Pulled Coupling Caps

[Chuck H]

Thanks Leo. I'm no stranger to painted canvas. And I know what I like. I just haven't had such a moving experience as Stan's yet. So far it's just music that has done that.

[Chuck H]

Maybe amps that are passed over for poor tone could actually be the ones with the best tone in a band situation.

That was one of the first hurdles I had to jump as a designer. The first two amps I built sounded just the way I wanted them to at home. Then in a live setting with a band they were truly awful. Hollow, boomy, didn't cut through the mix, etc. My tastes have changed so that now the sort of things I was after then sound crappy.

[Leo_Gnardo]

Thanks Leo. I'm no stranger to painted canvas. And I know what I like. I just haven't had such a moving experience as Stan's yet. So far it's just music that has done that.

I figured as much what with your having to deal with paint on a daily basis.

Long time ago @ 1963 had the 5th grade field trip to the big NYC museum. Kids in the lobby lined up waiting for our guide. I spied something odd on the other side of the huge lobby room: a canvas that looked like a frame out of a comic book. "Don't look at THAT!" hollered Mrs. Biederman my teacher. "THAT'S NOT ART!" Suuure it isn't, Missus B - then what is it doing here? It was a Roy Lichtenstein. Made an instant fan. You never know what you'll find.

"THAT'S NOT ART!" - - - - - - HAH!

Meanwhile a couple miles south there was a guy painting a tomato soup can onto a canvas... how subversive!

[dumbassbob]

'says his amp loses all its treble after the first hour every gig'
That's such a common complaint.
I put it down to the speaker getting hot (causing the voicecoil resistance to increase) - tell them to try a touch test on the speaker magnet (tricky if closed back).
Pete

I never said that All I ever said was it worked for the first few days I got it back,then It started to have the problems GW told me to send it back to him..But he didn't work on the amp,he gave it to a training employee to work on..Thats when the shotguning started,Pulling caps in and out.. They Never looked at the most common things I will start a new thread after I have more facts,One thing I found was the 220k resistor had a Hair line break at its base,You could not see it..I think when the amp got warm it would pull away I also found some other resistors that are way off...And a strange mod where ALL the plate (R)come to a Vee on both the normal and Vibrato ch.... Thats where another 220K(R) comes out of and one goes to point Y the other to X...Then to 2 500pf cap that are side by side,but one leg was not soldered to the board...I guess I have learned more here than I thought

[Enzo]

I had a moving experience in painted canvas, it was in tents.



(thank you, thank you, I'll be here all week.)

[km6xz]

There seems to be some confusion regarding recording, bad tracks and live and how they relate. Recording, the intent, capability and playing are entirely different animals from live stage performance. Capturing an event is not the goal nor can it be, live is a different art. Some artists can do both but not that many. A recording is not much related to a live performance but usually the listener enjoys both, even though there is no mistaking one for the other.
Bad tracks do not get on the final master, you have to start with good raw material and "fixing it in the mix" is not about tracks but more about song continuity and form than repairing bad tracks. No engineer would allow bad tracks to stay on the multitracks, he might not be the mix engineer and would not want his reputation ruined that way. Comping is primarily a vocal activity but a lead part occasionally is pieced together from various takes of the same part. Punch-in was used more often, to fix bad notes in a single track. Nowadays with unlimited tracks to work with and often a producer, musician, writer, arranger, engineer and manager is one lonely person working at home on his computer, all tracks are comped and played with forever. Record releases are much slower today, 18-30 months spanning between the 1st and second album on average. When recording was done in-house at labels or the heyday of independent studios, albums came in bursts of activity while the artist was popular. Two to five albums a year was not unusual.
It could be done quicker because there was a large team of experienced people doing the various tasks that a single person and computer does now. So now there is less of a finite time period, or deadline and things get tweaked and tweaked because everything is a learning experience without expertise in all facets of the record making process done by an expert. It was also expensive recording the old way, equipment and labor was high but a lot got done quickly with inventive contributions flowing from a dozen experts helping build something that did not exist before in the studio.
Making a record and playing the material on stage on tour are so different that quite an effort is needed to learn the material by inventing ways of playing it to simulate how the recording sounds, when live is an entirely different playing and listening experience. As recording became more and more independent of playing, songs on the album frequent could not be played live at all. The Beatles dealt with the complexity of their studio albums by just stopping live touring. The Stones were able to do both due to much simpler music.

