Chip McDonald

I'm really curious about the IK Multimedia Sunset Sound plugin. Can you get "those" sounds out of it? Does the "new" convolution engine sound better? Is it a Volterra kernal based product? Memory/CPU hog?

I found using a bridge single coil with it a massive high pass almost to 300hz, peak cut at the pickup resonance, into a clipper, into an L1 type compressor made a drastic difference in consistency with it (I think they incorporated some of that in the last release, I know it has presets for single/humbucking now, right?). They need DAW specific installers, it's super confusing initially to set up.

I think we're in for a backlash against skeumorphic "virtualized" software, and emulations. The Neural amp sim would be a harbinger for that, and the popularity of the Izotope products with their "modern" looking UIs - as more and more people become educated to guitar and studio sounds based on spectral character instead of "you use that box with the Fender logo to make that kind of sound". Which I actually think is a loss, because there are real reasons the classic devices ARE classics. Decades of evolution of process of using an 1176 for one thing, Neve for another is based on real outcomes. People will move away and drift backwards to less than satisfactory paradigms, like the person that wants a Tweed Bassman sound. but wants it to come out of his Orange half stack.

I lament the lost of MP3.com. I quickly made $$$$ with zero promotion, had people contacting me from all over the planet, and then one morning... ...I pull up the website and Madonna is on MY landing page, and a few days later I can't log in, then everything goes away. Music and musicians have been devalued today, like an Ansel Adams poster hanging in a bathroom at a restaurant. The context of "appreciation of quality" is no longer present. In it's place is "Evaluation of Adequacy": how many check boxes does the music tick? Then it's "ok". That's all. Hence people have no problem with a band that is basically taking the Zeppelin catalog and repurposing it, because they're adequately ticking boxes, and therefore it's "good". People are also numbed from being bombarded with crushed audio, constant dopamine stimulation from social media (that a.i. is literally steering people towards things that create dopamine responses), and the constant inflow of information/stimulation. The dopamine resultant from listening to music for music's sake is reduced in scale. Dopamine weariness.

My last Dunlop wah pedal was killed at a gig long ago when some MMA fighters were in town and decided to start throwing 300 lbs. oak tables around the room for fun, one landing on my wah and literally bending the metal shell. Just as well, Voodoo Chile is too trendy now and I don't play in cover bands anymore. I'd prefer a Vox 845 or Teese if it was free.

Albinoni/Giazott's Adagio in Gm. Some Carpenters songs. Depending, just about anything that is fundamentally great.

Valhalla Room. Algorithms ftw. Although I'm quite anxious to try the IK Multimedia Sunset Sound plugin....

It's curious to see what has changed. I think I was using Cool Edit at the time, but... I now champion a DAW made by the programmer of WinAmp (Reaper). Cakewalk, the first program I did Primitive First Steps with Digital Audio, is now "free" as Sonar. ....and my VS-880 I saved and paid so much for is worth nothing. Hah. But Roland is still making obfuscated musical products. "Hah". Sigh.

This crazy nutter Chip "Nostradamus" McDonald posted "here" almost 20 years ago... (holy frak...).. in a thread Craig started called "Napster: the End of the Record Biz There was another forum a little before this time of that post, it's apparently evaporated from the internet, that had Alan Parsons, George Massenburg, and... maybe Roger Nichols and ... a few other Big Name Guys I don't recall at the moment. In that forum I was basically asking them as a whole to push DVD-audio, surround as a standard for car stereos (making a larger file format, making the internet a more difficult medium for it), because otherwise MP3 technology was going to wipe out the industry. Of which they found amusing, since "nobody will choose to listen to an inferior sound" and "nothing is going to be easier to use than a CD!" etc.. Hmm. Maybe it's not surprising that has disappeared from the InterToobs. Taylor Swift? Frozen? Ahrgh. I should have wrote "most important". The funny thing here is that they're trying to game Spotify/Apple Music/Google Music, and still getting blindsided by Bolts From the Blue. R.I.P. Allan. I was inversely right about that, a new Communist attitude did arise: "music should be free!". A predictable result of devaluing quality. An interesting curve: 1) Music and musicians were valued, records/cds bought and paid for. 2) It became available for "free". 3) Industry laid down and tried to compete by being cheaper and cheaper in artist development. During this period a watershed event happened. I had a student bring in a song to learn on his IPod - it was something off of one of *my* cds I'd had on MP3.com. He'd gotten it off of Napster of all things, but didn't have any quarrel with bringing it to me having done that. 4) The industry reacts too late and allows streaming to happen. Music is now officially worth nothing. So last year a student brought something I'd had on Spotify in, and of course it costs nobody anything at all these days. 5) Music is marginalized as either a lost art, or an activity akin to throwing a baseball around. Yikes. Here's the funniest bit, something I think I tried to get across to the aforementioned panel of Industry Names but were unbelieving: Yikes.

