Avoid a bad guitar recording by turning down the treble
A common mistake a lot of guitar players make who record at home is that in order to make their guitars heard better, they turn up the treble, when the proper course of action should be to turn it down.
No midrange = sounds like crap
In a guitar player's mind, there is only low EQ, high EQ and nothing in the middle. Because of this, the end result is a guitar track that "thuds" and "screeches" at the same time.
A guitar that thuds is a huge no-no. As for screechy guitars, yeah that can work, but only if it's reserved for solo tracks usually.
I'm not saying you should make every guitar track "sound like a log" by turning down the treble. However, if the guitar being played is a rhythm track, it's not supposed to be front-and-center but rather blend in with the other instruments (as in drums and bass) being played along with it. A good blend makes for a much better sounding recorded song overall.
Amp modeling and purposely keeping it simple is the easiest way to get things done quick
My advice for recording at home is always the same: Don't use miked amps. Don't bother with microphones or creating a soundproofed area or anything like that. Just use amp modeling instead.
There are many ways to do amp modeling. Here are two of them, both of which are inexpensive:
Fender Mustang I guitar amplifier - This is a small 1x8 amp with USB out and 18 different amp models built-in, plus a bunch of other effects. Inexpensive, very easy-to-use, very easy to get "that sound" which is good for recording, all without using a single microphone.
DigiTech RP255 - I've mentioned this multi-effects processor many times and will continue to because it is one of the best floor units you'll ever own. A whopping 94 amp modeling settings and it's absolutely loaded with effects you can use. The RP255 may literally be the only pedal you'll ever need both for recording and live.
What does amp modeling do?
Amp models are basically equalization presets combined with digital filters of famous amplifier and cabinet setups of the past, all of which can be modified to get the sound you're looking for.
Basically put, you can simply select an amp model you think sounds cool, and then change the EQ (the RP255 in particular has a 3-band EQ for bass, midrange and treble), knock off some treble and bass and you've got a guitar sound ready-to-record. It doesn't get much easier than that.
Amp modeling is a million times easier than trying a miked amp. Getting the right sound for a miked amp takes a ton of practice and expensive microphones to do it with. Amp modeling on the other hand is cheap, available right now and much, much easier to get "that sound" you're looking for no matter what guitar you own.
this was the city
Dragnet 1967 is a television show from the late 1960s, and is actually the second version; the original was in 1951, and that originally started as a radio program of the same name that ran from 1949 through 1957. After Dragnet 1967 there was a (really bad) movie of the same name in 1987, then a television remake from 1989-1991, and then yet another remake from 2003-2004.
The 1967 version is the best of the lot, no question.
There are others who have pretty much picked the show apart to a degree I didn't think was possible. My take on Dragnet will just be on how the show relates to me personally.
I am a Gen X, so the show was before my time, but the way life was shown in Dragnet wasn't all that far removed from how I lived as a kid in the late '70s and early '80s.
The same General Electric rotary desk phones used in the show is what I used as a kid when I wanted to place a telephone call to someone. And a lot of the industrial landscape of LA pretty much looked the same as it did in New England during my childhood.
In Dragnet, driving shots through certain areas, you see tons of signs and utility poles, and I totally remember when pretty much all towns used to look like that, even from where where I grew up.
Back in the day, there were very few restrictions as to how a business could promote itself. Pretty much anyone could just throw up a sign on a steel post and have it be as short or tall as they liked. The end result in highly populated areas was this mishmash of signs everywhere of every color, combined with a sea of utility poles (many of them quite rickety) with wires hanging everywhere and a ton of road signs fighting for attention along with it. This was an absolutely and totally chaotic look that created a style all its own. That look mostly disappeared once more laws were written for what a business could and couldn't do for signage. That, and many utility poles were replaced with underground wire or the grid was rewired in a way where not as many poles were needed.
I've never been to LA and have no real desire to go there. I know that the city depicted in Dragnet is absolutely nothing like it is today. Nobody knew in the '60s what would happen in the early '90s there or this year for that matter.
I know that not all of LA is bad. To classify all of LA as "bad" would be the same like classifying all of Tampa Bay Florida as "bad" when it isn't. Does the Tampa/St. Pete/Clearwater region have its crappy parts? Of course it does. So does LA. You get that with any city no matter where you go.
