Yeah, i have never been able to summon up quite enough levels of GAF to bring a guitar body to a commercial grade level of sanding and paint finish, myself.

I am only going to beat the hell out of the thing anyhow. It is actually better for me if it starts out a bit sketchy.

I also like, perhaps a bit too much, looking at a thing i have done and just being completely unable to deny that i have smashed it together all myself by means of brute force and impatience. I like that process of leaving fingerprints, either literal or less so, all over the things i build.

Now tell me, is that body like a full size jazzmaster? Or is is smaller? Also, how heavy is the thing?

haha yeah that's definitely my way of working as well. I think it may be slightly smaller but I haven't played enough jazzmasters to say for sure. And I'm not sure on the weight, I'll weigh it all up when it's built. Doesn't feel excessive though. I'm done with all the coats of stain now, gonna start the oiling later. All the parts have turned up now so I should have it finished by the end of next week

Quick mock up. I'm now thinking maybe I should get a tortoiseshell guard later on down the line.

Huzzah for formerly high-end rack gear on-the-cheep. The following are not the specific specimens in question, but rather examples of the model. I picked up thusly:

a White Instruments 4100 10-band stereo inductor EQ


and a Yamaha Rev 7.


for grainy '80s digital 'verb and a bigass program equalizer.

Fuckin' score.

shit I 'member those Rev 7's. I had one. Fuck I am old.

I still see them from time to time in PA racks. They are the sound of my youf. (Or SPX 90 or similar. You know it when you hear it.) I intend on using it primarily for drums, though there's a few neat tricks it'll do outside of that. Did you use yours for guitars? Keys? Other?



Yeah, especially considering what I paid for 'em. They are slight fixer-uppers, but at about $130 for both together, I am not about to complain. The EQ is apparently a bit of a hidden gem; they used to be used for room tuning in high-end live sound applications, and on the large main monitors when studios still always had giant mains. Not crap; the current line o' stuff they make is quite pricey as well. But no one wants analog for those applications anymore (and large mains are a rarity), so these things have quietly found their way into studios alongside some serious outboard. A little research turned up some in mastering rigs. Mastering-grade EQ for seventy-five bucks? Yeah, I'll go there. Scratchy pots and a li'l hum can be fixed. The backlight is out on the Rev 7, but the display still works. Backlights are cheap.

It's Thunderdome time. Which wah will be victorious?

Well I was a bassist/keyboardist at the time so either of the two. I did have a fair amount of rack gear in my bass rig. but it was a bass/keys rig a huge rolling rack. Back in the bigger is betterer days. I know I used a rack delay for the bass, I don't remember which at the time. I do remember the Yamaha though...

I am becoming paranoid my recording rig/computer converters are fucking with the way my computer bounces down masters. A/B'ing a rendered out track versus one live in a session in different tabs is DEFINITELY different sounding to me.. Like, in a bad, bandwidth loss-y way...

Anyone have experience with this? Am I tricking myself maybe?

ALSO, are there any benefits of rendering out something that is 44.1 to 88.2? I just did it for shits and giggles and it didn't do anything seemingly unnatural or fucked up. I feel like my ears are too toasted from drumming and mixing to actually tell if it did anything good, but I MIGHT be placebo'ing a more broadband frequency response but IDK.

Usually, i find that this happens when i mix with a metric shitpile of compression on various elements of a mix.

I think that what happens is that it is simply impossible for the cpu, any cpu, to handle this shit in real time. So you mix based on what you hear which is based on what can be more or less computed in time for it to come out of the speakers, but this is a different thing to what comes out when it can do all of the calculations offline, even though the program might not show that the computations are overloading during live playback.

I definitely run into it continually though, especially when i am mixing things loud. Vocal and bass levels are particularly are difficult to pin down without multiple attempts especially, i find.

As far as the 44.1 thing, i personally think that it is pointless to do, but hey, i think a lot of this stuff is pointless to worry about.

It is also worth noting that the higher rates are slower to compute, so if the initial issues you are running into are CPU load/bandwidth based, then you might expect the difference between live playback and offline rendering to be even more accentuated.

I dunno.

If you're not downsampling on export, I wouldn't expect there to be any difference outside of various non-linearities you'd encounter from distortion or algorithmic 'verbs working in realtime. If you feel you're losing bandwidth, I'd check your settings?

Re: upsampling, there's an argument I've seen made that your plugins will sound better as you're pushing digital hash out of the audible range. With oversampling within plugins, I'm not sure that's as much of an issue these days. I think- I could be wrong- you'd have to re-import your tracks into a session at a higher sample rate for that to take place anyhow. Again, could be wrong.

If you want to be sure re: frequency response, look at the rendered mixes through something with a frequency analyzer. That will confirm what you're hearing- or aren't hearing. I just use FabFilter Pro Q when I want an analyzer, but I'm sure there's a freeware one somewhere.



