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

Ah Guildford, GRmeet flashbacks and the one gig I played there plus graduation.

It was a great store. I spent most of my time pretending I was actually going to have the money to buy an amp.

Band doing stuff tomorrow on twitch, 8pm start until later, I should be on at 9pm https://www.twitch.tv/tbsblast/about

Do you take requests, and if so can I have Dakota or sexy fire please?

Hope you have fun, id love to be in a band again.

Not really a band more back to back solo performances as we're in different areas/countries. Our last jam was last year in summer or something. You can have a dodgy version of Romanza (timestamp added to link) on my Ibanez and various other weird synth/arp/ambience/noise madness: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/649977045?t=0h11m15s

Massive video delay that seemed to fix itself but after I was on. Was using an old android smartphone as an IP camera and streaming that to OBS via VLC media player. strawberry floating crazy setup. After that set the entire room was about 35 degrees from valves burning away and I think I started to melt the polypropylene speaker cone I have soldered directly to an input jack, just as as a load for the valve amp (or it'll blow up). Amazingly for an amp from 1971, I discovered I can use the output for external reverb tank (essentially an FX send / FX loop on modern amps) as an output to my Saffire's preamps - essentially giving me a 120W all-valve pre-amp. The recording is clean from that - a little reverb and some pedals.

The last 15 minutes is pretty much 100% sub-bass so you can't really hear it without headphones and a surprise ending

Pretty much ended up like a helicopter with the speaker vibrating onto the floor.

The DJ set with weird Russian anti-nazi propaganda videos mixed with UK Covid-19 announcements from two other members were great

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/650067557

Stream issues but our piano/keyboard/synth guy really knocked it out of the park, the synth work at the end of this is just strawberry floating awesome: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/650024809

Went pretty well considering I had no soundcheck and set everything up from scratch barely an hour beforehand. Synths just a lot louder than guitar in the mix which I should have been able to tell would happen really. Things to fix next time! I'll just add compressors and limiters to my channels, which I improvised on the spot from an old set I opened in Ableton - I can't even remember what any of them are as they have weird names.

Oh and for intermission and announcements, I streamed the Metroid Prime soundtrack (previously this was the wrong link sorry) https://www.twitch.tv/videos/650058102

Just about recovered from that. Here's a good moment on video (timestamp): my loop pedal and valve amp/dummy speaker going completely nuts with a feedback loop https://www.twitch.tv/videos/649977045?t=0h40m24s

GG in his natural environment

Tuuuuune

More like weapon amiright

I have clipped out the actual musical part for anyone interested in my guitar playing, by no means perfect with several fluffs but then I had superglued a nail back together with masking tape and hadn't picked up the electric in several weeks

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/650694258

Piece is Romanza, very well recognised generally (My Chemical Romance covered it ), I learnt this when I was round 8 or 9 so I always go back to it since it's permanently etched into my brain.

Green Gecko wrote:Just about recovered from that. Here's a good moment on video (timestamp): my loop pedal and valve amp/dummy speaker going completely nuts with a feedback loop https://www.twitch.tv/videos/649977045?t=0h40m24s

GG in his natural environment

What a noise, I love it when things just of off on one on their own. There's a present on my pod that I stumble on every now and then on my way through them, and it's got so much delay and sustain on it that you can sound like about 50 guitarists playing on top of the world, just by fret wanking and throwing the odd open chord in there.

Is it crazy to be thinking about spending about £370 on a dual channel valve compressor for my home studio?

For guitar and vocals.

I could also use a cab, seeing as I have literally never in my life bought a guitar amplifier, yet own 2 and a half electric guitars (two are the same Yamaha, one was given to me and one is half missing because my brother stole the neck). I only have the valve head, so looking at some cabs.

Thinking about spending some money on my music / myself for the first time since like... 2014.

And possibly a SE sound anti-reflector for vocals too. Finding it kind of hard to justify replacing my old Samson three pattern condenser though, it's fine.

Thing's I've spent more than £500-£1000 on in the last 7 years:

Cutting plotter (business use)
CNC machine (business use)
Heatpress (business use)

Green Gecko wrote:Is it crazy to be thinking about spending about £370 on a dual channel valve compressor for my home studio?

For guitar and vocals.

