Universal Audio

Like this one?

http://www.uaudio.com/products/analog/SOLO110/index.html

There are various other ones that I'm running across. Something like this:

http://www.artproaudio.com/products.asp?type=79&cat=1&id=99

Not sure if it's any good or not, but something closer to that price range, which provided sufficient benefit, would be nice. $800 is a bit to lay out for this, though if it UAD one was just head and shoulders above anything else, I'd try to do it.

OK, I've gone and ahead and done it. I ordered the Presonus TubePre for the pre-amp/DI. It's a reasonably priced box, and you can supposedly get a lot of improvement by adding a better, after-market tube, so I ordered a better tube for it as well. And I ordered Amplitube, and will get the Ampeg bass sim for free once I register it. So, I've commited myself to this course now.

I posted a for sale of my PODxt Pro in the Gear forum, if anyone is interested. It's fully loaded with all of the optional packages.

I got the Presonus and replacement tube in this morning and just got the new tube in and got it put back together. I can see why companies send their stuff out to China to have it built. I mean the tolerances on this thing are amazing. I don't think that there was as single screw hole that was off by more than a quarter inch or so. But I finally got it back together. I'll give it a try here in a bit. I need to get the Ampeg plug demo downloaded and installed as well. I'll run Amplitube and Ampeg in the demo mode until my package arrives in a couple days and I can get them registered.

There is another advantage to this that I'd not thought about before. The two obvious ones are a warmer, 'tubier' sound and the ability to defer tone selection until the bitter end. But the other is that this keeps everything analog until it hits my card's A/D converters. I'm using the RME card which I would assume has considerably better A/D converters than the POD. In the POD scenario it's doing that conversion. At least the RME BETTER have considerably better converters, since it cost about as much as the POD and A/D and D/A are a large part of what it does.

So I'm hoping that will help a bit as well. There's nothing between the guitar and the bits on the disc but the RME. All of the amp and f/x are applied after the fact. Later one, if I have some money to spend, I'll consider a more up-scale tube-base pre like the UA one, if it's warranted. But from reading various other comments, if you get a better quality tube, the TubePre supposed sounds pretty darned good.

One interesting thing is that it has no power switch that I can see. You have to just plug it in when you want to use it. Being tube based, I don't think it would be a good idea to just leave it on on the time.


Some of that sound improvement on the new piece comes from three things:

1. Just learning to mix better as I go
2. The Ferox tape simulator, which is a really nice plug. It provides a great warm, clean tape saturation
3. The use of the Waves convolution reverb, just the -L version in my case, which is the lowest end version. They have some really nice impulse response files that come with it. I'm using some of their plate IRs and they just sound great. They are clean and crisp, with a good reverb tail and no muddiness. I was using the Waves TrueVerb before, which was nice, but not even close to the quality I'm getting now.

Of course now I'm going to have to trash the bass and guitar parts, since I'll probably never exactly replicate those exact tones again with the new stuff, and start over with just the drums. Since I have to do that, I'll probably go ahead and speed it up a wee bit, since it came out a little too slow.

You know, for that specific type of music, I'm not sure I have anything that really fits into that category. Maybe some Red Hot Chilli Peppers stuff would kind of fit into that category, i.e. pretty hard rock with an agressive funk bass line. But I wouldn't flatter myself that this piece is going to be in that league. Some of those punk-funk bass lines that Flea does are just amazing, but they are also more towards the rock side and I'm going a little more towards the funk side.

I wouldn't underestimate #2 and #3 above. Though I do agree with the generally quoted maxim that 'a plug isn't going to make the difference, it's all in the mixing technique', I think that those two plugs have made a very significant difference for me. Reverb is so important and it's so hard to find a really clean, clear, punchy reverb that provides ambience without muddying things up. And getting a really warm, punchy, saturated sound is also so important as well. And those two plugs just provide both those things in a pretty significant way. They wouldn't have made bad mixing sound good, but they make better mixing sound considerably better.

Actually, you are psychic since I did watch that one last week. He's pretty scary.

I came pretty late to that kind of stuff, I think Stevie Wonder's Songs in the Key of Life just had me gobsmacked, I can remember I just could not believe that was not some 20-year career greatest hits album, every song was different, but not of this world, each and every one - and it was a double album too, IIRC. I was just gone. Think he spoiled me for life in that whole department, although that's not 'pure funk', I guess. Lots of gospel influence, too. Anything else was just so-so, after that, anyway.

Sounds good, looking forward to that update. Am going to check on the local village ebay clone here for a small 15 (or so) watt amp, and do some micing experiments, think that's my route for filling out the more rougher sound I need every now and then. I think the occasional speed metal power chords and licks can go with just about anything, played with enough gusto.

