The Music Gear and Musicians Thread

*sigh* it's only stickied in this very subforum. :D

I only 'search for new', I never look at specific subforums.

Both. Imagine the picture below, but on the front where your forearm rests with cracks spreading outward. The finish on those things is that fragile that a fingernail can scratch them. After that it just got worse.

I like wear and tear from years of use as it adds character to an instrument, and small dings and the like usually have a story behind them, but I couldn't keep it after that. The point of that model was the beautiful finish and it was ruined. I went with the standard models after that.

Holy shit.

Yeah, you want the story to be something like "right after the show, some chick was jumping my bones, and I dropped a full bottle of Jack on it," not "I was reaching for my Xbox controller and knocked my guitar over onto the corner of the coffee table."

On another note entirely, I'm starting to regret having sold my 1980's-vintage Gibson Sonex 180 about 5 years back. I was thinning out my modest guitar collection at the time - I also sold my acoustic 12-string and a cheap 6-string Ovation - but I wouldn't mind having my Sonex back. It was the first electric I ever had. My parents bought it for me when I was in high school. Sigh.

Wow. That picture makes me want to cry, daemion. I wacked my SRV into the coffee table a couple of months after getting it, but, yeah, my ding could be filled and polyed over. I feel belated third party heartbreak in the way only fellow musicians can. :( As an aside, we can all feel heartbreak/anger at a friend of mine who drunkenly stepped onto his antique resonator one night. There are accidents, and then there are crimes against humanity.

Astromarine: I think I can Skype from my phone with a 4G connection (?). Not sure I'll have anything anything to say that won't be interesting to people who aren't musicians or gearheads or interested in terrible inside anecdotes (or even wind-ups/yarns), but I guess that's half the fun. :). I would LOVE it if jerri blank talked about her jams/the Nashville scene, BaconTastesGood talked about the wide world of synths, madkevin talked about growing up punk/hardcore Canadian punk (like MxPx... just kidding, guy, you know I love you), and so on!

I mentioned to Astromarine recently that I am unfortunately too busy to join in on any podcasts at the moment. Feel free to imagine me yelling about how Nomeansno are the BESTEST BAND IN THE WORLD!!!! for five minutes straight.

Also: TONIGHT is the night I am ONSTAGE for the first time in 17ish years! Lyrics: Sort of memorized! Chords: Also sort of memorized! Amp: CRANKED! Guitar: SET UP! Wish me luck, denizens of the internet!

Good luck! And a cranked amp is all you need. That, and reverb.

How about a pair of pink sidewinders and a bright orange pair of pants?

Heh. I've actually said "I couldn't see the floor for groupies and next thing you know..." when asked. Sounds better than "I was wearing socks and we have polished floorboards."

Like your Sonex, I've had a few that I've regretted selling. These days I will only sell one if it's being replaced with another, and only if I can buy another if I do regret it down the track. I always remind myself of my father's friend. We had a guitar case under the lounge for years. Occasionally it would disappear only to return a week or so later. Dad never played it and I wasn't allowed to take it out. It belonged to his friend who left it with us so he wouldn't sell it or do anything stupid with it when he got stoned. One day it disappeared and never came back. Turned out he pawned it for a few hundred dollars. A '57 Goldtop Les Paul (PAF humbucker model). At that time nobody knew it would be worth what they are now, but it was worth a lot more than a few hundred. You can't even mention it to him without him getting pissed off.

Bryce - Thanks. I've been lucky over the years. I've put dings and scratches on almost all of my instruments, but that is the only one I've outright damaged. Of course, it happened to be my dream guitar at the time and perfect for the Satriani cover band I was fronting, but what do you do? I was going to buy one of the new versions, but these days I'd rather be able to play it without worry.

Funny you should mention resonators, as my father had a custom resonator made by Beltona a couple of years back. Guess what he did within two weeks? Kitchen table this time.

So, er, some more minor tweaks to my setup. I sold the Schrittmacher sequencer to get an analog sequencer, in this case the Analogue Solutions Oberkorn mk3:



I also picked up a Shruthi-1 (preassembled) off eBay. These are amazing little monophonic synthesizers that you can build in kit form if you're decent at soldering (side note: there are tons of build-your-own guitar pedals out there too).

Holy shit, dude. You have some serious GAS. (always a good thing)

That Shruthi looks AWESOME!

I'm pretty much the epitome of gear whore. The only things keeping me out of insane trouble are other bills and limited room.

