GRollins

Our current socio-political situation has given certain sorts of people the all-clear to come crawling out from under their rocks. They were that way all along, secretly, but now they're publicly revealing themselves to be...er...nasty, shall we say. They like being that way and have no intention of changing, so don't waste the time and effort to try to get them to change. Hatred, fear, and paranoia rule their world views. Logic, reason, and science have no place in their lives. Germs are inconvenient and so are deemed to be overrated or a hoax. If you or your family get sick because of their attitude problems, then what? They apologize and that makes it all better? I don't think so. What if you or one of your family members die of Covid because of them? Was it worth it? Combine that with the racial animosity and it seems clear that they're akin to fair weather friends. They're only good to be around as long as the weather is clear. The weather turns and they're not such good friends anymore. Yuk. Run. It's unfortunate, but it's not worth your health and potentially your life. You're not opting out of their lives, they're opting out of yours. Grey

In the stereo world, there's a rule of thumb that says the better the music, the worse the recording and vice versa. Yes, there are exceptions, but it's true enough that you shouldn't set your expectations too high when you see a new album released by someone you like. Out of the untold tens, nay, hundreds of thousands of albums in the world, you would be hard pressed (*ahem*) to find a single thousand--of all genres combined--that have both great music and great sound quality. Regarding classical and jazz--note that some of the best albums ever recorded, sound quality-wise, were done in the late mono through early stereo era on the luscious sounding tube gear. Don't turn away from albums recorded from, say, 1955 to 1965. In the mid to late-'60s, they started tearing out all the good tube stuff and putting in solid state equipment. "Less noise! Lower distortion! More reliable! More modern!" BLEH! The top names, Sinatra, et. al., came in and said this stuff sounds like shit, gimme the gear we had last time. So the crappy sounding stuff got palmed off on the upstart rock acts, which is part of why the early rock recordings sound so horrible. They didn't have the clout to demand the good stuff. Then we had to go through the same process all over again when digital came in, but that's another story for another day. It's no accident that some of the best current manufacture recording gear out there is tubed. What was once old is new again... Grey

Glad to see that the aluminum stand will do the trick, but I'll throw in a few notes in case someone else is considering building a stand: --PVC works well as a structural material. The desk this PC is on is two levels of 3/4" plywood on 2" diameter, Schedule 40 PVC. Something on the order of 30 years old and still going strong. --I've stood on this desk many times, in addition to the weight of all the various hardware that I keep on it. Nary a problem. Very strong in compression. If it fails, it will be under an angular or torsion load, not compression. --If you make the PVC long enough, it will flex somewhat. How much depends on the wall thickness (aka Schedule), diameter, and length. Sorta like bamboo. --Although I have a table saw, a miter saw, and a band saw, I usually use a pipe cutter to cut PVC. Yes, the kind you would usually use to cut metal pipe. It gives a good, clean end without fuzzies and is safe (and a lot cheaper to buy). It does take a little longer to cut--crank the handle, turn-turn-turn, crank, turn-turn-turn, etc. but it's portable and can be used in situ. Quite accurate, too. Does not fling static-charged PVC "sawdust" all over the room...which is a bitch to clean up, by the way, because it clings desperately to absolutely everything. --PVC will take paint, but the paint scratches off relatively easily. --I used threaded joints in three places so I could break this desk down. Be aware that threaded PVC joints can seize after years together. Try silicone spray as a lubricant, or maybe a Teflon lubricant if you're going to make a knock-down stand. --I don't recommend depending on a friction fit at joints. --Be aware that T and L fittings are designed with an offset (5 degrees or so?) so as to keep waste water flowing. When gluing 90 degree joints together, you'll need to offset the pipe a smidgen to counter that. Don't worry, it works out okay. --That said, I'm using 80/20 extruded aluminum struts for (semi-)permanent stuff at this point. Strong enough to support a car and looks cool in a techno way. They've got different grades/strengths, but even the weakest is overkill by a thousand percent. Unfortunately, even the lightest grade is heavier than most people will want to carry for playing out, but for home or studio use it can't be beat. Buy it off of eBay rather than pay full price. There are other companies that make similar products--I just happened to get started with 80/20. Grey Edit: Note that I absolutely adore the tubular aluminum stands, but you can't find that stuff at any price around here. There's one guy who goes around and scrapes all the flea markets, then sells the stuff out of his home at a huge markup. I had a bad experience with him--two, actually--and swore off of further dealings with him. Other than him, there's nothing. The last time I saw an Ultimate Stand on Craig's List (other than the asshole guy) was maybe five years ago. Maybe longer. If you guys can find it, go for it. I wish they still made it.

