LucSulla

This thread is still by far my most lasting legacy and arguably my greatest contribution to humanity.

I warmed the Quickrod up the other night and marveled at how killer that amp is. I’m trying to book some bigger rooms in the next few months just as an excuse to break that sucker out and let it eat. The SS you sold me has been getting the nod lately over the JEL-20 as well.

I will dig up Mike Soldano throwing a metric shit ton of shade on Randall Smith on an early episode of Tone Talk later and link it. i never did like Recs much. I was still rocking Marshalls and dreaming of a Bogner in my teens and 20s while everyone else I knew was doing Rectos. A couple of the most heated arguments I ever had with producers back when we were testing out development deals was renting one for recording. That’s at least one argument I never lost.

The nut is fine as far as height. As I understand it, the reason bridge saddles move up from the E to D string and then back for the G string is because the diameter of the core string is what matters, and the G string is roughly the same diameter as the E string's core. When not fretted, if the break at the nut is in the same place for both strings, the saddles should be roughly in the same place. I need to give what Jim said a shot.

I recently had a new nut cut for one of my Les Pauls. I also needed to buy a new bridge because the original was sagging (it's 40 years old). After throwing a new bridge on and setting the intonation, I ended up with the saddle alignment seen below. Now, I know that technically for the G string saddle needing to be set this close to the pickup rather than toward the stop bar means this nut is more than likely cut wrong. Physics dictates that this should be toward the back rather than the front unless something else is screwed up somewhere. However, it does intonate, and it plays fine. So should I really give a shit over a technicality, or are there problems ahead of me as yet unforeseen?

What I don't think he nailed is Dave wanting to do much work on Mesas and the local tech thing. Dave hates Mesas as near as I can tell, and I've had two great local techs do work on my amps, one of whom did a better job of fixing my Mark V than the Boogie recommended guy in Austin. Yeah, there are a lot of guys who are just going to make whatever it is worst in a Mesa, but there are local techs with a ton of experience with them too. It isn't real hard to suss them out either.

This guy nailed it so hard four months ago.

I was helping a friend of mine find there first Floyd Rose guitar. Checking in to some old places I new sometimes close out mint "used," i.e. a return or demo, I saw that one sitting at that price. Bought that purple USA Select Charvel from them the year before for I think $1450 to my door. They advertise on Reverb, but they have a storefront they sell through that doesn't currently charge sales tax and has free shipping. If anyone is curious, I can pass their name along in a DM. Don't want to out them on an open forum though. The other seeming steal out there that no one has bought yet is this fella: https://reverb.com/item/82583075-jackson-american-series-soloist-sl3-riviera-blue-01890-wh Franklin Guitar Works is a licensed reseller of Fender b-stocks and returns. I almost snapped that one up, but I have a really nice late 90s soloist and no Vs of any type, so I went with that MJ.

I believe $1600 total.

I'm just to lazy to do a photo shoot, and I hate the extra steps to get high rez photos from my phone to the computer to here. Here are the specs: 25.5" scale length Basswood Rhoads body Through-body three-piece maple neck with graphite reinforcement and gloss color matched back finish 12"-16" compound radius bound ebony fingerboard with pearloid sharkfin inlays and 22 jumbo frets Luminlay® side dots Seymour Duncan® JB™ SH-4 bridge and Seymour Duncan Jazz SH-2N neck humbucking pickups Three-position pickup toggle switch, single volume control and single tone control Jackson TOM-style adjustable bridge with anchored tailpiece Gotoh® die-cast locking tuners and Dunlop® dual-locking strap buttons Available in Gloss Black with Jackson pointed 6-in-line black headstock, chrome pickguard and chrome hardware Foam core case included

I'm really not, lol.

I don't have kids but do have a tendency to over leverage. That's how I do it, lol.

That's so rad. I had just bought a Plex when those were coming out, and I really shouldn't buy a 50 watt version of something I already have a 20 watt version of. I also need to buy two more of those Fanes. I love those speakers. I was playing a Quickrod through a Marshall 4x12 with two Greenbacks and two of those Fanes just the other night for the first time in a minute. They sound so damn rock 'n' roll. I have a sudden need to wake the neighbors.

Here's what they got me with back in 2023. I need to just not look over there ever again.

So my handle on Instagram is @pointyguitars. Figured it was time to live up to that again, so I bought this slice of metal... or metal slicer. You be the judge. There's one music store in New York who has now bagged me two years in a row with year-end close outs. Bought a Charvel USA Select last year and this Jackson MJ Rhoads this year. To be honest, if feels about as nice as my 98 USA soloist and cost a helluvalot less than than USA Jacksons do these days.

