On the modern electric guitar

[dhex]

DUMB QUESTION TIME

how hard is it to set up a geeetar (presumably with a di box?) to go directly into reaper to do drones and whatnot? i can do amp modeling and fx to a fairly heavy degree on incoming signal with reaper, so it's just signal boost i'd need to contend with. i don't know if i'll ever have the brains to figure out how to actually play guitar, but i've had this idm drone metal thing going on in my head for a while and doing geetar style drones with synths is more difficult than i like it to be. (not impossible, just difficult)

DUMB QUESTION TIME OVER

[tr0g]

Look on Amazon for a Rockstar cable, which is a 1/4 to USB cable. That should get signal to your PC that you can then fold/spindle/mutilate to your heart's discontent.

[Highway]

DUMB QUESTION TIME

how hard is it to set up a geeetar (presumably with a di box?) to go directly into reaper to do drones and whatnot? i can do amp modeling and fx to a fairly heavy degree on incoming signal with reaper, so it's just signal boost i'd need to contend with. i don't know if i'll ever have the brains to figure out how to actually play guitar, but i've had this idm drone metal thing going on in my head for a while and doing geetar style drones with synths is more difficult than i like it to be. (not impossible, just difficult)

DUMB QUESTION TIME OVER

I presume with all your equipment you've already got a setup to get a mixing board into Reaper. If so, then just get a DI box (pretty much the cheapest passive one you can find will be fine, another time for Behringer to the rescue) and run it into the board and use your same path that you use for other analog instruments.

[dhex]

sounds good.

next time i run across a used guitar on the college's marketplace i'll probably snap it up unless it's fucked out.

[tr0g]

Since it's more appropriate here than techno-bleg. I have a cassette tape I want to transform into an MP3. Assume I have a reasonable complement of amplifiers, tape decks, computers, etc. What do I need to connect tape deck to PC? Do I just run an RCA to 1/8" cord to the mic port? Or is something like this Behringer doodad a better option?

[Highway]

You will need something like that Behringer Doodad. And that should work fine. You would get wholly unsatisfactory results if you try to go to a mic port from a line-level tape deck.

[JD]

New Guitar Day! A guy on a guitar forum I'm a member of bought this, got bored with it, and put it up on Ebay.



Now I have to decide what I'm going to sell off to keep the headcount down around here...

[dhex]

the 50 ish year old acoustic i had got broken (probably danced on by a tiny someone) and the neck was snapped off.

local music store was having a fairly deep sale so for about 150 (plus 20 for a padded soft case) i picked up an oscar schmidt delta king. may take lessons over the summer but for the time being anyone care to suggest an oh shit i just impulse bought an electric guitar now what guide of some kind?

(amp/fx chain modeling in reaper is fun as hell)

[Highway]

For you, there's not a lot that I (or maybe anyone around here) could tell you that you couldn't easily figure out on your own.

A lot depends on what you want to do with it. Are you just going to record tracks in your DAW? Then you're pretty set, unless you don't like the tone you're getting. Are you going to play live? Then you'll probably need some sort of backline amp, just because. And if what you like is the "I can get all these cool sounds out of an amp / speaker modeling setup", then you might want to do is look for either a pedal setup that's good at the modeling, or even an amp that is. Personally I think the Line6 models are pretty good for either direction. Or get a pedal you like, and an amp that doesn't color the tone too much.

On the other hand, if there's a particular tone you always want to play with, then look into getting that amp, or maybe the bargainy version of it. Fender Twin, Mesa Boogie, Marshall stack, Vox, there's all sorts of signature tones that you could go with.

[dhex]

i should probably clarify that i'm fundamentally musically stupid and, like, i don't even fully understand where the fingers go. do they go on the bars on the fingerboard or between the stuff on the fingerboard? how do i stop that big ass last string from buzzing?

etc. book/video series recommendations would be helpful.

[Highway]

One thing you might like, actually, is Rocksmith (2014). It's got a lot of workshops, and does really well showing you basics, and then working on your skill.

Plus, it's not super expensive, and it's a lot of fun, with incentive to practice and instant feedback.

Stopping the E string from buzzing is a guitar setup issue. You could read stuff about guitar setup and see what you want to do (I'm not a huge fan of messing with the truss rod or the saddles, I pay someone for that).

[dhex]

that looks perfect. thanks!

[Highway]

Oh, and as far as where your fingers go, the point is that you're choking off the string on the fret, so that the effective length of the string becomes from the fret to the bridge. So you want to push the string down behind the fret (finger towards the headstock) so that it's ringing between the fret and the bridge, over the pickups.

[D.A. Ridgely]

that looks perfect. thanks!

I strongly recommend JustinGuitar. Absolute beginner lessons through advanced intermediate lessons clearly presented and free.

Also, if you are at all interested in music theory and want to end up understanding the CAGED system and the Circle of Fifths, I highly recommend Music Principles for the Skeptical Guitarist, Volume 1 by Bruce Emory.

[dhex]

thanks all again. this has been an interesting experiment.

related: amplitube 3 is very nice. the routing and chaining possibilities are things i can replicate in reaper via vst chains and linking tracks but it's much faster. works well on keyboards too.