That set...I'm starting to look at modular systems =/

Hardly enough of a gearhead to jump in on this thread, but figured I'd try anyway. Can anyone advise me on a good basic amp and pickup for fiddling? I play violin and viola and joined a ceili band about a month ago, since which time I have been advised repeatedly to get myself a pickup so they can hear me better. I guess they like having a fiddle or something? :)

The instrument in question is a 1904 Czech number that my great-uncle claimed he got from a Sears catalog. Nothing particularly fancy except for a lovely tiger-striped back, but it's my baby. Currently not equipped with anything electric; I'm used to orchestral and pit work, neither of which have ever required much amplification for me in particular.

Anyway, I know my sister had some sort of small amp in the living room, but (a) she took it with her to Boston and (b) it was mostly a piece of crap anyway. I'm looking for something that (probably) clips onto the bridge, plugs into whatever small mixer the band is already using (more details on this Monday, providing I remember to look between sets!), and doesn't tie me to one spot on the floor. (I spend most of ceili standing and reading over the band leader/flute player's shoulder, to the point where I barely need the chair they give me.) Is there such a thing as an amp with a clip-on battery pack, or am I mixing my theater tech and my music tech?

I feel for ya' Damion, I took a chunk out of the bottom corner of this Strat and have been slowly filling it in with clear finish.




Here's some of my amps, I have a bunch more around the house, studio, garage etc.

You're mixing up the two =)

You'll want a pickup (to pick up the sounds from your fiddle), a wireless broadcast system, and then some amplification. If you're hooked into a mixer/PA, you can skip the amp part, you just need a pick up of some kind. Be warned, it's not cheap. $100-200 for the pickup alone.

Ack. That is definitely not a right-now sort of solution, then. Any suggestions on brands to look for or avoid?

Your other option is a live mic system that clips to the instrument, but that will be a lot more expensive.

You're looking for a piezo pickup; LR Baggs or Fishman are good options you will find everywhere. You'll be spending ~$100 for the entry level pickups, but it can easily get up to $200 or more. I say go for the $100 ones, no one will tell the difference. You can get substantially cheaper options from boutique/upscale/independent manufacturers, but, YMMV, you'll have to research them on your own because I either don't know how well their stuff works with violins (for the indies) or don't know if it is proprietary (for the upscales). The pre-amp will be ~$50. You might be thinking that you don't need a pre-amp, but you do. Unless the band is dedicated, has the right console (mixing board) and has someone who knows how to use it, you might not get plugged into the right line with the right impedance and then you'll sound like crap. The pre-amp will render all of these worries moot. Wireless is a middling buy at best, but that depends on the composition of the band, how far you'll be from the console, how much you want to deal with cables, etc. An actual amp, again, depends on what the live setup is - I love Genz Benz amps (not cheap, but you can find some great deals) for acoustic work, but check some violin forums and see what they have to say. As an aside, do not ever record with a piezo. Ever.

As always, check craigslist and see what deals on used or lightly loved gear you can get. You can easily cut all of these prices down by half or more.

Sorry, I'd write more but my head is killing me.

Bryce, that's awesome. Thank you so much! I swear, this forum has experts on everything. :D

Edit: so wait, Amazon's handing me recommendations for piezo pickups for less than $20. Is there another part I need to make these work? Am I missing something? Also, why the caution against recording with them? Not that I have any plans to record, I'm just curious.

You'll probably want a preamp, as he says, but if you're really trying to save money, some of those $10-20 piezos might be good enough.

I've always heard that the reason not to record with piezos is because, well, they sound like shit =) But for live use they're often a lot more practical than miking up.

Take our advice with a grain of salt, Bryce is a real musician and I'm a gear whore, if you're just looking to have fun, we're probably aggressively over recommending stuff. =)

Your trying to mic a fiddle?
Fishman and Baggs make some very good stuff of varying quality and price.
Some of the cheaper ones can be noisy and may not have enough gain (volume) you could probably find a good used pickup cheap, try EBay of course.

I've seen some good clip on units for horn players too.

Speak With Bread - Bryce and Bacon have both given excellent advice, but I figure it can't hurt to jump in (as a fiddle player for 30 years).

The LR Baggs bridge pickup is very good, as are the Fishman models. Feedback is always going to be an issue with a violin pickup, but the more you pay, the better the control. I have tried countless cheaper piezo pickups and while some were quite good, they did require a lot of adjustment and eq-ing. The one I would recommend, as do many others, is "The Band" from Headway. I won't go into the details, as the link has all the info and my experience matches their claims.

An impedance-matching preamp is always recommended regardless of the pickup used. And yes, recording with a piezo is not recommended. As has been said, it's really due to the sound. If you're going to record a violin, you mic it up.

