JohnnyG

i couldnt possibly decide. in the last two days the music in my playlist has shifted through Converge, Infected Mushroom, New Found Glory and right now its Dashboard Confessional ive also recentlly been getting into drum and bass and alot more electronic music type stuff. to choose one favorite style would be impossible im afraid

http://www.frets.com/FRETSPages/Luthier/Te...zorscrape1.html man that is a good idea. theres some great info on there, cheers for pointing it out

im lucky in that being in boarding school means unless your really persevereant then smoking is hard enough to do. i sure as hell cant be arsed to use my beer money to buy fags that id have to smoke down the bottom of the football pitches at 6 in them orning also hardlly any of my friends moke so im not around it that much at all. ah i wish i could play pool and win money at it. my plan at uni is to get people to bet money on me and my rubiks cube "bollocks you can do it in under 2 minutes" watch me lol

Hey all as title says im wanting info about midi pickup systems. im going to go scouring in just a moment but i figured id post here to see what other info people have the way i understand it is that the pickup tracks the string movement and turns it into a midi note which is them passed to whatever equipment as a standard midi signal what id like to know is whether this is compatable with all computer programs with midi interface in the same way that a midi keyboard controller is? also how does it deal with things like string bends or doesnt it? finally, how easy is it to go putting one into an existing guitar? does it come with lots of onguitar controls that have to be there hence making it necesary to make a new body with the space for them? thanks for any help people feel like chucking my way. reason for asking is ive recentlly got into electronically making music and my skills with a keyboard leave a fair bit lacking in comparison to my guitar skills and admit it, having different samples set to each note and playing a drum and bass drumline on a guitar would just be plain cool

my vote was no never tho ive tried it once or twice (i think everybody has) it just feels like someone is attacking the back of my throat with sandpaper and i get horrible cotton mouth. add to that i hate the taste and the smell id sure as hell never kiss a smoker "blearugh"

cherub rock is one of the altime greatest songs ever. 1979, and tonight tonight are also good as are about half the other songs they've done. and for anybody that hasnt heard it. check out the only album that zwan put out. its like really really happy smashing pumpkins and its ace

wow this be a pretyty groovy thread, cheers guys. as soon as i have the cash to build next guitar from scratch im sorted

in truth not that much i dont think very simply they're just voiced differentlly. obviouslly the frequency spectrum for a guitar output and a bass guitar output are different, standard guitar the lowest frequency you'll get in Regular Tuning and without octave boxes or summat is 82 Hz (I think) for Low E. clearlly on a Bass its going to be half that. take 5 strings and detuning into account and both go down. also the upper frequency ranges cut off at different points. if you have alot of distortion etc then guitars will have detectable 7th and 8th harmonics which could extend up to somewhere around and above the 5 kHZ mark (again I think thats about the range, numbers may be wrong but the point is the same) on a bass guitar the upper harmonics normally wont extend much past 2kHz. what this means is that when designing the amp for a guitar amp it doesnt matter how many DB of reduction the stuff below about 80Hz gets just so long as it doesnt attenuate the wanted frequencies that much. bass amps the converse is true, you want to keep the low end more but the upper frequencies above 2kHz dont matter too much since there just won't be any signal up there also ontop of this most Bass amps arent built with alot of distortion in mind. finally the output trannies on bass amps will be larger for the simple reason that lower frequencies have more power. thus an output tranny rated for 50 Watts at 60Hz is smaller than one rated 50 Watts at 30Hz thats pretty much it really and even then the majority of the voicing is mainlly pre amp situated i believe. it was the origional Bassmans i think (again with the thinking :-o) that had seperate inputs for Bass guitars and regular guitars and just had 2 seperate pre-amp circuits feeding one poweramp. hope thats all helpful, oh and a smart alec reply just to round it off...erm, lemme think. bugger i can't think of anything, ill have to get back to you on that one

im stuck in a bit of a fix over everse engineering lol. clearlly i don't prodice pedals on a mass scale (yet) but i can't say that ive never looked at schems for production pedals to see how and why they did things a certain way. tho what would it be if you're improving them?

personally id say you can't go wrong with the boss SD-1 or DS-1 cheap and fairlly good

i would have thought for faster riffing do whats done with every box that needs to track the origional signal, use the neck Pup and roll back the tone

ah now that is a very good point. i think that when the blokey from prodigy used it they had pro tools for all the vocal stuff. either that or they just sampled the vocals into the DR Rex sampler in there. remember that reason 3 is coming out and it should add some new and grooxy things. we shall have to wait and see lol

