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So Owen...this might be challenging (annnnnnnd maybe a little annoying) to do based on the lack of tightly-defined descriptive of what we hear, but if you HAD to describe the characteristics of that amp, how would you describe it?

Just trying to somehow determine if mine is just not performing well...or if I just don't like how the amp itself sounds.

Either way, I probably won't get rid of it. As stupid as it sounds and even more embarrassing to admit both to myself and publicly, I have almost completed "the set" having a YBA-1, a YBA-3, AND a YBA-3A. I just need to stumble onto a good deal on a YBA-1A (which is certainly getting more and more difficult). I blame my childhood media ruining me. All the cartoons I grew up on were basically just 30-minute adverts: "Buy All our Playsets and Toys!"

Garth wrote: Sun Sep 18, 2022 12:57 pm So Owen...this might be challenging (annnnnnnd maybe a little annoying) to do based on the lack of tightly-defined descriptive of what we hear, but if you HAD to describe the characteristics of that amp, how would you describe it?

Just trying to somehow determine if mine is just not performing well...or if I just don't like how the amp itself sounds.

Either way, I probably won't get rid of it. As stupid as it sounds and even more embarrassing to admit both to myself and publicly, I have almost completed "the set" having a YBA-1, a YBA-3, AND a YBA-3A. I just need to stumble onto a good deal on a YBA-1A (which is certainly getting more and more difficult). I blame my childhood media ruining me. All the cartoons I grew up on were basically just 30-minute adverts: "Buy All our Playsets and Toys!"

I can try!

My main amps for guitar over the last few years are a Marshall 2204, and an Orange OR120, so you know where my ears are coming from.

My Traynor is a mid 70s, non-master, and has JJ EL34s that I have had in it for 10+ years.

It does the "loud clean" thing exactly like I have it in my head. With my EGC it can clang with the best of them. To my ears the Traynor exists sort of like a combo of a Super Bass and a Model T...maybe? The guitarist who borrowed it is a Fender guy (Twins, Showman, etc) and he was really into the Traynor, he dialed out some bass, but that was it. Told me he went on Reverb to look at Traynors after practice lol.

With my Orange if I turn it to about 12 o'clock it starts to break up, and after that it gets REAL distorted fast (in a good way for me), but the Traynor, when it gets to the edge of breakup you can get more of a range of sound in a smooth way, before reaching full power tube distortion by turning the volume knob more.

The EQ seems real flexible, midrange seems more open sounding. and the high end has bite that can be rolled off to avoid harshness. Tons of headroom and again, I was just on 2, and I could palm mute an F and feel it in my chest. Has that thump that some amps have. It also feels like it never breaks a sweat no matter what I throw at it, pedals, different cabs, it has a baseline "Good" sound guitar or bass.

It's a simple amp, but sitting here thinking about it, it has a pretty complex sound (or perhaps this edible has made this sound like gibberish, but I hope this was helpful in some way).

dfglv wrote: Thu Sep 15, 2022 4:25 pm Homebrew is an excellent package manager that is helpful for helping yourself to the galaxy of powerful, useful command-line-interface tools and apps that can run on macOS. It helps you to install, keep updated and/or remove these apps, where that can be a bit of a learning curve if you're not au fait with the low-level conventions. Like a lot of stuff, it started on Intel Macs but now works on Apple Silicon too (there may be a few conditions; I don't have an Apple-Apple Mac yet.)

It can also take care of installing and maintaining a bunch of regular apps for you.

My happiest writing environment is a big Terminal window (actually, iTerm2) and a bunch of command-line apps but I'm not really a WYSIWYG-brained person at all. AsciiDocFX is a GUI version that can generate attractive output from a simple markup language. Closer to what Word behaves like, LibreOffice is actually not a bad experience on Mac, it just has second-rate UI design that makes it look more hacked-together than it is. Enable the 'Sidebar' UI-variant to minimise the impact of that. If all else fails Microsoft Office Home & Student is a lifetime Word/Excel/PP license for, over here, around $120.

