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Stoner/Doom Bassists Thread, Part 90: Maxed Out
- Thread starter Korladis
- Start date
Ordered Thursday night from bed and it was waiting for me when I got home tonight...
Looks like I'll be doing some recording after all.
Looks like I'll be doing some recording after all.
I'll mix these jams for you, get at me.
I tend to go straightforward and not too fancy. Send the signal through some sort of stereo pedal, then those signals go into the pedal of choice (maybe with one side being clean-ish), then some sort of preamp, then each side goes into the cab sim (a DigiTech CabDryVR in my case). I futz with the fuzz side until I like it, and if there's a clean-ish side, I'll mess with that until I like it. After that, I record it and anything else will get fixed in the DAW.
I may do just that! I have a couple friends in other bands that diy record their stuff so I plan on getting some other ears on the mix. When we did our EP I thought we got pretty good sounds but the mixing was a pita, at least to me.
What up, heavy fans? Not much here. Noodling, feeling ambivalent about playing, watching the world burn. Usual stuff.
I'll jump on the End of '23 Check-In train...
Band is doing well, but we're navigating some practice space shenanigans. i.e. We won't have one come Jan 1, and I'm scrambling to find one.
Aside from that little Monday detail, we're in full write/record/publish mode. Finally finished adding vocals to our first EP, and launched on Spotify/major streaming. Second EP needs some tweaks/mastering/gluing together, and that one should be up by end of Jan. Then the third in that little trio will be up by March. Also have a batch of new tunes that we'll start repping/recording when we get the practice space nailed down, since that's where we record everything currently.
Band is doing well, but we're navigating some practice space shenanigans. i.e. We won't have one come Jan 1, and I'm scrambling to find one.
Aside from that little Monday detail, we're in full write/record/publish mode. Finally finished adding vocals to our first EP, and launched on Spotify/major streaming. Second EP needs some tweaks/mastering/gluing together, and that one should be up by end of Jan. Then the third in that little trio will be up by March. Also have a batch of new tunes that we'll start repping/recording when we get the practice space nailed down, since that's where we record everything currently.
Well, I now have a tracking ID for the Pure Salem Classic Creep bass! With any luck it will be a nice Yule present for myself from that version of me back in February. 
Yeah, the more complex and more you mess with it the more difficult to get right without knowing what youre doing. I know I don't, lol.
One big thing I've noticed is that in general without a cab sim, gain/perceived volume is real wonky through DI vs real life cabs/IR. For the longest time I didn't have some type of cab sim and when practicing I'd adjust vol, gain, tone through headphones, then get totally different results when at low and high volume playing through the cab in the empty house. Straight DI isn't bad, used it tons, just different.
Dirt, especially high gain dist and fuzz sound wicked harsh through DI without a cab sim. Not to say it will be bad, just way different in my experience. I feel like you end up having to mess with a lot of plug-ins to get the sound right, when you can just go the 57 to speaker or cab sim/reamp route you're talking about. I know I prefer live tracking and gaining the room sound and ensemble feel, that's just me though.
Oh my yes, I've had the same experience. It's certainly not bad, the guitar for Black Dog was played through a compressor (with compression off, so it's really a preamp) driving another compressor really hard and straight into the board from there. Through that and EQ massaging it sounds like a normal guitar track.
My favorite collection of direct-into-the-board fuzz sounds that lean into their nastiness is definitely Ty Segall's "Californian Hills". Great riffs, and nasty fscking guitar and bass sounds that all sound like they're direct to the board without any cab emulation. I'm pretty sure they had to work hard on the EQs to get things sounding as tame as they did.
This is why I need an LPF on my amp head or at the end of my board. I like a crisp sound with plenty of treble. So the tweeter stays on. But I can run distortion and fuzz where I really want it (gain wise) when I have an LPF taming the harshness/bees.
All the fuzz will likely be basic live in the room near micd with a 57 and maybe one a little farther back for the room vibe. I've been told moving the close mic farther off the cone than usual can help tame some of the high end harshness fuzzes can have.
Been thru the same band room situation in late 2020. Sucks, we had to jam in my garage for 6 months or so before we got an in at another rehearsal space. Fingers crossed for ya
Thanks, hombre. Comes with the territory of 'communal' space rentals I suppose. Not terribly concerned, but it's just a matter of finding a place ASAP so we don't have to spend $25+ per hour to rent a closet with a sh1tty backline setup whenever we need to rehearse. Anyway, why wouldn't it be a grind? We're not in bands to make money - we're in it to scrap and enjoy ourselves...
Re: recording tricks.......guys, this is why you need a pro 
Help me by helping you
Help me by helping you
The black with the orange looks so good. Better than the orange and white IMO.
Thought you y'all would get a kick outta this, never saw one of their stickers like that. I'm also curious what circuit the business card is.
Got my Wizard clone the other day, and finally got to play it a bit today. It may finally unseat the Pharaoh Supreme as my #1 fuzz, but I'll wait a while before saying that for sure. Definitely still in the honeymoon phase. So far, though, I'm liking it with Highs and Lows at 10:30, Gain at about 8:00, Input Cap at #9 (of 12). Similar to my Pharaoh's tone, but with more lively lows and slightly more treble. The biggest difference is the amount of treble - this thing can get bright, but is also easily tamed by the EQ. For reference, my Pharaoh's settings have been Pre at 9:00, Fuzz at 3:00, Hi max, Tone minimum, and on MOSFET. This is a wooly and full-range fuzz-stortion tone. The Wizard is definitely capable of higher gain, which was initially worrisome, but between tweaking the High/Low knobs and adjust the Input Cap, there's tons of versatility in that box, and I quickly had a similar tone. Both are incredibly versatile, and I could get harsher with the Pharaoh and probably more mellow with the Wizard. We'll see which wins in the long run, but this Wizard is definitely up there with my Pharaoh Supreme and Swollen Pickle in the Top 3 Muffs for me. Three of my four dirt pedals are now Dunwich clones.
