The Guitar Thread

Sometimes I set the YT playback a bit slower just to keep up.
It’s so cool to have such incredible people sharing the knowledge!

One of my best purchases last year was The Neo Soul Guitar Book. Lots of great lessons and ideas for rhythm and lead guitar parts on this genre. It does share the same weakness that I’ve seen in just about all guitar books/lessons - some transcriptions have mistakes - and the customer support from the publisher website is nonexistent, based on my failed attempts to contact them for clarification on some of the book content. Still, it’s been inspiring, occasionally challenging, and fun to play.

I’ve worked up to playing one of the tunes from the book, Penguin Suit, at about half speed, using fingerstyle technique. The book says you could try playing with a pick, but I find fingerstyle more comfortable for this one.

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yeah, i don’t trust it.

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Is that you playing? This is great and I literally just bought a T5Z last week.

I can play that song half-speed at best, due to lack of experience in fingerstyle and those fret-sliding articulations. So no, that ain’t me.

I believe that is co-author Simon Pratt playing

I do love the tune though and practice it often enough that I should be able to play it full speed before too long.

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Picked one up used two days ago…. I’m pretty impressed to be honest. And that’s coming from owning some amazing tube amps (just sold a Bartel).

I’ve currently got this TM and a hand wired fender champ. I prefer the champ, but that’s more because I like tweed sounds I think.

It records well via xlr. With a little help from some plugins like a preamp and compression, room reverb etc it’s really not bad at all. I prefer to use an IR of my choice but the two installed are perfectly usable.

It feels nice under the fingers if that makes sense. Reverb is OK, but I prefer plate so biased. Tremolo is a little too square wave for me, but again, it’s usable.

I paid £650 used for a blond DR version. The black ones are a little cheeper and have a Jensen.

Not 100% I’ll keep it, I still prefer the tone of the champ mic’d for recordings. But sure with some time I could get the TM to sound like I want.

Only thing for me is the stepped attenuation. This is just bizarre. It’s digital ffs, just put a master volume on the back that allows me to pick attenuation levels. The lowest setting is almost pointless, and the next one up is much louder - it needs one in between really.

There was a firmware update for both black and blond ones, so doesn’t matter how old they are, they’ll all sound the same apart from speaker choices between black and blonde

Any Q’s drop me a DM. I’ve got some rough recordings I can share to compare to a Champ mic’d if it helps.

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Nice ideas there.

I used to have a similar (pre-Elekron) routine to him too - practice the major scale a little, then turn on the TV and noodle on major scale while watching.

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Thanks a ton! I didn’t realize the blonde had a different speaker, but now I’ve listened to a few tone comparisons and I think I tend to like the sound of the black one a bit more, plus that’s what I’ve got available locally anyway. My used gear market here is total rubbish and I’m far-flung enough that most reverb/online used stuff won’t ship to me, so I’m kinda stuck with what I can get local (or buy from an online mega-retailer). But luckily I kinda like the sound of the jensen.

I especially appreciate your notes about the attenuation – I couldn’t really grok why they’d make it stepped either. Seems a little bit silly, and that’s unfortunate that the first two steps are a big jump, given that I’ll probably be playing this thing at a low volume pretty often. But overall I think it’s the amp that makes the most sense for me, so I might be making a trip to my local shop soon :smiley:

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I forgot to share where I got the Neo Soul video. It’s here - all the songs from the book, featuring all 3 co-authors.

The book also comes with audio files for the shorter examples/lessons.

Well, I’m now officially the owner of this tone master deluxe reverb. Really happy with it so far - the attenuation settings are fantastic. My local shop had even marked it down fifty usd since I was there last!

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Got a good deal on a second hand spaceman delta II. Really lovely harmonic trem.

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Any guitarists here have tips or examples of drones they’ve made on their guitar in the context of electronic music?

Here’s a link to a track I did using the EHX Superego+, Meris Enzo, and EHX Mel9 for droning purposes:

The Superego+ is really at the helm of the drones, but the Enzo can do really nice pads too.

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Nice :clap:t2: has a very 10cc/I’m not in love kinda vibe.

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Hey there, fellow guitarists!

Since we are on Elektronauts, I feel it’s fair to ask the following - how are you integrating guitar into your Dawless setup?

My story is that I am guitarist first, electronic-whatever second. My usual workflow would be to record my guitar parts into Ableton and the to work around them creating drums and other tracks, yet as many people out here, I want to get out of the computer.

I have A DT/DN combo, which I use for my electronic music hat, yet I don’t find a nice solution, where I could record my guitars and then augment it with those two lovely boxes. I understand I can sample into DT, but I want to have longer loops of guitar and then giving DT the drum duties and Leads, Basses, Pads for DN (or sometimes everything on one device).

