General Music Chat

I've been checking out Hunter's post in Tech discussion about noise and so forth, did a little tinkering to see how my solid state RMS practice amp would do. Uploaded a couple of things just doodling around a little to see what kind of sound it would get.

Gain Doodles:
Cort CL 1500, RMS practice amp on high gain channel, no effects, no editing except the fade out. Tascam Portastudio 414 cassette deck, bypassed the cassette and just ran the line signal into Audacity on a Win98 computer. Nady mic, not great but works pretty well.

Gain doodles 2:
Same rig but on the clean channel, Ibanez SD 9 Sonic Distortion pedal. Same guitar.

Slide Raunch:
Same setup as gain doodles 2, but used the '45-'47 Electromuse lap steel.

These aren't great recordings, and aren't intended to be actual songs, just doodling around a bit to see how the solid state practice amp will do for low volume recording.

this is also my first attempt at recording electric guitar on the computer, all my previous recordings were done by the old ping pong method with a reel to reel and a CD recorder or another tape deck. I think they didn't turn out too bad for a first try and don't have a clue what I'm doing...the picture of the amp in the pictures section is the settings used for Gain Doodles, using the distortion channel. The other two were done on the clean channel with the Ibanez SD9 and the treble had to be pulled back a bit to get decent tone.

See what you think...at least now you guys will know I can actually play a little instead of just talking about it... hehe

I have a lil RMS practice amp, too, Pete. Love it.

Good tones.

Nice crunch there Billy. You may try hard not to say "ya'll" but it comes out of your guitar pretty plain to me.

Pretty cool overtones in "Gain Doodles 2" Pete.

Yeah, I like Gain Doodles 2 the best. Cool tone and good playing.
Slide stuff is pretty groovy too.

Thanks "y'all" I appreciate it. Nobody noticed the coolest lick of all, then again I didn't think it projected well to begin with. The last note of the slide thing was actually a harmonic, I then laid the bottle down on the strings and did the downward slide. I stumbled on that trick by accident at a party in Huston about 78 or so. I used a zippo lighter to learn slide, didn't even know they made slide bars and hadn't run across a good bottle, so I used my lighter between middle and ring fingers. Ended a song that night with the same harmonic at the octave and just wondered if I could make it slide too...to my surprise it worked, on an acoustic, so I've been doing it ever since.

My favorite of the sounds is gain doodles 1, that's just such a heavy sound I had to listen to it a dozen times the first playback. It surprised me how well the lows came out of the little 8" speaker. Gotta try the Champ now. I knew it was a keeper, might even make a decent song if I tried to work it out a little and come up with some chord changes that would fit, maybe even something better than the typical I, IV, V scenario but so far I haven't thought up anything good for it. I also really like the overtones in doodles 2, especially right at the first, I always wish that would come out better onstage, but usually the secondary overtones are lost in the mix. I'd also like to put Rollin and Tumblin together, always liked that one...

I won't be doing much else real soon, I need to work some more on the acoustic fingerpicking thing neanderpaul wants to put together and I'm having hell trying to figure out the middle changeup, the rest is no problem except for trying to match the guy's fingerpicking, I can't seem to get it just right yet, might not ever be able to. That's the toughest part for me, copying someone else's fingerpicking style is almost impossible sometimes. But it's an interesting challenge and a pretty cool little chord progression, maybe I can get it close enough. But that's what I need to focus on for now, see if I can get it close enough paul can do something with it.

Then again I keep wondering what the Champ would sound like...

Oh yeah...sanshouheil...

I LIKE IT when the southern boy comes out in my guitar. You can probably tell I was greatly influenced by Billy Gibbons, Van Wilks, Johnny Winter, Duane Allman, Rick Derringer and all the other southern rockers. (I don't even know some of their names...38 special, skynyrd, etc) Gary Rossington is the only one I remember from skynyrd but all 3 were excellent players. Allen Collins was it? Add David Gilmour to the mix, Clapton, Beck, Knopfler and Page and a few other british players and I think I have a pretty interesting style after working on it for many years. But the southern boy still comes out the best...what you heard here was just whatever popped into my head when I started to doodle, I'd work on it for a few minutes and try to record it. All the leads in gain doodles 2 were right off the top of my head except for the 1st few notes, I already knew that was how I wanted to work into the leads. After the first half dozen notes I had no idea where it would go...

gtzip:

I'm glad you like that one, I like it too but have never been able to do much with it. That particular riff works pretty well in E, it's not bad when I go to A, but I can't get it to work out too well in B at all so I haven't been able to turn it into a song. Sounds like a good riff, but my fingers just won't cooperate when I try to go to different chords, and can't find anything that really works well with it. I've played around with that riff a few times, I like it but can't seem to work it into anything but a good riff...it's really frustrating. I'm still running through ideas though, something might click one day...