guitar effects

I just learned something. Well, I guess I kinda knew it already, but I never really tried it.  For years I've been approaching guitar effects like a guitar player and studio effects like an engineer.  If you're using a simple setup with one amp and a couple of pedals, then this doesn't really apply.  However, if you're using a monster rig (or an asshole rig as I like to call to the rig I use) then this is the way to go.

 

I was watching a Steve Morse video today and he was talking about his setup.  He has a dry amp and a wet amp.  This seemed silly to me at first. Like there's really a big difference?  And more importantly, who wants to bring 2 amps everywhere?

 

Well, maybe the practicality of having a dual rig like this is questionable, but the concept makes sense.  Here's when this became obvious to me.

 

I was doing a gig last week and I kicked on my lead sound.  Here's a little under the hood description of what that means.

 

1. I press a button on my MIDI controller

2. The MIDI controller simultaneously sends out messages to my effects processor and my amp.

3. The amp switches to channel 3, kicks in the midboost button, the secondary master volume, and the noise gate.

4. The effects processor switches to my lead preset which is:  my sound -->Chorus--->delay--->amp

5. Then the expression pedal controls the wet/dry mix of each effect.

This is how I've been doing it for years.  However, at this last gig I noticed something that I've been subconsciously doing for all that time.  When I blend in the effects, the overall volume gets lower, so I've been going to the volume pedal and increasing the overall volume to compensate.  This constant tap dance has become very annoying.  By the time I get it right, the solo is almost over, and instead of using that time to play something good, I was tinkenering with levels!  At this last gig in particular, I couldn't get the lead sound to be loud enough with the effects on, so I played dry all night.  I had the rack of doom behind me and it was pretty much bypassed all night.  The effects were burying the guitar tone, and I just got tired of dealing with it.  Well, that's not going to happen anymore.

 

Today I went back into the presets that I probably programmed 5 years ago, and I changed them radically.  Like I said before, I'm not going to start carrying two amps with me, but I did use the Steve Morse concept today.  I configured everything in parallel.  Basically, I have straight path from my guitar sound to the speakers at all times (unless doing something drastic like whammy or wah.) On separate paths (you can do this in most advanced processors, or you can do this with complex wiring) I ran my effects.  The mix was 100%.  The output volume was set to OFF.  Then I assigned my expression pedal to control the output volume of each effect and VOILA!  No more subtracting volume!  Only adding volume!  So now when I blend in the effects, my guitar tone stays un-touched.  I can't wait to play my next gig and try it out.

 

If you're a strictly analog stomp box person and you want to try this concept out, here's how you do it:

 

First, you need 2 amps.  You'll also need a volume pedal (or 3) and a mono splitter or Y cable  (depending on your setup, you may need multiple splits.)

 

Plug your guitar straight into the amp. Or you can plug it into your wah and distortion first if that's where you're getting your basic tone. Anyway, get your basic guitar sound happening.  No delay, reverb, or modulation effects should go in this path.

 

Once your basic sound is to your liking run a cable out of your amps effects send.

 

Things to consider:

 

• Some amps terminate at the effects send until you send the signal back through the effects return.  If this is the case, you'll need a mono Y cable/adapter.  Plug the Y cable into the send.  On one end of the Y, go back to the return.  This should complete the loop and make your amp happy.  We'll discuss the other end in a bit.

• Some amps don't have effects loops. I call these Caveman amps.  Most people like to call them vintage amps.  (come on people, it's almost 2011. Get effects loops!)  This can be problematic for a setup like this, but it's not impossible.  The problem is that we want your tone in all it's glory to be duplicated through the wet amp.  An effects loops takes your guitar sound after the amp's gain and tone controls (the preamp) and sends it somewhere else.  If we can't do this, then we can't exactly duplicate this tone.  It's not the end of the world.  It's just that your wet amp may have a different tonal characteristic than the dry amp.  This may or may not be a good thing depending on your taste.  If your old amp (that you paid thousands for...ok, I'll stop now) doesn't have an effects loop then just put the Y cable out of the last pedal you would plug into your amp.  So if you have a wah and distortion, take the output of the distortion and split it.  Send one end of the Y to your amp and like I said above we'll discuss the other end in a bit.

 

Now you should have your basic sound all tweaked out.  That sound should be going through the speakers of amp A and it should be going through a cable that you haven't plugged into anything yet.  Next, you're going to take the cable (the effects send cable, or the cable from the Y split) and run it through the rest of your pedals. You're going to want to tweak the pedals out.  It may be beneficial to run these in parallel as well, but that will become a major pain in the ass because it will require more Y cables which can make things messy and noisy.  For the sake of simplicity, let's just say you have one delay pedal.  (if anyone's interested in the multiple effects parallel setup, I can do that in another post)

 

Plug this dangling cable that you have into your delay pedal.  Run the mix (or effects level as some pedals call it) at 100% on.  We want this to be all delay and no original sound. Take the output of that pedal and run it into a volume pedal.  Take the output of the volume pedal and plug it into the effects return of amp B.  If amp B doesn't have an effects return, then just plug it into the front input. If you need help with this step, ask your neighbor, Barney Rubble, to come over and help you.

