY guitar I record into Fruityloops to remove rumble below about 80hz. I take a lot of care with guitar sounds and try not to EQ them, so why waste CPU and RAM on a fully featured parametric or console EQ simulation? This will take the rumble out! The bandpass can be fun for telephoning stuff too. I enjoy that all the knobs are automation friendly. Totally handy plugin. Way more useful than Fruity (not free?) Filter and the filter plugins with fancier GUIs. Gets basic jobs done quickly and efficiently.

it sort of does its job

Plagued by the same problems as moreley's ABY box, the whirlwind selector is built a little better. While it has a nice, sturdy box, the buttons are way too close together for comfort. I thought the Moreley felt tight until I tried the Whirlwind. Better wear J Toe cowboy boots to stomp this guy with any precision.

You can use this for routing between 2 amps if 1) there is no ground loop potential between your amps and 2) you don't mind having your signal cut in half between both amps or you leave both on all the time and feed the whirlwind with a nice line driver.

it will work sorta

You can use this for routing between 2 amps if 1) there is no ground loop potential between your amps and 2) you don't mind having your signal cut in half between both amps or you leave both on all the time and feed the morely with a nice line driver.

growing on me

A crusty old pair of double-cream 80s super distortions came in my vintage washburn. At first I had weird feelings about them, but they are growing on me quite a bit. This is one seriously mean humbucker. The bridge cops a lot of 80s hard rock sounds that are difficult to get with PAF style pickups. I find myself breaking into early priest licks all the time with this guy. I wouldn't say the sound is 'me', but its not bad and I get why these pickups have been so popular for so long with hard rockers and post-EVH soloist types.

The neck pickup is awful though. Mud city!

UPDATE: I just spent an hour and a half riffing through a blazing loud AC4 and 2x12 cab. I was rocking all sort of heavy Queen riffs on the bridge position... "Stone Cold Crazy", "we will rock you", "brighton rock", "gimmee the prize (from highlander, dude)", "I'm in love with my car", "Death on Two Legs" and on and on... the enormous output was really fun and gave me that extra push over the cliff to rip it up on the riffiest section with my guitar volume gunned. I need to touch up the wiring for coil taps, a phase switch on 1 pickup and a master series/parallel to get the most common brian may tones, but these super distortion really hit a vox in just the right way to do late 70s and early 80s Queen stuff, and that's a big deal to me. Also, the guitar they're in is very red-specialish in its own unique way. I think some humbcker covers with Adeson Trisonic coils hiding inside, epoxied in place might take this guitar over the top for BM tone, but the super distortions are right there copping s a lot of my favorite bridge/middle sounds from Queens arena days just riding the volume on the bridge pickup.

sounds good, really good

Elekrostudio made this awesome looking emulation of an ARP Oddysey. Looks just like it and has all the features of a real one. Its freeware, how good could it sound? AWESOME! in the mix it sounds legit enough to satisfy my ARP lust, which is good because I cannot feed my guitar collection and buy famous vintage synths on my budget. One must be selective with their gear budget and you can't simulate a great guitar. I recommend this plugin to anyone who loves 70s and 80s analog sounds. Its great for making crazy pitch-bend pads and FX and all sorts of other think nasty patches. Sounds really great thru distortion plugins of all kinds. Worth a download.

WOW

I haven't been able to put my mid 70s Greco MR1000 double cutaway carved top down for weeks. Every time I plug her in I am wowed. I knew she had good CTS 500K pots and Sprague branded black shelled caps already, but being a curious guy I unscrewed the pickup rings and took a look... though the MR1000 was speced for Maxon U-3000 pickups, this guitar appears to have factory original "Dry Z" PAF copies that were made exclusively for Greco and Tokai by Maxon for their high-end guitars from the mid 70s until the mid 80s.

These pickups sound fabulous. They have plenty of bass an treble, but no thump and no harsh treble overtones even with tons of distortion. The fundmental has a great vowel-like midrange and the harmonics just jump out. The strongest harmonics start to sound like a magical ghost note over your sound as you push an amp into overdrive. I get what all the hype is about.

They appear to be built exactly like an old Gibson pickup, at least from the outside. mine have very accurate covers with rounded corners that I am unwilling to remove to investigate further. But the screws and baseplate look very right to me. Not that these things affect tone, just commenting on the attention to details.

I've played some old Gibsons with their original PAFs intact. These Japanese pickups have those elusive overtones in spades and the set is much better balanced tonally and output-wise between neck and bridge. They seem a little hotter than the PAFs I've tried, particularly the bridge, but that's subjective so take it with a grain of salt.

These are the best vintage-voiced humbuckers in my collection right now. I recommend anyone get a set if they can find them... unless you need a hot humbucker. These have lower output than the T-Top in my SG. They will drive your amp without a boost in line, but only at ear-splitting unless you have a little 5 watter with plenty of gain on tap. I would say these are slightly hotter than an overwound Strat pickup and even have some of the clarity of a well-made hot single coil like you might find in an early Tele, but with a much more focused response overall.

ugh

Okay, the triple rec is based heavily on Soldano's SLO100 preamp topology only with a gob of voicing switches added to each channel and an individual tone stack for each channel that is also a Soldano Tweed Bassman type of 3 band cathode follower thing. The tone controls have a wide sweep, the voicing switches do quite a bit and each channel already ahs its own unique voicing and gain structure. The power amp relies on a pile of 6L6es and you can change the rectification around between solid state for punch, dual 5U4s for some sag and 1 5U4 for ridiculous plate-starvin' compression when you dig in. There's an effects loop and a ton of other features that can be baffling to weed through.

Here's my review though... the clean tone on this amp is worthless. Its your typically weak channel switching clean. No matter how you voice it, how you set the power amp and rectification, the clean sound will be weak. The crunch channel has a bit too much gain in every voicing mode and the tone controls are hard to dial in. Its an overcompressed sound no matter what you try to do with it. Its good for certain types of rhythm playing. The Red channel, the 3rd super gainy one? It takes the SLO100 thing way over the top. In the 90s post-grunge world guys were using this crazy gain channel for rhythm all the time and it was a time of awful, sludgey guitars. Its so gainy you might as well just get a 1 channel fender head and play through a big muff.

Okay, I am being harsh. The red channel does this modern lead sound that is fairly unique. But its played out and still not cool enough to garner 'classic' status like a dimed out Marshall super lead. If you are thinking of a triple rec, skip all the features and get something that was voiced right the 1st time and make that voice your own. Think Soldano or maybe Bogner.