Posts by VoodooJef

    I've found Instagram to be a fantastic place to share snippets of new ideas, wondering how many folks on here are also on there. As cheesy as it may seem, I'll invite those who are on there to post up your IG ID here and expand our collective communities!


    I'm voodoo_jef

    I asked this very question not too long ago. I've got about 250 on mine, and I use.....four (rock rhythm: JSX, Heavy Rhythm: Triple Rec, Lead: Bogner, clean: Legacy III). I just haven't really bothered to clean out the ones I don't use yet. The way my controller is set up the unused aren't in the way or anything so it's not a priority.

    So my studio setup is pretty simple and my tones are an identical replication of what I hear from the monitors when I record something and burn it to CD to listen in my car (a great mix reference). I just picked up a set of headphones so I can get some work done after my son goes to bed and the effects seem to be obnoxiously exaggerated through them, delay in particular. I hear what I always hear out of the monitors but the sound in the headphones is just out of control (lest I fail to mention I'm using the headphone out from my interface so it's direct from the DAW). Just for grins I played a little 30 second bit of noodling and recorded it. Heard crazy delay in the headphones, did not hear it in the car system. I'm 99.998% positive it's not the KPA doing it, but maybe a monitor feedback loop or a weird latency issue (I have practically zero latency through the monitors. I'll have to look into that later). Any ideas?

    Congratulations on the new website. It looks good. Those are some great photos!


    That must have been some night with you, Steve Vai, Joe Satriani, Alex Scholnik, Eric Jphnson etc all together. Was that at GIT?

    Thanks!


    Not GIT. I was there back in `95 - ´96, that picture was just a couple of years ago in Glen Cove, New York.


    Side note: I would LOVE to head back to GIT for a semester for the chance to focus on a couple pf specific things. The tools they have available now dwarf what we had back when I was there. I`ve stopped in a few times in the last three or four years to say Hi and it`s just stunning how advanced their library has gotten.

    Sorry for stating the obvious but you may want to consider just profiling the Archon with the cab and not carrying those anywhere.


    I think a Kemper going straight to the FOH plus a powered monitor speaker on stage would be a significantly simpler setup.


    For your 2nd use case, I had to check the manual and for the "monitor" output you can disable the cab simulation so you are good to go. Check page 34 in the manual.

    This.

    Lots of mentions of classic rock! I`m of the age (44) that would have planted me right in the classic rock fan pool, but I never got into it. I never was nor am I really now a fan of Zep (GASP!!! Lol, I know. I don`t dislike them, they just don`t move me much) and I didn`t get into Jimi at all until well after I graduated college. I couldn`t stand Rush until after I graduated (of course now I am quite the fan).


    Participating in this thread has shaken loose a few dusty memories. I actually recall the first song I learned note for note (it was Sanitarium by Metallica, and it was a loooong time ago. I haven`t set out to learn an entire song by someone else in a good 15+ years), but more significantly I recall the first songs I WANTED to learn. They were How Will I Laugh Tomorrow by Suicidal Tendencies and a curious indie rock offering titled "She`s My Ex" by a band call All. I heard it in a snowboarding video and that fuse was lit. I guess it just struck me how fundamentally important the guitar could be, and how in most of the music I liked it was the very engine that pushed the music. Back in that particular era my life was perhaps a little more challenging than average and music kept me out of some dark, dark places. I guess I felt like if the guitar drove the music I loved, then maybe some day I could play it and write a riff that would inspire someone else to hang on for just another day, too. It was literally the power and energy in the sound, not the sound itself.


    Mike Ness from Social Distortion (eternally on my "best ever top three" list) did an interview some years ago. The person conducting the interview said to him "you know, Mike, your music got me through some of the hardest times of my life" to which he replied "Yeah? Me too". That was a lesson that resonates with me to this day. The power of music, from both sides of the experience, is almost divine sometimes.

    At the root it was just the energy. There was something in the sound an electric guitar made that I could feel that I couldn`t explain or define but I knew down to my last atom was there, and I knew I wanted to tap into it. I didn`t want to be a "rock star", per se. I wanted to make someone else feel what I felt when I heard it. Rocky George was my first inspiration, then Kirk Hammet. Then when I heard Joe Satriani`s Summer Song I knew right then and there what I wanted to do with the guitar and within a couple of months I packed up my things and moved to LA to attend GIT. My financial aid wasn`t even approved yet when I left, I just knew I was somehow going to make it happen.

    Thanks 808! I`ve run a couple of test feeds but my por macbook pro doesn`t really have enough processor to let me run enough software plus convert the video feed and it`s just a bad time. LOL. Picking up a new to me iMac with double the RAM and twice the processor on wednesday so should be up and running full speed by the weekend

    Yep. I ordered a Dawman pick to try out after reading this thread and it arrived yesterday. I got the black jazz III skull and I absolutely love it. Enough, actually, to have just ordered a handful more. My only complaint is that it`s only engraved on one side and the other gets very slippery....a problem solved, yes, rectified by emailing dawman and having them engrave the skull on both sides!! I`ve still got at least half a bag of my customs but I suspect from here those will be mostly used to give away at shows (I have seen at a few NAMM shows that handing out picks w/ contact info/website address is much more effective for a solo musician than business cards so I`ll still keep a few on me at all times).



