Tell me something interesting about yourself

RandomStickman , 30 days ago

I'm going to a King Gizzard show next month, pretty excited.

Best meal I probably had was an emotional support curry I made for myself.

I'm also excited about restarting my D&D campaign after a small hiatus.

Currently I'm pretty tired but I'm also going though some revenge bedtime procrastination...

Track_Shovel OP , 30 days ago

I’ve never actually sat and listened to Gizzard. On my list, but my free time is chronically limited.

Curry is love. Curry is life.

What are you going as for DND? I don’t play, but know enough to be dangerous. Also, I’ll make an AI drawing for you if you like.

Example:

https://slrpnk.net/pictrs/image/6d203890-904e-4a09-800b-4abd3888b62b.webp

Goblin Cleric

Hope you rest up. I burn the candle at both ends so I know the feeling.

RandomStickman , 30 days ago

If you're a metal fan give PetroDragonic Apocalypse and Nonagon Infinity a try. Their other albums aren't metal but pretty good nonetheless.

I'm the game master actually! So I play as all the NPCs lol.

ShadowCatEXE , 29 days ago

I’ve never had to do a job interview. 5 different jobs, all word of mouth.

hungrythirstyhorny , 28 days ago

amazing, but how?

pineapplelover , 28 days ago

I would also like to know where people network to find jobs. Haven’t had any luck. I just want a help desk role.

ShadowCatEXE , 28 days ago

A lot of it has been family and college. The college I attended has a research group that allows students to do internships.

The college also runs job fairs every one in a while. Those kinds of things I huge.

Conventions of any kind as well, where you can speak to people in booths, or even any of the other attendees.

pineapplelover , 28 days ago

I’ve been to college job fairs and went to conferences. Didn’t really help.

ShadowCatEXE , 28 days ago

My first ever job was running a wood chipper under my uncles tree business. Did that almost every weekend for a number of years. Even sometimes in the winter. I wasn’t even a teenager when I first started this job.

Second job was working in a warehouse at a company my mom worked at. They really needed weekend help.

My third job was doing landscaping over the summer at a smallish company where my brother in law worked at. The owner loved to hire students for cheap.

Fourth was a few software development internships ran by a research group at my college. I had a friend who was part of the group and vouched for me.

My current job is my first true career job as a software engineer. The project manager from one of the internships I had actually got a job as CTO at this company. Offered me a junior position there out of college. Been there almost 6 years.

I have applied to places where I certainly would have needed interviews, but I was never offered an opportunity.

To make this even more awesome is that I’ve interviewed candidates myself at my current job for junior positions.

sunbunman , 29 days ago

I thought I only had some ADHD, MFW filling out the psychiatrist’s questionnaire and I’m marking everything on the inattentive section as “almost always”

Sadbutdru , 28 days ago

? isn’t scoring highly on the inattentive section consistent with having ‘some ADHD’?

sunbunman , 28 days ago

No idea I have my first session next week, I’ll know more then. This was all just some homework they gave me to do beforehand.

PM_ME_VINTAGE_30S , 30 days ago

What do you do for work, or what are you studying towards

Studying towards masters in electrical engineering.

Musical recommendations (bonus points for metal)

If you like the song by Beyond Creation, you’ll love this.

Useless tidbit you know (bonus points for citing sources)

The Ibanez Tube Screamer pedal contains no tubes.

Best meal you’ve had

I have a sous vide machine. I’ve obviously done the whole “food porn steak” thing, but one time I took an entire chicken breast, sous vided it like a steak, breaded it, pan fried it, and ate it like a massive chicken nugget with a juicy interior.

Best place you’ve visited

Home lmao. Close second would be Cedar Point, although I don’t think I can fit on roller coasters at my current weight.

Track_Shovel OP , 30 days ago (edited 30 days ago)

That’s wild about the tube screamer, given the chubbies pedal heads get over them.

I haven’t had a pedal with a tube yet, but I’ve got a Wampler Pinnacle deluxe that covers some ground that my Supersonic 22 can’t do.

That second recommendation is outstanding. First one is good, too but more prog than I usually go for. I like prog, but I’m so far down the atmospheric black metal rabbit hole it’s dizzying.

PM_ME_VINTAGE_30S , 30 days ago (edited 30 days ago)

atmospheric black metal rabbit hole

Fuck I love me some atmoblack. It’s honestly my biggest inspiration as a musician. But I’ve been jamming tech death lately because it helps me study. I gotta recommend Mare Cognitum for a heavier atmoblack sound, and Trna for an instrumental post-black metal expanse.

