MXR Phase 90

I've had this pedal for a while now and have fallen in and out of love with it and back again. I tried it just about everywhere in my effects chain until I settled on keeping it towards the front end. This pedal sounds magnificent when it drives a good distortion or overdrive and has enough kick to shine through a compressor, as it adds a discernible boost in the treble frequencies when turned on. This is also great for clean parts because it lifts the guitar out of the mix. Anyone who, like me, has to fight for sonic territory with another guitarist and a keyboard player in the band will appreciate this. (By the way, I found that it's this boost that is the most notable difference between this 'block logo' version and the vintage '74 reissue.) Operating the pedal is easy, the only knob regulates the speed of the phasing effect, ranging from a slow wash to a whacked out wobble. Despite it's simplicity, this orange box ended up covering a lot of bases for me. With it, I can get pretty close to a wah-wah effect but the Phase 90 also produces a convincing rotary/Univibe swirl (about halfway on the dial) and has also worked decently as a replacement for a flanger, where a similar effect is needed.

Z.Vex Fuzz Factory

This little monster blows my mind. The Fuzz Factory (FF) can be pretty ordinary or take you into the twilight zone. There's a million sounds in this green box and it can oscillate like crazy, which is great fun to play with. It's not a modeling pedal (as the name may suggest), all the effects you get out of it are very original indeed. You need to spend a while with it to figure out how each of the five controls (volume, gate, compression, drive and stability) interact but it's well worth the effort. And a lot of fun anyway. The first four knobs are pretty much self explanatory, stability, or 'stab', is where things get really weird. It has a profound effect on the tone of the fuzz, treble content is reduced as you turn the sucker down. It's modus operandi is not explained in the manual but I remember reading a post somewhere that said that it regulates voltage. I usually have the FF set to a sharp fuzz sound that's great for power chords and lead (volume at about 9:00, everything else around 2:00). It's just on the edge of breaking loose and has that velcro feel when the compression kicks in. I also use the 'octave fuzz' setting (gate between 2:00-3:00, comp and drive at 7:00 and stab all the way up). Here the pedal produces an overtone when I play above the 12th fret, especially with the neck pickup. Pretty often I just play around with the oscillation, twisting the knobs to change the pitch and tone. In accordance with Mr. Vex's recommendation this is the very first pedal in my signal chain, going even before the tuner. It uses very little power, and I can therefore safely run this one on batteries, which is welcome since I have 8 units to power and only 7 plugs on my daisy chain :).

New 'Board

Here's the latest incarnation of my pedalboard: Z.Vex Fuzz Factory -> Ibanez LU10 tuner -> MXR Phase 90 -> Boss DS-1 Ultra (Keeley) distortion -> MXR Super Comp -> Boss TR-2 tremolo -> Electro-Harmonix SMMH delay -> Custom Audio Electronics (MXR) Boost/Line Driver. :)

New 7 series

It's no news to those who know me that I have a weakness for Beemers... Check out the new 7s:

I absolutely love these designs...

Anyway, back here on Earth, Radio Daze plays Oscar's in the Grund 2nite, see you there if you can make it ;).

Edit: my fave video won the Guitar Rig You Tube contest, yipeee :):

Photoelectronic noise

This was posted by Tom on his Musicthing blog, a really cool gadget made by a guy called Gijs. ;)

Low

Anyone got land for sale?

-

When I made my last entry, my only regular reader, my grandpa asked what I meant by it. What he said made me realize how banal my feelings were. He told me about the time he was watching the Allies carpet-bombing the factories in Pest across the river. The ground shook as he lay there in the hills petrified when each 4,000 lb. bomb detonated on impact. He was just 14. It's a story he told me a 100 times or more and I can feel how vividly that and countless other wartime memories were etched into his brain. All the fears I hold are mere products of my imagination. His are real.

This June, they found a tumor in his brain. I try to avoid the thought that this might be it and hope he may yet read this one day. I drove to Budapest last weekend to visit him at the hospital. He had just been through radiotherapy and lost most of his hair. Though he seemed to be in good spirit and eating well, the effects of the cancer were visible. He's weak and has a hard time remembering recent events. His thoughts seemed to be centered on his refusal to undergo any surgery, though the doctors ruled that out given his weakened condition. At one point, out of the blue, he looked up at us and said 'that's it, they're not cutting me up again' (last year he underwent surgery and had a very difficult recovery).

Then, the news I got today was not reassuring. I spoke to dad tonight. It wasn't what he said that scared me. Grandpa got transfered to another hospital, apparently to get him in shape for chemotherapy. It's that I can't remember ever hearing my old man's voice being like that. He spoke low, slowly and I could sense that he's only holding on to a faint glimmer of hope, even before he told me about how the prognosis was bad. He's taking it very hard. I talk to him alot now and feel his pain very intensely. And there's something very powerful about seeing your father like that... I can't describe it, my heart sinks so low. I wish I had a magic wand that could make all of this go away.

But we're strapped in for the ride now and there's no getting off...

Just a Quick Thought

I was laying in bed last night not being able to find sleep when this crossed my mind: the most important decisions I made in my life were guided by fear... Scary stuff...

!+%!+"%!+!%!!!!!!!

