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FatherAlabaster

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Everything posted by FatherAlabaster

  1. My very first amp was a Crate practice amp combo. Nothing good to say about the sound but it was fine to get started on. It had distortion and it might have had reverb. I don't miss it. Those old Traynors can be great with decent cabinets and the right pedals. I had a 40 or 50 watt head for ten or fifteen years and I really enjoyed it. I wound up trading it in for the 100 watt Traynor head I still use. Mostly in my bass rig but lately I've been using it alongside my main amp and getting pretty good metal guitar sounds out of it. It really does need the right distortion pedal though, or a couple that stack well. Fantastic clean tones. The Peavey Vypyr amps are terrible. There's much better modeling stuff available now. I'm happy with my tube amps though.
  2. It's worth doing if there's a problem with the tone or feel of your guitar and you think a different magnet will make it right, or if you're just interested in tinkering for the sake of it and hearing the difference for yourself. If you're happy with the sound you already have, there are definitely more fun and productive ways to spend an afternoon.
  3. New Selbst album "Despondency Chord Progressions" will be coming out through Debemur Morti on April 19th.
  4. That was my philosophy about it too. I only got interested in trying different pickups because my Explorer wasn't clear enough. I am glad I did, though. I've gone down the rabbit hole a little bit and learned a lot about what makes different pickups sound the way they do. It eventually brought me back to where I started, though; I like the sound and feel of a bright pickup in a darker guitar better than a thick pickup in a bright guitar, I like hot-ish scatterwound pickups with a bit of asymmetry between the coils, and I like a Gibson 24.75" scale length with thicker strings better than a 25.5" or longer scale with thinner strings. Because of all that, there are some guitars that'll never sound the way I want, no matter how I tweak them. I kind of envy people who play with the higher output metal-oriented active pickups because it seems like their sound is a lot less dependent on what guitars they're in. And since those pickups aren't as dynamic and responsive to pick attack, you don't have to play as hard, which means you can play faster with less energy. I found myself relaxing and playing a bit more "easily" when I was using the Fluence pickups just because of the way the guitar responded. But then I went to dig in for certain things and the tone and feel just wasn't there. Ceramic in the Warpig will give you a bit of a firmer feel, more aggression in pick attack, and more bite in the highs than alnico 5. A bit more output too. I wanted that for my rig but the change might not do anything beneficial for you... maybe fun to try anyway though?
  5. This all comes down to your guitar and your rig and personal preferences. I hate actives. I had three guitars with the Fluence Moderns in, and I wanted to like them, but they just didn't have teeth through my setup. If you're an EMG 81 player, the Fluence Moderns have a lot to offer, I just don't find them dynamic enough or strong enough on the attack, and somehow their EQ profile gets on my nerves. I'm a Bare Knuckle fan. My two main guitars are Gibsons - a 6 string Explorer and a 7 string Les Paul. They're both warmer-sounding guitars that benefit from brighter pickups. I have a Rebel Yell in the Explorer and a ceramic Warpig in the LP. The Warpig had an alnico magnet when I got it, but I swapped the magnet and it really brought the pickup to life for aggressive stuff. I also love their Cold Sweat bridge pickup. But again, these guitars are heavy in the low mids and they're going into an amp (Fryette Pittbull 100CL) that loves being hit with a high mid spike, so the pickups balance them out and add some sparkle and make the amp break up in a pleasing way. I wouldn't recommend a Rebel Yell in a bright guitar, but maybe it could be a good fit with the right pot values. Worth mentioning that both guitars have the bridge pickup wired to the jack, again not something that works on every guitar or for every pickup. I just happen to like it this way. Bypassing all the pots can make pickups sound harsh and unnatural. That's been the case with all the Duncans I use and in all of my brighter guitars. The 7 string LP came with a JB and it was almost great. I have another 7 string with a Distortion in the bridge and a Schecter 6 string with a set of Invaders. They're all ok. If I played simpler stuff I'd probably love them, but for what I do they feel a bit muddy.
  6. Too much Sparagmos, that's the problem. It'll turn your piss green.
  7. Schilling Brücius doppelbock these guys do not fuck around
  8. Blut Aus Nord - Disharmonium: Nahab ...the cure for what ails me
  9. I had managed to avoid most of it until today. I had to listen to a second album on the way back home. I now feel as though my brain has been scraped out of my ears. I didn't hate most of it but it's a bit much in aggregate. It turns out my wife is a massive Swiftie.
  10. Cheers dude. There is some weirdness in spots, but nary a prog riff to be found. No plans for any shows, we all live too far apart for it to be feasible.
  11. I haven't listened to any of this stuff before. It's a few cuts above the vapid dancey bubblegum bullshit I hear at the grocery store. So, no, not bad as these things go. Not how I would choose to spend a morning but it doesn't offend my delicate sensibilities. I love Rush, but I understand that other people don't, so I only inflict them on traveling or living companions when necessary. Maybe we'll listen to some Rush later to compensate for the Taytay marathon.
  12. It's in the upper 30s (F) here in Vermont, and even though it feels a little like t-shirt weather, I'm annoyed. When it gets above freezing the ground turns to muck. False spring, I guess. We are in my wife's car, so we are listening to Taylor Swift. Nuff said.
  13. I joined Construct Of Lethe as the vocalist for their new album, "A Kindness Dealt In Venom". We worked on this for a long time and had to keep it under wraps for a while. Transcending Obscurity will be releasing it later this year. I'm happy I can finally share part of it: This section is taken from the middle of the album. It's a concept album and it's meant to be heard as a single piece. It's a dynamic, immersive head trip, with more variety than this snippet suggests - spoken parts, found sounds, noise and soundscape elements - but it stays rooted in death metal. The lyrics deal with suicidal depression and self-loathing; despite (or because of?) the heavy themes I found it really enjoyable to work on. Lineup is: Tony Petrocelly - guitars, bass, synth Patrick Bonvin - lead guitar Kishor Haulenbeek - vocals Kevin Paradis - drums Concept, music, and lyrics by Tony Petrocelly; mixed and mastered by Tony; artwork by Kishor Hope you enjoy.
  14. It's all about the rig you're going into and the sound you're looking for, I think. There's no one silver bullet. The Rat is a great pedal once you get the filter frequency dialed in just right. I like it as part of a parallel processing chain with my bass rig, so I can blend in a compressed clean signal with the distortion on top. I thought fuzz would work great for that but the Rat hit the sweet spot.
  15. Moved to the guitar section. I never bonded with fuzz. I've had a few, nothing boutique, different flavors of Muff. I always found it too hard to dial in for a sound that did what I want or a level that made sense. Maybe it's my rig, maybe it's my ears. I get better results by stacking an eq or an overdrive into a distortion pedal. I got an HX Effects a few years ago and played around with the fuzz models, too, but I wound up getting my favorite fuzz-adjacent sound out of a Rat.
  16. My condolences man, that's terrible news.
  17. FatherAlabaster