That’s wild about the tube screamer, give the chubbies pedal heads get over them.

I keep a Tube Screamer clone in my arsenal precisely because it’s not a very “tube-like” sound. It is midsy and crisp. Like 95% of all metal recordings are done with a Tube Screamer, 5150, and Vintage 30s, or digital clones thereof. It’s a dream to play, but that’s kinda why I’m trying to move away from it as a guitarist. But as a producer, it’s a really nice tool for the toolkit. Also if I was playing tech death or something where I’m at the limit of my skill level, I’d probably rock a Tube Screamer so stuff is easier to play.

Also though, I believe that historically it was marketed as “tube sound without the tubes” early in its life. Which, compared to some of the alternatives available at the time, did come a little closer to tube amps’ softer clipping.

But IMO as a metal player and electrical engineer, I think that whether or not your distortion is generated by tube, transistor, or simulation isn’t that important [1] compared to properly tailored filters at every stage, especially the “tone stack”, at least not for metal players or people who play with “fully saturated” distortion. For this reason, I’m absolutely not afraid to use solid state amps if they sound good, and for metal they absolutely can sound better in the mix.

And even though tube distortion pedals do literally have a tube in the signal chain, they are probably not being run at a high enough voltage to actually be the source of distortion. You’d have to check the schematic to be sure. So there’s no benefit to getting a tube distortion pedal in general, and tubes have microphonics and just electrically kinda suck. Tube amps are great, but again, it’s more because of the various filters and the fact that the saturating nonlinearity exists at all rather than that the nonlinearity is generated by a specific device, so long as you use fresh tubes because old tubes do deteriorate an amplifier’s performance. But also, tube amps are “warm” without any further filtering, and I typically find that “warm” amps have trouble standing out in a metal mix. Hence why when I (and other metal players) pick tube amps, I pretty much exclusively use amplifiers (and their simulations) that filter out that warmness, which shows up in metal as muddy garbage.

[1] Assuming you’re using monotonic distortion characteristics like soft and hard clipping, power laws, exponential. Non-monotonic distortion characteristics (like a sine or Chebyshev polynomial) sound whack and I really wish that more metal guitarists would check them out.

Track_Shovel OP , 30 days ago

Holy cow.

That was more signal chain theory that I’ve ever read in one sitting. Really cool. Hard to follow a bit, but I get the gist.

• Source of distortion doesn’t really matter, it’s filters
• TS808 cleans shit up, no tubes. Tubes not necessary and probably dont do much in a pedal anyway

What are you running now for amps and such got get away from the 5150/TS808 combo?

As an aside, I had a Blues Jr. Mark II (2006ish?) that was god awful before I got the supersonic. That thing was so shrill it fired laser beams at my head. SS22 is a brilliant amp IMO. Gets a bit fizzy (thin, fuzzy distortion) at the top end of the gain, but overall rock solid, and the second gain stage is great for fattening up a single coil or for making it sound like you’re murdering a Tweed 57.

Mare is an amazing atmo band!

PM_ME_VINTAGE_30S , 30 days ago (edited 30 days ago)

That was more signal chain theory that I’ve ever read in one sitting.

Sorry 😂. Digital signal processing is one of my special interests so I typically go overboard with it.

• Source of distortion doesn’t really matter, it’s filters
• TS808 cleans shit up, no tubes. Tubes not necessary and probably dont do much in a pedal anyway

Yep that’s it.

• What are you running now for amps and such got get away from the 5150/TS808 combo?

In the “before times”, I used a TBX150 solid state amp alone, and a Peavey 6505, mostly for recording. The TBX150 is a great amp for modern death metal, but it has a parametric EQ. For me, that’s great, but a lot of guitarists don’t like the metal zone because it has a parametric EQ. For both, I plugged them into a cheap birch Seismic cabinet with a Vintage 30 speaker harvested from a Recto cab. Honestly, the biggest factor in the quality of my guitar recordings was switching to that speaker.

At this very moment, since my grandmother moved in, I’ve had to forgo amps altogether for simulators. I actually use either a 6505 simulator (Nick Crowe 8505) or a Fender Frontman (yes, that amp, specifically the AXP Softamp plugin) with the mids cranked up and the cabinet impulse thrown out and replaced with a set of impulses I recorded myself from the previously mentioned cabinet.

