Tag: Guitar

Gear Acquisition Syndrome, Again

Figures. I finally cave in to recording my guitar direct through some sort of amplifier simulation and almost immediately a pedal company releases a new line of amplifier simulation pedals. TC Electronics is the culprit. I doubt that these new pedals are going to be in the same league as the one Strymon makes, or Universal Audio’s line, but the TC stuff will be a whole lot less expensive, I can pretty much guarantee that.

I am not going to buy one of these… yet… I am going to think about buying one often. Very often. Even if I did pony up the cash, I would never like it as much as my actual Deluxe Reverb. You know, the actual amp this thing simulates? Yeah, real is always going to be better. It’s just that the sim is less likely to wake up your sleeping wife when you play through it at 5:00am.

The Streak is Over and What About Tomorrow?

My guitar playing streak is over. I lost count of how many days in a row I played for at least a few minutes. It was almost three weeks, I think. I failed to get any playing in yesterday. Oh well.

This morning before leaving for the doctors appointment I was able to get some work done though. Jen is in the office today so I had some quiet time in the house alone and I used it to record some vocals. I put them onto the 10th and final June song and two more May songs. I think I have six May songs still waiting for lyrics and vocals. I have decided to extend the deadline for the May songs to July 3rd. I am not extending the deadline for the June songs. Those need to be wrapped up by Friday. I only have one guitar part to add and then mix the final five and that’s it. No problem, he said with false confidence that probably wasn’t really that false.

I thought I was going to get back onto the photography bus today. Film, to be specific. As I was getting my shit together to go to the doctors appointment I looked out the window and saw sun gleaming into the back yard. Right. I grabbed Dad’s camera. I didn’t know where I was going to go after the appointment, but I was going somewhere. Then when I actually got outside and got in the car, the sky was clouded over and ugly and sad. Oh well. The day is coming. It’s summer now. Film photography. Digital photography. All over the place in Eastern Massachusetts and Southern New Hampshire and maybe even more places than that. I want Boston. I want light houses. I want to go shootin’. Ideally I want to go shootin’ with other folks, but if I have to do it alone at the crack of dawn then that’s what I am going to do. You heard it here first, folks.

What should I do tomorrow? Tomorrow is my work from the office day. I will start the day in Foxborough, which is about a million and a half miles away from my house. I will need to be on the road by 7:30am.

Should I try to get my couch to 5k training in? Tomorrow is the day that it should happen, as I am trying to do this every other day, but I was planning on pushing it off until the day after. If I get up at 5:00am and get right the hell out the door and start, then I should be done by 5:30. That would give me more than enough time to do everything I want to do, including recover from the exercise and watch episode two of Marvel’s Secret Invasion.

I am undecided. If I am out of bed by, let’s say, 5:05am then I will do it. Tomorrow’s plan is to switch from walk for three minutes and run for one minute, repeating eight times to walk for two minutes and run for one minute, repeated eight times. I fully expect my legs to fall off. It’s going to be freakin’ brutal, but it should also take less time than yesterday did. We’ll see.

Okay. That’s enough for now. Back to work, Robert.

This Might Have Been the Song for June But…

This is the other song that I was thinking might get the nod for this month’s Record Every Month Challenge submission, but I am not happy with the mix. The song is groovy and fun. I kept it as ridiculously simple as possible but then made the mix a little too busy. I think I’ll go with the song from the last post instead. I do like this though.

This Might Be the One for June

Of the 10 songs I am working on this month, only one can be my submission for the Record Every Month Challenge thing. This song might be it. There’s one other that is in the running, but I kinda like this puppy even though there isn’t much to it.

Good Morning

I wicked overslept today. I wanted to get up before 6:00, do my yogging, play some guitar, have some breakfast, then check in with work. There’s a customer going through a huge project this weekend and there is a chance I could get called in to help out. I wanted a status update to make sure I’m in the clear (I am 99% sure I won’t get called now, things are going well).

Instead I slept until after 7:30. I still did all of that stuff, I just did it hours later than expected. I also changed the litter boxes and filled up the bird feeders and am currently on my second load of laundry. It’s been an active kinda day so far.

Now that all of that is out of the way, I should be able to spend some time mixing some music and writing some lyrics for what I hope will be a huge car music tomorrow morning. Fingers crossed on that one.