Dragnet, to me, is a time capsule in the form of a television show. It's written by Hollywood scriptwriters of course, but police dramas in particular do have to base a lot of what they write from real-world events of the time to make it believable. And yeah, Dragnet does capture the essence of what late-'60s American life was like. I'm not saying it's 100% true (even though they said it was at the beginning of every episode), but it's a fun watch. I dig it.
This is the first episode from '67 with the infamous "Blueboy". It's a ridiculous season opener and you'll find out why when you watch it. The ridiculousness of the story is what makes it fun to watch.
You should definitely watch it.
i hold 22,755 floppy disks in the palm of my hand
I bought (and received today) a 32GB SDHC card. In the palm of my hand, that's the equivalent of holding the capacity of over twenty thousand floppy disk's worth of data storage. Price paid: Exactly $25.05. That's roughly 78.3 cents per gigabyte. Not bad. Although I'm sure by mid-2014 the price will be down to 50 cents per gig of SD storage if not lower.
Just for fun I did the math on how many 1.44MB floppies it would take to total 32GB of raw capacity, and the answer is about 22,755 of them. I'm pretty sure that many floppies would fill up a garage easily.
Are floppies still usable today?
No. A 1.44MB floppy will barely hold a single 4-megapixel image, and being that your average email is 8K in size, a floppy can't even store 200 emails. If they were plain text emails, that would be a different story and the messages would be much smaller. But just about everyone uses formatted email these days, so yeah, 8K is pretty much the average.
Do kids today even know what floppy diskettes are?
Most don't, and that's okay because there haven't been any computers made with floppy diskette drives for years.
Some kids today do know what the 3.5-inch 1.44MB diskette is and can recognize one if they saw it, but none of them know the 5.25-inch.
Heck, the 5.25-inch was already old and completely phased out in the early 90s when I first started using PCs.
Do I miss the days of floppies?
No, because they were notoriously unreliable.
Actually, correction. The 3.5-inch was the unreliable one. The 5.25-inch on the other hand was always better, and that was due to three reasons.
First is the tactile experience. When you hold a 5.25-inch disk, it is physically flexible, so the thought of, "I'd better be careful with this" is sent to the brain. Just from that your disks do last longer.
Second, the 5.25-inch drives were built much better because there's really no way to build one cheaply. This is why there are 30-year-old 5.25-inch diskette drives that still run fine to this day whereas just about any 3.5-inch diskette over 5 years old drive was tossed in the trash many moons ago.
Third, not too many 5-25.inch drives required the diskette to be jolted in or out of place which I'm sure is part of the reason 5.25-inch diskettes last longer compared to 3.5-inch. On most 5.25-inch drives, you slipped the diskette in, then turned a lever and the diskette was ready-to-use at that point. When ejecting, you turned the lever and pulled the diskette out. No harsh movements whatsoever.
If I had to use floppies again...
...I would purposely use the 5.25-inch 1.2MB high-density flavor not only for the reliability but also because it just makes for a better tactile experience. In addition, it's much easier to store and sort them as you can put a bunch in a box made for those disks where you can flip through them like you would address cards on a rolodex.
You can, amazingly, still find new 5.25-inch disks for sale easily, but I'm assuming all the ones for sale are new-old-stock and not actual-made-this-year new.
I mean, if you're gonna use floppies, you might as well do it right and use 5.25-inch.
And no, I would not use 8-inch diskettes. That's a little too retro, even for me. :)
Top 3 reasons why modern music sucks
Unofficially, it's said that the music you connect with and listen to for the rest of your life happens between the ages of 13 (right before high school) and 25 (after graduating college), and that you absolutely will not listen to anything else after that.
Well, I call b.s. on that mainly because music goes through its trends where at times some of it is great while at other times it just plain sucks. And right now were in one of those 'suck' periods.
I went through the first 5 of the Billboard Hot 100 just to see if there was anything in there that I, a guy in my late 30s (meaning someone TOTALLY out of the popular music demographic), would actually like.
Here are the current top 5, and my opinion on each:
- Blurred Lines by Robin Thicke featuring T.I. + Pharrell
Rich's opinion: Blah.
Weird clash of jungle-like beat with Motown vocals and 70s flavor. Doesn't work at all. This song tries a bunch of different styles, and fails at all of them. - We Can't Stop by Miley Cyrus
Rich's opinion: Sucks.
