daveq

I think everyone understands why it's being tossed but the question Perry and I were asking is what the issue was with the USACG necks? I was guessing that it was a scale length / intonation issue but I don't know. Is that why you are looking into getting one custom made and can't use their stock necks?

Yes, I was looking at that recently. Looks very interesting. Thanks!

I may be in the market for a new PC to be used for recording. I'm currently using Cakewalk Home Studio 2. I have a E-MU 1010 (or is it 1212?) sound card but I may just leave that in the current PC and get a more powerful card for the new PC.

The biggest issue I have had with my current setup is that there is a slight delay in monitoring. When recording, I need to listen to my headphones from my rack instead of the PC since the delay makes it very hard to get timing right. For single tracks, it's no big deal but when trying to play over a rythm track, listening to my rack does me no good (since I can't hear the rythm track at all that way).

I also have a minor (although annoying) level problem. I have to crank the output on my rack gear to get a decent level in the PC.

So, I'm wondering what I should be looking for in a new PC? Is it the memory speed (and amount of memory), hard drive access/speed, or is it just the sound card that plays the biggest role? Any tips would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

DaveQ

Are you saying that the necks from USACG won't give you the proper scale length? Is the bridge already installed?

Hey Matt-

Sorry to hear that but I have a feeling you're on your way to bigger and better things now. Forget that place and set yourself up with a plan! Don't be tempted to kick back and let things come to you. Once you have a plan - don't let anything stop you and get after it !

oh yeah - and keep those guitar pics coming .

I used to do that also but after trying it out last night, placing it after the dist. seemed to emphasize it more.

I'm really trying to get that incredible wah sound from "Pride" by Damageplan. It's just killer - sounds like the mother ship is landing! I doubt I'll ever reproduce it exactly but that's my mission for now. If anyone knows any secrets about how he did that, please let me know!

That's the only reason I'm not using the balanced lines - I couldn't think of any other way to get the wah after the distortion without using the 1/4" jacks.

I didn't know that the POD Pro had a wah built in. I'll check into that although I just upgraded to a dome wah so that's a bit of a bummer.

Thanks,

Dave

I'm still working on getting my rack "finalized". The thing that's giving me the most trouble is how to deal with my wah pedal.

I have a stereo rack that I use for playing live (just in my basement) and recording. The best place for the wah to my ears is post-distortion. Since I have two cables running from the preamp (POD Pro) to my effects, I'm not sure how I'm going to do this. I guess I could just go mono out of the POD Pro and then mono from the wah to the effects. I'm not sure if using mono in on an effects processor will result in stereo out but I think it will. Will doing it this way degrade the stereo signal in any way? I guess I'd be losing the stereo effects in the POD but eveything else would remain, right?

Any other ideas?

If curly maple is acceptable, www.curlymaple.com has some pretty sweet stuff also.

Wo!! Jackpot!!!!

Did you end up buying that Drak? I didn't see where Dangerouso posted a link to it? Was it his gear?

If you did buy it, I hope you are happy with the processor. It's hard to imagine you not being happy with it. If you have any questions, I'd be glad to help.

I'm no expert but to me, the BBE units seem to make everything sound better. I'll record a sample with it on and off tonight and maybe it will help in understanding what it does. I don't have a P-90 but if you can suggest what pickup combination I should use, I'll do that. I'll probably be using a guitar that has HB/SC/HB (EMG's). I can get the following combinations:

1. Bridge

2. Mid / Bridge

3. Bridge / Neck

4. Mid / Neck

5. Neck

The pickups are:

Bridge: EMG 81

Mid: EMG SA

Neck: EMG 85

I'll be using a POD pro with a Soldano emulation (loads of gain) along with the G-Major.

If you don't think it's worth the time (since I'm not using P-90's,...), just let me know.

Drak -

I think I've been bitten by the gear bug. After doing a whole bunch of reading, I've decided to add the eclipse to the rack. I was hoping to keep mine at 6 slots (one case) but I don't know what I'm going to do now. I guess I'll kick my graphic EQ out and let the eclipse take it's place. I was really torn after reading the harmony-central reviews but I have a feeling it will work fine in my situation. People were complaining about the difficulty in learning it and I guess it had a habit of dropping out in earlier versions of the firmware. I've wanted an Eventide all my guitar life so I decided to just do it. I'll let you know what I think of it but I'm sure you'll already have settled on something by then.

I'm keeping the G-Major though. I think I'll probably end up using it for reverb or delay and use the eclipse for pitch and other effects. Nothing set in stone of course.

As for the power conditioner, I'm using a Furman PL-8 II (PL8 II)

I have no idea if this is considered a good unit or not - it does a good job for me though. I've only had it for a couple of months though.

