Intersound IVP
Posted: Wed Dec 05, 2007 5:08 pm
buildingblocks wrote:benadrian wrote:The world is full of weirdo, unknown, unique sounding gear. It just seems that the Electrical board puts a lot of weight into three oddball pieces of gear much more than the rest of the musician world, and those three pieces are used by the guy who runs the board.
While it's a nice ideal to try to acquire gear by digging through the goodwill or music shop and find something collecting dust that is unique that looks interesting and try it out AND then find out it sounds great, but it's not exactly realistic for everyone to be able to do that and take risks on "unique" equipment that could potentially be garbage with little or no resale value. I mean, isn't the main reason we visit this board to help us make educated decisions about gear and recording? Some of that information may work for some of us and some of it won't.
What other weirdo pieces of equipment do you recommend that the EA forum users aren't aware of yet?
The IVP is definitely a unique piece of gear, but honestly doesn't sound all that great by most "guitarist" standards. That's fine, as I embrace non-traditionalism and think that musical sound is a totally subjective medium.
However, with the IVP, I find people who get them usually use them either A. to clone the Big Black sound, or B. find one weird sound with them and stick with it. Well, if the musician is just looking for one weird sound, ANY piece of gear can give at least one weird sound.
So, in my subjective opinion, the IVP is not built all that great, sounds passable but not much more for creating a traditional guitar sound, and, like and pice of gear, can do unique non-traditional sounds in some settings, but is already in use as a main pice of gear by a musician known for their unique sonics.
For studio use, the IVP was much more useful. Mine was $40, and for $40, I'll try almost any piece of gear. It was also a good, general use preamp for my bass setup, and worked well until I finished my home-made unit.
By all means, use what you like and what you believe sounds good. Hell, most the time I'm playing a Telecaster into a Fender amp, which is totally standard and commonplace. To me, it's funny to watch a piece of gear which was generally considered junk slowy turn into a fetishized piece of gear by a few and then turn into a commonplace and standardized sound and piece of gear in the noiserock subset. The funny thing is, I traded my unit for the "Rusty Box" pedal, which is also a commonplace and standarzided sound in the noisy rock community. I think I'll use it more, though.
As for weirdo gear, I have a pedal for sale. The audioworks FET distortion.
It is a unique pedal which I've never seen other than the one I own. I never use it, so I'm selling it.
The other secret of mine is the Digitech Valve FX. Yes, it's a digital rack-mount processor. However, they go for less than a hundred bucks and can do some very interesting and weird sounds. It's nothing that could be called traditionally good, but I like the sounds I can make with it.
So yeah, buy something you've seen no one else use and abuse it to inspire something that would not have come out of you otherwise
Cheers!
Ben Adrian