Tone is useless in a studio if it does not fit into the layering of the other components, particularly vocals. The vocal perceived level and attention in a recording is typically 50-60% of the album and live it is 20-30%. If the song does not require that tone, no matter how cool it sounds in isolation, it has no business in the recording.
Recording is songs, not playing. Live is about playing and performing and less about song. Tone is important on stage, but only based on whether it is a reasonably accepted substitute for the album sonic character. A lot of time is spent before the tour to figure out how to play a part and sound possibly enough like the recording. It is not always easy to do. Most often a lot of corners are cut because nuance is not so missed if missing as it is in a recording where everything can be heard.
Does the track help propel the song or doesn't it? That is the only question about tone or character that anyone cares about in a recording session. You might come up with the coolest riff in the world but if it does not fit into the song, it stays out of the recording. Live is another matter, audiences can accept a lot of flexibility if the core of the song remains intact.
I would suppose an apt analogy for the similarity in other fields fit. A recording is a movie and a live show is a theatrical play. Very different animals yet often concerned with the same base story and title.

[Steve Conner]

The endless tweaking allowed by computers gets tiresome after a while, and I personally think it can lead to a somewhat dull end product. With the band I'm currently in, we're writing the songs specifically to be played live, and will worry about how to record them later. It'll probably be on the quick and dirty side.

[Chuck H]

The endless tweaking allowed by computers gets tiresome after a while, and I personally think it can lead to a somewhat dull end product. With the band I'm currently in, we're writing the songs specifically to be played live, and will worry about how to record them later. It'll probably be on the quick and dirty side.

There have been several bands in the rock and pop genres that did most of their recording "live" in the studio. Van Halen's Roth years were almost purely live studio performances. AC/DC often did the same thing. Then consider bands like Boston, Steely Dan or Journey. Lots of tracks, dubs and isolated instrumentation. I've always been fascinated by different recording techniques and I tend to prefer an under produced rather than over produced sound. Almost everyone I know prefers a polished, over produced kind of sound though. It's all in what works for the individual band I'm sure. I miss the days of big tape reels and iso booths when the engineer was typically a sort of half hippie, half nerd that really knew his stuff. Now it's not uncommon for individual band members to record tracks at their individual homes and send them to each other and the engineer via Email. Refining and compiling is done by conference calls!?! I think we have definitely gained some things in the information age with new technologies, but we lost some things too. The effect can often be heard in the recordings. You can tell there are eminently more options for track selection, dubs, punches, better noise floor, etc. Not to mention easier scheduling for individual band members and lower overall expense of production. But sometimes I think I can tell that these people were only rarely in the same room together.

[Leo_Gnardo]

I miss the days of big tape reels and iso booths when the engineer was typically a sort of half hippie, half nerd

HEY! I resemble that remark . . . hm, as do many others here I'm sure . . .

that really knew his stuff.

still working on that part.

[km6xz]

I imagine that the purpose of the recording will be different than a general release album. Unless intended for sales as a stand alone product, unrelated to a performance, it is probably intended for sales at the shows as memory retrieval or for booking agents or clubs. These are different listeners than a general release buyer so you know the audience more, they are people who go to your shows now, or booking agents/club managers. It is easier when you know your audience precisely, easier to target to their buttons to push. There are probably no more than 20 agents in the whole region who you need to demonstrate your act to so you might know what they would respond to as identified individuals. Most people can plan a promotion campaign for 20 specific people. Knowing who your real audience is 1/2 the battle. In this case 20 people who might differ a lot from a general audience who is harder to target.

