The dude is pretty scarily proficient. I though that the other video on that page G3 Denver, had a little Spinal Tap'ish thing going on, wtih the triple neck guitar :-) Not in the playing of course, which was quite good, but you can't help but think Spinal Tap when you see a triple neck guitar. But it's pretty amazing how he accompanies himself on it by having the other neck in an open tuning.

It wasn't double or triple necks per se, but just the 'rock and roll artsy excess' thing, like multi-neck guitars, violin bows, big stage shows, custumes, cucumbers in the pants, and all those types of things in general.

Just try both and choose the one YOU like the best.
Cj

And, finally, with the guitars back, this time through the new setup, via Amplitube. This is the kind of sound I was looking for originally, or very close to it. It's ballsy and hard but clear.

http://www.charmedquark.com/Web2/TmpAudio/AfroMetalFunk%20Preview%208.wma

This still isn't perfect, but it's close enough that I'm will to comit to move forward on this setup and feel I can get the sound I want in the end when I take the time to really mix it and have the other bits in place and whatnot. I was most concentrating on the guitars here and the bass got a little short changed in the mix a bit, not as good as in the previous one above. The low end got a little lost on speakers that can't do sub-80's. It sounds very full on the low end in phones, but not so much on the monitors.

So basically what I did for the sound is:

- Instead of trying to get rid of all the mids (as I unusually do), this one is almost all mids. So it has the bit and power, but doesn't get in the way of the bass much, which is mostly all lows and highs.
- As mentioned, playing with some gusto with wide arm swing , hitting just in front of the bridge, to really energize all the strings strongly and evenly, on the middle pickup position.
- Putting a compressor before Amplitube with fairly high compression and a long release, and using the auto-gain to drive the output right up to clipping before going into Amplitube, and then reducing the gain on the amp sim. I used a high gain tube amp and it's own gain wouldn't give that kind of hard, clear distortion, it would give the really grungy high gain distortion. But driving the input hard would give the right type of sound.
- Putting an EQ after it to tweak the EQ beyond the amp tone controls. I pushed up the lows and highs a bit on the amp and then rolled them back off in the EQ. It seemed to help drive the amp sound more than when I tried to remove them in the amp itself.
- And putting the Ferox tape saturation plug after the EQ to get it warmed back up, boosting up the removed lows a bit and rolling off the highs.
- Sending to the darker, longer plate reverb instead of the shorter, brigher one.


So anyway, I guess this is a wee bit of a live evaluation of Amplitube/Ampeg for others to find in the future. I think though that the tube pre was a big part of the equation as well. I don't think it would have been nearly as nice without it.

Yeh, if you crank up the tube pre and use a high gain amp, it will basically amplify every stray electron passing by the strings and you have to gate them pretty heavily. You could probably use it for SETI work. I'm keeping my tube pre relatively light on the gain, so that it gets a bit of tube saturation but just a bit, low enough that it's not putting out any noise itself. I think it helps maybe to use a compression plug before the amp plug so that you aren't depending on the amp for all of the gain, so you can get more oomph out of it without having to crank the gain up so high.

I guess I'll post a link to my little thingie I did yesterday for anyone reading through this later:

http://www.charmedquark.com/Web2/TmpAudio/AlsoPukedZarathustra%20Preview%201.mp3

It's just a one day thing, so it's short and a little rough, but it was just to play with the new toys and see what I could come up with. The results are pretty encouraging. All of those bass and guitar tones are just slight variations on presets, with the usual post-amp processing (EQ, compression, bass maximizer on the bass, tape saturation plug.)

That's definitely distorted. That speaker cone is going to need therapy for the rest of its life :-)