Possibility: At higher volumes you start rocking out and don't pay as close attention as you do at lower volumes. I'd rather play in front of 10,000 people than one person. A crowd gives you energy that one can't, but with one there's still someone to hear your mistakes. I only had stage fright one time. It made no sense because we'd played the same place two or three nights in a row before that night without a hitch. Came out of the blue. Weird. Never since. I just reread the Dune books--all the Frank ones, not the Brian ones--a month or two ago. First time in ages. I was amazed/ashamed at how much I'd forgotten. Some parts are etched indelibly in my mind, but it seems that perhaps others aren't as well anchored. Of course, it had been...crap...twenty or thirty years since I'd read 'em. Grey

I started a thread a while back with a link to Dave Grohl playing a prog rock piece he wrote...all the instruments. Pretty cool. Grey

Me, too. Back when I was starting, left-handed instruments were special order only and cost more. I just went with what was available. I remember the first time I saw a left-handed bass...thought something was wrong with it! Grey

I happen to be fond of raccoons. My local wildlife place won't take adult raccoons under any circumstances, and really doesn't want to take babies, either. I took a baby raccoon in last year and they put it down, just 'cause. Had I known, I'd have tried to take care of it myself--at least that way it would have had a chance. Now, mind you, they're super high on possums for some reason. Love them to pieces. Talk them up at every turn--how pretty they are. How they eat ticks. How tractable they are. Let them wander loose in their facility. But make no mistake, they do NOT like raccoons--some sort of edict handed down from on high. Whoever's in charge has a thing about raccoons. Snakes, turtles, frogs, birds, you name it...they like everything but raccoons and I was unable to get a rational explanation why. (No, it's not rabies...they're quite happy to take care of any number of other mammals that are potential rabies carriers.) I learned my lesson, but unfortunately it cost a life for me to get up to speed. Be aware that not all wildlife places are equal opportunity when it comes to various species (but yes, they took good care of a broken-winged female woodpecker I took them). Grey

I've loved music since I was knee-high to a grasshopper, as the expression goes. I started on a borrowed set of drums, but couldn't get happy with them. Later, a friend of mine suggested I try bass. That took. Somewhere right about that same time, Stairway To Heaven came out and I became infatuated with the guitar intro, so I bought a guitar. I didn't put in enough effort to get good at it; bass remained my main thing. Years passed. I got married. My (now-ex) wife wasn't real keen on me playing and I kinda-sorta quit, though I kept some gear. That wife went away and I slowly got back into playing music. A while back I decided to get more serious about getting the music that I heard in my head organized. That lead to me spending more time on guitar and buying my first keyboard as a compositional aid. Both guitar and keyboards became money magnets for a while, but I've finally reached a point where I have sufficient hardware to make the sounds I hear in my head, and then some. Somewhere along the way I picked up a good hammered dulcimer, a cheap viola, a cheap mandolin, and a few other odds and ends. Unfortunately, I don't have the time to play all the stuff I've got. In fact, I've hardly been able to play at all the last few months, what with my family underfoot 24/7. I did manage to steal about three or four hours Friday for the first time since...March(?), but it was pretty pathetic. My hands scarcely remember how to play strings, let alone other instruments. I know from experience that I can get up to tolerable proficiency on bass in about four to six hours from a standing start, but the problem there is that I've lost my calluses. Guitar and keys don't take calluses, but they're not my main instruments. I sure hope someone gets a good vaccine for Covid going soon so I can send my family back to school and work--I need the peace and quiet. Grey

I 'bout near wore the grooves smooth on my copy of Steppenwolf Live. Love that album. Grey

