Everything around here’s breaking. The first channel on my Presonus Bluetube magically broke during the night. As you can see, the first channel input is pegged to the max even though there’s nothing plugged into channel 1:

And for the past couple of months I’ve been aware the phantom power light on my Behringer Eurorack UB1204-PRO is always on regardless of the switch setting on the back:

(It’s the red light beside the blue one. Spooky!)

I guess I’ll open up the BlueTube and see if there’s anything obviously wrong inside. Wait, first I’ll shake it.

Update: shaking did nothing. I opened it up and there was nothing broken looking. Poked around a bit and tugged on wires and things, powered it back on and now it works again. La-di-da.

There’s a lot of enthusiasm about Guitar Rising — a “real guitar” version of Guitar Hero. Just to be a stick in the mud I’m calling shenanigans: machine parsing guitar playing has been the holy grail of guitar nerds for quite some time. So unless the authors of this game have figured out something that all those folks working on guitar to MIDI translators for the past twenty years have failed to do, it will probably suck ass. And if they have figured that out, why not sell a multi-hundred dollar plugin to guitarists instead?

Holy mother of Christmas I would like one of these Gibson Robot Guitars:

Also please add: unstoppable killing powers.

The GT-8 + Power Engine combo got a tryout in rehearsal last night. Verdict: thumbs up. It was sorta touch and go with levels and patches for a first try, so I don’t think I’ll be using it at tomorrow night’s show, but with some tweaking I think it’ll be a big improvement.

The 60 watt Power Engine puts out more than enough juice to keep up. At only half gain it’s as loud or maybe louder than I ever got my Delta Blues 210 up to (my loudness demands are not very high).

The biggest difference is the amount of tone control available. It’s wonderful and horrifying at the same time — so many choices! Also there’s a fair amount of difference between what the tones sound like at whatever level I can manage in my house and band levels. That’ll take some adjustment — as well as probably me sitting in the garage diddling with settings and being eaten by mosquitos.

Previously beside my desk I had a keyboard stand and my Edirol PCR-50. The Edirol would invariably become covered in papers and garbage which really hampered my workflow. I also bought a second smaller keyboard that I wanted access to as well.

After complaining about it here and multiple trips through IKEA looking for something that would work or be adaptable, I realized I had a much larger table in my basement that I could cut down to my purposes and install a keyboard shelf into.

So after a lot of planning and some nervous work with a table-saw, here’s my new side-table with the keyboard tray retracted:

Here it is with the keyboard tray extended:

The keyboard tray slides were around $36 and the pine board was $10. It works pretty well though I slightly brutalized the board cutting it to fit. I may sand and stain it later but I’m too lazy now.

The keyboard tray works well but I’m sure a better craftsman could have made it less wobbly when pushing it in.

But it does what I want. The large keyboard stays out of sight most of the time and I can’t cover it with junk. The small keyboard is accessible up top and there’s plenty of room on the left side for papers and garbage. Hooray papers and garbage!

As chronicled in my amp search, I went with a Tech 21 Power Engine 60 extension cabinet. Today I had a chance to play with it for an hour and I’m really, really happy with it.

The big drawback of using a regular guitar amplifier with an amp simulator is that regular amps are specifically made to “color” the sound coming out of your guitar. That’s what makes guitars sound awesome. But layering the amp sound on top of your amp simulator results in random muddy crap. You have to constantly be compensating for the sound of your amp when designing your patches on the amp simulator.

The Tech 21 PW60 Power Engine however is more faithful — it puts out what goes into it with minimal coloration. When I switch between headphones and the PW60, the patch sounds are nearly identical (the PW60 has more “air” which seems unavoidable due to physics.)

It’ll be a week before I can try it at rehearsal — which is good because I’ve got some patch programming to do — but I can easily get the PW60 up to volumes I’m sure my neighbors can hear without even putting the gain at 50%.