Pictures:

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I put leads on two songs using my SG and then switched to my Les Paul for the third and final song. I have now run out of songs that are ready for leads. There’s only one song remaining that is ready for rhythm guitar, but I am waiting on that one. I don’t know why, but I am. I am still sticking to the May Music Project plan of only using the new King of Tone pedal. I brought my stay-at-home pedal board out of the closet the other day but I haven’t set it up yet. I will use that once the faux 50/90 starts on the 4th of July. I think. I want to put the King of Tone onto the board too, in place of whatever overdrive is currently following the Klon KTR in the chain. I think it’s the Keeley D&M Drive right now, though I hate to put that one away. I need to see how The King plays with others.

Okay, more music updates later. I think. We’ll see.

Look What I Did

It was 10:30 at night. I still had 40% of my move goal left to do. Jen was asleep so I snuck down cellar and yogged for a while. Once my move goal was closed (stand and exercise goals had been closed for many hours by then) I took a little time to recover and then…

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That’s right, kids, the guitar playing streak is alive. I only played for about 10 minutes but it counts, babie!

18 Days and Counting

Magically, the streak of consecutive days where the guitar was played for at least a couple of minutes has reached 18. I put rhythm guitar tracks onto one of the final two songs from May. Only one more song to go. Last night I wrote lyrics for two of the June songs, and after I finished playing the gitter I wrote lyrics for a third. There will be car music tomorrow, though I am not sure how that schedule will work out.

I used the direct out from the Bassbreaker 15 amplifier. It calls it cabinet emulation, not simulation, but whatever. It sounds… okay. Not great. The little nutube Vox amp probably sounds better. I’ll stick with this for a while and see if it grows on me.

Pics:

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Grogu used The Force to turn the amp around. After weight loss surgery, I am no longer strong enough to lift a tube amp.
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As for tomorrow. Here’s the plan. I am going to get up at the ass crack of dawn and do the third Couch to 5k training. I expect I will die during that, but once it’s over I will go inside and eat breakfast and recover. Then after breakfast is done, and the one hour pause after eating before I can drink water again is also done, I’ll jump in the car, drive to a secluded place, and crank out some vocal tracks.

Hopefully. We’ll see if I can stick to that plan or not. Wish me luck.

I Forgot My Amp Did That

So all of this early morning guitar recording has been with the guitar plugged directly into my USB audio interface. No microphones are being used because no speakers are being used. It’s a fully headphone setup.

I have been running the guitar through an amplifier though. My little Vox MV50 has a direct output on the back that includes cabinet simulation. Normally when you use a line out of an amplifier it sounds dog-shit awful. Not long ago the idea of digitally simulating a speaker cabinet and sticking it onto your line out signal has become a very helpful thing. There are all sorts of digital modeling amplifiers that do it now. Some are big rack mount devices, some are as small as foot pedals. My little Vox amp is an attempt at a tube amp in a pedal sized box. It uses Nutubes, which is something Korg came up with a few years ago as an alternative to normal vacuum tubes. They work off the same principals but they are extremely low powered. I think they sound okay in the amp’s pre-amp stage, but the power stage is still solid state so it doesn’t really feel like a tube amp. It sounds good enough to use, but it’s not really the same.

Wouldn’t it be nice to have an actual tube amp with a line out that has a cabinet simulation? Wait a second… I think I actually have one of those! My Fender Bassbreaker 15 is a fully tube amp with exactly that kind of output on the back of the box. Why am I using the Nutube thing when I could be using the real sucker instead? Today I plugged it in and took the Fender’s cabinet sim for a spin. I think the Vox might sound better. I want to mess with it some more, but it doesn’t sound terribly good. It’s probably usable, but it’s a lateral move at best, if not a step backward. We’ll see.

I had completely forgotten about this, but when I first got the Bassbreaker amp I used the line out quite a bit for recording. When I got the Vox I used both of the amps in line out mode together for a two amp setup on an RPM Challenge. I think it was 2015 or 2016. It worked okay then. Maybe the thing to do going forward is split the signal to both amps and run with a two amp set up again. That could be fun. I mean, if I am stuck going direct again, maybe that’s something to keep things interesting. We’ll see. Next time I record rhythm guitars (tomorrow, I hope) I’ll use the Fender. Next time after that I might use them both. We’ll see.