Re: (TV) fripp and bill

[Maurice Rickard <maurice@mac.com>]

At 7:52 AM -0800 1/6/06, Martin McClellan wrote:
> Maurice (or anybody)--have you checked out Guitar Rig?

No.  I should try the demo, but considering my investment in 
Ableton's Live (having bought a copy, that is, not as an investor in 
the company or anything), I'm going to keep using that.

> I'm naturally leery of digital effects, but I keep hearing 
> interesting things about it. Sadly, a downloaded demo won't work on 
> my machine with my cheap audio input device (works fine in Garage 
> Band!).

Weird.  I wonder what GR's doing that doesn't like your input device. 
Are you using a USB dongle?  GR might require more bandwidth, maybe.

> I'm awaiting that time where digital modeling really can give you 
> all those sweet tubes without the expense or trouble. It's coming, 
> but are we there yet?

I think a lot of what people think of as "tube sound" is actually a 
combination of tubes, transformers (very important, and often 
overlooked), and the speaker cone, all of which have their own 
nonlinearities.  I've not heard any amp modeling I really liked, 
other than as an "effect" ("wow, this really *does* kind of sound 
like a guitar through a 1" transistor radio speaker!") but then I've 
not tried the latest Amplitube (isn't that the one with the offensive 
ad campaign?) or Guitar Rig.  I've heard good things about both, but 
hearing the actual plug-in/program is the real test.

Even "tube" gear can be lousy, btw--there's a lot of awful 
starved-plate stuff on the market, which gives you a caricature of 
what tubes sound like.  While these days I'm usually going direct to 
the laptop and out to the PA, I'm using the EH LPB2ube (dumb name) as 
my preamp, cascading both channels into one.  It's a pretty good 
sounding little box--better than any of the plugins I've 
tried--though it suffers from EH's legendarily shoddy build quality. 
(One little, easily-loosened screw holds the circuit board just off 
the chassis, a fact which I discovered when that chassis went live 
with 300V right before a live radio broadcast.  Ouch.)
--

Maurice Rickard
http://mauricerickard.com/   |   http://onezeromusic.com/
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