Roll Your Own Reverbs!
Simulate Spaces with Impulse Responses

Location, location, location: IR reverbs can put your guitar anywhere!

Location, location, location: IR reverbs can make your guitar sound like it was recorded ANYWHERE!

Impulse response reverbs are one of the handiest tools in the digital-audio junk drawer. If you’re new to the concept, prepare to be amazed. (And if you’re familiar with the technology, jump to the end of this post […]

Echoes of Ancient Greece

I’ve just returned from a vacation to Southern Italy and Sicily. It was a nerdy scholarly tour, with an emphasis on ancient Greek archaeological sites. (There are apparently more and better preserved Greek ruins in Italy and Sicily than on the Greek peninsula.) It was terribly serious — my wife and I spent a lot […]

In Search of Ancient Ambience

Premier Guitar just posted my latest Recording Guitarist column. The subject: Capturing the haunting reverbs of Southwestern ruins via impulse-response reverbs.

Many years ago I marveled at the eerie reflections within the stone-walled ball court at Wupatki, an hour north of Flagstaff, Arizona. On this visit, I attempted to clone the tone. I did […]

Double Varitone: A Two-Headed Tone Control

I was kind of stoked about my latest wiring experiment: a “double Varitone” scheme I installed in my DIY “Kitschcaster.” I’ve written about these multi-capacitor tone switches a lot on this site, but this is the first time I’ve tried using a similar scheme to cut bass frequencies. The result is a lot like the […]

The Call of the Cave

Part of my recent trip to Europe was a scholar-led tour of Late Paleolithic cave art, starting in the Vézère river valley of France’s Dordogne and working west to northern Spain’s Cantabria region. I’m no expert on the era — just an armchair history geek with a lifelong early art fascination. I could bore you […]

Logidy EPSi Review:
The First Customizable Convolution Reverb Pedal

One of the coolest gizmos from last weeks NAMM show is already in my grubby little hands: It’s the Logidy EPSi, the first customizable convolution reverb pedal. I ordered it the instant I heard about it, and it arrived right before I left for Anaheim.

Convolution (or impulse response) reverbs can mimic acoustic spaces and […]

Attenuation Nation:
Loud Sounds at Low Volume?

I just tried an interesting tone comparison, one I’ve never seen attempted. It concerns the search for loud amp sounds at low volumes.

Have any of you ever experimented with speaker attenuators — the passive load boxes that reside between your amp output and speaker input, which let you crank the amp while maintaining […]

14th-Century Freakout!

Codex Chantilly: the electrifying page-turner that blew the lid off the perverse musical excesses of the late Middle Ages!

NOTE: I am a known perpetrator of musical hoaxes, but this isn’t one of them. This bizarre composition really is over 600 years old.

As Marsellus Wallace once quipped: “I’m’a get medieval on your […]

NAMM 2013: Digital Discoveries

This first installment of my 2013 NAMM report focuses on products for the digital guitarist. In the coming days I’ll be doing posts on analog amps, guitar, stompboxes, and accessories. (But maybe not as quickly as I’d like, because I’ve also got to cover MacWorld in San Francisco this weekend.) This is cross-posted from Create […]

Analog Schmanalog

Ever notice how most analog vs. digital battles discussions boil down to two basic questions?

1. Can digital sound as good as analog? 2. What are the practical benefits of digital?

They’re good questions, but they tend to overshadow another important (and probably more interesting) topic: What are the musical benefits of digital?

Everyone loves […]