moving to the next basement...

first basement:

- mid-sized keyboard amp

- e609 mic to upgrade the altec, maybe.

second basement:

- if i find an affordable ry30 somewhere, i must get it. not a priority.

- but, in the short run, something like an akai mini would give me access to velocity sensitive pads, if i can find one for very cheap. not a clear priority, for now.

- plastic recorder (or wind controller?)

- i've added a picture for fake strings to sept 6, 1997 because that's the oldest attempt i have at creating a string section that's designed to sound like strings (rather than a synthesizer), probably actually due to an influence from a canadian band called the tea party, and which is something i've struggled with for years and years. i'm going to be seeking generally approaches towards creating different sounds as i try to plug in production holes that i know i can't do well with sampling. i have an electric violin with a bow that i got for $50, but i've never set it up because it hasn't really ever made sense to do so. it's kind of a toy. that would be the obvious answer for high strings, but it's actually the low strings i generally want to reach for. i've used e-bows in the past (something that shows up in the next basement) and still have one. but, i've recently purchased an audio-to-midi converter that will let me track guitar parts directly to midi. with the aid of a sample library, an ebow and an actual bow, i wonder how close that will get me to what i need. but, it's an open question, and something i approach on a track-by-track basis.

third basement:

- the dan electro fab tone i used on liquify and the day inri messed the world up was not mine, it was borrowed from a friend. i have many distortion pedals, but i would grab one in the metal case (not one of those plastic ones...) if i saw it cheap enough. that said, i'm going to claim that the rocktron metal planet that i have is an effective substitute/upgrade for this (they're both based on boss metal pedals, but the rocktron has a less compressed sound than either of the other two, which is useful because it lets you control the amount of compression....), but you can never have too many distortion pedals:

i used that pedal as an extra gain boost on some of the parts for proverbs, along with a guyatone sd-2 and a marshall jackhammer.

i'm not a metal guitarist, though, and i don't generally use high gain tones like that, except as niche effects. i prefer a dirty overdriven sound to a high gain metal sound. 

but, like i say - you can never have too many distortion sounds. you never know what you'll need to get the sound you're imagining, and i've found that just having as many combinations as is possible is the best approach.

- i still install cool edit pro.

- by dad bought himself a nicer drum kit around this time, that was meant for communal use but ended up banished to my bedroom by my stepmother. this was the kit used for deny everything material. my solution for kit replacements is my dm pro kit:

that was the last of i think three kits that he bought, and i never saw him play any of them.

- there was a marshall amp in the living room for a while that was purportedly given to me as a gift, but it never functioned properly. i don't know where he got it from exactly, but he did a lot of garage sale shopping, and i'm guessing he picked it up from somebody's garage for almost nothing. i'm guessing he thought it was worth a lot more than it was actually worth. again - i'm not convinced i would have ever picked a marshall practice guitar amp over a fender bass amp, when the two are sitting side by side like they were; broken speaker or not, i don't think i ever recorded anything at all with it, and am not sure i plugged into it for more than a few minutes. yeah, i know - i've got a marshall amp on a table in my bedroom, and i don't even plug it in. i'm sorry. i had a di on the soundcard, and a bass amp for recording pedals...together, they were far more useful to me than this cheesy scooped marshall with a midrange speaker. my dad didn't get it, either.

i traded this marshall for a half broken vintage 50s electric mandolin that i fixed up and used on several recordings before it disappeared in 2011:

do i need to replace this, then? well, i never used it! and, i swapped it for a mandolin. i definitely need to replace the mandolin...

if i need to record guitar parts, the mini amps are more useful to me. i could never make any functional use of a 75 watt amp, in this space - or any space i'm likely to inhabit in the near future. and, really, the thing that replaces this is the pod:

so, i'm comfortable with leaving that as it is - although i've decided that i'll get a cheap modelling amp, if i find one, too.

the pod through a flat keyboard amp is a better idea than a cheap marshall, though, if it comes down to it.

- i've been saying this is 120 watts. it's actually 160 watts. it showed up around this time, and was meant as a bass amp. i still have it...and i may try to use it as a cab for the mini orange and/or vox...

i have used this periodically for recording heavily effected guitar parts through complex effects chains, specifically when i want a low frequency response. but, it's just so damned loud...

i mean, that was the point - it was parked beside a drum kit. it had be loud, and was purchased for the volume. but, that's not real life for me, and hasn't been since i was 20.

