chrisc

Hi Folks, I've got the following 100W Amp head for sale, we're moving to Australia and I don't own a speaker cab to go with this, so time to sell! Hughes and Kettner 100W Amp Head Vortex - Black Series Made In Germany - Barely Used - Solid State Amplifier - Clean and Lead (Hi-Gain) Channels - Lead Channel has Character control - Spring Reverb - FX Send/Return - Includes Marshall Footswitch with Indicator LED Footswitch is in as-new condition. Amp head is also in very good condition and tested working (via Headphones). It's approx 10 yrs old but has had almost no use. £100 o.n.o Images: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/vt7nyhlwc96ma06/WMKxwXzv2z/100W%20Amp

Hi, Just found this: www.pandora.com Type in your favourite band and It'll play a bunch of songs by similar bands (mixed in with tunes from the band you started with)- good for finding new music! Seems to be all free at the moment. I tried 'Hatebreed' and got a pretty cool mix.

Hmm, unusual.. It's a punk style country cover thing about breaking bottles over peoples heads etc. could work if you were going for a shane mcgowan vs greenday thing, unfortunately the guitars are only turned up to 7.2 so they'll never get far...

Hmm' date=' never really got into Atheist - Piece Of Time was it? With regarding to getting it on import, they're well past caring about a trickle of royalties - Paul Masvidal is busy doing some french Jazz/Pop thing. His manager actually used to manage Death - they posted their gigs on Soundshed.com a while back. [url']www.shareaza.com is ad-free software which you can use to sample all sorts of fine unsigned and hard to get music before you decide to pay for it. I think defunct artists/labels should consider relicensing their old albums so that people can freely download them, after all - very few are going to pay for Nuclear Assaults 'Critical Mass' but a few would download it for old times sake. And in the case of cynic it would open a few eyes to how varied music can actually be.

Secondhand By the way, for anyone looking for an amp in general I forgot to mention my top tip. Don't buy a new amp. For the same money get on ebay and try and find something much cheaper, possibly with valves, if you fancy yourself as a purist (and enjoy that 'just about to start, why's my amp not working' buzz). And you also know how much you'll be able to flog it for if you decide to go for something new later. There is something satisfy about playing through a nice old cab marshall with a big rip down the side and sounding great when the other guitarist has a shiny new Amp-o-matic2000 and sounds poo. It's nice to see people take a step back so their ears don't melt - always a favourite with the sound guy, they try the same gag every time - 'if you could just turn it down a bit the audience will hear you fine..'. bah, how ELSE would you make people fall off the toilets from the vibration?

Pricey! Funny how such nice guitars are never cheap! If I didn't have such damn small hands I'd like an upgrade from my ESP 7 string to this 8 String. Just to be elitist obviously, I would probably get bored of doing 8 string scale runs and novelty chords pretty quickly. Looks good though, which is the main thing, since most of my guitars are luck if they even get played nowadays. Anyone up for an ad-hoc metal supergroup, teach these whippersnappers a thing or two about heavy!

Amps Can't comment on that particular Line6 but haven't found the older ones to be all that beefy - a lot of amps often sound great on their own but in a sweaty club they don't hold up. If got an obscure Hughes & Kettner Vortex head that does the job pretty well - maybe a little ill defined. My last band the other guitarist had spent is life savings on a nice looking Mesa dual rectifier and cab, all very nice to look at. It got a bit lost in the mix playing live too. One thing I always have to remind myself with guitar tones is that the cool sounds you get on record are mostly Bass, the guitars are normally quite crunchy up top and mid, and if your playing yourself you probably have the bass turned right up to try and make it sound more like a recording (with bass thundering away in unision). So without a meaty bassline accompanying you you always just sound a bit off from the tone your really looking for. Offtopic: anyone else heard Diecast - Tearing Down Your Blue Skys. Like a more musical version of hatebreed. much better than the dross all the established bands have been churning out recently...

Generally, Death beats Carcass The recent Jeff Walker appearance on This Is Menace was actually one of the highlights of an otherwise disappointing effort. UK metal at it's most average! Roadrunner All Stars was much better but I digress.. I'd rate Necroticism over anything else Carcass have done, I bought it at the same time as Death - Human, and while Human is more to the point, Necro.. does a lot deeper. There must be about a hundred seperate riffs (at least!), and there much more complex layering. Old chuckie just played fifths all the time, bless him (messily done 'tribute' intrumental from me at http://www.eutioa.co.uk/ !). Cynic (a few of whom played on 'Human'), now there's a band - for the uninitiated, download Cynic - Focus, then pick up that guitar and try playing along to Veil of Maya. You'll then put it back down while you pick you jaw up off the floor. While I'm getting nostalgic, Alex Sklonick's 'Transformation' album is good for when you get tired of singers that are mad at their dad.