How's everyone else doing? I got hit hard by some sort of bug last week, and am finally feeling somewhat normal. Could barely breathe for days, just started sleeping (congestion kept me from breathing/sleeping), and was so exhausted I was in bed hours earlier than usual and pretty much worthless outside of going to work and getting only the absolutely necessary stuff done at home. Glad that I think I'm over the hill on that and can play some bass again, as well as just exist for a while.
How's everyone else doing? I got hit hard by some sort of bug last week, and am finally feeling somewhat normal. Could barely breathe for days, just started sleeping (congestion kept me from breathing/sleeping), and was so exhausted I was in bed hours earlier than usual and pretty much worthless outside of going to work and getting only the absolutely necessary stuff done at home. Glad that I think I'm over the hill on that and can play some bass again, as well as just exist for a while.
Dang, glad to hear you're over it. Getting sick sucks, and getting sick for unknown reasons is just the worst.
I'm mostly healthy other than old people problems that I'm having to learn to deal with. Sucks being old, but I'm above ground, at least. Hey, my health issues got me walking on a regular-ish regimen. That ended up being doubly good when my darlin' had a recent health issue and basically ended up walking with me to address it. Hopefully we keep it up.
Walking seems to be the only safe "sport" for me. When I tried to exercise and be healthy before, I'd always get way too into it and injure myself in some predictable manner. For instance, I eventually cracked a bike helmet and bruised my head through it in a single bike accident when I was bicycling regularly. I haven't figured out how to really hurt myself walking yet. I'll probably get hit by a truck. I also plan to try to quit cigarettes again this year. Knowing me, I'll probably figure out how to accidentally injure myself doing that, too.
(Complete rant about something you might not care about ahead. I honestly apologize. TL;DR: I got a great new position that is better than I probably ever hoped for, to be honest. Being on-call sucks, but it's currently better than it was at my old job. I probably should have deleted it, but I wrote most of the dang thing before I realized that. Might as well polish the turd up and let it shine.)
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I got a new position at work this year! I'm working with the people that I admired and often ran to for help before. I'm learning a lot. But in my new position I've joined my co-workers at end of the line for the piece of software I work on unless I lose my mind and move to management. I really don't have too much reason to complain. I'm now only doing the new job on a day-to-day basis, where I was kind of doing my old job and my new job at the same time before. That was pretty hectic. When I was in my old position, the guys I looked up to would still come to me for help on weird emergency issues that I knew something about. But when I was in that gray area of doing my old job and just helping those guys out when they needed, I was never on call. When my day ended, I let that computer go to sleep and didn't touch it for the most part.
I had jobs where I'd been on call before, and I had actually at times been on call 24/7/365. No sir, I was not a fan. Eventually under one of the old company's 24/7/365 regimes my metric for what constitutes an emergency was measured in "How many people are likely to be injured or die if this doesn't get addressed while I am on shift later?" If the answer was 0 injured or dead, then it wasn't an emergency. It was just a bad business plan, and they can wait until I get bored or my shift starts.
But that was basically when I worked in the wild west of hosting providers, and I was working for a company that was run by criminals. My current company isn't the kind of place where I can make those decisions. When my boss interviewed me for my new position, he said I'd be on call for a couple of weeks every two months or so, and we rarely get called. Maybe once a year. Twice is rare. Hey, I worked with my future co-workers. I asked and they agreed. They almost never get called. Either he's telling the truth, or they're all engaged in a conspiracy.
My luck's pretty good - hey, I did get the new job, and he gave me a couple of months before I was stuck in the on call rotation. At the old hosting provider, I was on call the first week I was promoted (and oh did I get called). But luck is still luck, and even mine does what luck does. I misunderstood what my current company considered an emergency and took on two problems over the weekends I was on call that I shouldn't have. That's on me. I was also called early in the morning twice for what really does constitute an "emergency" by my company's standards, but it was because the caller wanted me to sit on a call where I was going to listen to the customer yell. That's not really my new or old job and I mercifully was able to avoid most of the calls, so I was really bothered for nothing. That's on the company, and I'm going to make them pay for the on call charges.
So, basically I'm really, really whiny because I took a promotion and got snake bit my first time on call.
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Either way, I'm doing well. Looking forward to the new year, might actually get enough originals worked out to get my band in a real studio next year.
Hehe, are you really offering to listen to random mixes and work on them? If so, I've got a loony homespun space rock thing that could actually use a second set of ears in a month or so.Re: recording tricks.......guys, this is why you need a pro
Help me by helping you
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Yes folks, I truly would like to work on youse guys stuff. If you need someone.....experienced. All the Luggy Ton stuff was engineered/mixed by me, plus a fair amount of other stuff if anyone wants to hear my chops.
I can work Pro Bono, or you can buy me dinner, I don't care. I figure I might as well try getting back into it full time seeing how the writing is on the wall at my current gig. Get at meeeeeeeeee....
I can work Pro Bono, or you can buy me dinner, I don't care. I figure I might as well try getting back into it full time seeing how the writing is on the wall at my current gig. Get at meeeeeeeeee....
