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Messages - maelstrom79

#16
I've played a few B.C. Rich guitars.  One particular neck-thru Mockingbird with a Floyd Rose I got my hands on in Seattle once, I didn't want to put down.  They're definately unique guitars.  As far as Jacksons go, I wouldn't own a newer one, unless it were a USA model.  I had a DXMG and a DK2 both a few years back.  The necks just sucked on both.   But then again, I was an Ibanez player back then, and Ibanez Wizard necks ruin your taste for everything else.  They're just the fastest necks out there.  Maybe too fast.  I had a friend who scalloped the entire fingerboard on his RG3120 and the neck slowly split right up the middle of the back.  Just too thin, I guess.  The truss rod was adjusted properly and the string tension was fine.  Weird.  Those Jackson USA Warriors are wicked cool, though.  Especially the ones with the "bolted metal" finish.

I want one of those Hello Kitty strats.  Not sure why.  I keep seeing them in catalogs and they're cheap.  I want to shoot a music video someday when I'm a huge metal legend (yeah right) and just cut in a few seconds of me shredding on one.  It'll catch everyone's attention.  I'd have to route it and retrofit it with a Floyd Rose and something with more kick, like one of those new DiMarzio blade pickups.  I can't remember the name.  A DX2 or something like that.  They're the highest output pickups DiMarzio makes, according to them.

I don't do heavy guitars.  Well, heavy in weight.  They have cut, generally, but I'm moving away from the alder and basswood and going more mahogany these days.  My Schecter C/SH-1 weighs about half as much as a Strat.  It's almost like an acoustic.  But yeah, Seymour Duncans aren't the best for heavy (as in hard rock/metal this time) playing.  Not sure why Jackson puts JBs in their top models.  Distortions are better, Invaders are great.  Very unique, compressed sort of sound.  The only example of someone who plays them, though, is Synyster Gates, the lead player for Avenged Sevenfold.  I've never heard them before, though.  I don't listen to newer music much these days.  Duncan '59s are the best neck pickup out there, in my humble opinion.  I wouldn't swap them for anything else, except maybe a DiMarzio PAF Pro.  I have no use for Duncan Designed pickups.  I've met Seymour Duncan before at NAMM.  He's a no-BS kinda guy.  I can't imagine him designing those.

Good choice on the Crybaby and the Boss Digital Delay.  I use a Boss DD-6.  You can go to www.musiciansfriend.com and just browse through the effects pedals and listen to the mp3 sound bytes of each of the delay pedals on there to get ideas on different delay uses.  Some of them actually note the settings used to achieve different delay effects.  It's how I find inspiration for new songs sometimes.  I've been using a Morley Bad Horsie wah for years and I love the switchless ease of use, but it doesn't "wah" hard enough for me.  I got a Crybaby 535Q and it sounds fine, but I can't seem to get it "dialed in" to my soloing register the way I want it.  I think I'm gonna ditch it in favor of a Crybaby Classic.  And I use a Boss DS-1 Distortion.  I like it better than anything else I've used, better than a Big Muff, Rat, Expandora, etc.  Sounds super fat about halfway up.  Too shrill on the high end when you crank it.

But wow, a Mesa Boogie Dual Rectifer?  That's a lot of amp.  I have a '72 Marshall JCM 800 50-watt half-stack, but I can't get it to overdrive to saturation in my tiny apartment, even with a PowerBrake.  I've been impressed with my little cheapo Vox combo lately and I'm considering investing in a Vox AC15 with Celestions in it.  I'd have the same volume problem with an AC30 that I have with my JCM 800.  Mahogany bodied guitar, Duncan '59 neck pickup, class A tube amp.  Best sound I've heard in my 18 years of playing.  Maybe someday I can afford a handwired Marshall Plexi.  Like, after I retire, maybe.  Heh.

Yeah, I keep hearing great things about Sonic Maximizers.  I understand how they work.  I think I'm gonna throw one of those Sonic Stomps or whatever they call them on my pedalboard soon and see how great it really is.  Thanks for the reply.  Always good to bounce ideas off of other axe-slingers.  In a way, it's how we all got to where we are now, right?
#17
Just curious.  A lot of game music is played on acoustic guitars, some on classical ones.  I don't own an acoustic or even an acoustic simulator pedal or anything.  I've gone from Jackson to Ibanez and finally to Schecter these days.

