Nico Adie wrote: Wed Dec 18, 2024 6:02 pm A very old upright piano. There’s a lot wrong with it, sticking keys, very out of tune etc, but I look forward to getting it into shape. I took it apart today, hoovered about half a ton of dust from inside it, found a half penny from 1863 under keys. Cool. Going to be a long ride I think.

That dust is the mojo!

Pulsar Primavera - a spring reverb plugin based on a vintage model, with toggles for different conditions. I hesitated on this, because I had a decent enough spring reverb plugin. Once I started using the demo, I realized how much more this one offered than the one I already had. Just a lot of cool spring effects, now I kinda want something like this on my pedal board!

Pulsar Echorec - I'm a sucker for a good tape delay. I already have a space echo from UAD, but I found that I don't use it often. There's this free plugin (forgot the name) that is an amazing tape delay, albeit a little bit of a one-trick pony, but it tends to be my starting point and I use it a lot, sometimes I wish it had more to offer. There's so much going on with Echorec that it's hard to not buy on sale for $30.

I purchased these directly from Pulsar, they're giving away some free plugins with it from a third party. That really wasn't the catalyst for this purchase, but one of the plugins is a Chorus/Echo effect. You can't have too many fun plugins to mix with!

Pulsar just continues to put out really excellent plugins. They focus on quality over quantity.

cakes wrote: Fri Dec 20, 2024 9:45 am Pulsar Primavera -

Pulsar Echorec -

I almost bought both of these when they dropped the price to "hell yeah" amount. I just couldn't bring myself to buy another reverb or delay plugin. I'm getting decision paralysis with all the plugins I have but these are both great. WF for the Demo video on the Pulsar website having the absolute worst music for demoing a spring reverb that I have ever heard. WTF?

A couple of months ago I went to one of the second-hand-stuff barns in my area and found, in a corner, a Yamaha CX40 classical guitar. It had five strings on it and had been hanging on a hook in an unheated barn but I figured, it's a Yamaha, it's basically indestructible. £60 with five strings and no bag. I cleaned it up a lot. Frets are a little rough. But as life partner sez, "you need a guitar where all you can do with it is play it rather than [fuck about forever with the electronics and hardware]"

I started playing 35 years ago on an inexpensive nylon-string, so this feels like home to me. I'm no classical guitarist but it's lots of fun.

I bought it a strap and a bag and a set of La Bella 900B classical strings. These strings, they're definitely £17/set nice. The bass strings are polished, kind of half-round, they feel good and they can bark a little. The treble strings are black and look cool and sound better. (There are little helper things in the packet so you can tell which one is which.)

La Bella seem to be tricky to find in the UK, but I really like the sets I've tried. The MIDI guitar has got a set of the black tapewound Jazz Flats on it, and they're really working for me there.