That's one school of thought that I disagree most with. I don't blame anyone in particular - so please don't take this as a slam against anyone here.

EMG's definitely sound different in different guitars - I have zero doubt of this. I'd like to record a couple of them some day and post it as evidence. I have read that EMG's basically ignore all that is good about a guitar's acoustics/dynamics many times and it bugs me that it seems to keep floating around. Darren nailed it exactly - the pickups do not generate the sound - they react to the guitar and pass it along (after some filtering/preamp).

One more thought on tone woods:

It is easier to filter/attenuate certain frequencies than it is to try to add/boost them using EQ. If the guitar naturally produces a fuller spectrum then you'll find it much easier to find the sound you want by cutting certain bands. It's very difficult to boost something that isn't there naturally. What I mean by difficult is that it doesn't sound as good boosting a weak band as it does attenuating a strong band.

This probably isn't of much help but this thread reminded me of this and I was wondering if anyone else has more info on the subject? Are there any studies on spectrum analysis of tone woods? When it comes down to it, you're probably not going to be able to pick a tone wood by looking at it's spectral analysis but I'd still be very interested to see how they compare.

Anyway - good luck picking something that will sound good. Maybe you could ask Perry (Rhoads56) what he used on his baritone that recently won GOTM? I think he said he was very happy with the sound of it.

I think Darren gave some very good advice when he mentioned that you might want to go with a wood that will produce clarity. I've built guitars with black limba (supposedly close to mahagony), alder, maple, and cherry. The absolute worst guitar when it comes to the lower strings and clarity of them is the black limba.

Maybe it's just a fluke but I do know that each of my maple guitars sound crystal clear in comparison. The alder guitars sound good also but they have a different "growl" compared to the maple guitars. It's very difficult to explain without using these non-scientific terms.

I don't know if people are just reiterating what they have read when it comes to maple guitars or if they have played them (not people here - just in general)? I have two of them and there certainly is a difference but I wouldn't go as far as saying that it's harsh or unusable. In fact, my personal opinion is that maple is an excellent choice for a guitar that is intended to be used with metal/distortion. Having the extra mid freq's going into the preamp really helps - at least to my ears. I think the biggest misconception is that a "bright" maple guitar will always sound bright and can't be used for metal/hard rock. If you like a scooped sound, you can still get that - just scoop in the effects loop (or anywhere after the preamp).

I can't beleive I just did another maple rant. Sorry about that. I guess I feel like I need to defend it since it has treated me so well. I just think it gets a bad rap for no good reason. Bright seems to be a word that scares off a lot of people and I think it's misused and exaggerated (at least in my limited experience). Whenever clarity is a concern, I think maple should be considered.

I built a router jig a while ago for doing compound radius boards. There's a few pics on the web of others attempts at it but some of them don't look right to me. It's hard to explain but some of them look like they are relying on the jig "flexing" while adjusting. The design I'm talking about uses two side pieces that are about 10" and 16" connected to a frame. The router sits above. I'm not going to be able to explain this very well but if you imagine two different length boards (10" and 16") connected to a common axle (and connected together at the top by a board that the fretboard rests on) - when it rotates, it will have to flex or it would bind. The design may work but it just seems flawed to me.

Anyway, I found another design in an old issue of GAL. I think it may have been issue #62? It's a great design but unfortunately, the article gives incorrect angles. If anyone decides to build from it, you'll need to figure out the correct angles before building. I checked with the people at GAL a while back and they agreed that the information in that article was wrong but I don't know if they are including a correction in future copies or not. I was able to get it worked out and built it about a year ago. I've used it many times and consider it a valuable tool.

There's also a group of people who feel that doing it by hand (sanding though) is just as easy. I think I'd agree but when it comes to ebony, I would much rather use a router jig and do some finish sanding as opposed to doing it all with sanding.

There's no doubt that it is limiting but since I'm just gettting started using recording software, I just want something to play along with for a while. I don't want to spend hours generating a drum track by hand (not to mention that fact that it would probably sound very lame since I'm not a drummer).

So, people still use drum machines for this stuff then? For some reason, I thought drum machines were mostly obsoleted by PC software? Are the sounds from them better than what a PC can generate?

I'll check out those .sf2 files and SFZ+. Thanks for the help!

Thank you for all the info. I think I understand it now. I ended up using something called Edirol. It came with home studio but I never knew what the heck it was supposed to be used for. It has several drum sets to choose from but since I'm not into the electro-drum sound too much, I just pick the standard set.

I'll check into the products that you mentioned also. I don't know if you will have any experience with this but I wanted to ask if you know anything about Cakewalk's Drumatic? Drumatic

It looks promising but it could just be a collection of crap. Basically, what I'm after is some hard rock/metal drum tracks.

