i don't get it

lol

TIME BOMB

i can play the bury me solo with accuracy surpassing that of the original recording

Ah.

Don't see how those are power chords, though. They've all got dat major third. Those are major chords with E as a bass note (which is still a cool idea, it creates a droning thing, similar to that thing I like to do with open strings I was talking about). In the case of that G chord, it's a G major sixth. Or, if you want to look at it as an E chord, it's an E minor seventh.

In the case of that A chord, since E is already in the chord, it's just an A minor triad inversion.

The cool thing about doing this stuff is that the same chord shape gives different chord tensions, depending on what relationship the droning note has to the rest of the chord.

Yeah, there's more than one way to play a chord

Allow me to blow your mind

355433

Or even

320033

What witchcraft is this? How can the notes be in more than one place? Highlight the below text if you think you're ready for this

xx5787

Should come in handy for the whole "pfft I barely use the top two strings" thing

I pretty much only play in standard tuning or drop D tuning (I may lower all the strings by the same number of steps, but the intervals between strings are always the same as one of the aforementioned two tunings) because it's how I learnt otherwise, it'd be like learning a whole new instrument, and I'm too lazy to do that.

I also get bored of regular triads and am always trying to play with different chord tensions. Even just throwing a seventh chord or two into a progression can really spice it up.

As for voicings, I'm lazy, so I haven't really internalized any inversions yet, and I just default to the basic voicing of any given chord. Maybe I should try learning more. I was thinking lately that learning just three-string chords could help with sticking triple-stops into solos.

so i'm seriously considering buying an RME babyface. the older one, not pro. around 500$ give or take. small, portable, high quality audio interface with two good quality mic preamps. pretty much all i need. and i'll be able to take it with me wherever i go, which right now is greatly appealing to me as my old DAW computer is a huge desktop computer that i still haven't even unpacked because it's such an enormous hassle.

what are you guys using for audio interfaces? any recommendations for USB powered ones?

I've got a Tascam US-200. The Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 looked cool, too.

yeah i'd checked that one out too. significantly cheaper - like, half the price - which makes me a bit suspicious that the mic preamps are probably not of very good quality.

i mean let's be honest, anything will probably be an improvement over my old mbox 2 pro, but i'm not sure which price range really gives the best bang for buck.

Lol I know you can play chords more than one way I was joking

That's nothing. My Corgan impression sound more like him than Corgan's own voice.

We've been using a Zoom R24 lately, currently tracking the Mine album on it. It's pretty cool. We've been just using the multitrack function on it rather than as an interface (although it will do that). We'll just export all the wavs into a DAW to mix.

I almost got one of those. I have an H4N. Never considered using the multitrack feature to just record and then bounce the WAV's to a DAW. In terms of multiple tracks or overdubbing.

I always thught the multi-track feature was dumb because you couldn't use sliders and what not but now it makes sense..

I've been playing barre chord A in place of power chords

I've never really got use out of actual power chords but you can't go wrong with shapes that work all across the fret board

Also I'm getting the hang of jumping into a lick while chopping a funk chord without missing a beat. The key to the whole effect is that you never change the motion of your strumming hand regardless of where you go on the fretboard, I find this pretty tricky still tbh

Oh yeah. The multitrack for the H4N is just for demo purposes, I'm sure. The R24 is more an actual board and interface. So we can record live as a band to the first 8 tracks (kick / snare / toms / OH L / OH R / bass / guitar / scratch vocals), then add whatever overdubs on the remaining 16 tracks, all in reel time but with the option of digital editing later.

All shapes work all across the fretboard. There isn't really anything special about the power chord.

It's just that some shapes that are possible in open positions would be awkward in closed positions.

well sure

Yes but it's not really the same as when you're playing like open chords into noodling

Has anybody tried the Mooer Lofi Machine?

I asked because I purchased a Tomsline Mario, which appears to be a clone of it. It looks like Tomsline is a new pedal company trying to get in on that cheap clone market that Donner and Joyo are apart of. However, whereas the Donner and Joyo pedals I own have been as reliable as any big-name pedal I've used, it looks like Tomsline really cuts corners, because the Mario is noisy as fuck. You have to dial in some "sweet spots" in order to not get an annoying background sound, and one of its dials is pretty much unusable, because turning it up increases the noise.

The basic effect is cool, the the noise is awful. Thinking I should just return the thing and get the Mooer instead, but I'm wondering if anybody has tried it.

Another bit crusher I was looking at was the Malekko Omicron Bit, but the thing appears to have dropped off the face of the earth. The company probably replaced it with the Scrutator, a bit crusher with more parameters, but I can't even find used Omicron Bits anywhere, which is odd. The Scrutator looks cool, but it's out of my price range.

Another bit crusher I was looking at was a bit-crushed fuzz by Devi Ever (Bit: Legend of Fuzz). She has a lot of cool pedals, but I decided I'd probably end up choosing the Bit, because a lot of her other ones seem like modified Muffs, so I might as well get something weirder. The Rocket, Shoegazer, and Godzilla also look really cool, and the Rocket even does neat oscillations, but considering their prices, I decided I'd save up for a Fuzzhugger Sonic Shroom instead, which is slightly cheaper than a Rocket, but seems to have more controls and controllable oscillation, even if the fuzz sound isn't as "modern" sounding as Devi's.

Speaking of Devi, has anybody seen her new pedal line? It looks like she's using the same circuits as her old line of pedals (hard to tell, because she's fucking recording all the demos with what sounds like a laptop mic right in front of her guitar, and all you can hear is the acoustic vibrations of the strings), but renamed them in order to avoid trademark issues (she sold her company to Dwarfcraft). It seems a little shady that most of these pedals are trying to undercut the Dwarfcraft Devi Ever line's MSRPs by five bucks. Probably regrets selling her company. I hear she's fallen on hard times and was even homeless for a while, probably partly due to pocketing a bunch of Kickstarter money without developing the product she promised and having to pay it back. Even though a lot of this is probably her doing, I feel a little bad for the gal. Hopefully things look up.

