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Post by forgotteng on Jan 22, 2020 22:06:20 GMT -6
For me, I've chased those things for a long time. I wanted to try every flavor of preamps for different tone etc. When your a one man show and your just trying to keep up I found myself plugging into whatever was left over so I've been replacing all my pres with CAPI VP25's and 26's cause .....well....... I like them. It's also because we live in a time period where there is so much excess. It's like walking down the cereal aisle at the grocery store and trying to find a crunchy cereal. Or reading a magazine dedicated to cereal reviews and trying to make sense of it. After awhile I shut down and brain fog sets in.
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Post by Guitar on Jan 23, 2020 6:45:00 GMT -6
I guess I kind of agree with these last two posts. After a point buying and using gear, you just use "the stuff that sounds good." It's almost as simple as that.
You can get out of the young person mindset of magical thinking about audio quality, "unobtainable" tones, and things like that. They don't really seem to exist. Once you've demystified tape machines, consoles, "toobs" and etc. Eventually you just realize that gear sounds good or bad, and most of it is the techniques and skills in using the stuff that makes things sound good.
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Post by Martin John Butler on Jan 23, 2020 9:02:58 GMT -6
OK, so words fail to describe sound, but people try. Having references like Neve, API, Trident, Marshall, Fender, Studer helps, but will always fall short. Things change. The word awesome means nothing anymore. It could be used to describe the morning coffee.
So then, what must we do? I've been helped so many times by members here who are more knowledgeable than me, so I guess we just have to suffer the limitations of language and should perhaps not take it so seriously.
Should we not try our best to describe what we hear? If not, we might as well not visit any forum then. Those with experience can usually tell when a poster isn't as experienced. The internet breeds smartass characters, but it is what it is. Move on and up my friends, on and up.
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Post by jamiesego on Jan 23, 2020 9:29:47 GMT -6
No gear would have tone or mojo if it wasn’t used for a record that had tone and mojo. It seems that sometimes the gear and the art have a serendipitous relationship and sometimes it just happens to be what was in the room.
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Post by matt@IAA on Jan 23, 2020 9:37:51 GMT -6
The connection to food kind of reminds me of watching cooking shows. The good ones use much more precise diction and more evocative verbal imagery so that the viewer at least imagines they understand the flavor. I suppose at this point tone and mojo are as lazy for audio as delicious or flavorful would be for food description.
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Post by Guitar on Jan 23, 2020 10:03:31 GMT -6
No gear would have tone or mojo if it wasn’t used for a record that had tone and mojo. It seems that sometimes the gear and the art have a serendipitous relationship and sometimes it just happens to be what was in the room. I have to catch myself on that one sometimes. "So and so used this amp" or whatever. Even myself, when I have a good musical moment, I tend to latch onto that gear as being "special." As if it must have been the specific equipment that made the sound rather than the people playing the music! I think this is one of the last ones for me to flush away. If you are serious and/or a collector you should have any number of tools in your setup that can be used for "amazing" tones. Sure it might vary from one project to the next, but it's still not really the specific gear that makes the magic happen. It's just that good ideas and moments of brilliance tend to leave a mental residue around everything that was in play during that moment. A sort of sentimentality.
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Post by spindrift on Jan 23, 2020 10:43:28 GMT -6
Dan is right on point. The quality of gear these days is so high that I think we are reacting the beauty of the music or part or instrument a lot of the time. I have had a hard time separating tones from music.
I was listening the other day to a guilty pleasure of mine: Amy Grant’s Lead Me On album. I hadn’t heard it in a decade and it doesn’t sound great by today’s standards, digital and thin. But that record is so emblazoned in my mind from blasting it on huge PAs in my more youthful days, I still love it. It is the music and production that I love, not necessarily the tones or sound.
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Post by Guitar on Jan 23, 2020 11:50:00 GMT -6
Dan is right on point. The quality of gear these days is so high that I think we are reacting the beauty of the music or part or instrument a lot of the time. I have had a hard time separating tones from music. I was listening the other day to a guilty pleasure of mine: Amy Grant’s Lead Me On album. I hadn’t heard it in a decade and it doesn’t sound great by today’s standards, digital and thin. But that record is so emblazoned in my mind from blasting it on huge PAs in my more youthful days, I still love it. It is the music and production that I love, not necessarily the tones or sound. Same thing happening to me the past 48 hours. First time really listening to "OK Computer" on my Focal monitors. An album I used to listen to every day for over a year. I almost want to say it sounds kind of terrible from an audio point of view. There was just this halo on it because I loved the music so much. I guess it shows you what's more important and what's less important. Or even a nod to that article "Shitty is Pretty" by Gabriel Roth. The original use of the word "mojo" people are talking about. Originally it seems to have meant that things sounded horrible in a way that people enjoy. Well, ok, good or horrible. Sometimes both. But I am especially interested in the appeal of horrible, broken sounds, for my personal aesthetic.
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Post by EmRR on Jan 24, 2020 10:16:19 GMT -6
OMG, the Cranborne (sp?) 500 preamp has a 'mojo' knob.
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Post by forgotteng on Jan 24, 2020 11:07:20 GMT -6
OMG, the Cranborne (sp?) 500 preamp has a 'mojo' knob. I just saw that and thought of this conversation. There was a few more choice marketing terms sprinkled in along with it.
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Post by matt@IAA on Jan 24, 2020 13:37:00 GMT -6
OMG, the Cranborne (sp?) 500 preamp has a 'mojo' knob. Is that more of a sin than Rupert Neve’s “silk” knob?
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Post by Guitar on Jan 24, 2020 13:50:31 GMT -6
OMG, the Cranborne (sp?) 500 preamp has a 'mojo' knob. Also "cream" and "thump" I have wondered about the "cream" word specifically.
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Post by johneppstein on Jan 24, 2020 13:55:39 GMT -6
OK, so words fail to describe sound, but people try. Having references like Neve, API, Trident, Marshall, Fender, Studer helps, but will always fall short. Things change. The word awesome means nothing anymore. It could be used to describe the morning coffee. So then, what must we do? I've been helped so many times by members here who are more knowledgeable than me, so I guess we just have to suffer the limitations of language and should perhaps not take it so seriously. Should we not try our best to describe what we hear? If not, we might as well not visit any forum then. Those with experience can usually tell when a poster isn't as experienced. The internet breeds smartass characters, but it is what it is. Move on and up my friends, on and up. For some reason for the last several years whenever (well, almost whenever) I hear somebody say "awesome" my brain wants to substitute the similar (and somewhat related) word "awful".
Awe is awe, ain't it?
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Post by Martin John Butler on Jan 24, 2020 15:00:16 GMT -6
Many of those saying "awesome" are indeed awful!
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Post by EmRR on Jan 24, 2020 15:25:49 GMT -6
I noticed a trend of people from NYC telling me I was awesome, I decided it might be an insult.
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Post by christopher on Jan 24, 2020 15:30:59 GMT -6
I’ve experienced “creamy” twice. It’s really weird when it happens, but it’s the best way I can describe it. There’s such a thick continuity, completely smooth yet dense. First time was when I was running Meyer speakers at FOH, seems like no matter what you play through it comes out sounding big, rich, and smooth. The only other time was when Ragan showed off his Harrison EQ here, super milky and just smooth.
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Post by chessparov on Jan 25, 2020 15:55:17 GMT -6
I'm thinking either "Ice-Cream" or "Double-Scoop Dawg", for my Rap Stage name. Just to get down with my Homies betta... Chris
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