BTW if you want to check out something really good on the sound/production side, and is still my favourite of theirs - check out all the separate instruments used (and HOW!) on that Black Eyed Peas vid, Shut Up. That is *so* good, pretty incredible timing jokes, and I think should be used in schools as an example. Think it has the same level of complexity as good classical music. Really need to listen to it a few times to hear *everything* they pull of there, they come in thick and fast:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=JBTWAmQ4EdQ

With a name like that, how can you go wrong? :-)

I'm not completely happy with it yet, but here's a version with the guitars done via the new setup:

http://www.charmedquark.com/Web2/TmpAudio/AfroMetalFunk%20Preview%206.wma

The bass and guitars are still stepping on each other's toes a bit, and maybe the guitars are a little harsh still. But, overall, this is much closer to what I was thinking off for the right guitar tone. It's got plenty of body for what's required here, considerably more so than the Trash version, it's nice and disorted, but it's a fairly clean distortion without any low level grindiness. I got rid of that grindiness on the Trash version by rolling it off much higher, but that also got rid a good bit of body and bite.

I'm just assuming it's a brave new world and I'm starting from scratch in terms of finding out how to use this new setup. So I'll have a period of adjustment. Given that I've gotten this close with just a couple hours each night for a few nights so to play with it, it shouldn't take too long. And I don't mind it really. It's new toys to explore. It'll be a little frustrating but just having the new toys to play with is part of the fun.

I'm not looking for too sustainy a sound. There's going to be a good bit more going on in there before it's over and if the slam guitars just sustained heavily through the whole thing it would get a bit messy. I can get get plenty of sustain easily with Amplitube. It's just a matter of cranking up the gain on the distortion stomp box, adding more compression, and/or using a higher gain amp. But I'm going for something a bit cleaner and using a clean tube amp and just driving it a bit with a distortion pedal. And I'm playing an approximately 500lb Les Paul that has sustain out the ying yang, so there's plenty there if I want it. I'll probably increase it somewhat, but don't want one of those 'hit a chord and go to lunch' type of sounds.

I'll continue to tweak it until I get it right, but so far the progress has been gratifying. And I didn't want to put a lot of effort into tweaking the guitar part yet because I've still got to re-record the bass part. I'll never get exactly that bass sound I had before, so I'm going to have to re-do it on the new setup, and that'll end up affecting where I EQ the guitar. But I just wanted to at least get a rough idea of whether I'd be able to get where I want to go.

I always love it when you wax lyrical. Was thinking more Who-type chords,

That's kind of what I'm thinking of, maybe slightly more dirty than Townshend's tone. I can't depend on a bazzilloin watts of raw power to get that kind of oomph out of what is a actually a fairly clean sound like he does, but that sort of thing is in the ball park of what I'm looking for. I'll keep at it.

BTW on the bass - you'll get that straight too - but just wanted to say you could always easily hire yourself out as a studio bass-player, if you can do that stuff 'live', on demand. They're really stealing the show here, anyway.

Oh, no, unfortunately nothing like that. I'm the "King of a Million Takes". I depend heavily on the studio tools to get that kind of result.

I think Townsend also plays VERY loud, meaning he hits those strings like he hates them, even though I've seen him play very gently as well. Technique again, how to hit a chord on low volume guitar settings with such force it's still loud, and cleaner too.

Yeh, he uses heavy guage strings and plays hard. I couldn't do that on my guitar since I use very light strings. One good windmill chord and I'd have strings popping off in every direction :-)

edit] do play around with that volume knob on your axe - especially looking for distortion sounds that makes a huge difference. Read to my astonishment one guy, a long-time player, only found that out REAL late, he always had that on full, while THAT makes a huge diff. Mine's sometimes nearly throttled shut.

Tis true. I do play with that as well as the tone knobs. It's just yet another combinatorial complexity to finding the right settings for the sound you want. And you have to carefully document those settings so that you can reproduce the tone again as required.

I use Ernie Ball Super Slinkies, the ones that start at .009 gauge, and end on 0.042 I think it is. I really prefer a pretty light string and play with a fairly light touch (does that make me a Girly Man Guitarist?) The inside cover thingie on my guitar case *is* pink, so maybe I should start to worry here.

I don't think I'd want to go with heavier strings. My poor old fingers couldn't take it. I do play harder when it's needed, though in this case I'd played this little bit so many times and was kind of still in experimental mode with the new hardware, so it wasn't played with mucho gusto really. As I said, I'll have to go back and re-do it yet again after going back and re-doing yet again the bass part (which is going to be painful.) At that point I'll try to put a little more oomph into it.