BTW, if it matters, I have a E-MU 1212 card (actually two cards connected together).

Thanks again for the help!

I was hoping to find someone here who uses it before going much further. I did search their forum but nothing matched with what I tried searching under.

Anyway, it looks like I've got something going whether it be right or wrong.

If anyone here is a cakewalk expert, I'd love to have a chat with you some time.

Thanks. Maybe you can help me with this then:?

Do I need to send all MIDI tracks to a device that can synth the sounds? I thought that Home Studio itself could do that but the more I poke around, the more I'm thinking that I have to set the track up to send it's output to another piece of software (or external device) in order to get anything out of it.

Does this sound right to you? I'm sooooo confused!

EDIT::

OK, maybe I'm still doing this wrong but here's what I've done:

I inserted a hoocher called Edirol. I set the output of the MIDI track to point to the Edirol jobber and then it starts working! I wonder why it was so damn difficult to get to this point? Am I even doing this correctly?

I'm looking for someone who may have some experience using cakewalk home studio. I have a pretty simple question concerning MIDI tracks (at least I think it's simple). I can't get any MIDI tracks to produce sound at all. Only audio tracks seem to work. I've checked control panel and done some basic checking around (including the help - which isn't the best) - still nothing.

Any hints?

I've been doing a lot of research on the Eventide Eclipse recently and found that most people seem to compare it against TC Electronics gear. I'm not saying that TC's stuff is as good as Eventide (although several reviewers on harmony-central did say exactly that), but I thought it was a good compliment for TC to have so many people compare Eventide against them.

For the $400, the G-Major is really hard to beat. If you are at all interested in it, check one out but please don't judge it based on the factory presets. I don't use any of them. Editing is very easy and it shouldn't take long to find something that really excites you.

I don't know anything about the other choices you listed though. It's quite possible that they are just as good but from all the reading I've done lately, TC seems to have an excellent reputation.

That Eclipse looks sketchy. Some people just flat out trashed it - not what I was expecting to find.

What radius is the fretboard going to be? Sounds like a fun project!

Oh yeah - have you considered using the stewmac trem posts/bushings? They are made of hardened steel and seem to hold up very well. They aren't the same diameter as the standard bushings so keep that in mind if you are going to use them. I've been using them on every guitar ever since I had one of the standard posts give me problems. I gouged a set when setting up my first guitar. I raised/lowered the bridge with full string tension and the guitar never returned to zero very well. It's easy enough to replace them but that's what lead me into checking out the stewmac posts. I don't recommend doing what I did (with full tension) with the stewmac posts either by the way .

I usually use either 16 or 18" bridge radius on my compound radius guitars. There is an equation that you can use to get the exact radius (using the concept of a cone) but in practice, I have found that 16 to 18 works fine (for a fretboard ending in 16" radius).

Another rule of thumb I was given is that you can be off by about 2 inches in radius and you won't notice the difference (nut or bridge radius).

idch - what look are you referring to with oiled wood? What type of oil tung, linseed, ...?

Tru-Oil is a different type of finish but I think it still does have a different look than poly or nitro.

This is the best I can do for a sample pic of what Tru-Oil looks like:

It does darken the piece (which is true for just about every type of finish) a bit but it basically hardens clear.

I'm not saying that it is the finish that should be used - just an option since I know Matt was looking for suggestions. The instructions on the bottle says it can be used to fill grain also but I have never tried using it that way.

If you do use it, the key to a nice smooth shiny finish (as far as I know) is very thin coats. Wipe away any streaking that you can see immediately (use a bright light at an angle). Other than that, it's really pretty easy and looks very nice. Another bonus is that it is cheap and does not put anyone at home at risk in terms of deadly fumes.

One other thing to think about is durability. If the owner wants to be able to beat on it and abuse it, you probably only have one choice - poly. If he's willing to take care of it reasonably (you don't have to treat it like a museum artifact), then Tru-Oil will do the job.

Last thought on this for now - I don't know if you want to experiment with new finishes on this guitar though. If there's a way to get it finished the same as your others, maybe that's the safer way to go? Maybe that clear grain filler from stewmac and then have your friend clear it?

He, he, too lazy . I just wanted to get the overall size of the board to approx. what that is. I could have made it smaller by using SMT resistors but I didn't think that was worth the hassle. I actually use a big honk'n 1/4 in there also (I screwed up my order from mouser ). The caps were the biggest components (if I were to use non-SMT devices) so those were the ones I went after.

I did another board with a SMT opamp and that was challenging. I don't have surgeon's hands so that didn't help matters.

There's another place called pad2pad that supposedly populates comoponents for you as well as ethching the boards. I bet it's too costly for small guitar projects but maybe it's worth it for shaky handed people like me?