I use a Schecter C/SH-1 semi-hollow body or a Schecter C-1 Artist for clean tones, using the neck pickup (which happens to have replaced with a Seymour Duncan '59 on the C/SH-1, stock '59 on the Artist), with the tone knob turned all the way to the bass side and then backed off slightly toward the treble, played through a 15-watt Vox Pathfinder combo with the EQ (treble, mid, and bass) set to 12 o'clock and the reverb all the way up.  The C/SH-1 has a deep, bassy tone and excellent resonance, similar to a high-end acoustic electic in sound, but without the top-end harshness found in a lot of acoustic-electrics.  The Artist has a very Les-Paul sort of tone.

For the heavier stuff, like Mega Man and Castlevania stuff, I use a Schecter C-1 Exotic, using the bridge pickup (a Schecter Super Rock II), with the tone knob turned all the way to treble, played through a 20-watt Marshall AVT20 combo with the treble and bass EQ on 10 and the midrange scooped out (all the way up, though, for leads, which I sometimes play on a C-1 Hellraiser FR, with EMGs and a Floyd Rose) and the reverb turned down a bit.  Just depends on the song and style.  The faster you play, the more spring reverb tends to "blur" your picking nuances.

Anyway, I love my Exotic.  It's one of the best bang-for-the-buck guitars out there.  Mahogany body + flamed maple top + ebony fingerboard + massive pickups (seriously, the pole pieces on this guitar are TWICE the size of standard humbuckers) = excellent resonance, sustain, andbright attack.  These pickups sound a lot like EMGs when you play them clean and they have a ton of midrange kick for soloing.

The Hellraiser FR is about the only real choice Schecter offers if you need to do whammy bar work, in my opinion.  The C-1 FR and Damien FR use cheaper Floyd Rose-licensed tremelos where the bars screw into the trems.  They work, but they don't stay in tune as well, the intonation and action are a pain to adjust (factory-set Schecter Diamond Series action is a bit high for most shredders' tastes), and the bars come unthreaded and loosen when you start doing some Steve Vai on them.  But the Hellraiser FRs are great guitars.  VERY similar all-around to ESPs KH-2 Kirk Hammet $3,000 signature model (same trem, same pickups, same scale), except this one's a set neck and has a carved top, so it's more comfortable to play and it's thicker in the middle, so you get more tone out of it without pushing your amp into the red.

Anybody else out there play Schecters?  I'm curious as to what Chrono Cross acoustic pieces would sound like on a Schecter C-1 E/A electric/acoustic semi-hollow body with a piezo pickup.  So what's everyone else playing?