And of course I would like everything time synced and have the ability to store multiple guitar loops and being able to recall them.

Any ideas for potential setup?

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I can’t be of much help since I keep the electronic and guitar portions of my musical life pretty much separated, but what if I did try I’d probably start by getting a close look at how @AldoVino does it.

There’s just a single video example of the kind of stuff on their channel. Very inspiring! It seems like being a great loop-pedal user is where it all starts. Unless you’ve got a great internal metronome and consistently hit clean loops it might be pretty tough to get everything to sound cohesive. That’s the main thing that prevents me from trying too hard myself. If we’re lucky maybe my @ will summon Aldo to share some techniques :smiley:

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Hey, glad to hear you find those inspiring. :blush: A looper is definitely the key to create a guitar-friendly setup. It needs to have a solid MIDI-sync which is still hard to find. The cheapest MIDI-syncable looper is the Ditto X4 and I’ve used it for a while but it’s not reliable at all and can make the whole experience quite painful. Not recommended at all!

I personally use the Aeros Loop Studio from Singular Sound and it works like a charm. You can have up to 6 parts (verse, chorus, etc.) with 6 independent layers in each part and unlimited overdubs for each layer. I heard some good things about the Pigtronix Infinity too but it’s not as flexible I believe.

These are not cheap though so if you (@PovilasRa) want to give this workflow a try before buying one of those, you could maybe try using Ableton for the guitar looping? You could even use the DT (or DN) as a MIDI controller to control the recording of the loops. There are two ways you can do this :

  • with audio clips (but you can’t overdub)

  • with the built-in looper (but I personally couldn’t get it to work properly with a MIDI controller, also you can’t build a song structure on the fly like you could with the audio clips)

But yeah if you really want to go 100% DAWless then the Aeros Loop Studio is my recommendation. :slightly_smiling_face: Hope that helps!

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Ive two ways, if I’m making an “electronic” or more elecktron gear focused tune, I’ve been sampling in my guitar and sitting infront of my DT and DN coming up with stuff. If it’s a more guitar based tune with elektrons assisting (with drums, keys, pads whatever) I do the following:

I’ve my boss RC-10R looper and enzo pedals on midi so tempo is the same as my elektrons then I just loop as I want and use my pedal board as normal with my DT and DN playing along through my monitors. can either go to trouble of having DT send tempo to my looper and enzo pedal or get mini separate midi controller for tempo on the pedal board and just (boringly) manually align.

I then I just mic up my amps, I’ve a dry-wet-wet setup. So DT and DN through overbridge then my 3 amps mic’d through my DI recording each amp. Sadly no overbridge for my looper pedal dubs but I can take looping info from the pedal via usb later (which I can never be bothered doing). however, I usually just have couple of guitar lines than pan my effects separately but really…. mehh. It’s about playing guitar…, for me has to be me, stand in fronting of my amps n my board, not sitting at some screen. If I want to layer some bad ass solo or layers I can do that later through my DI or just dub loops in a way tones stand out (looping different effects n eqs each dub).

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Your stuff is incredibly cool, thanks for posting! Happy to see you around here.
What about that new RC 505 MK2, together with a pedal maybe it would help your workflow, perhaps a good alternative for the Aeros, for others looking into getting into it? :slight_smile:

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That‘s really good to hear. I’ve read a few user reviews and they’re quite negative, along the lines of the pedal being a beta product, the UI and features not being really smooth atm, and certain functionality not working or properly integrated (eg USB, Bluetooth). No idea if those are accurate / still relevant, if you have any thoughts on your experience with this pedal, I’d be grateful.

Re midi synced guitar loopers, it’s surprising how hard it is to find those on the market (reliable ones!). As you say, the Ditto X4 allows for midi sync but isn’t very reliable on the sync. Same goes for older Boss pedals (not sure where the new lineup ranks here, but I’d hope that Boss/Roland would have cleaned up the issues by now). Pigtronix Infinity 3 Looper looks like a decent option as does the good old Boomerang - but as @AldoVino says, those are more limited in functionality. I also like the look of the Electro Harmonix 9500 Looper, not sure how well this one works.

For short loops (like 20sec short), the Eventide TimeFactor is not a bad option and one gets a great delay pedal on top :stuck_out_tongue:

Oddly enough, an iPad with an audio interface and a pedal controller seems like a good/great looper option (eg using Audio Looper, Quantiloop or LoopyPro)…I think that says a lot about the state of midi sync enabled looper pedals (and their cost).

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