Ironically, while others have too much time on their hands, I have less than before lockdown. My wife is home 24/7 and the kids have been home for months with no clear idea as to when they'll go back to school in the physical sense. Yes, it's summer now and they'd be home anyway, but they were out of school for something on the order of three months before that. With my family underfoot, I don't get to listen to the stuff I'd like to listen to (at the volumes I'd like). My wife is okay with my musical tastes, but the kids complain. For their sake I don't listen to much except in my shop and even then at low volumes. This lockdown thing is much harder on them than it is on me, so I try to make it easier on them if I can. That said, I pretty much listen to the same sorts of things that I always listen to--no change, really. What that says about me, I'm not sure. Yeah, I'll try a YouTube suggestion once in a while, or a link that someone posts here, perhaps, but I haven't found anything that's made much of an impression on me. I like rock, jazz, and classical. For whatever reason, I tend to listen to one category at a time. For quite some time now I've been listening to rock, but I find myself thinking about classical, so it may be time to shift over. But the thing is, that's the way it's always been for me. Nothing new. Grey

I confess to a short infatuation with Starcastle, but then I saw them open for Boston in Durham. The word lame was insufficient to describe their performance...somebody hand me a thesaurus and I'll look up a hundred synonyms. That was the beginning of the end of my Starcastle thing. Grey

Head East got played plenty back when I was living up in NC in the '70s, but when I moved down here there was a vast...and I mean vast...cultural difference and they were playing an entirely different kind of music--pop or disco/dance. Nothing else. It was years before someone started an actual rock station. Jazz? Classical? (My other two preferred musical styles.) Whuzzat? Okay, the NPR station would play classical, but only at night--out of the available NPR formats, they only did the talk and news stuff during the day. A friggin' musical wasteland. Still is, for that matter. I've been spending a lot of time in my shop recently, finishing a build on a 5-string bass. The only thing I've got for music is an ancient boom box. The CD player no longer works and I no longer have any cassettes (and don't know if the cassette player works, anyway). That leaves radio if I want music. There's a guy who's on in the afternoons on weekends who's interesting, but all the other shifts are nothing but an endless loop of AC/DC played by DJs who all sound the same, talk the same, and have the same boring patter even though they're trying to be individuals and personalities. Nauseating, actually, but it's quite literally the only station I can get that plays rock. There's one other local rock station that trends towards more pop-ish stuff, but their signal isn't strong enough to get into the basement where my shop is, so... Yes, I could set up some "real" stereo gear, but I'm afraid that the sawdust wouldn't do it any good. Probably what's killing the boom box, truth be known. Should have taken better care of it, I guess, but hindsight is 20/20. Grey

The 2600 was supposedly going to be released in...April, I think it was. Superbooth in Berlin. Three months ago, tomorrow. You guessed it...crickets chirping. Yes, I know there's Covid 19 and trade wars with China and this and that, but the thing is that the lockdown stuff didn't really begin in earnest until just before the 2600 was due to be released. If there was really that much still to be done right at the last friggin' moment, then the product wasn't ready for release and they shouldn't have set the date. And if there was, say, a week or two or three's worth of work to do, then surely the intervening three months would have sufficed to get the job done, even at half-staff levels to allow for social distancing. Or work from home. Or whatever. And the Model D took, like, forever to get out on the streets, and that was after it was actually, for sure, truly released. (That said, the Model D is a lot of fun. I've got two and love 'em, but the bottom line is that the rollout was botched.) In short, I'm not going to get real excited over a vaporware 2500 that won't materialize for another year...or two...or three... Grey

I hadn't thought of this song in years. It gets no airplay around here, but then there are scads of things that don't get airplay that probably ought to. Whoever does the programming for the local rock station thinks AC/DC warrants a third (or more) of the available play time. By the time you backfill with Green Day and Tom Petty, all the other tunes of the last fifty years get about one song per day...okay, maybe two...if they're lucky, and that includes such no-name bands as the Stones, Zeppelin, Hendrix, etc. You know...the throw-away stuff. Never much liked AC/DC, and being force fed the stuff gets old. Can't think of a single song of theirs that I like. Okay, back to Head East. For some reason I'm thinking I might have seen them as backup for someone in the late '70s--can't remember who. I'll have to think about it. The OP's comment about "Geddy Lee-like vocals" was spot-on. I'd never made that connection, but now that it's been said I'm in complete agreement. It'll be difficult for me to not think that the next time I hear them...sometime around the year 2030... Grey