Same for me. It's like hooking up with a chick who looks like your ex simply because she looks like your ex. That rarely goes anywhere good, lol. One of the best shows I've gone to in the last 10 years was Uncle Acid and the Deadbeats in Birmingham, AL. The version of "Slow Death" I saw that night at 37-years-old in a small venue was as affecting as any peak moment in any big show I'd ever gone to. Plus, it was like $30. Not that they are just completely revolutionary, but I do find their mix of stoner/psychedelic rock/metal to be its own thing. 18-year-old me would have never given it a chance because a punk rock fan recommended them. The last two Opeth shows I saw in Nashville are up there as well. Even though they've been around quite a while at this point, harsh vocals are something I really didn't get into until I was in my 30s. I got into them early enough in their U.S. touring cycles to watch them move from playing a sport bar in San Antonio and having to compete with a football game being on all the televisions to seeing them in the Ryman in 2020. I also HATED country music until I was in my 30s, and got into that just in time to catch Sturgill Simpson blowing up. I thought seeing him at the Orpheum in Memphis was about as good as he'd get until I saw him this fall in Brandon, MS. Just an absolutely killer 3-hour concert. Another guy that isn't doing anything alien but also somehow just a little different than everyone else. All in all, just trying to find some new stuff to get into even if it meant getting a little out of my usual flavors of rock and metal has delivered on a lot of great shows even as I've got older that I wouldn't swap for some of the classics I went to for my age group in the 90s.

That is one of my favorite music biz autobiographies, and I eat those like candy. That is one of the few that was really something more than a tawdry way to kill a Sunday afternoon. More general to @RobB 's conversation prompt, coincidentally, I have been thinking about somewhat this topic but from maybe a little different angle the last couple of weeks due to the Van Halen subreddit. The only popular posts there are about band drama, and it is all the same band drama that has been there for as long as 40 years now. Wolf rightfully just checked out of dealing with Dave and the Van Halen fanbase because too much of it is so toxic. Al, even with the book, doesn't engage really. Mike seems like a classy guy who seems happy to just remember the good, sling some hot sauce, and enjoy riding off into the sunset playing with Sammy and respected by most everyone. Which leaves us DLR getting restless with the lack of attention and occasionally baiting the surviving parties, of whom only Sammy seems stupid enough to end up on the hook with any regularity. But then, Sammy always seems to be happy to deliver some little quip when provoked, which keeps the whole tired, sad, desiccated corpse of a fandom chattering about the same shit for another couple of weeks. I wish he'd learn, but he probably never will if he hasn't yet after all these years. All of which is totally moot because Ed is dead. There is no new story to spin out, and the only reason anyone gives a shit about any of those folks in the context of Van Halen is because we wanted to see where the story was going to end. Well, it ended. No new tour. No new album. No more wondering if Ed will reconcile with Sammy and Mike. No more wondering how DLR will sound on this tour. Plus, Wolfie is out on doing anything with the name and seems perfectly content to do his own thing and let the folks that don't get it fume, which I love. To whatever extent the drama circus could have continued without EVH, Wolfie saying, "Nah, I don't need that," pretty much locked it forever into this static universe with no new information. The fact I am so tired of hearing old shit over and over again makes me wonder why I still subscribe to that page. The older I get, the more I've started to make peace with everything having an end, something which fandoms seem unable to cope with as a whole. My Dad is a great guy, but he's also very direct and kind of treated me like a little adult from jump. I remember when I was three asking him why we don't buy batteries that never die. He responded, "Because everything ends, Jason." The implication immediately was clear, even to a three-year-old. Man, I hated that, and not just because of its implications on my existence, but just the knowledge that everything is ultimately ephemeral. "Merrily merrily merrily merrily life is but a dream." But, here in middle age, my perspective has changed somewhat, and I'm not sure if anything would be as magical if it didn't end. That perfect summer in high school, the first big romance, the first band that really had potential - youth - had they not had an expiration date, those experiences would have grown as mundane as any other I think. Not new thoughts from me; poets and philosophers have written on this shit for years. I just can actually feel it these days rather than understand it in abstract. And the same goes for Van Halen - how cool to have been around at the same time as Eddie Fucking Van Halen. It was never going to last for ever, but we were there, man! I hate it ended how and when it did, but what I hate even more is that a bunch of people, who literally know none of the people involved, are perpetuating an ongoing struggle to figure out who to blame for why they don't have more in the few communities left more than just the music itself, as if that will change anything. Seems all there is left to talk about is who to blame, and I do feel like that takes away from what it really meant. And maybe if that is all that is left to keep any sort of community engaged, it's time for everyone to just walk away and turn out the lights. I prefer to remember Van Halen as a band, not a soap opera. I also think you can still find new stuff like that as you get older if you stay open to it. Perhaps the reason a sense of wonder dies for so many as they age is because they keep looking over their shoulder expecting something that already happened to deliver something new rather than looking in front of them. No one was looking for "Eruption" when it happened, or at least they didn't know they were. You ran into that shit out of nowhere because you didn't have enough past to be hung up on yet to distract you from living. Whatever it is will never be another "Eruption," but I'm willing to bet we all have things right now in our lives that we will wish we enjoyed more 10 years from now just as much as we wished we would have savored 15, 18, or 25 more. So I find myself listening to Van Halen these days not wishing there was more, hoping some sort of official tribute happens, or being pissed at what we did get isn't official enough. I listen to Fair Warning and 1984 and think, "Man, I'm glad I was around when this was going on." Told you I had been thinking about it lately, lol. Also going to unsubscribe from that subreddit now.

