Guitar Nerds Anonymous

It definitely feels like there should be a tension cutoff before robo-tuners ruin the finish on your guitar (or worse?)

robo tuners gone rogue

I’m having an enforced break from guitar as I couldn’t find my Guitalele after the kids had borrowed and hid it before a 4am depart for a week in Brittany. Bollocks.

Did a bit of quick and dirty remote collaboration with a mate on some library music last week. This is his full-time gig and he asked me to pitch in for a bit of variety and for a laff. The plan was to meet up in person to do one track with a brief that broadly translated to “heavy blues”.

Annoyingly on the day we had set aside he got sick and I got super busy so I ended up throwing together a Bo Diddley groove and *ahem, tossed off, some slide guff and pinging him the files. Almost everything I played on it was a one-take improv squeezed into 15 min gaps between work and childcare. It was all very rushed. My mate recovered enough to cobble together a rough arrangement and mix on submission day… didn’t turn out too bad all things considered.

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• Faux Diddly rough 240724.mp3

Nice playing man!

I've been recording an EP at the moment with my band, I'll share some stuff here once we have it wrapped up but it's been such fun!

We decided that we were neither well rehearsed enough or sure of ourselves enough to make good use of a two day session at a studio so we decided to spend the same amount of money on recording gear and figure it out ourselves...

It's been going on for about four months now but such is the difficulty of getting people into a room together when you're over thirty and have all of the rest of life to be getting on with.

We've had to come up with some interesting and varied techniques for dealing with the imperfect acoustic conditions of our makeshift studio :)

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Sounds like a fun job and the recording sounds great, especially given the remote side of it all. Reminds me (in a good way) of menu music for truck driver sim video games.

Interested to hear how this comes out sounding. My band have started gigging now, done a couple over summer and have a third lined up early September, but we've got nothing recorded other than practice sessions on out phones and the Zoom H1N that I got. It's great for that purpose but not for anything to release. But I really want to go down the DIY route of recording stuff ourselves just as another fun creative avenue that we can all pitch in and learn together.

The DIY route can definitely work, all the early releases with my old band were self recorded in practice rooms, the caveat is, you do need a bit of gear and quite a bit of know-how. Some things are easier (guitars, vocals) than others (drums) but it can be great fun and push you creatively 👍

possible stupid question, but how have you gone about getting gigs with practice session recording? Essentially, i need to do this. I have a new band, I want to start sorting some live stuff and ideally without the rigmarole of 'proper' recording, the new project is intended to be much more chill/less work than previous ones.

Head mounted pop shield, I love it

Ta! That was pretty much the brief. Background music for heavy machinery. It’s hack as fuck, but was fun.

Home recording set up looks great. I do love a home recording project. Something to be said for giving yourself a finite time and aiming for getting something of the occasion down on “tape”.

Yeah I've dabbled a very small amount with some stuff and would quite like to go further with it now I've actually got something I want to record and release into the world. Our drummer has done some in studio recording for his solo project and I think he's said he's a bit disappointed by the outcome in the end because the tech swayed him on some stuff that he would have rather done another way.

We just put some stuff on soundcloud to include in emails to different places, but to be honest none of those emails have resulted in anything. We ended up with an agency for the first couple which we were fine with just to get some confidence and live practice in. No idea if they listened to the stuff we'd uploaded or if they just give everyone a go with a first gig then as we sold enough tickets were offered some more dates and stuff. Then one of the guitarists mates came to the last gig we did and asked if we want to play at something their band is playing at. Now we've got slightly better quality recordings of the practice sessions, and have been able to upload some live stuff to Instagram and that, I'm going to try emailing round to the places again to see if they have any interest now.

I've been experimenting with a DIY reactive load I built some years ago for the past few days. I pretty much wrote the thing off previously, but this time I've actually had fun noodling even through headphones. Here's a random recording of bright bridge humbucker --> slightly modded Princeton Reverb clone at almost full volume --> unorthodox pairing with 4x12" impulse response (plus a bit of room reverb). Usual caveats and all that, but I don't think the tone itself is half bad.

Having our own four walls I can just about crank the amp at home without the load box, but even at 14W and an inefficient 10" speaker it's still impractically loud going into overdrive.

Anyway, like this amp a lot. Planning on trying another tweak to reduce bass after the preamp (as it is, I almost always have the bass turned all the way down).

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• princeton_reverb_reactive_load.mp3

Not much wrong with that.

Just spotted this absolutely incredible Levi Perry-built Fender Custom Shop Marauder on Instagram that Taylor York, the guitarist in Paramore, has on the current tour.
My mind is blown by how incredibly tasteful this is. Fingers crossed it might find its way into a future series or Artist model?

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Saw Justin Vernon doing this in his home studio in a YouTube recording and it actually works pretty well!

Also @ric_a5 can you share some tunes or the old IG, interested to have a listen!

This camo painted White Falcon for John Gourley of Portugal The Man is also incredible.

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Sounds like a legit cranked Fender to me!

Reminds me of the meteora which I like a lot

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Any recommendations for a quiet EQ pedal?

I've never used EQ in my life, but using it a bit more on BIAS fx and its rad.

Guess this is middle age, when EQ and Compressor pedals start to make sense....

Also (maybe not) hot take - can't stand THE PEDAL SHOW on YT...

Guess this is middle age, when EQ and Compressor pedals start to make sense....

Haha, so true, I struggle without a compressor now, really miss it when it isn't there. And my BOSS GE-7 hasn't worked for ages, really miss that too!

Utter cunts.

They’re so fucking boring.

The little Aussie one’s playing makes me feel physically unwell. And the moves and faces he makes while doing it make, me want reach into the screen snatch his guitar and smash it up in front of him.

They’re guitar players who only listen to guitar players they write about in guitar magazines for guitar players who only listen to guitar players they read about in guitar magazines who only listen to guitar players.