Friday, August 3, 2012

Flutes, Switches, Rock Quartets

Do you like to get into fights with flute players? Flute players are a surly, mean, vicious bunch who will straight up knock you out for lookin' at them funny. But if you want to get into a bar brawl with them, tell 'em that it doesn't matter whether they have a full silver, 24-carat gold, or even just a silver-coated flute.
Wipe the blood off your bar stool and come on down for the fun.
I've found exactly one sound library in the world which purports to having a bowed tailpiece sound. One. It's the Symphonic Strings library by Sonivox. It's a thousand bucks. I'm not going to pay a thousand bucks.
What I want is a good violinist to come in and record some sound effects for thirty minutes. Sigh.
Railhammer guitar pickups. I'm perfectly happy with my pickups as they are, I just thought these were interesting.

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At the rehearsal studio the other night I played a Mesa-Boogie head with a whole bunch of channels. The channels couldn't switch though because there wasn't a footswitch. So for most of the night I just  used the "hot" setting but with the gain turned down.
And then I discovered that if I set my bridge pickup to be louder than the neck pickup I could switch between a more overdriven sound and a cleaner sound just by switching the pickup switch on my Les Paul.
Now. I realize that most guitar players would have figured that one out about 25 years earlier than I did. But I'm not like most guitar players. I'm much, much worse.
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Noteflight is the program I use most of the time I write something out for Tyrannosaurus Mouse. Although I've mostly given up on writing stuff out for TMouse because nobody really wants to read it. Writing out music for a rock band might have its merits but the problem is that our notation system just isn't that great for a rock quartet (and even worse for a rock trio). So I mostly use the program to make "notes" for myself so I remember what I wrote.
Steering away from getting a high-end notation program like Sibelius or suchly, there's MuseScore -- open-source and free. I don't really know that I need something more sophisticated than Noteflight though as I'm primarily just making what we used to call "lead-sheets" (are they still called that? Were they ever called that?)
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3 comments:

  1. Your ability to know and understand what you can and can't do with a guitar has made you, for 3 full decades, world's greatest guitarist (in my humble but expert opinion).

    ReplyDelete
  2. brawl invite accepted. straight up knock out. coming your way in september.

    ReplyDelete

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