Virtual Music - Online Collaboration

I've modified, improved and built MANY "screwdriver" guitars from scratch. It is a great learning experience and often you end up with a fun player that you don't really have to worry about - great for club gigs.  Read a few different posts online about leveling, crowning and polishing the frets. THAT'S where the rubber meets the road!!! You can have an ugly monstrosity of a guitar and if the neck plays great it's as good as anything.  When leveling frets, I highly recommend loosening the truss rod, level the frets with a fine toothed file, and then get a smaller 3 corner file and carefully use a sander or grinder to smooth out all three corners. Polish the corners shiny and smooth, mask off the fretboard and you can easily "round up" the fretwork so there is just a thin strip of the center top of the fret that shows the scratch marks from leveling. Then start with 120 grit sandpaper and just use your finger to apply pressure. Remove all the file marks, switch to 220 then 320, 400, 600 grits. Finally take some 000 steel wool and polish the frets up all shiny.    That is the most essential and important upgrade you can do yourself to all of your guitars. It will allow you to get lower action without buzzing and the polished frets will make stretching strings smoother and easier too. 

Among my many observations, there are so many VSTs that it is virtually impossible to parse even a fraction of them.    I'm certain that we all find our own preferences and some of those are pedals and tabletop units. Despite all the wonderful VSTs I've tried, I still prefer running a Focusrite ISA Two as a mic pre into 2 of the 4 mic inputs in my MOTU M6. The MOTU pres are very good on their own too. I get a good variety of mic tones that way.   There are also 2 TRS Line In channels on a MOTU M6 and those have a Tech 21 Q-Strip in one (my favorite EQ and fantastic on bass guitar) and a Tech 21 Para Driver DI in the other, which has a huge range of distortion levels, a Blend knob so you can meld clean and distortion tones together, a semi-parametric midrange, Air and a Rumble Filter.  Analog tweaky-deaky, good stuff. If you can get good sounds going in then you don't have to work too hard to bring up a mix.    Gotta give kudos the the Mic-Parts T-67 kit that I built, bang for the buck is off the charts, a great mic by any standard. I also use a Shure KSM8 dynamic, a Heil PR40 and a Blue Encore 300 (small diaphragm condenser mic). I also have and use a Rode M3 small diaphragm mic, an MXL 990 with with a Mic-Parts upgrade kit (capsule and circuit board) and an MXL 1006 with another Mic-Parts kit. I got all three capsules sold by Mic-Parts, the T-67 mic has the T-67 capsule and one of the MXL mics has the -47, the other has the T-12 capsule - so 2 Neumann clone capsules and one AKG clone. All 3 mics have transformer / JFet circuits and all of them sound lovely.    We are lucky to have such high quality gear available at low prices. Last but not least by any means, I would highly recommend a Furman P-8 PRO C power strip to run your audio goodies. Very clean, quiet power, 8 AC outlets in back and one in front. Rack mount but I set it under my monitor screen.    There's a bit more to it than that but maybe in another post or another thread. 

Theo, that sounds like it would sound great. 🙂  I think the approach of cross-compiling the graphics into something like SPICE is definitely the way to go.  Good luck!

Lol. I should have given that list a more deliberate read. Perhaps primed by the recent “What Discontinued Keyboard Bugs You the Most” thread, I went with “bug” as being an irritant. Not that software bugs aren’t irritating…

All I care about is that I cranked up the preset demo and it came at me like a T-Rex. Its pretty much brimming with the lush character to which we've become accustomed. Its also the most digitized synth to date, so each take on it will be subjective. I'm suffering from an inflamed Mac, so I'm not shopping for More, but I have to say that listening to it was like enjoying a sinful Italian meal made by angels. Damned if it didn't remind me of old music store thrills, playing Moogs, Jupiters and Obies for the first time. WIN.   

OT - just a comment on the original white face Oddy - I modified mine so I had an octave up/down switch. Also changed the pitch knob to one which had a notch sticking out so that I could curl my little finger round it and be confident that I could return it to the neutral position. And I managed to rewire the modulation slider on the first oscillator so that the second oscillator modulated too. It was all very ambitious of me, with not much real understanding of what I was doing, but it worked nicely. i hung onto it for years, only selling it off about 10 years ago. Nowadays I occasionally use the app on the iPad. It’s close enough for me.

Waaaay back when....I bought a white face ARP Odyssey off a friend of our drummer. Never had my eye on one, but it was a great deal and I needed one more synth for my rig. Probably did 200 gigs with it. I used it a ton, and it never let me down. I eventually sold it to help pay for a brand new DX7 when they first hit the streets. (Ya, it was that long ago) I honestly have never missed it - not even once, and would not buy another one, regardless of who makes it or how inexpensive they are. Too many better options out there these days. Odysseys always sounded a little too "thin" for my tastes. I much prefer a synth that can do "fat".....and any 37 note keyboards are generally an automatic  pass for me now.

I just bought one used two days ago.   I had in the past (a very past) the original ARP Odissey and an Avatar (the guitar version of the Odissey). They sounded quite differenti, and now I understand why: two different version of the filter. A friend of mine still have the all black one with coloured sliders, which Is again different, maybe two poles filter?   Anyway the Behringer sounds good but a bit differenti too.   My ARP had a ring modulator I used to build fabolous bell like sounds: metallic, full of harmonics.    The kind of sound you can hear on Japan Tin Drum or Oil on Canvas albums.   Until now I couldn't recreate this sound.    Neither the Avatar did. Just my ARP Odissey I sold for little Money :(