Its touted as a bass pedal but its perfectlly usable with guitars. i think that boss either origionall did, or were planning to, market it as a guitar pedal but didnt think it would sell well enough so marketed it to the bass players where the idea of being able to get a bif fat buzz saw square wave was appealing. as for the moog sound. it does funky synth sounds but whether its like a moog is entirelly opinion. i think it has some auto filtering on it but if not then combine it with an auto wah and the fuzz of your choice and you'll be playing bit beastlly techno basslines in no time

the first time i looked at reason at scared the S*%t out of me lol. its literally a case of just treating it as a large rack system and its fairlly self evident from there some of the stuff works on patterns that you program (Redrum and Matrix) and can then skip between the rest of it works on a combination of patterns and stuff that you program in using the keyboard. then there are the little tricky things like learning how to get the control voltages from whatever controlling whatever else you have. i just worked through it rack system by rack system starting with working outhow to program ReDrum and then have it change between patterns in the song. my only background in synth stuff is from knowing how a fair few work RE: my own studies and knowing how they can work together. even tho ive never actually got my hands on a real hardware synth :S as for Live you're probablly right that there will be degredation tho i havnt come across it so far. butthen im almost certainlly not using it to its fullest potential

the only thing with live is it kinf of makes me feel like im cheating lol. if you have 3 samples all at different BPM then you can set a global BPM in Live and it will automatically change the sound samples so that they play at the chosen BPM. no pitch change, no degradation that i can hear. very clever but it makes me feel a little cheap lol tho in fairness the ex xynth player from NIN uses Live for all his current work so to quote my friend "If its going to be considered cheap then were in bloody good company" i havnt had a look at cubase at all. played with logic a bit and i can remember most of the stuff from my music technology courses at school but i hardlly know anything about logic. just seems to be hidden stuff. things like Live and Reason dont really seem to need manuals even. Reason certainlly doesnt just to get it going. i dunno, each to their own. now i have to spend time filling up my 160 gig HDD with porn, i mean samples, thats it ?

nope fraid not wes. origional tube screamer was just a standard op-amp and clipping diodes affair. no tubesthere

ooohhh free VST plugins that look like they do cool things the flofi deluxe looks to be pretty cool.

in truth drum machines are the way forward. they keep time, it cuts down on beer cost and it wont try and grope your girlfriend

Gorecki, me and a friend are planning to start some sort of musical project type thingamyjig and im really tempted to start recording guitar parts as samples and then going down the whole NIN route with lots of synths and electronica type stuff. ive also been playing about with ableton live which is such a powerful program and is perfect for doing the same sort of thing. im a happoy bunny atm

i personally stick with planet wave cables. they're slightlly more expensive and they do have the hype of oxygen free copper and gold plated contacts. but they're built solidlly and i know they'll last so as far as im concerned it was worth it re: length, i have a 10 foot from guitar to pedal board and a 20 foot from pedalboard to amp. its all buffered and my tone is so screwed anyway that "cable degredation" doesnt really matter to me

body shape and metal sections are amazing, as is the fretboard. only thing i dont like is the unfinished black but i assume that wont remain unfinished. so how the hell did you do that fretboard?? actually looking at it again. the one little niglly thing is the piece of metal with the micro switch in the middle thats screwed onto the body. i dont like the fact that you can see the screws tho otherwise thats seriouslly ace man. i cant wait to see that when its done

control with the whammy is easy enough i find. tho if you're looking for a pitch shifting effect thats pedal controlled and you can set the interval that it shifts upto with the pedal then pickup an old Boss PS-3/PS-2 and get a boss expression pedal. the new PS-5 may be the same but i cant vouch for that. and anyway, it cant feed back into itself like the PS-2/3

choosing pot vlaues for volume control is a little trickier than youd think (at least than i origionally thought) you need to look at it as if it were input and output impedances. so lets say you havea 100k pot and a 1Meg pot. at full volume the effective inut and output impedance to the guitar signal is zero (assuming slider at top, proper pots etc etc) since there will be nothing in the way of the signal. now lets turn the pot down to 50% resistance (if using audio taper pots it wouldnt be half way along the travel distance but we dont need to worry aboutthat atm) this means that the guitar signal sees either a 50k resisistor in the signal path followed by a 50 k resistor to ground or a 500k resistor in the signal path then a 500k resistor to ground. looking at this as input impedances, the 1Meg pot will have a higher input impedance. and as we all know from our pedals, higher input impedance means more highend sparkle on our pedals. so effectivlly the 1Meg pot will cut down on the highs less than the 100k pot. however, you also have to look at it like an output impedance. the 100k pot will have a much lower output impedance than the 1Meg pot. the lower the output impedance of a pedal the more current it can source and so the harder it will be able to drive any resultant stages. so the 1Meg pot at 50% will mean that resulting stages after the volume control will not be driven as hard as they could be. this could be a problem it could not, depends on your rig. im fairlly sure it works like that. LK and Paul feel free to slap me upside the head if i got things wrong. i think thatto give you some idea of values, guitar volume pots are normally 250k for single coils and 500k for humbuckers. also the pot in my marshall high gain passive volume pedal is 250k hope thats all helpful JG

in defence of digital, playing around with a software synth can actual;ly get you some pretty good drum sounds tho in truth it is better for slightlly more "out there" kind of sounds and if you want a real sounding kit then it is just alot easier to use real samples. ive recentlly started playing about with Reason (the cut down adapted version came with my soundcard) and the little software drum machine it has on it is amazing. its so easy to program in whatever patterns you want in whatever time signature, add in fills, change BPM on the fly. infact the whole program in itself is truly amazing for making music tho depends what you're into. (the majority of the latest prodigy album was made on it)

man this theory lark always confuzzled me. i just learn chords that sound nice and then work out how ill be able to move it around to keep the same sound. tho in truth if given a little time to think about them i can just about work out the proper names