The Jam Room Blog Thread.

[Muffin Man]

AMM style avant garde noise jam and some humboldt london. god save the queen.


lion
rager, i suppose you dont consider this bass playing either. 

How is the intonation on that bass? I have the OCD complex when I look at bridge saddles. I always look at those. Tony Levin's saddles are straight across. Then I see some $10,000 guitars where the saddles are wonky af. I have a booteek Tele from a master builder...saddles, wonky. I have the 50's Blackguard Tele hardcover book, worth a $mint now. Every saddle (brass tele saddles mind you) are fairly even across. Nowadays, of course, we have modern nuts and bridges, saddles, and tuning methods. But everytime I see a pro guitarist's number #1, the saddles are even-steven.  it's OCD, I know.

[Pissy]

I read somewhere recently that the reason intonation needs to be set is to compensate for the string stretch when pressing down on the frets.  It never occurred to me until reading that why a straight up half way point between the nut and the bridge at the 12th fret wouldn't make it perfectly intonated.  

Armed with that knowledge, action height, neck relief and string gauge would dictate how much compensation at the saddles would be necessary to intonate.  Why it might be wonky.  String gauge likely being the biggest wild card. 

[mortlock]

my bass neck is shot. the intonation is good but it bows real bad in the winter dry months and kind of goes the other way in the summer humid months.
you ever hear someone say the neck is shaped by the player. i never knew what that meant until recently. my neck, a fender jazz bass, has a noticeable curve from about the 4th or 5th fret to the head stock. the e string side slightly rolls over and i think its from my hand position and motion from playing in that spot on the neck. ive had that bass and have used it almost exclusively since 1992. i literally reformed the neck through use. the wood is malleable.   

[Pissy]

That sucks.  I'm getting one of my fretboards replaced now because of a similar issue.  Not cheap because most all of the cost is labor.  

[RAGER]

Late nite sando in the synth lab a while back.

Mortadella, cheese

[mortlock]

Late nite sando in the synth lab a while back.

Mortadella, cheese

this post would be equally at home in any number of threads.

[everdrone]

I moved to Austin....south by southwest happened this weekend, many cool shows and saw Nebula and The Atomic Bitchwax for free yesterday yay! 

[renfield]

Question for yall, and I'm sure there's already been ink spilled on the topic..

Any tips for minimizing feedback on vocals? It's not really an issue for my project because we just bellow atonally, but my buddy sings with a very loud band with very dynamic vocals and he's at wits end trying to figure it out. He's playing through a boss VE-20 if that helps

[RAGER]

Is this at shows or at practice? 

[mortlock]

i notice for us in the jam room, we have to have the mic not facing the monitors. im sure you guys have already thought of that.
youd think with the ve20 there would be some way to control the feedback problem.

[Muffin Man]

they probably play too loud for any kind of correction

[RAGER]

Power. Lots of power equals head room.

Obviously the size of room and mic placement In conjunction to the mains  is a factor. But if you're trying to squeeze every bit of power out of an underpowered system you're using too much gain.

[Muffin Man]

1-2-3 kaboom!

[renfield]

I have relayed your wisdom.

I do think metal is just too loud for clean vocals in general. It sounds good when they're buried deep in the mix like in doom. Otherwise you should just do cookie monster to cut through

[everdrone]

use a directional mic like sm58beta or audix om7 to shield frequencies ...I use both

I use IEMs to stop the shrieking feedback of the mic too close to a monitor and monitor GAIN turned up too loud/much....but there are great monitors nowdays that you can fine tune out the feedback

[RAGER]

I saw the dude from Caroline Guitar Co. talking about his HIWATT Custom 20 so I very interested cuz. Never see anybody talking about these. It's such a great amp. I'll post the video. Anyways he talked about a certain setting so I took a screenshot and used those settings to great success. It looks weird but works great with a little overdrive.



And here's a strange thing too. If you turn alll the EQ all the way down you get no sound. Not even if you turn the gain and master to 10. Weird.

Here's the vid.

[RAGER]

Here's what I'm talking about with my HIWATT. Not sure if the audio will work so I'll include the link too.



https://i.imgur.com/wk4GBZg.mp4

[Pissy]

Really cool.

I wired that goldtop up with standard LP wiring and turning the volume all the way down on either pickup with the switch in the middle kills the signal like that.    I thought something was wrong, until i read about it. 

[RAGER]

All my LP's are wired like that. Shunt to ground at zero setting. Like my HIWATT.

My latest experiment is to turn the gain to 10 and everything to zero and bring things up individually to see what happens. It's like having 4 master volumes but 3 with their own frequency. I've searched around and haven't seen any use this approach and can't figure out if the HIWATTs are wired this way. Pretty fun though.

[Pissy]

We had Husky band practice today.  The guys drove up from Charlotte and we rented a rehearsal room locally.  $25/hr.  I thought that was more than reasonable.  We knocked the rust off and played 12 songs plus a few new things.  They actually record there with a house engineer for $45/hr, which is pretty low. BUT it's really more of a rehearsal room with recording capabilities.  

The room itself was sound treated and sounded great, very clean.  Had bottled water and coffee included.  It was also equipped with a JCM 2000 212 combo and a Vox AC30.  The bass amp was an Ampeg SVT3 through some 410.  Drums were a 4 piece DW kit with cymbals if needed, we brought our own.  Also it was air conditioned quite cool, which was strange because band practice was always a hot and sweaty thing in the past.  I was pretty impressed. 

[RAGER]

Just for fun or any shows in the future? 

Figured you had room at your place for jamming or you didn't wanna scare your neighbors. Anyways sounds fun.

[Pissy]

I do have room, and in the future we'll probably do it here.  It was nice to be there though, and so cheap for 4 hours. 

We have some plans revolving around recording.  For us the best kick in the pants we could give ourselves is to schedule a show.  We probably should if we still have any connections with the venues.  Most of the bands we used to play with are gone, but there are a few with members of those old bands.  

To be honest I personally got tired of the bullshit of playing out.  Playing was fine, even playing for no money was fine.  But dealing with some of those other bands was not my favorite thing to do.  I have stories I won't air out here of some of the bands decently known in this corner of the internet that are less than flattering.  Just not into those politics at this stage of my life. 

I don't think the other guys feel that way, and I'll go along with the intentions of enjoying myself.  but if it were up to me alone, I'm content to jam and record and release maybe even try to make videos. 

[RAGER]

Oh dude I hear ya loud and clear. Between being the singer/guitar player/ song writer/booker and trying to be social enough to get on some good shows, the whole thing burned me out. It eased up a bit when we brought our bass player in. He'd been
In some well known bands in the Midwest and knew some people and was willing to take some of the vocal duties too. But there were other things going on that slowed our momentum and I just said nah fuck it.

That and standing around a club until 3am. Fuck that.

Honestly don't know if I'll ever play out again. The whole process gives me the heebies.

[mortlock]

yeah i hear you guys on that. im at the point where i want to play out, but barely. i want opening slots at like 2 pm on fests that have tons of bands.

why the fuck are there not more matinee shows ffs.

   

[Pissy]

Good question, but if you want that I think you have to make it happen. Host your own Mortlock Monthly Matinee Saturday Afternoon Day Drink Event Thingy®.