Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

gear

The Electric Cult

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Epiphone Dot Archtop. I've played on this since 2004 (mine has gold hardware).

Boss TU-3 Chromatic Tuner. It seems silly to pay $80+ for a tuner pedal up until you have two beats to fix an out-of-tune string on stage. Also, chromatic means good for alternate tunings!

Last night as I put the finishing touches on my electric guitar’s pedal board I realized that I have become that musician, with his own persnickety alchemy for how his guitar sounds.

I really don’t understand how I became that musician or how anyone else becomes one, but I definitely am one now, and I am fully prepared to find myself insufferable.

How does it happen?

I’m not talking about playing. I get how to learn to play (and how to be insufferable about it). Western music is a system executed on a device. Notes on a guitar are the same as math on an abacus or Super Mario Bros on a Nintendo. I took six guitar lessons to learn how to play Ziggy Stardust and then struck out on my own, and I seem to be doing fine, even if I still don’t hold a pick correctly.

The thing that puzzles me is the layer on top of the music. The technology layer. Gauges of string, hardness of picks, choosing wood for a fretboard, different pickups for guitars, types of pedals to get a sound.

SansAmp VT Bass Driver. Though owned pedals before it, this analog amp-simulator finally got me to join the cult.

Boss GEB-7 Bass Equalizer. I already had this per the recommendation of Peter Mulvey to help keep my alternate tunings punchy and bright. Now I actually use it on a bass!

Did you know that electric guitars don’t even come with an instruction book? This is an electronic device more complicated than your typical kitchen appliance. I mean, the blender has little explanations under each button. A guitar? How am I supposed to know what the pickup selectors do, or what string gauges work best, or anything else?

My electric came with a warranty card and a little brochure advertising yet MORE electric guitars for me not to understand.

(As for tone, once I picked a few favorite songs and read up on their guitar tones. The first one was “Go Your Own Way,” and I learned that Lindsey Buckingham ran his guitar through a broken tape deck to get the right tone. Very helpful.)

I suppose the answer is community and experience – two things I’m not very good at doing. I want science. I want a fact sheet.

For many, many years my musical community was Gina. That’s it. When I won my first electric guitar in a contest I’m pretty sure I had to borrow an amp from her so I could play it.

Boss TR-2 Tremolo. I already owned this (to simulate old amp tremolo), but it became one of my favorite weapons in Arcati Crisis.

As for experience, I didn’t have any! I never had money to try untested solutions and I wasn’t out playing anywhere or with anyone (except for Gina). Hell, it took me over a year to even get good at TUNING.

The Loop-Master ABY Pedal. Gina started playing her own electric guitar, so I needed to be able to switch between us into the signal chain. This rugged, custom-built ABY pedal works in both directions!

Neither deficit really impacted my acoustic guitar playing, but breaking into the electric world was a different story entirely.

There is this cult of electricity, where you sacrifice your money and time to crafting that perfect tone only to have the electrons snatch it away from you with little notice. They’re fickle little beasts, and after a few early mishaps we didn’t want to have anything to do with them.

I think that’s why both Gina and I shied away from electric guitars for so long. We didn’t even like playing amplified for a while after a disastrous first gig in Drexel’s quad. Even after we got okay with amplification, we were still happy to keep things acoustic.

Weirdly, it took bass guitar to put a crack in the electric dam for me. When I bought a bass to fill in for Filmstar, I immediately understood something was missing from its tone. It didn’t sound like THAT bass sound, which is something a lot more discernable and tangible than guitar tone.

Seymour Duncan SFX-07 Shape Shifter Tap Tremolo Pedal. The more I played the TR-2 on Gina's slower songs, the more it bugged me that I couldn't match the tremolo rate exactly to the song's tempo. Not anymore ;)

Boss OD-3 OverDrive. Further research into Lindsey Buckingham yielded the fact that he now plays solely through a Boss SD-1, but I think it sound is a little thin. The OD-3 one has a thicker crunch.

I realized I didn’t have the money (or muscles) for a high-end tube amp, so I bought a SansAmp pedal to beef up my tone, but that gave me a bit too much 125hz, so I added a Bass EQ pedal, but I also wanted to add some fuzz to a few passages, so I started playing with distortion pedals.

Suddenly, I not only had a bass tone, but a burgeoning pedal board to plug my electric guitar into. It only took a few Arcati Crisis rehearsals to realized I wanted different things for my electric than I did for my bass.

A year later the result is last night, holed up in the attic working out the signal chain order of my new overdrive and tap tremolo pedals.

Learning the technology layer of music is an iterative process. It’s trial and error. You have to hear a tone on the radio or in your head before you have somewhere to go, and then you need the disposable income to get there.

I still don’t understand it. I guess some musicians have bandmates to learn from, friends to chat with, or a favorite guitarist to emulate.

Gina and I have always only had each other, but as we’ve become more confident as a band I realize we’ve also formed a community around ourselves – Jake in Arcati Crisis, our friend Chaz, Glenn from Filmstar, Josh Popejoy, Cris Valkyria and her bassist Lou Paglione, & Maria from Bedroom Problems.