I could also use a cab, seeing as I have literally never in my life bought a guitar amplifier, yet own 2 and a half electric guitars (two are the same Yamaha, one was given to me and one is half missing because my brother stole the neck). I only have the valve head, so looking at some cabs.

Thinking about spending some money on my music / myself for the first time since like... 2014.

And possibly a SE sound anti-reflector for vocals too. Finding it kind of hard to justify replacing my old Samson three pattern condenser though, it's fine.

Definitely worth it if you can afford it. From checking out your video, you've obviously got some great skills, so you deserve to get yourself the right gear - it's not like you're just starting out and think that the gear will make you a better musician!

I'm in the unfortunate position of recently losing both my parents, which on a more positive side has left me with a little money to finally sort my and my partners music equipment requirements. I've spent quite a bit on sorting out/upgrading over the past few weeks, and I'm feeling more inspired than I have for a long while.

I say go for it, GG. Think of it as a long-term investment and it doesn't seem excessive at all.

Sorry to hear about your parents, Lime .

Does this mean you'll be getting your hands on the Fantom 8?

Oblomov Boblomov wrote:
Does this mean you'll be getting your hands on the Fantom 8?

I do have the money for it (thanks Dad ), but at this point I decided not to. The keyboard action of my Fantom X8 is really nice and I'm very used to it, and I'm using it to trigger the Ravenscroft 275 piano app on my ipad. I've tried a few piano apps (Addictive Keys, iGrand, Korg something or other) and the Ravenscroft is just right for my playing.

How is your piano playing going?

Lime wrote:

Oblomov Boblomov wrote:
Does this mean you'll be getting your hands on the Fantom 8?

I do have the money for it (thanks Dad ), but at this point I decided not to. The keyboard action of my Fantom X8 is really nice and I'm very used to it, and I'm using it to trigger the Ravenscroft 275 piano app on my ipad. I've tried a few piano apps (Addictive Keys, iGrand, Korg something or other) and the Ravenscroft is just right for my playing.

How is your piano playing going?

Fair enough! No point splashing out just for the sake of it.

Honestly, I love it so much. There are times when I'm playing (literally for hours a day most days) when I wonder why anyone wants to do anything else other than play the piano.

I'm still not very good at it! Over the last couple of weeks I've been getting my hands around all three movements of Beethoven's Opus 13, Sonata in C minor, and when you manage a decent run of it, it's just such a wonderful feeling.

The grief I use to give my mum for 'forcing' me to take piano lessons how guilty I feel now. Looking forward to her being able to visit me again (dad is still shielding as vulnerable) so she can see it was worth it, at least a little bit!

Oblomov Boblomov wrote:
I'm still not very good at it! Over the last couple of weeks I've been getting my hands around all three movements of Beethoven's Opus 13, !

If you're playing through all 3 movements of the Pathetique, you are pretty darn good!

Lime wrote:

Oblomov Boblomov wrote:
I'm still not very good at it! Over the last couple of weeks I've been getting my hands around all three movements of Beethoven's Opus 13, !

If you're playing through all 3 movements of the Pathetique, you are pretty darn good!

It takes me about half an hour

Oblomov Boblomov wrote:

Lime wrote:

Oblomov Boblomov wrote:
I'm still not very good at it! Over the last couple of weeks I've been getting my hands around all three movements of Beethoven's Opus 13, !

If you're playing through all 3 movements of the Pathetique, you are pretty darn good!

It takes me about half an hour

I know that feeling. I've lost hours to this 1 little bar, and still can't get it even close to tempo.



RH - fine
LH - fine

both - you are kidding me.

Green Gecko wrote:Just about recovered from that. Here's a good moment on video (timestamp): my loop pedal and valve amp/dummy speaker going completely nuts with a feedback loop https://www.twitch.tv/videos/649977045?t=0h40m24s

GG in his natural environment

I seen this ages ago, and I meant to comment. strawberry floating hell, GG is some player. Teach me senpai.

Went for a pizza that a pub was doing and my guitar teacher just walked past, chatted for a while and gave him my email address (which is literally first name, first name last name .com so it's not hard to remember ). He's already emailed me a bunch of new guitar tabs (these tabs aren't like normal tabs, they're musical notation with a 6th line added and fret numbers instead of notes) and recommendations and told me I was a dear student to him, which was just lovely to hear.