 

Now your all set up.   When your raise the volume pedal you will add delay through amp B.  This will preserve your initial tone and only add delay through a separate source.  It's pretty cool and I think it sounds great.

 

guitar ---> wah ---->distortion----> amp A

 

amp A effects send ----> delay ----->volume pedal---->amp B effects return

 

You can also technically do this sort of additive setup with one amp, but it would still require you to blend the wet and dry sound before going into the amp which could get messy sounding.

 

-Richie

I assure you, we're working on it.

Some news for Tiger's Fang Fans

We're definitely opportunists here at Tiger's Fang Productions. It's been more than a year since Tiger's Fang 6, but that doesn't mean we've been taking a break. We've been working on this non stop since March. So what's taking so long?

When you're trying to make an ambitious amateur film (or any other project you can think of) and you have a budget of $0, you become an opportunist. When someone is willing to give you something for free, or do you a huge favor, you need to take advantage of that on their time. You don't get to choose when you will get these opportunities, you just take them as they come. We've been fortunate enough to have several great people donate their time, services, gear and facilities to us. Like I said, when the opportunities come, you can't wait too long or they will most likely go away. We started working on Tiger's Fang 7, but then an opportunity came up to shoot in an amazing location that would work great for episode 10.  So before we even finished 7, we shoot half of 10.  Then another great location become available to us, but for a very limited time.  We need that location for parts 7,8 and 9.  So, we do a marathon week of shooting every night and get it all done.  Last week I just finished the video editing on Tiger's Fang 7, but we have super-duper top-secret special guests who are only able to shoot next week, so as I'm editing Tiger's Fang 7, I'm prepping for next week's shoot of scenes that will be in Tiger's Fang 10. 

It's a big mess. We're working on 4 movies at once. My computer has so many files on it that I'm starting to lose track. Aside from all the chaos of doing 4 movies at once, I also had to get knee surgery smack in the middle of shooting which complicated things a whole lot.  

Each one of these 4 movies is more ambitious than any of the previous 6 we've done. In fact, Steve and I spent today trying to figure out how we're going to achieve certain effects, we did green screen tests, watched countless tutorials, and even messed around with 3D animation. I feel very fortunate to know Rudy Sarzo, and Jon Rodgers. Aside from being fantastic musicians they're both video experts. I was calling and e-mailing them both today and picking their brains. As crazy and as stressful as it gets, it's always fun to learn how to do new stuff. That's the most rewarding part of doing these movies. They force you to develop new skills. I encourage everybody to do some youtube stuff. It's fun and you learn new skills, and at the end of the day all of the skills are related.

Here's what you can expect in the coming installments.

• Bigger, Better, and Longer Fight Sequences
• Amazing Special Guests
• Increased Production Value
• Mind Blowing Special Effects
• New Costumes
• Incredible Locations (seriously, you won't believe this)
• Tons of New Music
• The same old crappy dubbed dialog
• More Subtle Continuity Errors
• NUDITY!!! (well...maybe)

After next week, we will officially wrap production on Tiger's Fang 7, 8, 9, and 10. I seriously need to stop shooting for a while and start working on the post production.  The only thing that would make me want to keep shooting footage is if we got an all expenses paid trip to the Shaolin Temple, and complete access and permission to shoot wherever we want. Other than that, I think it's safe to say that post production officially begins next week.

This isn't the end of the Tiger's Fang Series. I predict we will need to make 17 to 20 episodes to tell the whole story of what happens to the iron master and his daughter. I have the entire story written down. The climax is incredibly ambitious and I only hope that by the time we start to shoot those scenes, we will have developed the skills necessary to make them look amazing.

Once 7-10 is all finished, we'll have a release party. I'll give details on that later.

-Richie

Thanksgiving Eve

Ah yes...Thanksgiving Eve. The biggest bar night of the year. Almost everyone is off from work on Thursday, so they let loose on Wednesday night and party hard.  Obviously, bar/club owners also LOVE Thanksgiving eve. This is probably their busiest and most profitable night of the year. For bands, Thanksgiving eve was also a great night to play because you would get Holiday pay which is usually considerably more than what you would normally get.

Now, notice how I phrased that sentence about the bands in the past tense? That's because the days of Thanksgiving Eve being an awesome gig night are coming to an end. Yes ladies and gentlemen, strap yourselves in for another rant on getting paid to play gigs!!!!

