GRcade Musician's Club - Do You "Do" Music?

I'm learning Euphoria by Muse. Very convincing tone with an Orange Tiny Terror combo on about 6/10 gain and somewhat bassy on an EMG 85 neck pickup on my Ibanez S series (you want those super hot pickups or P90 style), and an MXR Phase 100, and can pretty much play all of it. When the strawberry float did tab sites get so advanced?? Songsterr is really good. It redirects form mxtabs.net (apparently no relation so they must have bought the domain). I tried that because someone on Ultimate Guitar in 2004 just wrote on a tab for Futurism "this is gooseberry fool" and someone else pimped that domain. I can now see that Ultimate Guitar has something similar.

I haven't bothered learning any in years and never really got into tabs much either (the best it got was PowerTab). Partly because they weren't exactly reliable and were often needlessly difficult to play.

https://www.songsterr.com/a/wsa/muse-eu ... ab-s517369

But then you get to the insanely fast passages, even the slower arpeggios, arpeggios and compare the performance on YouTube and realise, this is just not tabbed well in terms of what's actually practical to play. And I can play it, I can just tell it's not optimal fretwork.

I mean, even with alternate picking (which since I play fingerstyle I have to do with either tremolo technique or my thumbnail, something I sort of invented) some of those passages are strawberry floating ridiculous at speed. But look at the performance and there's a lot of pull off and descending sequences rather than changing strings which is a much faster (and easier) way to play generally speaking. Then you can just tremelo one or two strings and have limited hand movement.

This is why I never really bother learning online tabs fully - they're generally wrong but get you far enough (and have enough fun along the way) to realise the left fret work in places is just bad technique from whoever wrote it by ear. And then you just wish you had access to the guitarist somehow!

Anyway the main riff is fun and easy to play and it's really a joy with a good trem to mess around with.

A smooth trem and MXR Phase is fuzz and harmonics eat your heart out. After About 15 years I seem to have finally fixed my rattling trem arm holder which was showing up in the tone of records as a distorted buzz for that entire time (fixing it required taking off the entire ZR Trem system which I just couldn't be arsed to do and spend a day setting up the guitar again). Another time I realised the 9V battery was completely flat for years and years which was also introducing terrible distortion. I need to pay more attention to my guitars

It was also nice to find some classical tabs on there too.

I also found this

https://www.songsterr.com/a/wsa/not-ste ... ab-s485807

Bias FX standard is currently free on the Positive Grid website. It's only for one day, so be quick.

I've been learning Rust in Peace by Megadeth. I can play the individual rhythm parts at full speed but I always stuff up the end and forget where I am. More practice needed.

Squinty wrote:Bias FX standard is currently free on the Positive Grid website. It's only for one day, so be quick.

I've been learning Rust in Peace by Megadeth. I can play the individual rhythm parts at full speed but I always stuff up the end and forget where I am. More practice needed.

Thanks for this! Awesome!

Learning new stuff is hard, but also incredibly satisfying when you pull it off.
Currently I'm tackling an excerpt from a Chopin Polonaise, finger-crunching stuff but absolutely beautiful when you nail it.

What I struggle with sometimes is the voicing. When you hear recordings of other people playing it they seem to bring out all kinds of counter melodies and depth that take me forever to get my fingers to do.

Now I'm going to be distracted by my guitar again....!

Squinty wrote:Bias FX standard is currently free on the Positive Grid website. It's only for one day, so be quick.

I've been learning Rust in Peace by Megadeth. I can play the individual rhythm parts at full speed but I always stuff up the end and forget where I am. More practice needed.

Cool, I've had the light version for ages. It's a good virtual amp.

Similar to Ampeg or GuitarRig.

Edit: Yeah I had the "lite" version which was a few FX and I think no amp controls, only some presets or similar. In a deal with Focusrite. Which had an amazing scheme for ages for free VSTs etc. I bought that interface in 2010 and have had literally over 10 years worth of plugins and instruments. Just added the standard version to my account.

For quiet production, with my neighbour being a bit sensitive, it is helpful. As all my production gear is in a room that shares a wall with them (only choice besides the bedroom which obviously has its own issues). Even if it's often cleaner and easier to transport projects using the Amp device in Ableton (which is built by SoftTube). I can find opening old projects with loads of unlicensed or uninstalled VSTs to be a real pain so I've been thinking about not doing that and only using my SSL plugs that are built around my control surface.