To be honest, growing up, my family knew I was good but didn't really do anything by way of encouragement, half the time they didn't even show up to my concerts.

Thanks for the encouragement about adding some significant upgrades to my set up, so I can perhaps record a proper album without depending too much on twiddling software effects. I really dislike interacting with computers despite being excellent with computers (I can code a bit as well and I use design software all the time, in case that wasn't common knowledge!) so I would like something more musical with knobs. A valve compressor that naturally acts slightly as an exciter might be nice for smoothing out waveforms so that there is less "twiddling" to do. I just can't be bothered to do automation, but I can set faders to touch mode on my master midi controller and do it that way... Perhaps with some look ahead so it syncs up. I just don't enjoy this part!

I used to enjoy live mixing but my mixer blew up. Perhaps I can source a replacement for it, but, it's not that good sounding and the preamps on my Focusrite are probably much, much better anyway. It did a very, very good job for the money (22 channel mixer for £280 I think it was) but you can't expect those pre-amps to be much good for that sort of money due to the physical cost of all thos jacks and pots alone.

So, as I have been thinking for some time, perhaps I will take a short sabbatical from my design business and focus on music (as well as painting) for a little while, and see what happens. And I can meet up with my old teacher too, once this is OK, and perhaps learn some new tunes and refine old ones!

Thanks for the positive comments. That piece, Romanza (with the first half pretty straightforward finger style and the second part much more difficult so most people never learn it), I've been playing for a very long time. There's some seriously interesting other stuff (some of it quite rare) in my repertoire that I can record in earnest... I just have to try not to be too much of a perfectionist or accept that punching in recording is OK to correct flubs.

I used to learn tabs from my teacher as soon as he had written them and most of them weren't available until he did it himself, and not many of his students could play them either.

I was fortunate to have a great teacher for a very long time (about 12 years regularly) but I think I do owe it to myself, that I stuck with the instrument and I challenged some really hard material.

GOing to do some more snooping around just for ideas and not spend too long doing that so I can play a bit this weekend and rediscover what I'm already capable of producing...

Unfortunately I forgot to save the TWitch archives so they are gone - those of you who checked out the clip, that's it, it's gone forever now! I have no local copy or recording at all, that moment of madness at the end is part of the sands of time. To be honest, I might prefer it that way. It's very easy for me to get prissy about keeping recordings of everything.

And it's also like the band is cursed... I've failed to get a recording at all never mind a decent one at about 95% of our live events/gigs, despite possessing all manner of devices for doing so so I have hundreds of hours of jam recording and none of the "results". Very strange.

Green Gecko wrote:Thanks for the positive comments. That piece, Romanza (with the first half pretty straightforward finger style and the second part much more difficult so most people never learn it), I've been playing for a very long time. There's some seriously interesting other stuff (some of it quite rare) in my repertoire that I can record in earnest... I just have to try not to be too much of a perfectionist or accept that punching in recording is OK to correct flubs.

Nothing wrong with mistakes at all. In fact, I think that is part of what is wrong with a lot of music these days. Anything human about the recording are often eradicated. I'm guilty of this myself.

I wish I could perform pieces without strawberry floating up quite so frequently though. I generally practice to old school metal stuff which I can play no problem technically, but my mind drifts away too much and I sometimes strawberry float up because of that. I also have a completely awful memory which does not help.

I just replaced the drive in my music laptop for a 500Gb SSD. What a transformation for £50!
Ableton loads in a few seconds, and a 14 audio track set loads almost instantly.

I had a few cases where playback would mess up/stutter/cut-out due to hard drive activity - if this has resolved it fully (which so far it has) I just saved a huge amount on replacing my laptop.

What I do need to do is rearrange my space so I can easily access laptop, piano, mixer, ipad etc and be sat in a good place to monitor. Until now I've 100% used headphones but when you listen back to the mix on speakers it's always disappointing.

I was looking at studio desks but they're huge money for a table with a pull-out drawer. I'm thinking I just need an up and over (3 pieces of wood in an upsidedown U) that can stand over my piano - and put the laptop, speakers, mixer etc on there. It just might be a reach for the mouse I guess?

What do you guys do in terms of your studio setups?