Tell me something interesting about yourself

Phenomephrene , 30 days ago

What types of metal do you like? I can try to aim if I have an idea of what you're into.

If I'm going just for an out of the blue rec, maybe try Emptiness - Not For Music if you're not already familiar. Belgian black/death band having turned toward the avant garde have left nearly every indication of their more extreme roots on this album, and it's fantastic. All the tracks are great but if you're looking for the "single" maybe try the track Ever.

Track_Shovel OP , 30 days ago

This is right up my alley; it’s going on my collaborative playlist called ‘forks in a blender’ which is just me and my bud making a playlist.

I really, really like Vvilderness. Huge fan. Also like panopticon, Unreqvited, Witchcraft, Nordic Winter, Skrm (I think?) Elderwind. Psychedelic Witchcraft and Blood Ceremony are up there too.

Phenomephrene , 30 days ago

Ok, I can work with that. If you are a Panopticon fan you may already be familiar with this, but if not it's worth a listen: Eneferens. A little more toward the VVilderness vibe, but essentially purely folk, check out Ekstasis. And to go with the psych vibe, if you haven't heard Hexvessel - Dawnbearer then give that a spin and thank me later.

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

God, how have I not heard any of these metal bands in this thread? I listen to metal every day, most of the day. Such a huge genre.

I’m going add these to the list.

Holy shit I’m in love with Eneferens and I listened to about 40 seconds. Thanks. Checking out the others .

They do a Kettering cover? Fucking wow

All of this. All of it goes into my and my friends joint playlist (forks in blender)

Phenomephrene , 30 days ago

If you care to, let me know what you think of these. I think I'm on the right track, but I'd be curious to hear how these strike you.

Track_Shovel OP , 30 days ago

Eneferens is top notch. That’s going to be a deep rabbit hole with associated bands, once I have time to sit down and explore.

I liked hexvessel and Ekstasis (in that order). Again, need to check out more before I really pass judgement, but they have a lot going on that I like

Phenomephrene , 30 days ago

I'm not sure there's much in the way of branching off from Eneferens. I thought you may have heard of them due to label affiliations. At any rate, glad you are receiving these positively. And yeah, trust that the Hexvessel album is worth some deeper dedicated listening. That's a special album imo; I don't know of anything else that's quite like it.

Vaggumon , 30 days ago

Arron Nordstrom from Gemini Syndrome and I could pass as brothers, and not just because we are both albinos. We both look a lot alike, even though I probably have 80 lbs on him.

tiefling , 30 days ago

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

My day job is in tech. At night, I’m a bonafide freak. I perform with fire and sharp things.

Musical recommendations (bonus points for metal)

In This Moment - Ritual

Useless tidbit you know (bonus points for citing sources)

The tongue consists of two muscles that go down to your throat. I know because I have a forked tongue.

Best meal you’ve had

I will kill for sweet plantains

Best place you’ve visited

Salem, MA is one of my favorite places. I go very frequently (just not in October)

toomanypancakes , 30 days ago

I approve people for disability money when I can. It’s a lot of reading medical records and ensuring I’m being compliant with some really stupid rules.

Depending on the kind of metal you like I’m a big fan of Delain, especially The Human Contradiction, The Agonist, especially Lullabies For The Dormant Mind, and Infected Rain, especially 86.

For useless tidbit, the barnacle has the biggest dick to body ratio of any animal.

Best meal I’ve ever had was the pizza my realtor made for me after hubs and I closed on our house. I don’t know how he did it, it was an outdoor dinner in a frickin wood fired pizza oven, he made a margarita with miyoko’s mozzarella and fresh basil he grew with homemade sauce. It was so fucking good.

Most fun place I’ve ever visited was New Orleans. I went on a cruise to Mexico once that left from there, and I had an amazing time both days I was in new Orleans and a miserable time while I was on the boat.

Track_Shovel OP , 30 days ago

Those recommendations are on the punch list.

That’s a super cool, and I imagine, rewarding job.

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 , 29 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.

ReeSilva , 30 days ago

not today, nsa ,👁👄👁

Track_Shovel OP , 30 days ago

I’m just bored, talk about what you want.

xavier666 , 30 days ago

nice try, fbi

Tippon , 30 days ago

Not on your lives, MI5

Track_Shovel OP , 30 days ago

Lmao. my friend just texted me:

So somehow i managed to supercool like half this box of freeze pops, and now every time i grab one theres a 50% chance its liquid that freezes as soon as i touch it

This is the content I demand