I standardized on 19" racks. I've got so much other electronic gear that's 19" it would drive me crazy to have some other standard in the house. Of course, that meant that I had to get a bunch of Euro/19" adapters, but it's worked out for me. I used 80/20 bars (see www.8020.net for more info) to build a sorta steampunk-ish rack with two 19" bays side-by-side--if I recall correctly, I set it up with 14U per side--that also supports the MIDI keyboard that I (re)built from the dead Kurzweil K2500. For the time being my mixer is in there too, but if I get more electronics it'll have to find somewhere else to live. The synth stuff is a mix of Eurorack and things that are already 19", like a Moog Voyager RME, plus utility do-dads such as a tuner, a MIDI controller, power distribution, etc. Grey

Currently up on eBay: eBay auction for Keith Emerson's Model D Apparently, he had a Minimoog modified so that the keyboard could sit with his stage rig while the electronics sat elsewhere. The opening bid is nearly $10k, so I won't be bidding...and I'm not sure I would anyway, as I've got roughly the same functionality with a Behringer Model D plus the MIDI keyboard that I built out of the old Kurzweil. But... Keith Emerson never played my rig either, so there's the historical aspect to be considered. Maybe there's still some of his DNA on the thing and it might somehow graft onto my DNA and give me (in some pseudo-scientific, mumbo-jumbo sort of way) Superhero Playing Powers . If I could play even one tenth as well as Emerson, it might be kinda awesome. Okay, maybe I should reconsider bidding... Grey

There are bunches of variations on this theme. My favorite is the one where the cops are leaning on a criminal, trying to get him to 'fess up. No luck. Then they bring in the bass player...and...you can guess the rest. Naturally, the underlying theme to all the jokes (and they are legion) is that bass players are at the bottom of the heap, musically. <sigh> We're worse off than Rodney Dangerfield. Grey

bandmix.com is dominated by guitarists and hostile to keyboard players. They run down keyboard players when their posts get deleted from their forums. Of course you've not seen it, they engage in censorship before anybody can witness it. This is not diminishing returns. This is your elitist disposition talking because you refuse to admit that someone other than guitar players dared to offer a solution to the problem. You admitted that when you found it curious that keyboard players were in possession of secrets that guitar players didn't know. You had nothing to reply when attenuators suck yet I countered that no guitar player complained of Tom Scholz using one. You had nothing to reply when asked when does the hair splitting become insignificant. You had nothing to reply when I countered that many keyboardists play their EPs through tube guitar amps quite frequently. Your answer was to walk away. You're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem. So long, coward. I don't engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed person. Want a reply? Okay. Rather than waste my time writing a lengthy post to break it down for you, I'll simply suggest that you (or anyone else who happens to be interested) Google "cone breakup." Or "Chladni patterns," just to look at pretty pictures. The driver's cone ceases behaving as a piston. It happens when you get loud. I guess they didn't cover those when you were getting your EE. It's the nonlinear stuff that matters when you're talking about guitar amps and speakers at volume, not tame little RCL networks. There are other points as well, but cone breakup alone is enough to break [*ahem*] any 'rational' argument you might attempt to make into pieces so small they'd make dust look huge. Add the other stuff and it's beyond slam dunk. Battle of wits with an unarmed mind? You lost. Clearly this is an emotional thing with you, but there are rational aspects (albeit chaotic) that will explain it all. It's called "physics" not "elitist." Have fun learning, though. It's kinda cool to figure this stuff out, but you'll have to work your way past your anger issues first. Grey

For the final verse, the dog needs to take the truck and run off, taking the girl with him. The dog sits on a bale of hay to see over the dashboard while driving. (What the dog & girl do in their private time is beyond the scope of this forum...) Grey