Bespoke Synth is huge amounts of fun if you like fucking about with that sort of thing at all. ocenaudio is a tight little GUI audio editor. Calibre is my favourite e-reader.

Mickey242 wrote: Audio hijack is nice if you want to record a lecture off a website.

Thanks! Some of that stuff like Homebrew etc. goes over my head. I just want to write research papers, not fly in the matrix, but that seems to be pretty common these days?

VaticanShotglass wrote: Sun Sep 18, 2022 9:58 pm Thanks! Some of that stuff like Homebrew etc. goes over my head. I just want to write research papers, not fly in the matrix, but that seems to be pretty common these days?

Okay, cool. I'm not clear I recall your research field, bs far as working on research papers goes: I worked with Word when I was getting started, and it's okay, but some of the features I really needed, like cross-referencing within a document, I don't really trust. I've put in a long time with the (free) LaTeX system and for the upfront cost of learning a bit of code syntax -- markup stuff, mostly like phpBB -- it is super-powerful. In particular, it gives you tools to manage the structure of the document as much as its appearance. For example, you can get it to assemble your final document from an ordered collection of input files (rather than one big file). Once you get your head round that, you can safely do high-level structural revisions in a couple minutes, or confidently re-use materials (like reference lists, diagrams, or lengthy source quotes) across different writing projects. A lot of the example usage you'll find online emphasises how good it is for math applications, but it's not restricted to that.

Overleaf is a web-based version with a free plan ($give-us-an-email-address) and tutorials that could give you a good taste of the basic LaTeX environment, and if you find you like it, it's straightforward and literally free to get the stuff installed on your own machine. You can set the local software up for different experiences quite easily - so while I put most of my hours in using the same editor I write regular code with, there are graphical editing packages (e.g. LyX) that look and behave quite a bit more like Word.

Latex is worth it for document revision control alone

Man its been AGES since I was given the privilege of setting a document in LaTeX. Like 15+ years since and its all been Word bullshit.

So I put my reply about writing software in a new thread: viewtopic.php?p=806463#p806463

I didn't wan't to derail this thread. I didn't address the latex suggestion. I forgot. Looks promising, though I've also been a bit intimated.

Remo “Fiberskyn” Felt Tone bass drum head (24” in my case). It’s definitely a very different sound from the clear, plastic heads I’m accustomed to. I’d describe it as somewhat “papery”; bone dry. It doesn’t have a whole lot of tone — it’s kind of flat and characterless, and definitely not “warm” like I was expecting. I eventually decided that it doesn’t work at lower tunings; it really needs to be cranked tight.

I wasn’t digging it as a beater head, but as a resonant head, its dryness is working for me. The combination of the Fiberskyn head on the resonant side, cranked high (way higher than I’ve ever tuned my resonant head), and a Remo coated Felt Tone on the beater side, tuned low, has my kick drum sounding like a cannon.

I’d be interested to know whether a coated Felt Tone on both sides of the drum would sound even better — but the coated head was way backordered, and took all summer to get to me, so I’m not going to find out any time soon. In the meantime, I have a kick drum sound that I actually like (i.e. that I consider more than just passable) for the first time in as long as I’ve been playing drums. And I’m definitely not going back to clear plastic kick drum heads ever again.

EHX Memory Toy - sounds pretty much the same as my big box Deluxe Memory Man (holy FUCK they’re going for stupid money now) and takes up approximately 1/8th of the space. I like it.

Nico Adie wrote: Tue Oct 25, 2022 1:38 am EHX Memory Toy - sounds pretty much the same as my big box Deluxe Memory Man (holy FUCK they’re going for stupid money now) and takes up approximately 1/8th of the space. I like it.

I had a vintage deluxe memory man and put it side by side with the modern one and the sound was so close I sold the vintage one. Figured even if it broke I could buy four more for the price