If you only want to increase your volume without getting into amping your fiddle, the best setup I have used is not a pickup, but a microphone designed specifically for a violin. The DPA 4099V. The sound is superb, but at a price (around $900).

If you don't intend on changing the sound of the fiddle (gain, effects etc.) then you don't need to worry about an amp. Guitar amps, even acoustic amps, are not designed for acoustic violins and don't sound as good as a good preamp and straight into the desk. Some will no doubt say otherwise, but that has been my experience.

Now... if you do plan on changing the sound (even the slightest amount of gain) and getting into the electric side of things, you're going to have to look into an electric fiddle. But that is another discussion entirely, involving my experiment with expanda-foam, a piezo, an overdrive pedal and the most godawful noise you've ever heard from a fiddle. I should get around to posting my latest recording of my Yamaha running through a Pod with Cello and Choir patches to give an idea of what you can do with an electric fiddle and processing these days.

Oh, man, please DO post those recordings. I love the sound of both fucked up fiddles and saxophones.

See! This, plus the past few posts, is exactly why I insist that a Broken Forum band would be such great fun. On one end it'd be like Eno era Bowie (paging Gabe Lewis) and on the other we could sharpen our blues chops. Ingmar can arrange. Diversity, ladies and gentlemen, we have it in spades.

I'll do the ironic dub step remixes. =)

Bryce - The violin in this isn't anything weird, so you may be disappointed.

You'll have to forgive the sound quality as these are rough recordings. The focus is obviously on the guitar, so the drums and bass are just filler.

Through His Eyes - First part.


Track info - Yamaha Silent into a Pod X3 (clean patch with reverb and a touch of chorus) with cello and choir plugins in Reaper. You can ignore the lead guitar at the end as I haven't got around to that (what's there is just a quick take) or the rest of the song yet.

To give an idea of the music I play, I've included a couple of rough solo tracks and one from the side gig.



This one is called Outer Phase and came about from playing around with an EH Small Stone Phaser pedal (the big black one). Again, it's a rough track with mistakes and iffy sound quality at times, but it's complete. The drums were done with EZDrummer and were the first time I played around with getting the drums to sound close to what I wanted in the finished song.

All Thumbs.


This is a fingerpicked piece for Seppeltsfield Winery, to be used as background music for their documentary during tours. Recorded on the Gibson ES-125TC with smooth wound strings. This version is one take with a lead part added.

I Don't Trust Nobody (When it Comes to My Girl)


This is a track from the album "Try Before You Die" by Tinfish George. After the album, all shows were just him and I. He is a piedmont style blues/folk blues/jazz player. This is the bluesiest track we do. The rest of the stuff was a little out of my comfort zone at first, but the more we played, the more comfortable I got with it.

There's a lot more, but I won't bore everyone with my middle-of-the-night caffeine fuelled attempts at being the next Satriani.

daemion, when I start seriously mic-shopping, I shall take your advice very much to heart. Thank you all so much. Trusting the internet feels much more reliable when you're asking a familiar subset of it. :)

Apparently the whistle player DID record last week's session, with the typical mic setup that they haven't figured out how to integrate me into (because I move too much). He says it's nothing worth posting, though.

It is well known that one does not become an adult until one procures one's first SM57.

I'd recommend a condenser or ribbon mike for most acoustic instruments, and the SM57 is a dynamic mic.

/pedant

Someone should make a GatFacts series for the SM57. It would make Gearslutz explode.

So I posted a vid of blinky lights in my new setup and a friend gave me shit since he couldn't "hear the track" (it was on my phone, and it was just random shit on the sequencers so they'd blink). So I finally sucked it up and recorded...something.

I just did a house 4/4, hit play, then record, then twiddled knobs. That's it.

All Minitaur (lead/bass) and Vermona DRM1 MK3 for drums. Kurzweil Mangler and Lexicon MPX-1 for effects, then all straight into a single stereo track in Reaper and Cytomic The Glue for crushing the everloving shit out of it.

I would not call this a composition, just evidence I'm actually going to use all this gear I'm buying =)

Analog sequencers are ridiculously fun. The composition process goes from intellectual to 100% visceral. I'm in the key of "sweet". This 'track' is just getting more hooked up from before. I just went to almost every instrument and tried to give it something to do in a loop on the Cirklon, it's mostly interesting because the Minitaur sounds phenomenal. Analog bass FTW!

I did all of it while lots of noise was going on so had no idea how bad the reverb tails were...oops. 4 on the 4 @ 126 with major chords -- weak trance!

...and I tried making a video. Kinda fail, so I cut it short. WMM 2012 is not so good at trying to sync audio to video (that I could figure out)

I'm waving a glow stick in your honor. I'd take some ecstasy, but it's a work night.

