jimmarchi1's Reviews

really fun

there are 2 versions of the .22 caliber mesa with different output tubes... also, some have graphic EQ and some don't. The Graphic EQ is lame on this low wattage amp. You are not going to use it to cover 'master of puppets.' That said, both versions of this amp that I've used extensively dish out a nice Deluxe Reverb clean sound and a classic, early mesa lead as popularized by Santana. Many complain that its hard to match the levels of the clean and dirt channels for rhythm, but this amp was not designed for that. the idea was to have a vintage fender clean-to-crunch and then a big, boosted and loud 70s mesa solo tone. It accomplishes this goal while delivering Mesa's best clean tone in their whole history. I dock these little mesa combos a star because they are notoriously unreliable.

not bad

This is Mesa's attempt to mate a fender clean with a marshally dirty. First off the bass and treble response on both channels is more fender than marshally, but that's not a bad thing. It has shared EQ like a Soldano, but it works well for both channels somehow. Also, you can kick the drive channel from 2 input Marshall JMP crunch into a hot-rodded 800 mode that splits the difference between the old Mesa Mark series lead tone and an 80s hair band thing. I really liked the electradyne overall but not enough to buy one. I believe it has been replaced in the Mesa line by the more refined and feature laden Royal Atlantic 100. I am sure the RA100 is awesome but I liked how easy it was to navigate the electra's control panel and quickly dial in clean and dirty tones that were very familiar in feel and timbre. I have never heard any complaints about the electradyne's reliability so I highly recommend this amp for guys who much switch channels but don't need ridiculous gain and want a good clean sound too.

Great tones from this cock-rock classic!

I should have bought this amp when I had the chance. The Soldano Hot Rod 50 is a single channel high gainer based on the lead channel of the famed SLO100. It has more traditionally designed power and output transformers than the SLO (also cheaper, making this a more affordable amp) that give it a browner voice. If a SLO has the percussive, hifi crispness of a Hiwatt with way more available gain, then the Hot Rod has the skronk and midrangey transformer saturation of a Marshall... again with WAY more gain. Different flavors.

What I like about the Hot Rod in short:

1) available in 50 watt... single channel MV heads are better at 50 watts 2) vintage voice up until about 6 on the gain dial 3) very british tone section that helps the amp crunch well, plenty of treble, but more available bass than a Marshall and all that bass is in a very musical register 4) very American lower mid-range grind when you push the power amp hard 5) simple and easy to dial in even though I would prefer less controls

what I don't like: 1) built on PCB... I am sure its a great mil-spec board laid out with care and the tube sockets appear to be far from the board in a well ventilated head box, but PCBs are a bear to work on and they all go down eventually 2) price! this amp does what it does well, but its very expensive for what it is... price more than anything kept me from buying one of these

also, the '50 plus' channel switching version of this amp is the only channel switcher I've ever been really into... you can set channel 1 up for a slightly hairy brit clean and get a mammoth crunch from channel 2 OR you can go with crunch and lead respectively on the 50 plus... great amp too depending on your needs... also overpriced

if you don't have a JCM800 handy or you MUST have channel switching....

Let me open by saying I cannot speak to reliability as I borrowed this amp for a few shows where I was sharing gear with another hot-shot guitarist who wanted to use it thru my awesome old marshall cab. I figured it was a good chance to audition it for myself. While the single rectifier (the thing is solid state rectified only, hence single) series suffers from recto-fier-itis on the clean channel (stiff, sterile, indistinct, hazy cleans until the amp is pushed so hard that your clean gets hairy), the gain channel does really solid American flavored crunch and lead sounds that can hang with an 80s Marshall without demanding that you navigate a bewildering array of mesa-bullshit to unlock the tone. It has more gain than I've ever wanted or needed, but I guess some folks will use channel 2s gain control past 5. I didn't. I also play pretty loud and am not ashamed to turn my loud amps to face off stage and have them miced up so I can work the power amp harder. It has all the typical mesa features, but none of the extraneous pull pots and switches of the more expensive amps. The solid state, diode bridge rectification keeps things tight and punchy in the Marshall vein and the stock 6L6 output tubes lend a nice, complex & glassy grind to the high gain channel when pushed hard. Not my cup of tea, but totally reputable. The reverb sounds okay if you like modern spring reverb circuits. The feature set is not bewildering on this amp like dual or triple rectos. You could use this to play a rock show if you didn't have a JCM800. Given a choice between a single-rectifier and a channel switching JCM900 or any of the JCM2000 range I would take the rectoverb any day of the week.