MXR M182 El Grande Bass Fuzz Pedal. I've been struggling with a distorned tone for my bass. I tried the Electro-Harmonix Big Muff, but this is far superior.

MXR M-120 Auto Q Auto Wah Pedal. This is the one effect I covet for my acoustic guitar. Joshua Popejoy uses it to great effect, and Ani DiFranco uses a similar effect.

And you know what this group of people hs in common. None of them learned this shit from science – even the ones with formal training. They groped around until they figured out what they liked.

Maybe that’s why I’ve always found that musician to be so insufferably annoying – not because she bothers me, but because I’ve never been sure how to become her.

Well, now that I’m her … err, him, in my case, but probably still “her,” since all my idols are women … anyhow, now that I’m me, I don’t want anyone else to feel that way about it.

I might be a member of the cult of electric, but I vow to always share my trade secrets, and never make it sound like a bunch of technical gobbledygook.

Are you another member of the electric cult? What are your favorite electric guitar gadgets? Which major pedal in your setup do I need to know about, stat?

Flip Video Hell

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Good news: wallet found!

Bad news: still in video encoding hell.

Since I’m sure someone else on the face of the internet is experiencing this issue, allow me to expand:

My project: Shoot video with my Flipcam while I record audio in my home studio. After mixing the audio, sync it to the video in Adobe Premiere for a studio-quality music video to post to YouTube.

Sounds straight-forward, yes?

The Flip is certainly straight-forward – about the size of a pack of cigarettes and operates with a single button. Its 1280×720 isn’t the crispest, but it does well in all sorts of lighting conditions, and can absorb loud sound at concerts without clipping.

That said, the sound is still through a relatively tinny single mic, so adding stereo multi-track audio from my studio marks a vast improvement.

The problem comes when I import the MP4 into Adobe Premiere. It looks beautiful! However, its timing is every so slightly off – compared to the audio track the video falls increasingly behind. The difference is less than a second, but enough to ruin the visual sync of the audio to the video.

Not only is it visible against the video, but you can hear it via an increasing echo if you turn up the audio from the Flip. And after encoding the problem seems even more pronounced.

I’ve been trouble-shooting this for 72 hours, and I can’t discern the source of the problem. So far, I have:

  • Installed, uninstalled, and reinstalled all of my various video codecs
  • Tried encoding the end project in a number of formats
  • Tried editing with multi-threading on my system turned on and off
  • Tried converting the Flip video to other formats prior to editing

    At the moment I am truly and completely stumped. On one hand, it could be that I’m simply not unpacking the MP4 file correctly into a format that I can edit with.

    However, my growing suspicion is that the Flip is dropping and/or inserting some frames, and it would only take one or two “skips” to throw the video off several milliseconds against my audio recording.

    I lucked out on Monday with “Icy Cold,” which lags just a hair, but since then I’ve been completely frustrated.

    Unless some video superhero comes through with an explanation and a fix it looks like I’ll be hawking my Flip to step up to a more pro-sumer model for my upcoming projects.

    Updated: Comments from my personal video superhero, Colin, of SeptaWatch.

    MPEG is a compressed format, meaning it uses a combination of dropped frames + keyframes to make up for the lack of real data. When you “decompress” the MPEG, those frames are gone forever, so they have to be recreated. This is an imprecise science. Since the Flip is recording compressed video, you’re not recording with any sort of frame-by-frame accuracy.

    The songwriter’s job is never done, eh?

    PS: Could it be the audio that’s off? It’s possible, but not probable – I’ve been using Cubase for over two years, and my DAW is customized for it. It’s certainly not a logical explanation

    • learn how a PA system works

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    I’ve found that the biggest barriers to becoming a successful local performer are usually connected to the PA systems I play into or mix on.

    Did an open mic host EQ me badly and not know how to fix it? PA system. Did I not have the right mix of equipment to successfully amplify my show? PA system. Did I spend a night hosting our open mic at Intermezzo wrestling with persistent feedback problems? PA system.

    Honestly, there’s no “too much” that you can know about the workings of a PA system – it’s what brings your sound to an audience! And, the more you know means the less you have to rely on others to craft your sound for you – even if you don’t lay hands on a mixer you’ll know just what to ask for.

    If all of that already sounds daunting to you I would suggest that you read the Musician’s Friend PA System Buying Guide as a primer.

    Their guide breaks down each element of a PA – from microphones to mixers to speakers, explaining the function of each one in easy-to-understand language. Though it’s featured on a commercial site, it’s ripe with info and relatively low on cross-selling, except in instances where there is an industry-wide standard worth mentioning, like the Shure SM58 mic or the BBE Sonic Maximizer processor.

    I have a minor in music production and I’ve been setting up various PA systems for Lyndzapalooza since 2003, but a lot of the guide was either surprising news or a welcome refresher. Especially handy were the following two definitions, which I tend to fuzz into a single explanation when talking to Gina or Elise:

    Compressor – will limit the amount of variation between the loudest and softest sounds.