Why does one open a bar/club/restaurant? (we'll just call it a bar for the rest of this post.) The answer is simple. To make money...a lot of money.  No one goes into the bar business if they think they're going to make a little money. Yet some bars come and go quickly while others seem like they've been around forever. This is because the bar business is a high risk business.  With the markup that bars charge on food and alcohol, they could potentially make a seriously large amount of profit. However, if you have no customers, you will quickly lose your ass and go out of business.  This is the nature of a high risk business.  Excellent profit potential, and moderate probability of failure.

We know that reasons why people like to go bars, but let's look at some of the reasons why people DON'T like to go to certain bars:

Location

Prices

Selection

Cover Charge

Service

Atmosphere

Entertainment

Size

Demographic

So there you have it.  If a bar sucks, people won't want to go there.  As a bar owner it's important to make sure that all of the elements listed above will appeal to your desired customers.

Now to make my point. I turned down thanksgiving gigs this year because they weren't offering holiday pay. I have nothing against any musician who does a holiday gig for regular pay, but I try to avoid doing that because I don't feel it's fair. So now bar owners don't feel the need to cut the band in on the most lucrative night of the year. As abhorrent as that is, that's still not the point of this post.  I've heard from friends that bar owner's are expecting bands to take a pay cut if they're not satisfied with the customer turnout on Thanksgiving eve.

Wait...WHAT?!?

So, not only are you not paying them what you should, but you want them to make less than a normal gig in the event that your place isn't able to attract customers? This is insane, and more importantly it's wrong. Here's why:

The bar owner stands to make a staggering amount of money on thanksgiving eve. They have agreed to pay you a reduced rate to play on the busiest night of the year.  That should be the end of story, but by them asking you to take a pay cut if the turnout is less than ideal is the same exact thing as them asking you to incur all the risk for their bar.  The bar owner would never ask any of his staff to take a pay cut, but as a musician they now feel that you are responsible for their risk.  This is totally ridiculous and it's completely wrong. If you enter a high risk venture, you don't get to pawn off the risk onto someone else. That takes the risk out of it. It's not like they're saying, "if we have a great night, we'll give you double pay."  They're saying, "if we have a great night, I win.  If we have a bad night, you lose."

This is an unfair business practice and it needs to stop now.  See the list I wrote above?  The one that says Location, Prices, Selection, etc...?  It is the bar owner's responsibility to choose these elements to create his bar.  The band is only a small fraction of the total picture.  Why do they take the brunt of the loss? If they buy beer and nobody drinks it, do they call up their suppliers and ask for a refund?  And on top of that, you can be sure that they don't pay their staff less on a bad night.

One analogy I can think of is a casino. You go to a casino to make money. It's high risk. Your chances of losing are very high, but you can potentially make a lot of money. If you go to a blackjack table and lose all your money, do you ask the dealer to share the loss with you?  Of course you don't.  Do you ask the Pit boss for a refund because you didn't know you were going to lose so much money? No!

As a band, it is not your responsibility to incur the bar owners risks. You are a service that he is hiring to entertain his customers. If the night turns out badly it falls on him. He can then choose not to hire you again, but he may NOT ask you to take a pay reduction. You should make that clear when you book gigs. As it is, local gigs don't really pay that much. This new practice is turning gigging into a gamble. If I'm gonna go out and bust my ass all night, I shouldn't have to gamble on getting paid. People are supposed to get paid for work that they do.

Bar owners, if you don't like handling the risks involved with owning a bar, then you should go into another line of work. Maybe retail, an office job, or even McDonald's. If every night was a winner then I'd open my own bar and do my own gigs there.

One more point I'd like to make, and then I'll shut up.  A DJ would not deal with this sort of thing.  I'm not going to say if a DJ is better than a band or whatever. I'm not going there.  My point is that bar owners generally don't pull this stuff on DJs. They do it to bands because they think that we love playing so much that we don't mind lugging our gear around, getting treated badly and not being paid for it. This needs to stop. I feel like I'm going to have to start renting out spaces and putting on my own shows just so I don't have to deal with this.

-Ricihe

I paid $65 for this?

Why are video games 65 dollars now? They aren't way better than they were when they cost $50.  In fact, I'd say apart from graphics and physics improvements, the games are pretty much the same.  So why this price hike? Why are video games 65 dollars when people have far less disposable income these days?  I tried gamefly, but I had to ditch it.  I'm not a hardcore, 5+ hours a night gamer, so it usually takes me 2 or 3 months to finish a game. The problem with gamefly was that it was 17 bucks a month and I would keep each game for 3 months.  So that comes out to $51 per game. Not really a great deal when you think of it. So now, I usually wait until a game becomes old, used, or DLC priced before I buy it.