{Puts on bass-player hat} From my perspective, I'd say it depends on the style of music and--importantly--whether the bass player plays acoustic or electric. An electric rock bass solo is going to be an entirely different animal than an acoustic jazz solo. Anyone playing electric has volume and tone options (more treble to cut through, for instance) and can comfortably dominate keys, guitar, etc. for the duration of the solo. Acoustic players have fewer options and may benefit from less competition, instrumentally and sonically. All their volume is supplied manually and they may reach their limit (unless mic'ed) if there's too much else going on. The worst case scenario being a big band--much better to have most...possibly everyone back off so the bass can be heard, as even light playing by a dozen people can bury an acoustic bass. The bass player may have some things that work well with chords in the background giving structure and others that need more space...even from the same player...so it'll vary. There's not necessarily a one-size-fits-all solution. Something I was thinking about just this afternoon while I was listening to the radio in my shop (they played Rush--I think it was Tom Sawyer(?) that started my train of thought)--it's rare to hear a full-on bass solo where everyone else is still playing full-on, the way that you're accustomed to hearing a guitar solo while the rest of the band is still going. Even in rock, the rest of the band typically falls way back or quits playing entirely. Someone who plays with a trebley tone like Geddy Lee doesn't need that much space in order to get his solo across. His tone can cut through the guitar and drums easily. If he played acoustic, it would be an entirely different matter. Grey

Like you, I've not seen other musicians running down keyboard players; it seems to be a KC thing to bash guitarists. There are numerous more technical points I could make (bassists have to contend with Fletcher-Munson curves, for instance), but it's clearly an emotional issue with some people and it's just not worth the angst. I've reached the point where this is clearly a diminishing returns thread, so I'm going to bow out. You folks have fun. Grey