I think that's the way to do it. Save the money (and hassle) you'd put into tape and put it into some cool pres, mics, and outboard gear. After I went into a recording industry program, I would still occasionally run into the engineer who did my band's first album. I'm sure I was annoying as hell, as you are the first time you learn about all of the toys. I remember him saying, "I always figured if Bruce Springsteen could make Nebraska with a couple of SM57s and a Portastudio that I could make a good sounding album with just about anything. It's all about just getting the most our of what you got." Point taken.

I wish we could run this experiment. I'd be curious which you would prefer if price was not an issue. Analog is such a massive pain in the ass, starting with how much you can get on a tape. You have around 14 minutes a reel at 30 ips or 28 minutes at 15 ips. There is a bit of an art to getting the timing of a punch down due to the difference in time between the playback head and the record had. You have all the head alignment BS, test tones, splicing, and on and on. Then there is storing all of it somewhere if you want to keep the multitrack, sometimes having to bake it, and the joys of print through. Me? I love the romance around analog, but no thanks on dealing with that again. What I miss is going somewhere dedicated to a thing and having a limited amount of time to do it. Going to the studio was an adventure, and there is absolutely no comparing a purpose-built studio to bedroom recording. Walking into a place with acoustically tuned rooms, speakers that cost more than some houses (along with the NS-10s they were really mixing on), the huge consoles, outboard gear, and on and on - that was where it was at. And you know that you have however much time you have - 8 hours, 40 hours, whatever - to do it. This forces you to come in ready, and it also forces you to make choices. You want to spend an extra day on vocals? Well maybe that is one less day to mix. Scarcity - I think that is what the OP's video is really about - building in a sense of scarcity or the finite. Digital recording removed so many areas of scarcity in the recording process, from the financial resources to just data storage space, that it just made everything seem possible all of the sudden. To borrow from Kierkegaard, we moved the danger being "lost in the finite" to "lost to the infinite." You can make any sound you made with analog equipment on digital. That topic has been beaten to death on this forum and others, but the research is out there, along with the explanation around urban legends like the infamous "stair-step sampling" *ahem* analogy. However, people tend to not think holistically about the entire process involved with affixing sound to a medium, and I think therein lies some of the reason for the perceived difference. There's was a somewhat popular media philosopher I'm sure some of you have heard of named Marshall McLuhan who posited that "the medium is the message," basically saying the constraints and affordances of any communication medium have as much affect on what is ultimately communicated as the intended message itself. For instance, we are on a forum here and can only speak to one another in text and pictures for the most part. Text and pictures allow thoughts to be conveyed in very specific manners, and anyone posting here is restricted by what those media allow and how facile they are with them. With pre-DAW recording, we have the limitations and affordances of tape, the financial barriers to accessing the means of production, the level of ability of the musicians and engineers to use the recording technology, how various mental states made an impact on performances, and how much time there was to do things beyond the space available on the medium. I'm sure there are more, but that seems a good general list. Most all of that was driven by the essence of what tape was and what was required to get the very best out of it. All of that shaped what was being communicated in the final project. So I'd argue that thinking you have to have tape to recreate that is possibly losing the forest for the trees. What you really need to recreate is that sense of scarcity recording to tape in a dedicated studio created and the way negotiating that scarcity and the emotional states involved with it helped to fashion the end result. I'm pretty sure you don't have to have a 2" Studer machine sitting there any more than you need to be living like a vampire four days into a week long coke binge. Figure out ways to make the takes mean something and to make having as close as possible to an entire performance as a real prize. Spend more time in pre-production getting sounds, and set a goal of not fixing everything in post. Set goals on how little or how much EQ you want to use. Don't line-in and re-amp and commit some effects "to tape" where they are just there now unless you redo it. Go after fire performances rather than perfect parts, and get a second set of ears to tell you whether you are about to nuke a take over a mistake only you can hear. Yeah, it's going to be way less flexible and introduce a level of difficulty, but that's the experience if you want it. To sum up what became a bit of an essay, I'm not a proponent of making stuff hard again just to do so either. Like I said at the beginning, even given unlimited resources, I'd still record to hard drive to analog tape every time. You can do things to make recording to a computer as stressful as to tape, but why? Most of that sucked a lot, and there is a big difference between comping together, beat-by-beat, a perfect drum performance in the box vs. finally having a tool that makes a few more punch places available for a drum take, or, even better, not worrying that blowing a punch on a drum take because you clipped a cymbal's decay now means the overall good take is gone forever and you have to start over. Adding entire days to your recording budget because your singer is burned out and can't quite hit a note at the end of a session vs. tuning it a few cents to me is a lot different than tuning an entire performance for a singer who genuinely can't sing. For me, I look at it as taking pride in your work and being a musician, and using the tools available in a way that represents may skill accurately. Don't use technology to tell a lie. If you can't do that part live, don't record it unless you are working in a genre where a totally live performance isn't exactly the point. From there, the biggest trick is realizing where to stop polishing and leaving some humanity in there.