It’s slim on features, which I like as opposed to Behringer’s habit of throwing shitty digital effects processors in anywhere they can. Three EQ tone controls, gain control, handy XLR in and out and of course 1/4″ in. Mine didn’t come with an AC power cable but I’m not sure if that’s Tech 21’s fault or the music store. I have lots around so it was no big deal.

It’s lightweight (33 pounds) and nice looking. It’s smaller than my Delta Blues 210 so I guess I’m less of a man now.

All in all, I’m very happy with it, five thumbs up.

I’ve wanted to ditch my Peavey Delta Blues 210 for a while but what to replace it with has been an issue. The 210 is a great amp but running my digital amp sim into its tubey goodness is basically dumb (and a huge hassle in patch-tuning).

Ideally I’d like to not lug an amp around with me and go straight to the PA but the few sound guys I asked about this seemed terrified by the idea. They said they’d probably run my amp sim into a monitor and mic that just to be safe. So I guess I should still have an amp that I can control.

Looking around the bossgtcentral.com forums lead me in the direction of keyboard amplifiers like the Roland KC-350 and Behringer K3000FX. Keyboard amps of any decent power and quality are expensive (the KC-350 is $600+ here) and they get quite heavy.

Somewhere I stumbled across the Tech 21 Power Engine PW60 extension cab: 

The Tech 21 Power Engine 60 is an open-backed 1×12, 60W powered extension cab designed to be used with the Trademark 60. It is not a standalone piece; however, it can be combined with any discrete bass preamp. You don’t have to tweak your usual settings or presets. Just plug into the Power Engine and go. It has a level control, 3-band active tone control, 1/4″ input, and balanced XLR input and output. You can daisy-chain any number of Power Engine 60s together for the really big gigs.

Regardless of what it’s intended for, it’s been embraced by amp sim users. The Harmony Central reviews are glowing. “Clear”, “clean”, “flat”, “loud”, all very promising. Also it only costs $380 Canadian, weighs in at a svelte 33 pounds and if I decide to go for stereo I could grab another one without too much hassle.

I’ve ordered one and it should be here tonight, I’m hoping I should be able to make that cash back selling the Peavey if it’s all good.

I broke down and bought a Boss GT-8. I had run up against tweaking limitations with the GT-6 and finally decided to go for it. Immediate knee-jerk review is that it sounds great, a substantial improvement over the GT-6. Other things:

• The GT-8 does two amp models at a time, giving you a nice big stereo sound.
• The patches sound more full and natural.
• The synth patches (wave, sitar, etc) are actually responsive and playable. (On the GT-6 you could make noise with them but they frequently missed notes if you played at anything above a really slow speed.)
• It’s black and looks sexier.
• The effects chaining makes more sense, particularly that it has a standalone compressor/limiter outside of the effects chains. It always pissed me off on the GT-6 that in order to use the compressor or limiter you had to give up an effect slot.

The bad:

• The acoustic guitar sim presets still sound like tinny crap. Maybe I’ll be able to tweak it into usability but I’m not optimistic.
• The Output defaulted to JC-120 instead of Line/Headphones so I had a little “uhh why does this sound like total garbage?” moment, which I assume would be way worse for someone new to amp sims.

I’m very happy with it though I’ll need some real time programming it to know the full score.

Not sure even Jimi Hendrix would have looked cool in these things. Maybe Devo could have pulled it off fashionably. (via Music Thing)

It’s allergy season so I am a stoned zombie wandering around walking into things and sleeping for twelve hours a night. I sat here staring at the computer today and I think maybe I did absolutely nothing.

Work continues on the album however. There are some great potential album covers in the forum thread with some other sweet ones on the way. I’m trying to think of a way to use the album covers I don’t pick for “the one”.

Did I mention I’m having recurring nightmares of putting the album out and then nobody buys it and then I get chased by bees? Uhh…

Thinking about selling my guitar amp and switching to running my Boss GT-6 into a keyboard amp (or two). Right now the Behringer K3000FX or the Roland KC350 are the  leading contenders. Sorta leaning towards the Roland because a) I don’t know why I’d need 300 watts of guitar and b) I know Behringer stuff will eventually turn to dust in my hands.