The best results I’ve gotten have been with using an EQ before a Boss HM-2 (Buzz Helvetes) set to… however much “HM-2-ness” you want in the EQ depending on what you’re playing, and the smallest possible offset from zero distortion. The pre-EQ is typically a bandpass so I can get more “grinding” and as a cheat for not changing my strings. But, it doesn’t really change the “overall” frequency response of the output of the HM-2, just how the HM-2 “sees” your guitar, so you still get its nastyness. Then the majority of the gain comes from the amp.

If an HM-2 or Metal Zone is too much, I’ve gotten really “smooth” results with using the ProCo Rat as an overdrive. Note that on a ProCo Rat, the Filter (tone) knob “is backwards”; all the way to the left = minimal filtering.

My inspiration for this is really the fact that old school death metal was recorded on shitty gear compared to what is available today, and that some of the magic lies in the fact that it sucks in just the right way. Besides At the Gates who used two shitty pedals, Chuck Schuldinger from Death used a shitty Valvestate and got great results. Most of the old school death metal bands were using Valvestates.

In the past few months, I’ve been experimenting with using the RS-MET tool chain plugin to generate nasty sounding distortion with odd-order Chebyshev polynomials. It initially sounds like a more unhinged Boss HM-2 with no pre or post eq, but since the plugin lets you input the math you want to do, it’s much more controllable. If you use this plugin, you gotta make sure to set the built-in filters to cut off high frequencies that will be aliased, or turn on oversampling, or both. This is included within the plugin, but you have to actually set it. Otherwise, everything just sounds like aliasing, although that’s pretty gnarly too.

So the short answer is: switch out a tube screamer for some garbage piece of gear, preferably something with a frequency response (loosely “tone”) you like and a “bold” distortion. Then, set the pedal so it is giving the least amount of gain while still exhibiting its nonlinearity (minimum possible distortion), then set the amplifier to give you the rest of your gain and cut through the mix. I cannot stress enough that for metal guitars, particularly recording guitars, you gotta set your knobs so that it sounds good in the mix. If it sounds perfect in the room without the rest of the band, I guarantee you it will sound muddy in the mix.

Track_Shovel OP , 30 days ago

I love how into this stuff you are. It’s like me cornering people and talking about soil science, geomorphology, or anything environmentally related.

I bet your setup sounds amazing since you know your shit cold. Your comments must be like nuclear bombs dropping on scrubs in persnickety guitar forums.

T O A N W O O D Z…

Mildly related, but I want to throw a creamback or something similar into my SS22, if I get time. I actually took about a 5 year hiatus from guitar because of kids. I’m starting to get back into it now though and I forgot how healthy of a habit it is for me.

PM_ME_VINTAGE_30S , 28 days ago

I love how into this stuff you are.

Thanks, I wish people around me felt the same way 😂.

T O A N W O O D Z

So I actually found an Acoustical Society of America article on wood species for acoustic guitar by a luthier. My favorite quote was:

Provided the wood does not respond like the proverbial “piece of wet cardboard”, most luthiers can create a respectable instrument from available timber.

And tbh with enough EQ and compression before the amp I probably can get metal out of a piece of wet cardboard.

From the conclusion of the paper:

Specific woods types have specific attributes that make them best suited for making particular guitar components.

…

However, the street lore attributing specific types of sound to specific species of a genus is seldom justified.

…

Guitars designed to acoustical criteria (rather than dimensional criteria) where the effects of different stiffnesses and densities of species are minimised, sound very similar.

…

The residual differences that can be heard may be attributable to the sound spectral absorption and radiation of the particular piece of wood used, a property that is not easily measured and is poorly substituted by the occasional measurement of the damping characteristics of the wood. Once the density and Young’s modulus of particular species is accounted for by careful acoustical design the residual differences are very subtle, yet can be important enough to ensure that some luthiers continue the romantic search for that “holy grail” of woods.

I believe that some of this discussion should apply to electric guitar. However, unless you are playing basically perfectly clean electric guitar, the wood your guitar is made of is a lot less important than… everything else in the signal chain. However, since wood does affect the guitar’s sensitivity, I could see it affecting how it responds to classic amps with low (relative to modern amps) distortion generated by few gain stages and less filtering, i.e. the playstyle employed by those guitar forum people. However, a much larger factor in your guitar’s sound is…big surprise…all the other choices the luthier made when designing and fabricating your guitar, as well as your pickups and the signal chain you use after the signal leaves the guitar.