I originally got BIAS AMP FX 1 and 2 Lite versions via Focusrite. I've just logged in to my account to snoop around and yet again now there's some £45 AI-driven balancer/EQ plugin going 100% discounted for registering an audio interface I bought 13 years ago. That's mad. https://collective.focusrite.com/products/fast-balancer

Pretty solid hardware, shame mine (Focusrite Sapphire Pro 40 firewire which I currently have in a rack) only works up to a specific version of Windows 10 but it does work and was bulletproof on OSX too. If I only used Reaper or another DAW I'd be well happy. I bought Ableton Suite 2 years ago though and that's still going with updates. WIsh I had more time to use it all but I stayed up until about 2am making some hardstyle techno on my Digitakt the other day which was a blast. Finally getting the hang of it and LOOK MUM NO COMPUTER. I can get totally overwhelmed with options in a DAW. Ableton helps a lot for this but just end up listening back to endlessly 8 track recordings and dicking around with half finished things.

Whereas on 100% hardware you can really focus on just a small groove, idea or pattern sequence and with the built in sampler and really good compressor/effects it's an awesome little box. I do miss a live band, even if sometimes it just sounded gooseberry fool, and a mixer goinginto a digital recorder (we used WAV/FLAC on an iRiver thingy and as dadgy as it was it worked well. I then started 8 tracking direct outs from a mixer into a tiny PC I made that size of a DVD player using an M-Audio Delta 1010LT with a massive CRT plugged on top. It worked ).

Gear like Elektron's is pricey but I will get some of that into production and it's a great live performance tool. I spend so much time in a software environment with a mouse clicking away (graphic design work) I just don't want to do that for music escapes. I wish I could afford more studio outbound and digital tracking hardware. Sometimes I just feel allergic to computers. Even a tape based setup would be cool... And I might be able to do that, if only tape weren't so strawberry floating expensive. So I was looking at some digital WAV recorders you could then burn to a CD - no computer anywhere.

But really you should just use a small mobile recorder or a tablet these days, much cheaper.

Squinty wrote:Bias FX standard is currently free on the Positive Grid website. It's only for one day, so be quick.

I've been learning Rust in Peace by Megadeth. I can play the individual rhythm parts at full speed but I always stuff up the end and forget where I am. More practice needed.

Nice one thank you!

Edit: I've just watched someone using it and it looks brilliant. Can see myself rerecording most of my stuff now

Another freebee, this time it's the LA-2A compressor, at pluginboutique.

https://www.pluginboutique.com/products ... Compressor

Free until the end of the month.

I never really know what I'm doing with compressors, I just tweak and fiddle until it sounds ok if I A/B it with the uncompressed version. Any tips are welcome!

Oooo thank you!

I'm much the same with compressors.

Been mucking around with Bias and there's good and bad with it. The distortion sounds like a wet fart.

I think the use I will get out of it is for reamping my bass parts (if I ever get the time to record anything again). I think the bass amps sound better than what I already have access to.

Squinty wrote:Been mucking around with Bias and there's good and bad with it. The distortion sounds like a wet fart.

I think the use I will get out of it is for reamping my bass parts (if I ever get the time to record anything again). I think the bass amps sound better than what I already have access to.

I'm not a proper guitarist, but I meddle a bit.

There's so much about it that I'm unsure about - I'm a keyboard/piano player.

I only just learned that I've been fretting the strings WAYY too hard, and that it's only supposed to be enough pressure to make the note clear. Turns out this is very little on my guitar. I've been clamping them hard with my fingers and wondering how everyone doesn't get terrible hand cramps.

With distortion/overdrive I always seem to get a very thin, trebly sound, I can't seem to get a really nice full power chord sound. There's so many factors! Which pickups should I be using? How should I set the volume/treble on the guitar? How hard should I pick/strum? What about the many controls on the distortion pedal/plug in? What amp sim? Too many questions!

Can anyone point me in the direction of a decent tutorial to get me going? Every youtube video I look at seems to make a lot of assumptions...

Many thank yous