Portable Sound

Right now I'm not going to get into a debate about amps and how valve amps are the only real amps. That's a different topic entirely and one which I don't really want to stir up. I mention it just so you know I believe nothing can legitimately replace an awesome valve amp.

That said, while I've been songwriting, I haven't had the luxury of being able to blast my amp up to 10 due to not having the benefits of an isolation booth in a studio. But an electric guitar plugged straight into an audio interface is somewhat disgusting to listen to and software amp simulators are almost worse. I was trying to find a way around this by having a load resistor replace my speaker cabinet so I could go straight from my amp head into the audio interface. But apparently no one really makes anything like that and even if there was something like it on the market the speakers add a lot of the character to the sound so going direct from the head wouldn't have helped all that much anyway.

Then the Sansamp GT2 was brought to my attention - an analogue guitar amp simulator. Like I said I'd never replace my amp in an ideal situation but when I need to record straight from my guitar this thing was brilliant. I was able to tweak the dials to get a nice warm clean sound that could run with my effects board. I was really really surprised. The sound in headphones was actually decent. Something I wasn't expecting from a simulator.

I got back to Brisbane for rehearsal the other day though and plugged back into my amp, and yeah, the Sansamp is a good thing for the portable studio when demoing, but please don't substitute out the real thing.

Retro Looking

Now I'm not usually one to get all excited and talk about something computer related but someone just twittered that if you have a Mac you can go all retro by pressing command + option + control + 8. First, I promise it won't cause your computer to crash or kill itself. Just try it. It's v cool.

Grammys Backlash

I personally didn't actually see the Grammys the other week. But apparently a lot of people did. And apparently a lot of people weren't so happy with them either.

I'm subscribed to a blog called The Lefsetz Letter which essentially is a music commentary by a guy called Bob Lefsetz. It's an entertaining read. He has a lot to say and is often very controversial. Anyway, periodically one of his posts will be called "mailbag" which is essentially all the emails he's received on a particular topic. One such recent mailbag was about the Grammys. Bob himself didn't even bother commenting on the Grammys.

What I was going to say before I diverted to that back story was that I was really quite shocked and surprised at how much criticism people were prepared to spray at the Grammys. I didn't see it like I said so I don't know whether it was good or bad but that's not really the point. I can't understand it when people go out of their way to absolutely bag something just because they don't like it. There was a whole lot of (paraphrased) "the music industry is absolutely f#*ked right now, it's nothing like it used to be, there's no good music anymore" etc etc aimed specifically at the acts that performed at the ceremony. What was funny though was that people would rant and rave about how bad it was but then would say something like, "oh, but [insert artist here] was great, they were the only good bit of the whole show". Heaps of people said something like that but each time the act that they thought was great was different.

I'm going to start a new paragraph to make this easier to read. So essentially pretty much every act who played at the Grammys was great in the eyes of at least one of these people bagging the show. What I'm saying then is that with this is mind, their views are based on nothing but subjective musical taste. There's nothing wrong with musical taste being subjective. In fact if music wasn't subjective I'd be worried. I think music is one of those things that is really personal and so if we all liked the same music we'd all be pretty much the same people which would be boring. What I can't understand is why people go out of their way to passionately (and I mean with hatred) rubbish music they don't like because it's successful.

I've been guilty of it before but every time I do it I always hate myself and I only ever say it to friends, never publicly or anonymously publicly if you get me. Just because I don't like something doesn't mean it's bad. And the same goes for everyone else.

So I wish that people like those writing in to bag the Grammys would just be content to say "I don't like it" and leave it there. And enough about the music industry being in a terrible state as well. 1) It's not. 2) A strong enough belief in something goes a long way to creating the fact.