Yes, fully agree with the process of layering indefinitely in digital recording is fully non-interesting to me. The whole process of starting with a beat box or loops and adding until it appears to be done is a process that is not fun or interesting to me at all.

I did record an album on my laptop, a young girl from Moscow, that turned out well and was fast, got lots of radio play but never got a label deal. Guitar, a horn part or two and some keys were recording in my living room, vocals were done in the hall way for natural reverb all with 2 input tracks and mixed on the internal laptop speakers. She did not know English so was taught the songs phonetically and did an amazing job, far better then the song writer who was a pro singer who was classically trained and technically good but boring. So I know it can be done with limited gear, and a bunch of loops. That was fun because there was no expectation that it would be any good so there was no pressure.
The song writer wrote them for himself, a highly respected jazz and rock performer here. He was 43 year old and wrote almost juvenile lyrics in English but did not realize they sound dumb sung by a 43 year old man. I burst his bubble and laid it out straight "seriously, have ever said those words to a woman?" "The thinking and emotions are of a 16-18 year old girl singing into her pillow in the night in her darkened bedroom, not an adult mature man" "Find a young girl to sing it and you might have something but it is unbelievable with your singing". A song has to sound as if the singer means it, lives it and owns it. Otherwise the audience knows instantly, before anyone in the industry would know, that it is all without meaning. As he originally recorded it, he sang the 12 songs straight with Standards style phrasing so it was not very interesting. But he found a girl, and came to me 6 months later with her. I met her at the train station, a mousy 19 year old who looked like a timid 15 year old, a girl you would walk past on the street and never notice. She had a quirky voice but a lot of expression and a sweetness that could no be faked. The funny thing was when he taught her the songs, he worked with her natural range, and non-pro technique and it sound so believable and so honest, quirky and fascinating in the embellishments they worked in instead of his straight boring phrasing when he recorded it himself. That is when I volunteered to record it, because suddenly it seemed like fun and that she was the missing link in his songs. He was writing for the Russian pop market so it might not sound rock because it isn't.
If anyone is interested I could post a sample of the ultra-low end recordings as to what can be done with a total amateur singer who does not know the language she is singing, with no studio or controlled acoustics or fancy mics and no outboard gear, and mixing loops with live instruments, 16 bit 44.1khz

The live-studio recording is often not so live and spontaneous as it appears. We did some albums "live" but it was always a pain and took more equipment and people. The Santana projects were live recording but still took months. Some of those sessions used 118 live mics, and players, singers scattered around to all the iso booths, in the studio, because it was still all multitracked, just done live with high isolation.
Even "live albums" were not so live when released. A band named Night Ranger had a stadium concert that was recorded as a live album but the producer had a heart attack when listening to it in isolated tracks, it was a terrible performance and the drummer was all over the place so nothing sounded tight. They brought it to use to "fix", and the only way to fix it was save the house tracks and replace everything and it was a total pain but it worked and sounded live with original crowd noise.
There were albums that were not intended to any more than demos, done live. One was Bruce Hornsby, did a demo that ended up with those tracks done live on the album after the studio tracks did not sound like the demo that got the record deal. The album was to be recording back in Atlanta and just did not make it so the producer used almost all the demo multitracks for the actual release. That was done mostly live with isolation so the tracks were flexible. There are lots of live albums that were not, and studio albums that used live tracks. Did a couple Heart Albums that turnout well after being a total disaster and blowing you the budget at another studio in LA where they wanted live--like recording because 1/2 the budget was going into video shoots of the whole recording process. That did not work and so it was brought us to "fix" so we had no choice but to bulk erase $500,000 in prior tracks since they had nothing useable after months of burning through cash. We found nothing we could use to fix it without starting from scratch when we got the tapes transferred up to us. So we figured out how to do the whole project on a fraction of the original budget, fast cheap and as live as possible, and re-using all those used tapes. That worked well, the band likes the faster work and the girls were re-energized. The results were quite rewarding, lots of sales, good reviews and put them back on the map. And of course the months of video shooting was worthless for syncing up to the album for their planned documentary. Video production costs are gigantic compared to recording sound.