- i still have the creamy dreamer, and still use it

- from previous post dated to june 8th:

i picked up a morley pro series wah around this time for pretty cheap but i found the effect to be a little more subtle than what i wanted. i mean, i was hardly interested in doing 80s hair metal whammy dives, but, after playing with direct x filters in cool edit, i wanted a much more dynamic instrument that i could warp like a dj or sound engineer warps filters with their hands, but in real-time with my feet, and found this was really designed to be the opposite of that. there was no doubt a mental disconnect between the world this was made for (southern rock guitarists) and the kind of sounds i was imagining (warped sound effects from contemporary experimental techno, like download). i mean, i knew better, but i guess i didn't. that said, i made some sufficiently demented use of it in the climax to "entropy", as well as in the intro solo to  "ignorance is bliss" before i swapped it for a digitech xp-100 a few basements later. the pod has a couple of wah sounds in it; it wouldn't make sense to try to model this in a daw, unless you have the right kind of controller. so, you need hardware here, one way or another.

so, i'm happy with the pod as a replacement for this, and also for the digitech.

- i can still install the aipl spin cycle plugin as a direct x effect, but i've mostly put it aside. there are leslie-like effects in guitar rig. likewise, the hyperprism and north pole effects are there, but i never reach for them anymore.

- i still have the 90s pc and pretty much every important piece of hardware in it still works flawlessly.

- pi warp is a weird effect and i absolutely still use it.

- sounder does not work right in xp, but i'm hoping to get it running on the 90s pc (in windows 98)

- i've dropped acid. the program, i mean. discarded it. i was actually hoping to use it for samples (listen to entropy to hear my intended use), but i just keep going back to basic midi. the old scorewriter is just the most useful way for me to write, always has been. so, my replacement for acid is noteworthy composer, but there's nothing you can do in an old version of acid that you can't do in a slightly less old version of cubase:

- i posted the imaginary trumpet and imaginary sax because i'm looking at getting pocket versions for use with the midi controller i just bought. you can get mini saxophones for cheap and i'm on the brink - as soon as i finalize the operation transactions.

- there was a baby grand outside my door, which....i can use a vst effect. that's fine. if i find a million dollars, yes, there will be a real piano. but, it's not even on the radar...

- i now have two mini classical guitars, and they're really both functional replacements for the aria, in any meaningful way for how i used it, which was never intended to be as a performing guitarist at a church or something.  i want to keep one of them. but, i need to get a 21-fret classical guitar with a pickup in it relatively soon.

- i still install audiomulch. 

- granulab doesn't work will in xp. it seems that there's a vst version. but, the granulator i used most often is in the hyperprism suite (see xenophanes for a good example)

- i still have the rubber ducky setup files, but i don't recall the last time i ever used it.

- i still install leaf drums, but i couldn't imagine myself writing that way anymore. it's actually a useful program, and i'd recommend it as a basic drum machine for noise music.

- i stil have the mxr flanger & distortion II boxes, as well as the ibanez eq.

- i cannot find a downloadable version of megatrancer

- koan does not work in xp. but i can try to update it and should.

- from june 8th:

i picked up a mooger fooger mf-102 ring modulator that spring, hoping to drive it with the morley and get that dramatic foot driven techno-oscillation filter, but it didn't actually work; it just didn't convert to an expression like i hoped. i never got another expression for it. guitarists kind of have their hands busy, so this became an expensive trick item. that said, it is used extensively as a bass (acidosis) and vocal (trepanation nation) processor over the next few years, before i cashed it in as having done it's purpose. it's also become very expensive ($600?), but isn't any more useful than a freeware vst plugin - it's expensive because it says "moog" on it, and likely of little actual functional value to you, unless you're doing very modular synth work. just about any old ring modulator with a carrier signal should be just as good.

i wish i could find a demo with the expression pedal plugged in like i wanted to set up, but what this demo (not posted) does is really demonstrate how kind of useless the thing really is.

the pod has a collection of synth and ring mod effects that are quite frankly more usable than the moogerfooger, which i really was quite disappointed in - but it had a lot to do with the fact that i just didn't have a foot controller for it. i'm going to pencil in a generic ring mod, but the pod is really probably more than good enough.

- i've long wanted to get or make a theremin and never have, so i'm going to pencil this in as a project.

- a ukelele would be a useful utility sound generator, but it's hardly at the top of the list of priorities.

- i don't know exactly what happened to my old electric mandolin, but i definitely need to replace it. the electrical was a little funny, but i would have hardly discarded it over that. it's in a small list of items that just kind of disappeared. i don't imagine the item was worth much, and i'd probably benefit from upgrading it to something newer. but, i got it for almost nothing and am sad it disappeared.

- likewise, i've decided to replace my bontempi with a bontempi. they do show up on ebay, but i don't really want to pay shipping. i was looking at melodicas as a replacement and it's probably going to be roughly the same price. but, i still may decided to go down that route. we'll see.

- i still have the e-bow.

ok, let's get to the next basement, then.