I'm going to ask one question: have you or have you not personally tried this GT Speaker Emulator? By "personally" I mean actually hooked it to your guitar amp using a good guitar and played the emulator through a sound system with decent quality, not by assessment from YT videos or opinions formed on discussion forums or from other players. Your statement "if you folks have found attenuators that you're happy with" implies you have not tried every emulator on the market and have formed the generalized blanket assessment "they have another name-- "tone suckers"." Have you or have you not tried this speaker emulator? http://www.analoguediehard.com/studio/guitars/groove_tubes-speaker-emulator/groove_tubes-speaker-emulator-stock.jpg If I'm not mistaken, there was an amplified version of that emulator--low power, maybe 20-40W or so? A friend of mine had one. I played with it. It was interesting, but like all the other soi disant solutions to the amp problem, it was its own thing, not a Marshall/Fender/whatever replacement. Note that this was long before YouTube as those things are old as hell. I find it curious that keyboard players are somehow in possession of secret knowledge that guitar players do not have--that there are effects pedals, emulators, power soaks, etc. that somehow, mysteriously, guitar players have never heard of. Oh, wait, that's right...guitar players actually know about them, but because they're arrogant assholes, they refuse to use them. Willful ignorance. Got it. Er...not so. At least, not everybody. Yes, there are going to be guitar (or other instrument) players who are going to play loud (drummers, jeez...), regardless, but not everyone. I mean, there are real world considerations such as newborn children, significant others, neighbors, landlords, et. al. who put significant pressure on said guitar players to keep it down. Some people, like me, just don't play loud that often anyway--but would do so if they could without messing up their hearing. If there was a real world, practical product that would do the trick, guitar players (and bass players, who face similar problems, but also have a whole 'nother realm of worries) would be all over it. Ain't happened yet. For those who are kinda-sorta following along, let me point out that there are other factors involved that you're not going to be able to emulate with any combination of resistors, capacitors, and inductors. Let's give heads a rest for the moment and do a quick overview of the speakers themselves, just to change things up a bit. 1) Howzabout the non-linear behavior of the driver's suspension? Good place to start. Fairly easy to visualize--to feel with your own two hands, for that matter. Okay, buckle your seat belts and let's talk about how drivers (aka "speakers" although a speaker is technically the finished box with the drivers in it) are built. When you look at the front of an average driver, you see the cone. In the middle is typically a round thingy; that's called the center dome. We'll leave that for the moment and focus our attention on the outside rim of the cone. There's a corrugated circular area with one or more humpy ridges. That's the surround. It's one of the (usually) two points of suspension for the cone. To see the other, you have to drop the driver out of the cabinet and look between the back of the cone and the magnet structure. Another corrugated area. That one's called the spider. Here's the thing...the surround and the spider are grossly nonlinear. In a hi-fi speaker, that's a bad thing and the people who design the drivers go to great lengths to make them behave as predictably as possible. Musical instrument drivers? Huh. We're so used to the distortions that we've grown to love them. So, what about that suspension? What happens is that if you push on the cone with your hand, you'll discover that the cone typically moves relatively freely for the first eighth of an inch. The next eighth of an inch is harder. The next eighth, harder still. In practical terms, that means that the louder you play, the more the driver fights back. It's a compression mechanism. So...if you play at low volumes, you'll get dynamics, but if you play at higher volumes, you'll start getting compression. Note that this changes dynamically as you play and also from driver to driver. An EV driver will not behave the same as a Celestion. If you model, you're going to have to pick one or the other, or maybe provide both options. Options. Cool, right? Er, no. As I've hinted before, all you're doing is opening more cans of worms. For instance, are you going to model the Celestion G12M, the G12H, or the G12T-75? Likewise, which Electro Voice? How about all of the above? Oh, dear, what shall we do about the guys who play with a mix of drivers in the same cabinet? (Yes, that's a thing.) How are you going to model that? 2) The voice coil. Simple enough. It's nothing more than a coil of wire wrapped around a coil former, right? What could go wrong? Well...funny you should ask... It turns out that resistance is a non-linear parameter, itself. The hotter a conductor gets, the higher its resistance goes. Hotter. Hmmm...when would a voice coil get hot? When it's played hard, obviously. Now, the impedance of the driver--impedance being the sum of the resistance along with the two reactive components: capacitance and inductance--has changed. On the fly. Do the inductance and the capacitance change with heat? Well, yes, but only by an ultra-small smidgen, so we don't have to lose sleep over them. But the resistance...that one makes a difference. 3) Drivers are air-cooled devices. The neat thing is that if you design them properly, they will cool themselves. You can use the motion of the cone to pump air in and out of the magnet structure, which is where the hot, sweaty voice coil is cowering, being assaulted by all those watts coming from the head. How much heat? This can get complicated, but let's round things off by saying that a typical speaker cabinet is on the order of 5% efficient. Yes, you read that correctly. A 100W Marshall head cranked to the max will give you roughly 5...oh, I'm feeling generous, I'll let you have 10 watts of acoustic power. That's all. No shit. So where's the other 90-95W go? The Laws of Thermodynamics always apply in the end, but in this case we don't have to wait very long; all the rest of the power is converted directly to heat. Where? In the voice coil. Ever hold your hand on a 100W incandescent light bulb? Bet you didn't do it for long. Hot, right? Yeah. That. Okay, so let's dive back inside our hypothetical Marshall cabinet screaming out its death song. The voice coil gets hot. Real hot. In fact, the adhesives used to hold the windings to the coil former have to be rated so that they won't melt and allow the wire to unspool inside the magnet. But the driver is pumping air, right? Yep. Air is frantically rushing in and out through the spider (which is basically an open weave fabric for exactly this reason--so that air can go in and out [it's also porous so as to reduce back pressure within the magnet structure, but let's not go there]), hence cooling the voice coil. But then what? Where's the heat go from there? Into the cabinet itself. Yes, the Laws of Thermodynamics apply here, too, and the heat will eventually escape into the room, but the plywood is a good enough insulator that it takes a while for that to happen. In short, the cabinet gets warm inside. Put a 100W light bulb in a wooden box. Turn it on. Walk away. Come back later and you'll find that the temperature in the box has risen. So what? Well, as the temperature in the box rises, the ability of the driver to shed heat diminishes, which means that the voice coil gets a little warmer still, which means that the resistance (see #2) increases a little more. Uh, so, uh...oh, right...I get it...the cabinet gets warmer inside when it's played hard. Bingo. NOTE: All three of these apply to keyboard players too, but to a lesser extent. Why lesser? For one thing, keyboard players generally go for more linear (more hi-fi, if you will) speakers, so the non-linearities aren't as much a part of the sound you hear. Unless you're playing a Leslie, which brings us back to some of the things I said earlier. Sneaky of me to loop things back that way, eh? Grey