So there are no rules, what works is what works, every session is a processing of inventing novel solutions to unique problems that have not been dealt with exactly the same way before. Management of time, resources and people is as much related to successful projects as anything musical. When it clicks, nothing is more fun and exciting however. That is what is lost in the current lone actor type of recording.

[trem]

The endless tweaking allowed by computers gets tiresome after a while, and I personally think it can lead to a somewhat dull end product. With the band I'm currently in, we're writing the songs specifically to be played live, and will worry about how to record them later. It'll probably be on the quick and dirty side.

Good for you guys.
That is ONE Reason Stan Lynch left TP and The Heartbreakers.....the songs structure and recording process started to be "more important" than the playing.
That is the whole point is it not.?
Otherwise, when you went to see a show, there would just be a guy spinning records into a 4k Watt stereo.....
best

[Chuck H]

Like anytime someone works in a creative or interpretive environment the job is re invented on an as needed basis. Any line of work that requires this kind of thinking should be gratifying. Alas, not always monetarily. But it beats the hell out of data input from a cubicle. My work now is eminently harder and more gratifying than it use to be. I think there is a correlation there. By gratification I speak in the spiritual sense. I'm not getting ahead monetarily. But very few ever do really. If you can make any gains at all, monetary or spiritual, your ahead of the game IMHO. If gratification isn't in the equation at all your in the wrong line of work or your not looking at it from the right perspective. Most of the time it's drudgery, for sure. It's important to consider that when you aim for a career in any creative field. If you can't recognize the peripheral rewards you're better off wearing a paper hat and working for "the man".

I like pop music. And I like quirky female singers. Not the Brittney Spears scene. More like Bjork, early Pretenders, Nina and the Motels. I'd like to hear what you tracked. It sounds interesting. If a public link is bad a PM would be fine.

[Enzo]

Damn, I guess I'll never hear Tom Jones singing "I am woman, hear me roar" then...


Steely Dan was mentioned. Something about them, right from the start I always got the impression that every single note on the guitar was written on the tracks. every bend, every riff, composed ahead of time. Zero spontaneity.

[Steve Conner]

I still love the guitar work on "Reelin' In The Years" though!

[Leo_Gnardo]

I like pop music. And I like quirky female singers. Not the Brittney Spears scene. More like Bjork, early Pretenders,

What a great post to wake up to Monday morning Chuck, you ain't some ordinary paint-slinger! (But we knew that... )

When I first heard, didn't like, but a couple years later, became a big fan of Kate Bush. Then one fine day, I was sent on a mission, to her house... No biggie just renting a CS-80 Yamaha synth, & had a big chin-wag with her brother Paddy (his band Planxty shows up on some of her recordings.) Recent radio interview Kate says she's re-recording some of her early work. Also her voice has dropped a bit, can't hit those glass-shattering pitches she could whe she was a kid. Still sounds good.

One of my customers @ 15 years back gave me a CD of Suzanne Vega "nine objects of desire". Verrrry interesting. Suzanne's old record company wouldn't give her possession of her masters, so she's having some sweet revenge by re cutting her earlier work. Haven't heard any yet but I'll bet it's good.

Enzo, I hear ya about the Dan. Yes, highly orchestrated, but the players and engineers did an incredible job. They selected their "hired-in" musicians carefully and got the results they wanted. And even with written parts, there's a lot of interpretation. I got a feeling there's a certain amount of improvisation, but with mostly written-out parts they could avoid spending way too much time on track comping. I'm a big fan, mostly of their 'classic' albums. Ear candy.