[Highway]

In not quite guitar but at least band related stuff, we've ordered a new mixer for our band, a Behringer XR18 X-Air. Normally I wouldn't consider a Behringer mixer, but this one has a great price point (like all Behringer equipment) but has no control surfaces (the solidity of which is usually their weak point). All the mixer is is a box with a lot of inputs and outputs, and it's a digital mixer that uses PC / Mac / Android / iOS devices to provide the controls through wifi. But the processing happens in the box, so it's hardware, just with wireless controls.

The reviews have gotten better as time has passed, and it has a lot of really neat features that look to take advantage of the flexibility of the apps for control. Getting really excited about the possibilities.

[JD]

A guy on a guitar board I frequent was looking to buy one of the exact models I own - a guitar I'm not particularly emotionally attached to - so I'll be selling it. (This one, if you're interested in which one it is.)

So of course I had to immediately buy a 1970s or 1980s Hondo Les Paul copy (plaintop, tobacco or desert burst) that I found at a flea market... *facepalm* I know these were cheap guitars, and people don't speak that well of them, but it's a good player. The frets are low, low, low - about the lowest I've ever seen. And it's not wear; they're evenly low everywhere. Now I have to decide if I want to keep it and mod it, or try and flip it for a little more than I paid.

[dhex]

psa: rocksmith for pc is meant to be used on pretty much nothing. usb interfaces? fucked. dedicated pci interfaces? no. hdmi? no. onboard sound only, which means i'm shit out of luck.

oh, also messing with the usb driver for rocksmith fucked up my asio4all install, so now i can't record anything either.

[Highway]

psa: rocksmith for pc is meant to be used on pretty much nothing. usb interfaces? fucked. dedicated pci interfaces? no. hdmi? no. onboard sound only, which means i'm shit out of luck.

oh, also messing with the usb driver for rocksmith fucked up my asio4all install, so now i can't record anything either.

Boo, that sucks. I used it on my 360, and it worked ok there, but there was definitely latency issue with sound output.

Do you mean that it can't actually play through anything? Or that the latency on everything is just too high to be able to play effectively?

[dhex]

i mean it refuses to recognize there's sound output devices available, and the usb connection driver (which is a neat piece of kit, actually) breaks asio4all, so i've had to reinstall reaper and asio4all to record anything. in fact, i'm still reinstalling shit.

i try to remember "this is how some people feel about email" but it's not working right now.

[JD]

I am attempting the most serious modification to an amplifier that I have ever done - adding gain stages. If all goes well, I will transform a well-behaved little amp (a VHT Special 6) into something vaguely like a Mesa/Boogie. If all doesn't go well, I'll end up with a fizzy, farty, squealing unusable mess (or something that catches fire when I turn it on). If all really doesn't go well, I won't be posting here anymore because I will have been electrocuted. HHOS, but I am trying to be as safe as possible, and not let the 400VDC gremlins get me.

[JD]

I picked up a used Squier Standard Stratocaster, with a hard case, for a really good price. I haven't been much of a Strat man in the past, but this one seems pretty nice, and has the two-point tremolo that I personally think is a superior design to the traditional six-point. If I bond with it, great; if not, I can probably sell it for more than I paid for it.

[Highway]

I hope you like it. Personally, everything about Strats combines to make me not like them. The always floating bridge with no locking nut that goes out of tune if you blow on it, the wimpy-thin sound of the single coils being the only sound you can get, and the deep half-circle shape of the neck that I find uncomfortable. So I don't like playing them, and I don't like the sound you get out of them, and I've found they're hard to maintain.

[JD]

My feeling so far is that the two-post tremolo* is definitely superior to the old six-screw style, simply because it's mechanically simpler and offers fewer possibilities for things to go wonky. (Many guitarists argue that the six-screw version has "better tone", but my feeling is that many guitarists will use any excuse to argue that guitar design achieved perfection in 1959 and it's been all downhill since.) Even without any particular care or maintenance (e.g., carefully shaping and smoothing the nut, lubricating the string trees**, etc.) this guitar holds tune with reasonable tremolo use as well as any other non-Floyd that I've used.

Asides from that, the most noticeable thing is that the longer scale length of the Strat definitely changes the feel, even with light gauge strings. I think a 24.75" Strat would be the market...maybe what I need is a Jaguar.

* For those not intimately familiar with guitar hardware: the "tremolo" on a guitar actually creates a vibrato effect, but Leo Fender got the names mixed up back around 1954, and now we all have to live with his confusion.

** String trees are an ugly hack necessitated by the flat headstock on a Strat. Admittedly the flat headstock is easier to manufacture and stronger than an angled headstock, but it creates the new problem of insufficient string pressure at the nut for the higher strings. A more elegant solution would have been tuner posts of different heights - although this moves the complexity into the manufacturing and assembly stage instead...

[Highway]

I learned that my phone's microphone is limited to the low 80 dB as far as SPL. Was ringing out our PA system, and thought it was weird that I couldn't get it to go any higher, even pushing the levels up. Then I found out that it was limited. Boo. So I was probably playing music up around 105 dB in my basement (with earplugs in), with some ear-splitting feedback.