I watched that yesterday and agreed with all of it. Fully acknowledging there are a few people here who have done a lot more in music than I ever managed to, but I did do quite a bit of recording in Nashville from 2001-2003. Most of it was to DASH, but a good bit was also analog. One reason we did more DASH was it was MUCH cheaper, and we couldn't tell enough of a difference between tracking to digital tape through an SSL and tracking to 2" analog through a Neve. The work flow was a little different thought, and you were a little sharper when tracking to analog because you couldn't just punch forever. But even with DASH it was still destructive editing even though it was digital. You could punch a billion times, but there was no saving 15 takes and picking the best. I don't think we were quite as "on" working with DASH because the lag wasn't as bad in timing a punch, this making punches a little safer than on analog, but it still wasn't drag and drop. We finally did our second album at a ProTools studio, and that was definitely different. Most of us were pretty well rehearsed because at this point we were paying out of pocket, but it was very different. Our bass player at the time really wasn't all that well prepared, and at least one song was just a total Frankenstein of a performance. I don't think it affected to overall vibe of the music too much, but even 20 years ago, you could see the danger in it. But I think it's interesting to think back on that after watching the video posted. I got to work in a scenario where I was doing both analog and digital, but both were still tape. The approach stayed much the same as a result, and the whole vibe was mostly the same. I've was recording to digital tape and hard drive around the same time, pretty much the same again, but the copy-and-paste nature of PT just made for a totally different thing that had nothing to do with it being digital.

I'm definitely getting the itch for one of these. I would love to get another Mark III like I had, but they've gone up so much that I don't know if it wouldn't be easier to just get one of these and know the caps are new and so on.

I'm all over the place. My last two purchases were an H535 and a MJ Jackson Rhoads. In the spirit of what you're asking though, I like guitars dedicated to producing a specific sound and purchase accordingly now. I've never desired a single coil option in an LP style guitar, and I don't want a tele with a humbucker. I've never cared for split pickups much, though I love what Charvel and others have been doing with their 5-way switches in their HSS guitars. I prefer all of that wired in though rather than having push/pull knobs or mini toggles. So while I do buy the odd fancy guitar still, I prefer things to be the purest form of what they are supposed to be, whether that is an LP-style guitar or a strat. I have the luxury of being able to afford a lot of guitars, and if I need a strat or a tele for a gig, I'll just bring one of those rather than seeking some flavor of wiring of a two HB, 24.57" scale guitar that gets kind of in the ballpark. For the most part, I don't change pickups either, with the exception of the two LPCs I have, which I wanted to sound the same, and a Les Paul trad that I had and could never get along with the 59 Classics in. I like guitars that do one thing well and a little different from my other guitars for the most part. If they cover more ground in factory spec, then that is a cherry on top.

His full review is the best on the web right now IMO. Gibson should crawl over broken glass to thank him for this.

This year, from the Hamer realm, I bought these two Tallys. Also bought a Heritage H353 and have a Jackson MJ Series Rhoads RRT coming.