I'm in a hurry, but I'll drop in this one thing: Yes, attenuator boxes exist. They have another name--"tone suckers." The purely resistive ones are the worst, but even the more sophisticated ones with reactive components are lacking. If you folks have found attenuators that you're happy with, more power to you (no pun intended), but I've never heard one that doesn't alter the tone, nor does anyone I've ever spoken with about the subject. At least, no one who's serious about tone. Some are. Some aren't. It varies from player to player. If your attitude is that the guitarist's tone doesn't matter, then I hope you don't post here that you're not satisfied with your tone. That would be rather hypocritical, wouldn't it? For the record, I've got a Marshall 50W Plexi reissue (model = 1987X?) with an early '70s 4 x 12" slant cab (unfortunately, not the original Celestions), so I went towards the smaller end of the scale, wattage-wise. No, I haven't played guitar in a band, I just use it here at the house. I have not found a way to get a good crunchy tone at less than 6 or 7, which is actually more-or-less full volume. I've got two Mesa Boogies, a III and a IV. I mostly use them for Fender-ish tones, although they're not really suited for that. They're kinda their own thing. The master volume does allow you to get distortion at lower volumes, but it doesn't sound right to me; I'm more interested in '60s/'70s overdriven tones, not '80s. And, yes, they'll get stupidly loud. Much louder than I want or need. Bass? Let's not open that can of worms. Guitar's bad enough. Grey

You know, I've seen a couple dozen of these "guitar players play too loud" threads, and not once have I seen a single post that acknowledges the central problem that a guitar player faces. Not one. So...here goes... It's called tone. Okay? The only thing that keyboard players face that compares to what guitar players have to deal with is reproducing a Hammond/Leslie in full cry. Period. Nothing else remotely compares. Note, please, the number of threads where members of this forum have argued, complained, sought advice, whined, fought, and just generally made tone-fools of themselves whilst discussing Hammond tone and how to get it. Go count the threads. I'll wait here. On second thought, no, I won't. It'll take too long for you to return from your survey and I've got things to do. Although keyboard players have Hammond emulations of various sorts available, there is no universal solution to the Hammond problem unless you intend to bring a real Hammond and a real Leslie to the gig and cut loose. The grind. The swoosh. The sheer physical presence of the tone is inimitable. The emulations ain't right. They're just approximations. Sometimes better. Sometimes worse. Sometimes just flat rained out. But never perfect. Piano? Well, you've got your Steinways, your Yamahas, your Bosendorfers, etc. At which point you begin arguing about which piano sound you want, but wait...there's an argument I've never seen...the fidelity of the speakers you're playing through. Honestly, there ought to be a thread where people discuss which PA speakers are the highest fidelity in order to get the best piano tone across to the audience. Like a really big stereo. Never seen it. Yes, people talk about which PA speakers are "best," but I've never once seen a thread where people actually talked about the nuances, like the wood of the body of the piano, the dynamics, the midrange, the bass, the depth of the image, etc. (My background in high end audio comes in here. That hypothetical thread could potentially be lengthy.) But that still doesn't approach the Hammond tone thing. That Yamaha DX7 sound? A Moog riff? A Farfisa? A Roland? A Yamaha? A Korg? All those are played clean 99.999% of the time. There's no need to reproduce the sound of an overdriven amp to make it sound right. You turn the volume up. You turn the volume down. It's the same sound, just more or less of the same thing. You can't do that with a guitar! The amp is an intrinsic part of the tone and for better or worse, the tone is intertwined with the volume. It's the nature of the beast. You cannot change that one central fact. Except for Jon Lord--he of the Hammond through Marshall stacks--and he's the exception that proves the truth of what I'm saying. It's the Hammond problem, people! If you want anything other than the cleanest of tones, a guitar amp doesn't sound right until it's turned up. Period. It's that fucking simple. Mesa and Marshall tackled the problem by adding a second volume knob--one that allowed the player to turn up the gain of the the front end of the amp. It adds distortion. Only...the problem is that it doesn't add the same kind of distortion. It's a different sound. A Marshall Plexi does NOT sound the same as a Marshall with a Master Volume. The Plexi has a grinding, growly sound that you've all heard on Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin albums. Master volume amps have a fizzy sort of distortion that's more high frequency-oriented. Think '80s era metal. All Marshall and Mesa accomplished by giving guitar players this option was to invent a whole new range of tones for guitarists to emulate. Well, there are various effects pedals, right? Fuzz boxes and overdrive pedals and emulations and stuff. Go buy an effects pedal and all your problems will be solved, right? Not! There's never been an effects pedal that properly mimics the tone of a Marshall stack driven to the limits. They simply don't exist. The reality is that you've only discovered a whole new rabbit hole of sounds that you're expected to reproduce during your gig. Ooops. Okay, so you're a guitar player. You've got a gig. In that gig you're going to be expected to play tones that originated from Fender amps, Marshall amps, Mesa amps, etc. All at different volume settings, but frequently WAO. All during the same gig. What are you going to do? Do you take one of each? What wattage? One 4 x 12" or two? Pretty soon you're packing enough equipment to require your own, separate truck. Oh, you say to yourself, let's see, tonight we'll be playing to 300 people, so I'll set up with the 50W Marshall head and one cabinet. Except there's that other song that takes a Fender, so I need to take in the Fender Twin. Etc. And all night long, you're swapping between amps and trying frantically to match volumes. It's a bloody nightmare. Expensive, too. You're going to need to own separate 50W and 100W heads from multiple manufacturers, plus an array of cabinets that would make a music shop faint. And the next night it's a gig for 1200 people. Time to pull out the big guns. Full 100W Marshall stack with two cabs. The Fender Twin will need to be mic'ed. On and on. Let's see a show of hands. How many of you carry a Rick Wakeman sized rig? Now...how many of you carry two or three Rick Wakeman sized rigs and select from the stuff in the truck the gear you will need for that night's gig? The first question alone will cut the pool or respondents to maybe a handful. The second will cut it to zero. Unless you're willing to compromise on your Hammond tone ("Oh, hey, this tune needs a Hammond, so I'll use this churchy-sounding Gospel Hammond setting on my $200 keyboard to play Smoke On The Water. The audience won't care!"), don't complain about the guitar player. He's got his own problems, okay? Note that I've not even begun to address the problems bass players face. Yes, playing loud is fun. Got it. Yes, there are guitar players who won't balance with the rest of the band no matter what. That's also true for drummers, bassists, vocalists, and even (gasp!) keyboardists. But there's this whole other aspect to the "guitarist who plays too loud" complaint that never gets addressed. I have now pointed out that there's an elephant in the room. Grey