As it turns out Reaper supports video editing, holy shit! Lining up video and audio in Reaper is way easier than doing it in WMM. I'm sure I'll find some other fussy thing in there to piss me off though.

Hey, kids: Let's say I wanted to blow some money on some pedals after Christmas. Let's say further that I want a good overdrive and/or distortion pedal, a chorus pedal, and a wah pedal. Thoughts?

First...budget?

Second...do you have a pedal board?

Third...what style of music?

First: Between $80-$150 per pedal. I know the boutique distortion pedals can get really nutty pricewise.

Second: Yes, but I've already used up the space. (It was a mini-board.) So I'll probably get a bigger one.

Third: Loud. We do some heavy-duty shoegazer stuff, Pavement-style noise, and some quieter post-rock style bits. I like volume.

I'd first invest in a bigger pedal board and a good power supply, but that's just me -- I hate having a crap ton of pedals just lying around everywhere. I have a PT-2 and Voodoo Labs power source, but I wish someone would just make the power source to end all power sources -- a lot of pedals these days are asking for 12-18V and those are in short supply. Eventide just shipped the PowerFactor which looks good (and is designed to provide power to a lot of their stuff).

A solid pedal board keeps things clean and also makes swapping new pedals in/out easily. Guitar pedals are the guitarists equivalent of synth geeks modular setups.

Pedals are just personal preference, this is why Craigslist is full of "pedals fs/ft" because people buy and then decide they don't like them, then swap them out. The nice thing about this is if you buy them used or do straight up trades, a lot of times you lose very little money.

If you want the classics, then there are a million to choose from. There are probably 50 different distortion/OD/fuzz pedals to choose from in that price range alone, and you've probably heard or heard of most of them, everything from the Boss HM2 to Tube Screamer to Big Muff. If you want something a bit more off the beaten path, then I think PigTronix makes good stuff, I use their PolySaturator on keyboards and guitars and it sounds good and is incredibly versatile (from shred to bluesy). I think this depends on whether you're looking for something with a distinctive tone or something that is more general purpose. MXR makes a ton of great stuff in your price range, l think it's a case of just buying stuff and trying it out for a while.

For a wah, if you just want a wah pedal without breaking the bank, the Cry Baby is cheap and covers the bases and it's a classic. If there's a specific artist that you're trying to emulate then I'd try to get whatever they use (there are various signature models as well). If you want something more versatile than the stock Cry Baby, the Cry Baby Multi-wah 535Q has a bunch of parameters you can tweak to nail a tone you like.

For the chorus, I think it's hard to go wrong with the MXR. Maybe for your sound the MXR Black Label would work? A bit more off the beaten path is the Visual Sound V2 Liquid Chorus. You didn't mention if you needed it to be stereo or not though -- stereo is a bit more expensive.

I'm also a bit of an analog weenie, so I have a bias that way, the exception being reverbs (and delays, but I consider analog delays serving a different purpose than . If I had infinite money I'd probably have an Eventide Space and a Strymon Timeline.

Oh, and the PigTronix KeyMaster is fucking awesome. If you don't have one, I'd almost recommend getting it first. I use it for the impedance matching so I can have my synths run into my guitar pedals, but just having two independent effects loops that you can blend between and run in either serial/parallel is hugely flexible. That way you can chain two separate rows of guitar pedals and alternate between them or mix them, etc. It's extremely convenient for dicking around with pedals.

Ooooh, I like the look of that MXR Black Label pedal. The idea of a chorus pedal built to handle distortion is interesting, because distortion + chorus = Killing Joke and PiL's Metal Box.

Thanks, Bacon!

Okay, made another video, this time with proper lighting (sort of) and using Reaper. The music is just a 16 step sequence, but I have the Leipzig running through some pedals what not. Mostly this was an experiment on the video editing side.

NGD! (Well, it was a couple weeks ago anyway...)

So, at work I get X amount of stuff to do and a deadline. Last release I got my all my work (and extra bonus work) done well before the date it was due. I have to have ass-in-chair regardless of whether or not I have anything to accomplish. This leads to a lot of browsing, which in turn generally leads to deciding to buy things I don't really need.

Anyway, new guitar! I have wanted a PRS Starla since they first came out. I have never seen one in person and had to special order it. I placed the order in early October, they told me two to three weeks. On week four, they told me it was backordered until December. I picked it up on the 12th, and I absolutely love it. The finish is Charcoal, which is translucent, but it pretty much looks like black unless you are looking at the back of it directly under a light.

(New strap too!)