tolerable

During an aborted quest to find a channel switching amp I could wrap my ears around I experimented with some mesas. The best was an electradyne head, but I didn't hate the lonestar. The gain channel, despite its numerous voicing options, suffers from the classic post-90s Mesa mush-tone syndrome. Look Mesa, a Bright switch should help an amp cut the mix, not just add harsh to your drive tone while it still gets lost in a wash of drums and vocals. Anyway, the clean channel on this amp was really sparkly and nice for a channel switcher. Not brittle, mushy, slightly dirty or stiff. If I liked the lonestar's gain voice this amp would be great. I recommend the lonestar to people who only use the gain channel for soloing and have a discriminating ear for good clean tone.

Best Display EVER!

The Korg Pitchblack is a chromatic tuning pedal with a giant, bright display that you can't miss on stage. It gets the job done pretty well, but the tuning engine seems to be borrowed from Korg's awesome rackmount tuners really could use more lights for really precise tuning in a flash. But then the pedal would get big. This tuner was also the first affordable chromatic tuning pedal to feature pop-free true bypass switching which is why I ditched my old TU-2 for it. Its faster and more accurate than the Boss and when I bought it the Pitchblack was easily the best pedal tuner that wasn't a Peterson. I since switched to the TC Polytune and gave my Pitchblack to a friend of my wife's who is always going out of tune on stage. I miss the wicked display, but the Polytune is more accurate and the at-a-glance multiple string feature of the Polytune is a real time saver.

I still highly recommend the Pitchblack.

pretty okay

I was not as impressed with Lindy Fralin's take on the SRV Eric Johnson sound as I expected to be. I used it in the bridge of my strat for years and never could love it, though I got some cool sounds with a matchless DC30 and Marshall 18watt. When I got my Blues special you could specify magnets to Lindy and I think I got alnico 2 or 3 slugs. Maybe that was the problem? This pickup has plenty of chime and great output especially in the lower mids but not enough bark for my taste. Still a great pickup that kills a Fender Texas Special.

fat, small and pointy... like your head

These Dunlop picks are a great shape for playing Lee Ritenour type LA session Jazz. Guess that's why they are called Jazz picks.

I almost never use a capo

When I break down and use a capo the Dunlop trigger works fine. I mostly just use it on acoustic when I sing my kid bedtime songs. It also is great for doing setups. Capo at fret 1 to check neck relief...

its okay, I will sometimes use this when composing

For a soft-synth with so much good press I was underwhelmed by Sylenth. It has a bevvy of features, but I always end up making patches that could have been generated by something a lot less complex. Not that its hard to program, its not. It really lends itself to modern dance music. The sound quality is outstanding though. I get it. But you can keep half the features as they are not that inspiring or useful in the mix (though the built in phaser sounds pretty nice and saves you the trouble of breaking out the waves plugins on an insert if you wanna phase sylenth)... if I hadn't already owned a bunch of real synthesizers and carefully chosen plugins Sylenth would have been a good early purchase, but I pre-date this plugin by many years. I guess I highly recommend Sylenth1 for newbies. And points for great sound quality (though sometimes shitty sound is cooler than great sound, really)... I take away 1 star because Sylenth1 is "Boring, Sidney... BOOOOOOORING!"

it does its job and does it well

This is a downsampling VST plugin AKA bitcrusher. Thank you Trent Reznor for reducing the bit-rate of your samples/tracks so frequently in the 90s that now there are plugins for the job. Before you popularized the technique it was a real pain in the butt to do, but now you made it so ubiquitous and cool that there are a bevy of free plugins that do it. TAL has arguably made the best freeware downsampler out there. The addition of a low and high shelving EQ as well as an extra knob for white noise is really cool. I really like to use this across a drum bus with samples to get an emu emulator sound going.

