Much Work, Slow Progress.

Story of my life, I guess. *sigh* Nothing comes easy for me. Or perhaps I always choose the difficult paths?

This post sort of begins to explain my many weeks of not updating this blog.  I’ve been busy!

So whaasup this time? It all seemed innocuous enough when I first started thinking about it,a simple plan: I wanted to do away with the “modern” digital guitar-effects I’m using now and go back to old-fashioned analog effects.

Digital audio is basically audio that has been reduced to numbers, (1 and 0 !) and then these numbers are modified by all sorts of clever calculations and computer-like processing, and then reconverted into sound which you and I hear….when you bring it down to it’s simplest,  basically digital sound is the art of manipulating what you and I think we’re hearing.  Really. All sorts of stuff that the scientists “know” you and I cannot differentiate becomes irrelevant,  sor of lik I can typ thi sentnce lik thi n u can stil think u kno wha i mean.

So? Fuk digital. Fuk Fuk Fuk. If I want to say it in a sentence I’ll say it in a goddamn sentence without sounding like some 14 year old retard texting his retard friend. And if I want to spend 40 years learning how to strum a simple G chord I want you to hear the whole bloody G chord and not some scientist nerd’s idea of what constitutes the essential audio aspects of a G chord.

So? Just go back to the old-fashioned equipment, and play the old fashioned music the way it used to be played. Simple.

But not quite. Nothing’s ever simple. Not in my life anyway. If you’re a guitarist, or someone with a morbid sense of curiosity, you might want to read on. Might. The rest of you can just kindly go back to whatever it was you were doing. Something digital, most likely.

Guitarists use gadgets called “effects” to produce enhanced and interesting sounds. Some are simple-ish effects like reverb units, some are outrageously freaky effects that belong to sci-fi soundtracks.

I’m an old-fashioned guy. I just use some Overdrive and Distortion effects, along with some Chorus, Reverb/Delay and of course the mandatory Wah pedal. A Tuner gets into the stuff as well, thought a tuner is just an aid to tuning the guitar and does not do anything to the actual sound.

My almost-wholly-analog setup: (The delay unit is still digital). OK, guitarists, you can get jealous and drool and call me a sonofabitch now, I’ve set you up for this nicely! But there’s a whole BIG and extremely complicated story unfolding, which I’ll address in subsequent posts if time permits….