Using software amplification simulators, or amp sims for short, is becoming increasingly popular. The benefits are many, you can tweak your sound endlessly, switch between different amp sims trying to find the best tone for your song. A drawback is that an amp sim not properly tuned can generate digital artifacts giving away that it’s […]
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There are three basic ways of recording guitar: miking up an amp, use a digital amp modeller or direct input. The first two record a “wet” signal, with effects like distortion already present in the sound. The third records a “dry” signal with the signal unmodified as it comes from the guitar output jack. 1. […]
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I found a list of 10 great tips in an unexpected place – Wikihow. Wikihow is a collaborative site with how-to manuals on almost every subject, including writing thrash riffs apparently. The tips are simple but really very good and most of them can be applied to writing music in general. Here’s the list in […]
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Palm muting is really essential to most metal genres, and fast alt.picked palm muting even more so. I’ve really put time into my alt picking – practicing slowly with a metronome at first – really aiming at getting a consistent sound between upstrokes and downstrokes, and getting a good chug out of each note. It’s […]
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Have you been practising your scales, your picking and your bends like crazy and your solos are still crap? I know mine are… I found a post on guitar blog Guitar Noise that is really on to something. The answer is phrasing – the division of a solo into small parts, alternating between fast and […]
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The newest version of Reaper (4.10) has an amazing new feature, found in some other DAWs – track freeze. Freezing a track means rendering it to a static sound file, the point of which is to save a lot of precious CPU cycles. I’ve done this manually before, mostly to be able to work on […]
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I’m usually singing the constant praise of Reaper in this blog. This time I’m going to point out a big weakness, in my opinion. The bundled VST effects are either too complicated for me or not very good. After numerous attempts with ReDelay and Reverberate I get only crap results. What I want is more […]
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Most pickups are available in black, some maybe also in white and zebra. Dimarzio has a wider selection of colors, for instance I have a green Blaze in the bridge of my Schecter Omen 7 (bought it used – would probably not have gone with green :-)). But what if you want to go completely […]
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Redwirez is one of the most famous impulse response makers. They have a catalog of 49 cabinets that have been sampled with lots of mics in all possible positions. The full bundle is $125, but they’re giving away one of their cabs for free. And it’s a famous one – and the perfect complement to […]
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If you have a Reaper project that won’t load or that makes the application crash, chances are that the cause is a brokenVST plugin. An example of a plugin that often causes problems is LePou’s otherwise excellent impulse loader LeCab2. If LeCab2 can’t find its selected impulses it crashes Reaper on load. This is particularly […]
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