Also since we’re metal players and we’re absolutely destroying the original signal, the type of wood only makes a difference for structural reasons (i.e., not going out of tune, exploding under the pressure, etc.), which can similarly be accounted for by a competent luthier. For example, all of my guitars are uber-cheap, and their necks can be very easily pulled out of tune, because they were not built by competent luthiers. Consequently, the few times I did play live shows, I had to be very careful on stage to not “do stuff my guitar doesn’t like” so it didn’t go out of tune by the end of the song. Good times…

Creambacks

So I found a video where Creambacks get compared to a V30. IMO based on that video and forum posts, I would consider a Creamback H-75 over the H-65 or the Neo. H-65 sounded too dark to stand out in a mix, and the Neo sounded like bees and basically nothing like the other two. (If my guitar sounds like bees, I want it to be an effect I can turn off.) However, take it with a grain of salt since mic positions were not the same for each speaker. But also, it depends on your primary use case (recording, bedroom play, playing shows).

Although honestly, I think 99% of guitar players would get a lot farther investing in a PC with a decent CPU + a decent USB audio interface than buying actual physical amplifiers unless they need to amplify an actual venue [1]. You’d get better sound, more controllable sounds [2], easier recording, and more possibilities by going digital. Also, if you can send guitar into your computer (or run the Effects Send to your interface to test it with your real amp), it would be cheaper to pick up an impulse response of the speaker before committing to buying one. (An impulse response captures the “character” of a speaker + cabinet + power amp assuming it is a linear system. It is a very good approximation, nearly indistinguishable from the real thing. For example, I recorded several IRs of my Vintage 30 and a couple other speakers in my cabinet.)

[1] Technically you need plugins and DAW software too, but you can 100% use a combination of stock plugins and freeware and get excellent results with practice. The Ardour DAW is free and open-source (but they do charge for pre-compiled Linux binaries, but Linux package managers typically have a version ready-to-go for free), although REAPER is better IMO (not simple, but extremely customizable and stable) and has an infinite, unlimited free trial (and runs on Linux).

[2] For example, the “clean” channel on the 6505 absolutely sucks, except (ironically) as a rhythm metal channel. If I needed to use both clean and distorted sounds, I would have to use a second amp and an A-B switch. In software, it is absolutely trivial to automate the switch between two (or more) amps (or effects, or whole signal chains). ReaGate, a freeware noise gate plugin that comes with REAPER but anyone can get, includes an adjustable pre-filter so that it only responds to the frequency ranges you expect your guitar to “live in”. It also has a side chain input, meaning you can gate the output signal based on the signal that goes in before the amplifier, like the “four-wire” noise gate setup in an amplifier’s FX loop. This setup means that the amplifiers won’t distort the signal as the gate transitions from on to off, and it also can take care of noise due solely to the distortion stages.

Track_Shovel OP , 28 days ago

I think for acoustics, wood definitely matters. For electrics? Not at all. There’s a plexiglass guitar out there that sounds amazing. Hell, the first LP was legit a log.

There MIGHT be differences between solid and semi hollow electrics, but not as much as people put stock into it.

I’m just a basement player, and an ok one at that, but I am really good at dialing in tone. Like you, I could probably get toan out of a wet shoebox.

Heck, those little pignose amps were used by greats and they are stupid simple circuits.

hanke , 28 days ago

Here’s some music from one of my favourite bands :)

open.spotify.com/album/1B12ldQwBhDeS0gIcUg0ux?si=…

clark , 29 days ago

I am a woman who prefers short men.

Persen , 29 days ago

So you also like them short in bed?

xilliah , 29 days ago

Ah I like bald men, especially if they have some hair left. Issue is I don’t like insecure men

clark , 28 days ago

Shame society perpetuates certain things to be insecure about. Just makes it harder to love people with said insecurities.

hungrythirstyhorny , 28 days ago

at my place, there’s a food name Saksang

its a pork cooked with its blood…

Mothra , 30 days ago

I got synaesthesia, and Track_Shovel is a red and yellow name.

sneezycat , 30 days ago

I don’t have synaesthesia, and Track_Shovel is a name.

Mothra , 30 days ago

Fair enough, equally valid

Track_Shovel OP , 30 days ago

That’s super cool! What colour is your name

Mothra , 29 days ago

Mothra is kinda brownish-mauve, but my irl name is orange

clark , 29 days ago

What colour is my name?