    Books?

    What's with this pseudo-academic bullshit, everybody knows Satan originated in England in the late 1970s.
  18. The original Watchtower vocalist was in a newer group called Howling Sycamore that had a couple of albums I really enjoyed in the past few years. He doesn't "sound like Warrel" but listening to that stuff made me think he could pull it off. Not many could. I loved Nevermore. It took me a long time to warm up to anything they did after Dreaming Neon Black. Still kinda think that's their best. Everything after that sounds like plastic to me. But I have come to enjoy Enemies and Godless. I agree with everything posted here. GWAR - Scumdogs Of The Universe is the only album I need from them. Not amazing but pretty fun. No point seeing them live and getting spattered with crap for me though. I kinda recall having this conversation with Navy a while ago, too.
  19. Some food for thought there. A big part of what I like about live shows is being there in person, in the moment with the musicians, and another big part is feeling the impact of air moving off the kit and from the amps and so on. I wonder what it would take to have a setup that's fast enough and interactive enough to feel like you're sharing that moment instead of just playing along and having it synced up downstream. I like a good live performance video but I don't think it could take the place of an actual show for me. It would be fun to jam on those tunes across the ocean though!
  20. Behold... The Arctopus - Nano-Nucleonic Cyborg Summoning I got this album from a friend about 15 years ago and really liked it for a while, but I haven't played it in several years. Funny how some of you are shitting on it for being too chaotic, I had remembered it being more spastic and inaccessible than this. I think the mix sounds a bit unpolished and the playing is a little rough and loose sometimes, and maybe that makes it feel a little more frantic than it is. And maybe it comes off a little less intelligible without the "glue" a vocal would provide. Not surprised some of y'all don't get it, I would never expect the Goatster to enjoy a Colin Marston vehicle. But I'm happy this prompted me to put it back on. Philistines.
  21. I saw them on tour three times and they weren't too good. It seemed like Pete really didn't want to be there and the rest of the band kind of felt the same. I wrote them off for a few years and then finally saw them play on home turf at L'Amour, and they were fantastic. I got to see them twice more there and they were outstanding every time. Pete's energy was totally different, he was funny and humble and charismatic.
  22. I pretty much agree with Jon. Anesthesia is a highlight. The song does slow down, and even sound a little mellow in parts, horror of horrors. My understanding is also that writing for the band was Pete's baby and he and Josh put everything together. I heard rumors that Pete recorded most of the guitar parts himself. Not to take away from Kenny, he was always on point when I saw them and his vocals added a lot to the band dynamic. I can't get into any of his post TON stuff though.
  23. Not much for me either. I love good cover art, but bad cover art has never put me off if I like the music. Bad art and silly band names probably make me less likely to check out a band in the first place though. Maybe an Apple watch would help as backup - I could show it to my wife and say look honey, the machine says it's time for me to go to bed now.
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