WOW

If I don't want my bassline to be FM-based, wavetabley or a super Depeche-Modey ARP2600 sound I go for Elektro. TAL knocked it out of the park. The FM knob, roland-type PWM, great assignable LFOs, multiple filter types and filter contour knob with a wide sweep add to the goodness. Think of this as a 2 oscillator SH101/TB303 with the super-fatness of a Moog (courtesy a sub oscillator that is just outstanding) and some extra features. It doesn't simulate any particular synth I can think of, but it is one of the few 80s-inspired bass VSTi plugins that can go toe to toe with good hardware. It might not take on a real moog, but it'll stomp on a lot of 70s and 80s analog synths. It sits in the mix so well. You can do a lot of other stuff with it, and I do, but its a great bass machine for better-than-vintage patches. I use this plugin more and ore for bass sounds that harken back to my childhood but have a little something extra going on.

All that said, I must remind you all what a previous review pointed out: this synth will not replace a more modern synth if you need modern bass on your track. Don't bother unless you intend to Do some multiband or side-chain compression, EQ and maybe add some bass-enhancement. And it wills till be a vintage texture, though a complex one if you are using all the features wisely.

just okay

NoiseMaker has a ton of features and a wide range on every control for such a straightforward little synth and is a very power virtual analoger. That said I just don't like the sounds it makes. I sometimes will use it for a deep bass sound or something, but TAL's Elektro is a cooler virtual analog bass machine capable of the same gut punch, grit and detuney goodness as NoiseMaker. Also, the GUI for this synth has too many collapsible windows. Its hard to see all your parameters on screen. The simpler architecture of Elektro doesn't make it any less powerful for the tasks I employ both of these plugins for. NoiseMaker is free, so you might as well download it. Maybe you will like it better than I do.

sounds oberheimy

This is a VSTi emulation of an old OB-X. I have extensive experience with the OB-X and the similar sounding Matrix series including the table-top Xpander module. The feature set and architecture of OBXD are right and the oscillator and the 2-Pole filter emulation just sounds really oberheimy. Has that Oberheim midrange quality and they nailed the Oberheim band-pass filter tonality. I usually break this guy out for sounds that want to be band-passed like big swells that have a crazy filter envelope and LFO sweep that lowers the resonance while slowly goosing up the frequency to transition from a busy, rhythmic section of a song to something open and ambient.

That said, I wish someone would emulate the Xpander. Love that thing :-(

oh my god

I had a casio SK1 as a kid. I wish I knew what I did with it. It was horrible in just the right way.

these red plastic triangles can be used to pluck a string

The red tortex picks were my favorites when I was in highschool. I played in Jazz Band and I must have gone with really light, floppy picks to be contrary. Its very un-jazz to use a pick less than 1mm. The thin tortexes last a long time and have good flex for certain kinds of speedy runs. They sound very good on acoustic. I am not picky anymore, I use whatever is handy (often my hands are handiest), but I used to give a shit and I liked these. I do not know why. They're not special nor are they especially awful...

I know I still have a bunch in one of my cases.

70s/80s Hamer Sunburst on a budget

As anyone on equipboard who follows me will know, I love double-cutaway set-necks of all kinds. I've always been partial to the old Hamer Sunburst model, but it’s a big buy in for a flat-top-set-neck electric guitar that doesn't say Gibson on it. Players who are wise know they rip and will pay a premium for a nice old one... when you can find one that hasn't been fucked with too badly.

Now without further adieu, here’s another rambling off-model vintage guitar CSI: So I saw this Washburn Falcon (billed as an '84) on Reverb. All the wing series Washburns of the 70s and 80s I knew about were bolt ons or neck thru… which is cool. I still want a 70s vintage white Eagle like Nancy Wilson from Heart used to play. But apparently in the 80s Washburn switched manufacturing to Matsumoku (wing series guitars were Japanese made during the height of MIJ greatness but with original designs they were meant to give Gibson and Hamer a run for their money, literally, as they were cheaper, but really well made at a number of small Japanese shops). At the time of the Matsumoku change the Falcon model became a glue in 3 piece mahogany neck with a mahogany body, rosewood board and flat maple top as opposed to a 5 piece mahogany and maple neck thru with swamp ash wings.