Some of the pedals are brand new, though, and look pretty cool. Like that Atomizer pedal. Out of my price range, but the demo videos sound wicked (the ones not recorded by her, at least; some people have recorded them with proper setups).

Kind of wonder if the "bit-crushed fuzzes" I see out there are actually reducing the sampling rate to make the waves more lo-fi, or if they are just heavily gated and have lots of gain so that they sound all 8-bit without being true "bit-crushers."

Another lo-fi fuzz I was looking at was Noisemaker Effects' Super Arcade. Only thing is that the pedal is from their old line (they don't make it anymore), and some of their older pedals have defects that they've fixed in their newer line (if you look at demos for the old model of the Nebula, it pops when you engage it, but reviewers say that the new version doesn't do that; I have a couple of their older fuzzes, and they have cool sounds, but waaaay too much headroom and volume on tap, meaning I can't even get the full fuzz sound at bedroom levels, unlike my trusty Muff, where I can get thick fuzz at a low volume if I want).

They have another pedal called the "Loveless," which is a fuzz and reverb in one box, meant to emulate the MBV sound. Obviously it won't be spot on, because Shields' sound was a whole bunch of studio fuckery that went beyond fuzz and reverb, but I think it's more supposed to be evocative rather than literally the Loveless sound in a box. It sounds really cool, but I keep on trying to tell myself "I don't need it, I can always just use a fuzz with a reverb." But still, the particular fuzz-tone of this box sounds pretty cool.

Also, I've never had luck using reverb with distortion, personally. It always just sounds too "arena" for my tastes when I do it. I only like the sound of reverb on clean guitars when I play, which is weird, because there are probably plenty of records I like that use reverbed distortion. Only times I've gotten cool sounds with reverb and distortion is when I "break the rules" and put the reverb before the distortion.

But the reverb+distortion in the Loveless pedal sounds good to me, which is why I think I'm a little tempted by it and not totally satisfied to just use one of my fuzzes and one of my reverbs.

lol

This is like a couple weeks worth of pedal thoughts that I was going to post bit-by-bit but then I was like fuck it I wanna talk about all of them.

Maybe I should just stop playing music and become a pedal builder.

Except it seems like an expensive hobby, especially considering that I'd spend the first couple years just following tutorials for Fuzzface clones before I understood enough to actually build something novel.

Should I just become a pedal?

you might as well, you got stomped on by lyfe

:banging:

most of the guitars i can think of on Loveless are pretty dry (much like on SD, for obvious reasons). it's got a lot going on but most of it is not wet with reverb. maybe a bit of delay. but yeah, that pedal doesn't sound bad

Part of me wonders if the only reason I feel it evokes the MBV feeling is because the pedal demo is doing that "glide guitar" thing.

I heard that Shields did some weird things in the studio, like recording guitar samples on his keyboard. I always hear that he used reverse reverb, but yeah, the album doesn't sound that wet, so he probably used it sparingly.

I think the vibrato stuff going on is where a lot of the Loveless sound comes from. Sometimes from vibrato effects, sometimes just from the whammy bar. The pitch modulation in a lot of overlaid tracks being out of sync gives the distinctive effect. You'd think a pedal called the Loveless would be a vibrato + fuzz.

Poots and slunken seem to read more about behind-the-music studio stuff, so they probably know more about what the fuck Shields was up to than I do. I'm just kinda guessing.

But yeah the pedal does sound nifty anyhow.

They have another cool pedal that has been really popular (their most popular, in fact, I believe) called the Nebula. It's like, a delay + reverb, except the delay part has a "shimmer" effect. Don't really know what that means in the context of delay (seems totally different from shimmer reverbs), but whatever it's doing sounds cool.

http://tapeop.com/articles/26/my-bloody-valentine-2/

http://tapeop.com/interviews/26/my-bloody-valentine-1/

http://www.polymathperspective.com/?p=2997

Reverse reverb

you're welcome

I got my bassist a Mooer Lofi for his birthday. It is very noisy. I don't think it's very good tbh.

I have a Devi Ever Bit: Legend of Fuzz. I don't think it's really a bit crusher. It's a great sounding pedal though. It sounds kinda "8 bit" and synthy if I really dial back the volume on my guitar. I just play primitive power chord hardcore stuff through it and it sounds great.

Pretty interesting. Thanks.

Checked it out, and it sounds really cool. Kind of reminds me of a Rat, in that it's a distortion that can somewhat border on fuzz. And it sounds like it cleans up nicely, too. Like, overdrive, distortion, and fuzz, all in one pedal, depending on the gain level.

Thanks for the rec!

I see. If the Mooer is also noisy, the pedal I have probably is identical to it, so there's no use returning it to get the Mooer instead (especially because the Mooer is, like, $30 more). Since I paid so little for it, I probably won't return it at all, and will just play around with the non-noisy settings.

Thanks for the info on the Devi pedal, as well! I may end up getting one.

Just looked at a YouTube demo, and it sounds cool as fuck.

I just ordered another weird noise box thingy, the Electro Faustus GuitarDämmerung. I was also looking at this other pedal they had with a photo cell, but then I was like, "so, it just makes a differently pitched whine depending on the light it detects? Cool I guess but nah."

lol

i thought this was a spoof and realized it's real

not even sure what to think of it

poots that pedal rules. dwarfcraft is amazing. when you decide to sell it - keep me in mind.