I just finished restoring my console this evening. At least, as much as I can do without getting serious- or, really, having my friend who's an electrical engineer get serious- under the hood. But all pots, faders, and switches work without noise or scratchiness, all inserts, busses, and routing works, all the I/O works, though I have three broken locking XLR bits on input A for channels 6, 7, and 9. They have been covered with blue painter's tape and the switch for the B inputs engaged. Still needs a VU meter bulb replaced, as it's burnt out, but considering the meter bulbs date from the late '70s/early '80s anyhow, they all need to go. Drum tracking next weekend, for Garda and my own stuff. I am not lacking for quality mic pres these days, that's for certain. Got meself the AEA Stereo Protractor, two 10/20/30dB inline pads, and four phase reverse XLR adaptors as well. I realize you can just make the latter, but they were so stupid cheap from Full Compass it wasn't worth the effort.

The White Instruments EQ showed up today. Channel 1 sounds fantastic. 10 bands of sweet EQ from 31.5hz to 16khz, and a continuously variable HPF from 20hz to 160hz. Channel 2 is right buggered. It passes signal, but not even in a cool-broken sort of way. This can be fix'd. (See above.)

Also: my HM-2 is on the fritz. It's probably just dirty pots, but I can't coax anything even conventionally HM-2 "good" out of it at the moment. On the plus side, a broken HM-2 sounds fucking awesome. It's my favorite bass dirt, so I really want it working properly, but it makes a fine mangler in its current state.

Done gone and bought a DBX 286A today, just $95. Ain't done nothing with it yet, but will report back upon investigation.

Hmm. Found an old ElectroVoice computer subwoofer in my basement. Think I'mma DIY a subkick out of it...

Hell yeah, I've been intending to make one of thems out of the rando shit 12" speakers we got running around here.

We are getting mad horny on this recording biz, I tell ya.

I finally got round to buying a used V30. I hope it sounds good after all this procrastination I'll try it out tomorrow.

Also my band may be changing direction which I'm not happy about so I may have to try and find something else. They want to concentrate on the 60s rock niche. Not sure if it's my jam. Unless they want to go the garage punk/rock way of MC5 etc in which case it could be cool. I'mma give it a go for a bit anyway since there's some good songs from that era.

edit - the V30/H30 combo sounds good! Definitely a bit less scooped and fizzy sounding. Wondering whether I should go the whole hog and replace the other H30 with another V30 now though

edit 2 - yeah, the 60s band isn't gonna work for me. The songs they're proposing are gonna be so fucking boring to play, as were the two we went through last night. Back to the drawing board.

Man, that sucks. You had a good thing going there for a while. Finding decent bandmates is an endless struggle. Ever onward.

It's funny you mention the V30/H30 combo- my other guitarist in Garda just picked up that same combination of speakers the other night. He's planning on putting 'em in a convertible-back 2x12, Matchless/Bad Cat/Dr. Z-style. The second V30 will give you... Well, more V30-ness. To my ears they aren't as bright or harsh as people on the Internet like to claim- they read as all mids to me. Bright/harsh, to me, equals lots of top end, which V30s don't have so much of compared to other common guitar speakers. They work for a certain sort of thing; pretty tight, rather dry. YMMV. Some people hate 'em. They are application-specific. I'm not a big fan of them clean.



Drum sessions coming up tomorrow for some Garda stuff and my solo record that sat on the shelf for a few years whilst the State University of New York decided I was a competent historian. Back to the more important business of making rock records. Many photos and clips should be arriving in a few days.

I think a 2nd one would perhaps be too much mid, it's got a nice balance now and doesn't have as much harsh high end, nor sound as scooped.

About the band, ive already managed to find another guitarist and drummer who are up for playing the same kinda music. So I've just gotta fill in on bass again til we find someone. And a singer. Ugh. Sometimes it seems more hassle than it's worth. I've also been in touch with a singer and bassist who loves his stoner rock stuff so perhaps my dream of an original band may still have some legs.

Ps - if you've seen the news today, please rest assured that I was not a xenophobic racist "leave the EU" voter

I think the best comment I've seen so far re: Britain leaving the EU was something along the lines of "now the UK will take the next ten years rebuilding to where they just were." Nationalism, it seems, is hip again these days. We tried that a hundred years ago and it kinda sucked.


We drumulated earlier. Thusly:




When I've copied the pictures off my dumbphone, I'll post some more. There's a great one from the far back of the room for perspective- there's what, probably fifty feet of space after that stage. And I'm set up next to a grand piano. With a Tigger blanket on it. Not ours. But someone left it on the piano. There's a third piano on the other side of the room as well. Sessions should- fingers crossed- finish up tomorrow.

The drummer is great. I've known him since... Seventh grade? He was good when we jammed in high school. He's pretty monstrous now. Extra points for one-foot heel-toe doubles as he "can't play double bass". He really brings a lot of life to these songs.

Mic selection was pretty standard decent stuff. SM7B* in the kick, modded Oktava 319 outside**, homemade subkick. Plain old 57 on the snare- we didn't like the i5- with an AKG 451 gaffer taped to it. No bottom snare mic- not needed in that room. Toms are AKG 414 and Sennheiser 421s. Hats are an AKG C1000. Overheads are Rode NT5s on an ORTF bar. Room mic is my Blue Baby Bottle off-axis about 20 feet back.

*- The SM7 is a great kick mic. You should try it sometime.

**- I didn't place the front-of-kick mic. My friend Jim did. He was inspired to move it back a few feet, and it sounds great there. Adds some nice tone of the actual drum and a cool midrange thing. Loved it- and I usually ditch the outside mic in a mix. This I'm keeping. Clips will be poasted.