There are exceptions. Force Unleashed 2 just came out, and I had to have it, So, I paid the $65 bucks. At first, it was amazing. I was having a blast. Then it was over. I try to savor games and make them last by only playing a little bit at a time, but there was no getting around this.  This game was ridiculously short.

Aside from the length, there were some other glaring problems.

1.  There are 4 levels in this game.  They'll tell you there are 6, but that's nonsense. There's a Dagobah level where there is no action, only cutscenes, so I don't count that. Then, they commit what I consider to be one of the cardinal sins of video game design. They reuse maps. You begin the game in Kamino, and you end the game in Kamino.  I therefore refuse to count that as another level, so there you have it.  4 levels.

2.  Glitches.  A $65 game should have no glitches.  The camera in this game would get stuck during in game dialog sections. You and Darth Vader are crossing swords and screaming at each other amidst an epic battle and all you see his the corner of your shoulder. Or even better, the camera gets stuck inside Vader's helmet where you can see through the actual computer model.

3.  Repetitiveness. Killing stormtroopers is fun. They act unpredictably and that makes things funny. All the other guys you fight do the same attacks every time. You kill them with the same tactics, and the finishing move is the same every time.

4.  Control Problems. Although they fixed most of the big problems from the first game.  Jumping is still a problem.  I personally think the LucasArts Jedi double jump method should be retired.  We never see a Jedi kick off the air in the films, yet this is the way LucasArts has handled force jump for the last 15 years.

So in closing. I paid $65 for a game that is broken, short, and unfinished. It feels like they rushed this one out for a quick buck. The Lucas people have once again successfully conned me out of my money. 

May The Force Be With You

-Richie 

That 25 song iPod shuffle thing

I put my droid on shuffle and this is what came up:

Flight of Icarus - Maiden

Fuck You - Cee Lo

Jungle Love - Morris Day

Fire and Rain - James Taylor

Bad Company - Bad Co

Honey I'm Home - Shania Twain

Sunglasses - Badmouth Betties

Feel Your Love Tonight - VH

The Trooper - Maiden

Jukebox Hero - Foreigner

Perpetual Change - Yes

Get Up Offa That Thing - James Brown

Can I Play With Madness - Maiden

Top Of The World - VH

Life In The Fastlane - Eagles

Bring Me To Life - Evanescence

Perfect Strangers - Deep Purple

Rowboat - Ron Thal

Jump - VH

Joining A Fan Club - Jellyfish

Good Company - Queen

What About Love - Heart

At This Moment - Billy Vera

Hit Me Baby One More Time - Britney Spears

Don't Be Stupid - Shania Twain

I think my droid likes Maiden!

-Richie

Halloween

Every year I get all dressed up for Halloween and never have anywhere to go. I'm putting an end to this!

This year, Comic Book Jones and I are hosting the greatest Halloween party ever. Now I don't have all the details yet, but I can say this: The party is on Halloween, October 31st. The party will be held at Comic Book Jones (the greatest comic book shop in the multiverse.) There will be a costume contest, so come in costume, and the evening's entertainment will be provided by.....

SPINAL PAP

David St Hubbins (Andy Ascolese)
Derek Smalls (Russ Jones)
Joe Mama Besser (Damian Scro)
Viv Savage (Ray Magnuski)
Nigel Tufnel (me*)

Yes, we are playing all Spinal Tap songs, and Yes, we will be in costume.

performing with Spinal Pap are special guests MorningStarlett (featuring Ann Marie Nacchio)

This is going to be a lot of fun.  If you haven't seen the movie "This is Spinal Tap," then you have 3 weeks left to watch it and realize why this will be the greatest Halloween party ever.

 

*depending on BOC's schedule, which as of now is completely open for the halloween weekend.

Internet Goodness

I posted a video of a project I did for fun:

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmExtL-UOKM

It's me doing ABC by the Jackson 5. The response has been extremely positive and I really need to thank my family and friends for checking it out, commenting on it, and speading the word! This is really cool.

 

The overwhelming reaction to this video has given me a nudge to get the rest of my online stuff happening.  I've updated my website, gave my twitter page a facelift and I completely overhauled my youtube channel and the myspace page. In fact, there are 10 songs up there on the myspace page right now that are free to listen to.

 

http://www.myspace.com/richiecastellano

 

Some of these songs are from CDs that I've previously recorded, but there is one brand new song called Floating Away.  There is a clip of this song on DiMarzio,com on the page for the Crusier Neck Pickup.  I've received e-mails asking about this song, so here it is!

 

I hope you get to check out the songs.

 

Thanks,

-Richie