Mothra , 29 days ago

Pale orange

Feathercrown , 29 days ago

My 2nd and 3rd toes are webbed up to the first “knuckle” on both feet

ClassifiedPancake , 29 days ago

I used to not cook at all. Then I realized I can’t go on like this and started a challenge: Eat a self cooked meal every single day for a month. It was super challenging but I learned a lot (and initially wasted a lot of food due to bad planning). Now I still cook almost every day.

When you wanna know if a hobby is for you, try doing it every day for a longer time and see if you still enjoy it.

toototabon , 29 days ago

may we get some pointers on what did you start with?

ClassifiedPancake , 29 days ago (edited 29 days ago)

I don’t remember what meals I started with. Nothing too fancy but also not too basic. In Germany we have a cooking app called KptnCook that has very easy instructions with pictures and a shopping cart that’s integrated with major grocery chains to show the exact name and price of products. It was really helpful for the beginning and they have many recipes I still cook today. I’m sure something like that exists in other countries.

In the beginning it’s important to read the recipe first before you even begin to plan it. You might need some utensils that you don’t have or furiously need to search for during the cooking process. Later on when you’re more advanced you will probably have everything (or something similar) on hand. It also helps in the preparation. Sometimes there is a step to add multiple spices at once. You can pre-mix them in a small bowl.

Do the preparation first and have everything ready. American recipes already often list their ingredients pre-cut. But in Germany it will just say 1 onion, 3 tomatoes and so on and then in the recipe it will tell you how to prepare it.

Look up Youtube Videos. It will have techniques and cool recipes. Pick Up Limes, Yeung Man Cooking and The Nard Dog Cooks are my favorite channels.

Sparky , 29 days ago

Im the person who’s been “chosen by the people” to do “IT stuff”. Family, friends, teachers, and neighbours reach out to me for the simplest tasks. Stuff they could probably figure out on their own, but insist I do for them.

I’m a nightmare for my school administrators, as I know my way around every blocking and monitoring thing they’ve set up on the school equipment.

I’ve also caused headaches for the entire city wide school system, as I got cloudflare to (unintentionally) block traffic from our ip address, and since all traffic is funnleded trough a VPN to a central gateway (all schools in said city use the vpn) ,meaning I blocked 66k kids from using the internet for 15m. ( I didn’t get in trouble :3)

MxRemy , 30 days ago

I work in a makerspace, that’s in a public library.

weeeeum , 29 days ago

What are your tips for a library opening a tiny maker space? Some libraries near me have been given grants to have a “tool library” section, with some work benches and basic hand tools, that can be borrowed.

MxRemy , 29 days ago

I think my biggest suggestion might be to try to avoid the huge industry of companies selling “makerspace” stuff to libraries, i.e. GlowForge, etc. All of it is wildly overpriced and underpowered, at the supposed tradeoff of having a lot of support. It’s a bad trade, the support isn’t worth it.

Try to build your own open source equipment, like Voron for 3d printing, OpenFlexure for microscopes, all the Precious Plastics designs for plastic scrap processing, etc. Building these from scratch is ultimately cheaper. Also, it means you’ll know how to fix anything that could possibly go wrong, since you know it inside and out

Don’t worry about not having the necessary skills/experience. It’s all very learnable by anyone, and also there are definitely members of your community with those skills willing to help out. On that note, you really want the community running this thing more than the library admin. They know what they want/need.

Pay attention to the environmental and health consequences of this stuff EARLY ON, before you invest in something terrible. Use easily compostable materials like PHA and hempwood, or post-consumer recycled stuff like PETg from used soda bottles. Get into making/recycling your own materials if/when you can.

That’s what i can think of for now, hopefully that’s at all helpful.

Bilbo_Haggins , 29 days ago

Highly recommend IGNEA if you like melodic metal. A few faves:

Jinnslammer www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZF_qqeXzM4g

Disenchantment www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnV9vpEit6E

Mermaids www.youtube.com/watch?v=YU9WFEwsQQw

But gosh their stuff is just all awesome.

ThighlanderEnjoyer , 29 days ago (edited 29 days ago)

I never quite understood emotions until I started hrt at 32.

WHARRGARBL , 29 days ago

I have total Aphantasia. There’s no internal voice, ever. I’ve never pictured anything in my mind. No taste, touch, or smell can evoke a memory or whatever it is other people have. My husband says he battles negative voices from his past? I live in absolute peace.

Track_Shovel OP , 29 days ago

Incredible