It's interesting he chose to do that. Ghosn was big on Renault's Formula 1 car racing team (head of Renault), and it's occurred to me a number of times that each of these F1 teams packs all of their stuff into gargantuan road cases, and then the Formula-1 infrastructure for the "show" - enough to fill 6 chartered jumbo planes, sometimes 7. Plus cargo shipping. From a smuggling standpoint, it presents a unique opportunity I think. They go literally everywhere to race: Russia, Azerbaijan, Turkey, U.S., Abu Dhabi, China - 2,000 tons of road cases. ....and with thousands of people, and with some... sketchy oligarchs involved. Oil magnates, Russian mining oligarchs, Italian "businessmen", etc.. Ghosn being a sketcher himself. I would be highly surprised if smuggling isn't tied into Formula 1 transport at some point. Weapons, nuclear material, whatever. Ghosn thinks to hide in a case? "Hmmm...."

Thanks Craig, Geoff. Going to look around now.

Member #22 here. Wow. Hello Craig, everyone else... What a nostalgia trip! It looks like most of the content is back? Interesting lesson: content online is ephemeral. "Here" can go away. A law, as far as I'm concerned: Once an online community reaches a particular population amount - the S/N ratio plummets exponentially. The thing about "here" that was novel is that the S/N ratio never got too bad, somehow. Facebook ran me off a few years ago. Twitter is a political battleground at the moment, a Mos Eisley of Establishment propaganda and Peasantry Dunning-Kruger assertion. Other online forums have become hunkered down with very narrow focuses and belief systems. For a long while I had morphed over to the Cockos/Reaper forum, but it reached that bad S/N crest a few years ago and has become .... aggravating. Maybe I'll come back in here some for a respite....

Hey Myles.. I've got an old Gibson GA40 that sounds great *to me* - super dark, warm and thick... Except.. Works fine at a low volume. Turn it up and it starts oscillating, the higher you turn it up the higher the pitch. Not a motorboating sound, but a loud constant low pitch that will rise if you turn the volume up, a feedback sort of effect. New-ish tubes, don't seem to be microphonic. I presume something is failing, grid resistors? I'm not getting false notes (at lower volumes).. My questions are: A) How much would it be to blue print it (I'm broke now, but hopefully at some juncture...) and... B) With everything new - non carbon resistors, etc., do you think it will get brighter, or just "quieter"? C) What tubes could I put in it to make it even *darker* still? D) If I put a new AC cord on it, I only need to solder the ground to the chassis, or would a specific point on the chassis be better? (the stock AC cord is actually bare at some points.. I had to use electrical tape to cover some of it...) I love the way it sounds now - I've never heard an amp that sounds as dark, swampy and warm as it.. Had to stick a crappy Eminence speaker in it after frying the stock Jensen, that made it even darker.. But I haven't heard one of these old GA series amps "fresh", so I don't know how it would sound reconditioned... The thing is, it's so cool sounding I almost don't even want to mess with it so I can use it for recording certain gritty lead sounds at a low level.. ?

Myles: Just skimmed your tube essay/dissertation... fantastic work! I need to find the time to sit dow n with it an really absorb, great detail, very interesting...

Ok, here's one of those "should be in a book but isn't" questions: I've noticed over the years... that when you first start using a tube amp after having not had it turned on in "a while", it'll make intermittant, static-like low-level noise - which, after a while, will go away. With regular use, stops. Doesn't come back. I've noticed this with all different types of amps. Amps that come into the store I teach at, a guy goes "listen to this:"... I say "leave it on and go get lunch, then come back" ... no more noise. I presume this is moisture in the filter caps burning off? It gets really really humid here in the sow-yuth; tubes wouldn't fix themselves, right? It seems like I should know this for sure, but I'm not sure so.... there you go...

Ok, here's a typically Chip off the wall angle: Is it possible to make X-rays with a rectifier tube? If so, is it possible to be receiving lose-doses of x-rays when near tube-rectified amps... ?

(Taking advantage here) What are the center frequencies and q's of the tone controls on the following amps/FX? Just out of curiousity to see it side by side in one place... Marshall Super Lead Fender Deluxe; Twin; Super Boogie Dual Rect Vox AC30/Top Boost Gibson GA-40 (just because I have one and I'm curious if you happen to know by some weird chance (and would be very impressed if you did)) Ampeg SVT Ibanez TS line Boss DS-1; OD-1 Fuzz Face Just curious...