    Limiter – allows compression to occur only above a set threshold and the compression ratio can be very high. This prevents clipping, distortion, and other related problems.

    It goes on to explain the (relatively arbitrary) difference between “parametric” and “graphic” EQ, which has always puzzled me. The difference? The sliders on a graphic equalizer control a set portion of the frequency band, so when you adjust them en mass you get a “graphic” up vs. down visualization of the changes you made to your sound. That’s it.

    I’ve been collecting some thoughts on my year of gigging, and I think I might have enough to warrant an ongoing series on the various pitfalls of live performance. Does that sound useful or – to those of you who aren’t performers – interesting?

    Gimme Gimme Gimme

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    Ten toys, of which I can presently afford to purchase one, roughly in order of how badly I am pining for them.

  • A Digital Audio Workstation from Woot Computers. Price: ~$2200 (My computer is now 5+ years old and, though it works as well as the day I bought it, its age makes me increasingly uneasy. Also, I’d like to record a proper demo CD rather than just four-track exercises.)
  • A 16- or 24-channel mixer, powered or unpowered, with inline or accompanying reverb and compressesion. Price: ~$1000 (I am so fucking sick of using other people’s PAs. Seriously. Never again.)
  • A mid-range vocal condenser mic and an XY pair of directional instrument mics. Price: $850 (For solo recording awesomeness.)
  • A light-weight laptop w/at least two gigs of ram. Price: ~$800 (I would be so much more productive, and so much more willing to go places.)
  • An Android Phone. Price: ~$200 + $360 additional services fees in a year. (I love it, but not really, because I don’t like T-Mobile. Hopefully Sprint comes through with their 1st gen in the nick of time before the wedding.)
  • A 160-Gig iPod. Price: ~$320. (I can’t add any more audio to mine; on the flipside, this endeavor probably requires a larger hard-drive to be of full use.)
  • Something that is a pedometer AND has GPS. Price: $150. (I’ve just wanted this for so long. Possibly the above phone would take care of this?)
  • An auto-feeding CD-Duplicator. Price: ~$800 (Seriously, burning 100 Brown Bag CDs is a major chore. Note that the Woot Computer would two lightscribe drives for duping, which would knock this off the list.)
  • A flat-panel monitor with a 19″ wide viewable area. Price: ~$250. (Work has spoiled me, a bit.)
  • New computer speakers. Price: ~$150. (I’m still using the ones I bought from Lindsay’s Digital Media teacher, and my reference monitors aren’t really appropriate for general listening.)

    • So, if anyone feels like giving me a $7k Amazon.com shopping spree…

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    Matt’s amp is buzzing. To get any kind of volume out of it you have to turn up the Gain knob, which distorts the signal a little and leaves you with this constant amplifier hum. It feels expectant, as thought some rock band’s big sound is going to come crashing out of the amp any second in a tidal wash of big guitars and growling bass, but really it’s just me sitting on the floor trying desperately to read sheet music from the Bass Cleff of a Tori Amos book.

    The apartment is otherwise empty. I did a lot of wash yesterday, so the bedroom looks somewhat organized. In here is another story … everything scattered – papers, cds, jackets, shoes. It’s really the fault of this weekend; i didn’t spend much quality time with the apartment this weekend. Saturday night Drexel had their homecoming dance and i have this single glowing picture of me with a tie tied around my head as though i was some kind of savage, sweating like a horse and smiling madly. I love to dance, that’s all there is to it.

    It took me fifteen years to learn how to do the mashed potato correctly. I’m not sure that the learning curve is so steep … i think instead i had to spend time learning all sorts of other little rhythmic pieces of the puzzle before i could put it all together. A decade and a half is a long time to have spent doing anything. I’ve been in school for fifteen years now… i’ve been out of my first house for fifteen years… i’ve had my Thundercats for fifteen years. it’s funny, i only have a decade on my closest cousin and he won’t ever know the same things i knew as a child. Thundercats, GI Joes, Madonna, George Michael, Casey Kasem’s countdown, Johnny Carson, Ronald Regan, the Gulf War … all of those things are vivid emotional and psychological building blocks of my life.

    I’m the only one of my cousins that will remember my Grandmother. My nine-year-old cousin Dale wouldn’t have any memories of her active and laughing since he was five or younger, and all of my other cousins are only four. I’m the youngest person in the family to know her; we spent hours sitting at her kitchen table playing solitaire, lying on her living room floor watching Golden Girls every week, eating Golden Grahams before i got picked up by my carpool on the way to middle school. Last night i was on the phone to my mother and she reminded me how long my father’s mother had been in a managed care facility … time had shrunk it down to only a year, but she was out of her own home months before we left my home of sixteen years in SouthWest Philly (which she owned).

    That was almost three years ago. It’s been a long time since i’ve sat and played solitaire with her, but to me it doesn’t really seem so expansive. She’d always get up and dance when she won… singing “Let the Good Times Roll” and dancing around the kitchen. I eventually learned to jitterbug so i could join her, but by then it was too late.

    https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2001/01/2182260/