1) I have posted many times to the effect that no one, regardless of what instrument they play, wants a bass player who plays more than the bare minimum. Whole notes. Half notes. Quarter notes. Maybe, if you're a good boy, you'll be allowed to play an eighth note once per gig. Maybe. Don't press your luck. 2) I absolutely, positively HATE 12-bar I-IV-V progressions. They are the worst of the fucking worst for bass players--at least bass players like me. It's all about the guitar player (and, yes, sometimes the keyboard player). There are scads of bass players out there who are okay with that crap. Go get one of them. Don't call me. Don't get me wrong, I like Stevie Ray Vaughn's [fill in other names, as needed] stuff, but being in Double Trouble would be the death of me. 3) I would kill to have a "real" keyboard player to play with. I would like, ideally, to be able to move from instrument to instrument, depending on the requirements of the song. Perhaps even playing "rhythm" keyboards whilst the real keyboard player does something fun (I'm not likely to be a "lead" keyboard player anytime in the near future...or even far future). Then I'd move back to bass or guitar, depending. Something remotely like the way Greg Lake functioned in ELP. I also have other instruments on hand, but am happier on strings. 4) Keyboard players are scarce here too, but then musicians, particularly musicians who will consider original material are nonexistent in this area, so that's not saying much. 5) Being a bass/guitar player, I don't necessarily see guitarists as the enemy, but I'm not blind to the fact that it does happen. I've got stories, too, just from the bass POV as opposed to keys. *sigh* Okay, rant over. Back to you guys. Grey