Starts off with this creepy detuned voice, then the main vocal comes in which sounds auto-tuned and monotone as hell, the over-pronounced kick drum noise is REALLY annoying... this is just bad. - Radioactive by Imagine Dragons
Rich's opinion: Huh?
Very weird clash of styles here. The electronic drums totally ruin this song which otherwise could have been great. I don't get what the producers of this song were trying to do at all here. The vocals carried the song just fine, but that beat is such an immediate turn-off to ridiculous levels. Oh, and one minor note on the video. This is the kind of stuff that gives kids nightmares. Not kidding. Very, very wrong in every way. The creep-out factor just goes way beyond the line. - Get Lucky by Daft Punk ft. Pharrell Williams
Rich's opinion: AWESOME!
Yes, great. Why? Everything is done right. This is a great song. Nothing is too overdone, everything is mixed right, and the disco influence is done 100% correct. I genuinely do like this song. - Treasure by Bruno Mars
Rich's opinion: Eh.. okay.
This is obviously a disco tune in every way, but it's trying way, way, way too hard to be disco. It's okay at best. Not great. Just okay. Get Lucky got it right in every way, but this one missed the mark by trying too hard.
You can tell that I dig the songs with a much more organic sound to them compared to ones which are over-produced electronic pieces of garbage. And it just goes to show that even at my "old" age, modern music is something I can connect to if done right.
What are the top 3 reasons modern music sucks?
These 3 reasons expound on my opinions above.
1. Clashing styles don't work.
Songs that can't decide what they are just plain suck. Listeners appreciate songs where it's very easy to tell what genre they fall into. Songs #4 and #5 above do that very nicely, but #1, #2 and #3 don't. When you have a song that can't decide what it is, it's not memorable, confuses people and just doesn't work.
2. It's obvious the music industry (still) hates rock and roll.
The music industry for the longest time has been trying to kill rock and roll forever. Make no mistake, they want it dead. Why? Because pop music is easier to sell. The industry could not care less how many dedicated rock fans there are out there because at the end of the day they prefer to churn out garbage that's a quick, easy sell.
In addition, the industry prefers to sell music that appeals to the widest possible audience, which brings me to reason #3...
3. "White people" music is expressly forbidden in all forms.
I'm just going to call it as I see it here. Any music that leans towards a Caucasian audience is something the industry avoids like the plague, but the funny part is that there are many who aren't Caucasian that would really enjoy NEW proper rock songs. And by "proper" I mean "not electronic junk" where you can actually hear overdriven guitars, real acoustic drums and so on.
On my YouTube channel and Facebook page, I have several fans, both domestic and international, who aren't "lily white" people whatsoever. These are people who really like rock music and absolutely fall into the 13-to-25 age demographic. But as far as popular music is concerned, there's nothing for them out there that they can connect to.
What I see is this growing gap of rock fans that want the music industry to just die off altogether because they're sick of the plastic pop crap. While I can personally hear some good groove in a couple of the songs I mentioned above, this gap I speak of hates every single song I mentioned and wants them gone.
As Ozzy Osbourne once sang, you can't kill rock and roll. Try as the music industry does, rock is just something that they can't kill off. They've tried, failed and should just embrace it again. If they don't, then the industry will die off due to their own stupidity.
Would I buy a 3D-printed guitar?
3D-printed guitars are NOT affordable and start at around $3,000 to buy one. Eventually they will get cheaper, but for now they cost way, way too much.
But let's say for the moment that I actually had the money to spend on one. Would I buy it?
No.
Right now, 3D printing is still a maturing thing, and at present there is no real reason to own a 3D-printed guitar. They don't play better, don't sound better and solely exist just because some people think they look cool (I personally think they look like children's toys).
3D-printed guitars do use wooden necks, by the way. Why? Probably because one hasn't been able to have been printed yet that has the right flex or weight to it. I'm sure eventually someone will develop a printed neck that gets it right, but that's probably not going to happen any time soon, therefore wood is used.
Basically speaking, 3D-printed guitars at best are a novelty, much the same as guitar bodies made from acrylic.
You'd be better off saving $2,650+ and just get an Epiphone Les Paul Studio instead. Or heck, even a Gibson Les Paul Standard is cheaper than a 3D-printed guitar. Yes, really.