Mine has a lovely reddish tobacco burst over some beautifully flamed maple. They stuck with their Hamer sustain-block bridge copy that they were using in the 70s. Its a huge chunk of brass in the fender hardtail/string-thru-body style with heavy duty brass saddles and a G&L-ish set screws to lock the saddles together side-to-side. The pickups don't appear to be original on mine (the originals woulda been nothing special) and may be 80s Dimarzio super distortions. We shall see when I open her up. Otherwise she is stock.

Right out of the case this guitar sounds awesome for hard rock leads (though it fails to clean up well with my volume knobs... its not muddy, just SOOOO much output compared to my other humbucker axes). She is in need of a neck adjust and new strings, but even with a little too much relief and worn out 9 gauges she is a joy to play. I will probably change strings, raise the plain string action and tweak the neck back a hair later today. Did I mention this guitar is light like an SG or Jr? Well it is, but its still has that maple top, snappy attack thing going, though to a lesser extent than my 2 carve tops.

Medium to Large C shaped neck. Comfortable nut width (though it doesn't feel as wide as a 50s/modern Gibson or as thin as a 60s one, must be a wonky Japanese metric thing). The sustain on this guitar is just fabulous. You get under a note and the top of your bend just hangs for days even bone clean. Mine has 5 ply binding around the top and fretboard that is really well done. I expected this guitar to be a polyester finish, but after feeling her in my hands I did the lacquer test... as it turns out the thing is sprayed in glossy nitro and its a really well done spray job at that. My 335 copy is a Matsumoku guitar from this era too and those guys were just killin' it with their lutherie skills.

I am thinking of putting a Duncan pearly gates in the neck (I DO NOT like the enck pickup, mushy and boomy) and then trying out another Duncan 59/custom hybrid at the bridge to split the difference between 80s hotrod humbucker and vintage complexity. My 2 gripes are the lack of fret nibs on the neck binding and the fact that it has a recessed tele style jack and I really like to use L-ends on my Gibsony guitars. Oh well. I could change it to an LP or football plate if the jack cup ever works its way loose. If I had designed this guitar I woulda done a top-mounted SG style jack but I am partial to those.

These are a deal and mine is just as good as any Hamer Sunburst I have considered buying and the top is flamier and the binding is nicer. Hell, having neck binding at all is a plus... a basic sunburst had no binding anywhere, each layer of binding was an upcharge.

If you can find one of these rare old Washburns, snap it up at the lowest price you can negotiate and treasure her always.

LUSH!

This VST effect really emulates the classic Roland stereo chorus sound found on Juno synths, Chorus Echoes and the venerable Jazz Chorus amps. Sounds good in mono too. It deviates from the classic Roland effect by having a continuously variable stereo spread control and a mix control (more like on a boss CE1, which is essentially the same effect by the same company). Otherwise its just a Roland style chorus that sounds fantastic on any source that needs a touch (or a ton) of 80s sparkle 'n swirl. You can really get your Psychadelic Furs or Billy Duffy on with this plugin. AND ITS FREE!

Its a 101 emulation, what's not to like?

TAL knocked it out of the park again with this SH-101 emulation. GUI looks perfect and the little single-oscillator summbitch sounds pretty close to my buddies SH101. Being a VSTi I don't have to worry about breaking the chintzy faders and pots either (real 101's are built like shit). You can do some pretty solid tb303 lines with this plugin and a whole lot more.

KILLER

Years after getting it, I am still scratching the surface of the capabilities of this FM/subtractive/matrix synth. It does things we only dreamed possible as kids. The user interface is simple and intuitive. I can't say enough good things about Image Line's Sytrus. Its biggest fault is that it is so powerful you can get sidetracked fiddling with it. If you just need a DX7 sound or something else basic its better to reach for something less versatile so you don't waste a bunch of time over-refining things. But if you aren't 100% sure what sort of FM sound you wanna make, then Sytrus is the jam. It will inspire you to better the vague notions already in your fevered musician brain.