Yours truly is a major ass:
http://www.native-instruments.com/forum/showthread.php?t=59110

Jeez I feel überstupid now. Just what the doctor ordered for Christmas :)...

Merry Xmas!!!!

Csendes Éj.mp3

Looping It

Here's a little video I just recorded:


I'm playing around with my Boss loop pedal and my new Fender Champ (thanx Mom!). It's a bit long but I hope there's enough going on to keep your interest. :)

"October"

October (1st mix)....

I uploaded this one more than a week ago, but I wasn't really sure if it was good enough to post here. I got a couple of very positive responses (which, to be honest, surprised me a bit), so here it is. It's a song that I put together real quick, just to keep busy and maybe to see how far I could get with a simple idea. BTW, this is the first time I used Guitar Rig 3 on a recording. Hope you like it too.

GIG!!!!

Just dropped in quickly to let you guys know that my band, Radio Daze will be playing on October 24 2007, 21:00 at the Ecosse in Clausen, Luxembourg City...

$$$$$

Money.mp3

This song was stuck in my head all week, I had to get rid of it somehow, so I put it into my sequencer :)... I recorded the whole thing in about 45 minutes and played around with the drums and adding effects for another hour or two, so it's not like alot of effort went into it. I used GR2's tube compressor and studio reverb on the lead vocals and the drums and I think it came out pretty nice. The bass runs through one of GR2's stock presets ("Ballsy Bass", if I'm not mistaken). There's two guitar tracks panned left and right, both played on the Les Paul into my new pocket POD. I used emulations of a JTM-45 and a small Fender Tweed amp.

Pocket POD

Grabbed a new toy today. Finally a way to liven up my solid state amp, it works like a charm. It's loaded with amp models, 300+ presets and cost me under 100 euro... Hope to post audio pretty soon.

Mice

Mice.mp3

I spent most of Friday afternoon recording this track. The song itself is something I've been playing around with for quite some time now. It's been recorded during rehearsal by Szegényanyámhalátna. At that time our drummer was away on a scholarship for 6 months, and we had a guy fill in for him who just got back from Canada and was trying out for orchestras and stuff, so he was pretty good. Anyway, I used the bassline that was on that recording as a basis for what I do here. I also recorded an acoustic version about two years ago but that was very uneven.

The bass became the lead instrument for the first two verses, so I reverted to playing chords on it so as not to overshadow the guitar solo at the end. I must say that I'm really happy with the way my bass guitar sounds. My playing is still a bit sloppy, so it's nice to have that compensated by a pleasing tone.

The drums are made up of a backing loop (dnb 156bpm) from Guitar Rig 2 and some added accents from the LiViD synth. Again the LiViD patterns were manually modified in the sequence.

I used my Telecaster for the comping right up to the solo. I made several attempts at recording the lead with that guitar but it always came out too clunky. The Les Paul's P-90 at the bridge was the answer. Since I had about 30 shots at recording it (no kidding), the solo came out more structured than usual. The section over the verse riff was fully mapped out by the time I recorded the final version, the rest was pretty much improvised on the spot. I feel I'm stuck in a rut with my lead playing. I have horrible difficulties coming up with stuff that sounds original and isn't too repetitive... Anyway, both guitar tracks use GR2's "Hall Warm FX" factory preset.

Kitchen Groove

This one came along as a series of accidents. I initially wrote the underlining bass groove in 4/4. As I was setting things up to record it, I accidentally set the metronome to 7/8. I tried it that way and it worked out, so I kept it. It then took me a good couple of days to figure out the guitar parts. I accidentaly stumbled upon a video review of the Roland JC-120 amp on Gearwire. The guy was playing those jazzy arpeggios between chords, something I still couldn't get my head around after all these years. I saw that he was pretty good at responding to questions posted on the site, so I asked him how that works. He told me to check out diminished chords and scales. I googled it and found a website with a basic introduction. Reading that article, I realised that one of the riffs I'm playing on the bass in this song actually matches the "whole-half" scale. That's how I ended up playing the corresponding diminished chord over that part. Recording the lead part there was pretty uncomfortable, my left hand is locked into the pentatonic box thing. It took me about 10 takes to get an acceptable result.

For the recording I used my Magix Audio Studio software. I built the drum track with "LiViD", a synth that is included in the DAW and did some manual editing to fit the bass track. All bass and guitar parts were done with Guitar Rig 2. I used a Jazz amp with a Psychedelay a synthlike effect on the rythm guitar. The main bass groove uses my own preset, all the others are stock, namely "Vocode Bass" for the bass solo, "No Holds Barred Lead" for the cleaner lead guitars (the distortion is turned off), "Stepping Gates" for the parts over the diminished chords and the lead guitar following the bass solo (the tremolo rate was adjusted to fit the song). The latter part is doubled on another track with the "System of a Crown" preset from the Metal & HiGain bank (wah pedal on, controlled by the input level modifier). Enjoy:

Kitchen Groove.mp3

Super Andrea

Hilarious:

So Easy v2.0

Here's a new version of the song I did based on comments I got on various forums. There still might be some room for improvement...

So Easy v2.mp3

So Easy

Yeah, right! I spent the better part of three days putting this thing together and I'm still not entirely happy. But I guess this is as good as it'll get without starting over from scratch. Check it out:

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