Jesusonic Hi Folks, the jesusonic stuff is written by Justin, the guy who also wrote WinAmp (the media player software). In addition to the CrusFX effects unit there is also a downloadable bit of software you can use as an effects unit/amp modeler on your PC. It's not got a fancy user interface so technophobes beware, however it can be made to sound pretty good and it has loads of effects, and it's free. So if you can't afford to get a Line 6 Pod XT etc you can try this instead. You need a fast PC and the better your soundcard the more likely you'll be able to use it without much latency (delay between hitting the string and hearing the processed sound). Likely to improve in the near future and if your a techie you can even write/edit your own effects (don't like the amp model or delay, write your own!) The actual CrusFX is a PC in a box and looks more of a curiosity than anything else, the Jesusonic software is whats cool here.. Cheers,

The section for reader submitted articles and tutorials etc isn't active yet - we're collecting a few articles first. We'd be interested in an article about scales if it could be applied in a way that people can relate to easily (like breaking down a famous solo etc). Discussions about scales can quickly become dry and intellectual -but if it was aimed at beginners learning their first scale for soloing then it would work and we'd certainly be interest in any article you cared to write. I'd suggest writing a few paragraphs to give a feel for the overall article with bullet points for the rest, then we'll go from there. As for the site being a bit overwhelming. Give it time, you'll soon be able to see the matrix. Seriously, we welcome all feedback and we'll be trying to tone down the information overload soon.

Hi Folks, Over at www.soundshed.com we run a musicians wanted/available site. We're looking for lesson contributions from willing participants - think guitar player online etc. We wouldn't be limited to just guitar and anyone who knows what they're talking about and thinks they can write well enough should give it a go. We're not currently offering anything in return except exposure to thousands of readers, so the article can include links back to your band website etc for a bit of promotion. Not everything will be published as we'd prefer the quality to be pretty high. Any takers? Check out the site and let us know. Cheers, Chris

Hi Folks, It's been a while since I've plugged soundy on here so I thought I'd post a wee reminder that we have heaps of musicians wanted/available at http://www.soundshed.com We're also looking for contributors for articles, gear reviews etc. We can offer nothing in return except a decent amount of exposure so writing for us is perhaps best suited to aspiring journalists. Any takers should visit the site and send us an email. Cheers, Chris __________________ Instrumental (Metal) demo toons and some finished tunes: http://www.eutioa.co.uk

I use Cubase SX 2.01 (which for evaluation purposes you can normally find on something like kazaa if you look hard enough) - For guitar I plug into a Line 6 POD II. PC is an AMD 1900XP so roughly 2Ghz performance wise. 512MB ram, 100GB hard disk with an external disk (firewire but USB2 would be fine too) for making backups. I've got some example stuff at http://www.eutioa.co.uk which was originally done in Cubase 5. To be honest I've only recently gotten good at using this stuff and there's a lot to learn if you want it to sound professional - those examples tracks are somewhere in between competent and good but you can get excellent results if you try - I would say the emphasis is still on the musician(s) to record good stuff in the first place (garbage in, garbage out as they say - or alternatively you can't polish a turd!) - so you still need to do several takes if you want a perfect performance even if you only have to play the riff once and then loop it.

Cubase Hardware Setup Yeah it's worth troubleshooting that until you get it working. Different versions of cubase vary in their well-behavedness but in general the first problem you'll have will be that cubase stores the settings for the soundcard driver selection and midi device setup in the project file - so you'll have to go into the device settings of the cubase project and try out different combinations until you find one that works Generally the safest way is to start with a basic driver selected, so in Cubase SX go to the 'Devices' menu, then VST Multitrack and choose a driver for your audio - the safest one for me is usually DirectX Full Duplex (especially with the SB Live soundarcard). Then try playing the demo again. if your problem is with playing back midi files then look in the same dialog for 'Default Midi Ports', try selecting different outputs from the options provided and playing back the demo song. Once you get a combination that works for you, save the project. You will also need to eventually set up your default song project so that the settings that work for you are set by default, which saves you setting them every time you start a new project. Older versions of Cubase are similar but have different options which do roughly the same thing. Hope that helps.

As a general bit of info on PC recording, I've been recording on the PC since about 1998 and I've gone through my fair share of both crap and great software. My advice would be to skip the basic software and go straight to Cubase SX 2.x - the learning curve is a bit steep if your hardware doesn't work first time but it's a program that is very likely to always be among the industry standards and it can literally do anything (especially with the help of all those plugins you can get for it). You'll start out using it as basically as possible while you learn the ropes, then before you know it you'll be fiddling with all those software noise gates, grouping your sends and quantizing your midi, you can get pills for that though. I can happily get at least 38 simultaneous CD-quality tracks running while I record and my PC is nearly a couple of years old (Athlon XP 1900, 512MB Ram, 90GB HD standard IDE not fancy SCSI, Creative Audigy Soundcard) Something a lot of the basic programs lack is good midi - you can use it for controlling drum machines, fx units etc or just for connecting a keyboard to your pc so you can do your own drums/synth effects. If you have a drum machine which has a midi output you can program the drums live and then fix them/tidy up in cubase - then when you play back the drum machine will play back the fixed drum parts, and you can copy and paste the drum section in cubase to build up your song structure. For recording guitars a lot of people try to plug their effects unit straight into the PC and then try and eq a decent sound out of it (it'll normally sound too harsh) but if your not mic'ing up your amp then you'll need a decent amp simulator like a Line 6 Pod or V-Amp. All my instrumental stuff was recording and mixed in Cubase, check it out if you haven't already. (Note: quality or lack thereof of recordings is not a reflection on cubase)