    FWIW, I was concerned I wouldn`t like the 3mm pick but the way the tip is shaped it plays like a much thinner pick as far as attack goes.

    I`ve been using DR for 22 years now, been on their artist roster for three years at the end of October. Specifically I use either Black Beauties or Highbeams but I think I`m going to throw a set of Veritas on a guitar and see how I like those.


    I used Dean Markley Blue Steel before I was introduced to DR and I liked them enough but when I got to GIT the salty Los Angeles air and my acidic perspiration turned them to barbed wire in just a few days. I can`t say it was a failure exclusive to those strings, maybe I just learned to wipe my guitar down when I switched to DR. But I have enjoyed my DR strings for a very long time, I`ve only broken maybe four in the 22 years I`ve been using them and the people in the company treat me like family.

    Those two sentences contradict each other. Are you asking if it`s possible to make the gain sweep as the pedal moves but the delay and volume are triggered at the toe down position? If so then no. Midi can in fact be programmed that way but the KPA`s midi just isn`t that deep.


    Part two of my reply is...why? If you don`t want to hear the morph "swell in" just step on the pedal faster :D


    As for your last question, midi can technically do anything you want and there are certainly some mind numbingly elaborate midi rigs out there but you are correct. Given wha the KPA is programmed to be able to read/receive it wouldn`t be able to ascertain WHICH morph you were asking it to control even though two were on different incoming midi commands. You`d just end up with two pedals that did the same thing if we could even assign two different command channels to the morph function. (ie; our midi isn`t deep enough for it to be able to think "ok, morph channel 4 controls X, but morph channel 3 controls Y")

    Weird little glitch I encountered: occasionally I will switch whatever the active effect is to another (ie; one delay to a different type of delay), it changes the effect just fine but when I attempt to adjust any of the new effect's settings it reverts back to the original effect, and if I try to make changes to that effect`s settings they will immediately revert back to their original. It`s not really a big deal but one time I had a significant amount of time invested in a nice fat, expansive delay and I lost the whole thing when Toast threw its little tantrum. LOL.


    Not expecting there to be a "solution" since it`s a mildly unstable platform for software (relax, the editor for Hughes & Kettner is on the same platform and has its own issues) but it would be nice to know I can prevent it if there is in fact a way.

    Standard tuning for me. Always have. And like Wheresthedug I typically use one guitar for a whole show, the exceptions being the obvious like breaking a string or using the acoustic. Just perusing Ted Green`s Chord Chemistry book and realizing none of us could ever exhaust what we can do in standard tuning is enough to humble anyone back to standard tuning for the next three lifetimes.


    As far as tone chasing goes, I actually just did a clinic on that very thing at the studio where I teach.


    We`ve all heard it; tone is in the fingers, right? I`ve been on the student end with so many great teachers and players from unknown locals to the greatest of the greats and I`ve heard it from all of them. So why, then, do so many people blow so much money on gear trying to find "their" tone?


    It`s an excuse to not practice.


    I don`t claim to hold the holy grail of tone. I like the sound I have (and absolutely the Kemper helped refine it!), but it`s MY tone, and I`m sure someone out there won`t like it. With that said, I`ll get to the meat of it:


    Your tone is as much a part of your style as the notes you`re playing. We invest all this time and energy learning how to play just the right notes and say everything we want to say with them, but few really "work" on their tone. It`s like trying to write the next War and Peace via text message.


    Pfft. Work on tone....Jef must be retarded.


    Nope. It`s a real thing. (I`ll try to cut out the fluff from the clinic here). When you get close to a sound you want; you have the gear that`s supposed to make you sound like a personal sunbeam from the core of heaven itself, it`s time to start putting your own fingerprint on the sound it makes. You have to learn how your own personal technique affects the sound; do the notes bloom quickly, or do they just sound like a 440hz (or whatever note you happen to be on) frequency vibrating the eardrums? (note bloom is a rarely talked about phenomenon. I spoke about this at length with Joe Satriani). The pressure you exert on the neck, where you pick in relation to the bridge, your vibrato all add up and contribute to your personal tone. That`s why two people can play the exact same setup and sound very different. Chasing someone else`s tone is foolish and futile. You can come close, but their tone has THEIR fingerprints on it, not yours. It`s not in the next pedal, or the next profile. It`s in your next practice session. Spend time with your rig, learn how it reacts, learn how it reflects what you put into it. Learn how to tickle a note just right so it expands with the mythical bloom.


    There truly are ways to develop and work on it, but that is fodder for a different thread. If anyone would be interested I`d be happy to work up a blog post for my site going over the things that have helped me over the years, especially what I have learned in the past couple of years from players I consider the epitome of legends of the instrument.