(Yeah, I'm pretty loyal to Schecter.  I'm gunning for an endorsement and I've got one foot in the door, already.  I'm not trying to convert anyone or sell anything.  Heh.  They're just great guitars and versatile enough to do all sorts of game music on.)
#18
Tab Requests / Re: Current tabs I'm working on
June 08, 2007, 07:50:51 AM
Ah, nice work on "Halls of Collosia."  I always did like the music in there.  I'd been trying to rip and SPC of that track from the rom, but it's not working out so good.  Maybe ZSNES just doesn't know how to deal with it, i.e. it could be compressed all weird.  Maybe I'll try it with SNES9x or whatever that other "big" emulator is out there.  I do have partial SPCs, though, like of just one instrument or just the "left" audio, etc.  If you'd like, I can try to make MIDIs of those and extrapolate the sheet music and post it or send it to you.  When I get around to it, that is.  I'm currently staying at the hospital with my sick newborn, so it's hard to find time for anything.  Later.
#19
If you can find a MIDI of the song you want to tab, you can use a MIDI editing program to transpose it into tab.  I use Anvil Studio.  You can get it free on www.download.com and it works great for me.  I don't think you can export tab directly from it, but if you can read sheet music, it makes things a breeze.  If you can't, you should learn.  It's a good skill to have and it's actually quite easy.  I mean, middle school kids do it all the time in band class.  Also, look around to internet for game sheet music.  Deezer has some good links up on the main site that have links on them, too.  I have found complete collections of scores for dozens of games by searching the internet, usenet, and file-sharing networks like eMule and DC++.  You can also use programs like SPC2MIDI to create MIDIs from audio tracks ripped from games.  That particular program can be found at www.zophar.net among other ones.  It does a decent job of making MIDIs from Super NES audio tracks.  Then you can open the MIDI in Anvil Studio and voila, there's the sheet music for each instrument in the song.  Anyway, that's how I tab a lot of stuff.
#20
There are a lot of games out there with great atmospheric music.  It seems like everyone's so focused on visuals these days that music has suffered as much or more than storyline and character depth.  I think that often times, less is more when it comes to atmosphere being created by music.  Super Metroid, for example, wouldn't have been nearly as dark and creepy if it'd had constant, "perky" music.  The use of silence made that game more startling and tense.  Other games such as Shadow Man and Shadow of the Colossus have minimal music.  Usually, music means danger for these games.  And sometimes when a game is full of great music, a little silence reaches out and grabs your attention, like in the case of Chrono Cross, which, might I add, has the best soundtrack in game history in my opinion.  ActRaiser 2 and Final Fantasy VII were also exceptional.  Anyway, that's all I have to say about this subject, whatever it was.
#21
Tab Requests / Re: Guilty Gear
June 07, 2007, 11:30:23 AM
I may work on some Guilty Gear X tabs at some point.  That game has some pretty decent guitar work on the soundtrack.  I've never played the original Guilty Gear, though.  There are a few Guilty Gear X tabs to be found at www.vgmusic.com in the PlayStation 2 section.  I know there are a number of programs for working with audio tracks from games to be found at www.zophar.net as well.  You might be able to use those to actually rip the tracks from the game disc and convert them to MIDI format.  It's a fairly simple process, since game music and MIDIs are both sequenced audio (except for music found in FMV scenes).  I got a program off there that converts Super NES audio tracks into MIDIs.  It works decently.  And you can get a free program called Anvil Studio from www.download.com to create and edit MIDI files.  If nothing else Neill Corlett would probably make you some MIDIs if you paid him.  Heh.  Anyway, he's a great translator/coder/application developer who's done a lot of work in the area of audio ripping for PlayStation and PlayStation 2.  If you haven't already, you should check out his site at www.neillcorlett.com and download Highly Experimental.  It's a plugin for Winamp and XMPlay that plays PlayStation and PlayStation 2 audio tracks that have been ripped directly from the game discs.  You can find compressed archives of ripped game audio tracks from www.zophar.net as well.  Anyway, hope that helps.
#22
Tab Requests / Current tabs I'm working on
June 07, 2007, 11:16:13 AM
Here's a list of what I'm working on right now or have worked on in the past and still have partially done:

Brave Fencer Musashi - "Nighttime"
Chrono Cross - "Death Sea ~ Tower of Ruin"
Chrono Cross - "Star-Stealing Girl"
Chrono Trigger - "Sealed Door"
Chrono Trigger - "Secret of the Forest"
Chrono Trigger - "Undersea Palace"
Dark Cloud 2 - "Balance Valley"
Dark Cloud 2 - "Flower Garden"
Dark Cloud 2 - "Garden of Memories"
Dark Cloud 2 - "Gundorada Workshop"
Dark Cloud 2 - "Lunatic Research Laboratory"
Dark Cloud 2 - "Peace of the World"
Dark Cloud 2 - "Rainbow Butterfly Wood"
Dark Cloud 2 - "Starlight Canyon"
Dark Cloud 2 - "Starlight Temple"
Dark Cloud 2 - "Time of Separation"
Final Fantasy IX - "Awakened Forest"
Final Fantasy IX - "Kuja's Theme"
Final Fantasy IX - "Loss of Me"
Final Fantasy IX - "The Sword of Doubt"
Final Fantasy Mystic Quest - "Aquaria"
Final Fantasy Mystic Quest - "Temple"
Final Fantasy VII - "A Secret, Sleeping in the Sea"
Final Fantasy VII - "Flowers Blooming in the Church"
Final Fantasy VII - "Jenova Absolute"
Final Fantasy VII - "Off the Edge of Despair"
Final Fantasy VII - "On That Day, 5 Years Ago"
Final Fantasy X - "Cloister of Trials"
Final Fantasy X - "Path of Repentance"
Final Fantasy X - "Silence Before the Storm"
Final Fantasy X - "Someday the Dream Will End"
Final Fantasy X - "To Zanarkand"
Final Fantasy X - "Wandering Flame"
Final Fantasy X - "Yuna's Theme"
Final Fantasy X-2 - "Eternity ~Memory of Lightwaves~"
Golden Sun - "Lalivero"
Grandia II - "Despair and Hope"
Illusion of Gaia - "Ending 1"
Illusion of Gaia - "Legacy of the Ancients"
Illusion of Gaia - "Shipwrecked"
Illusion of Gaia - "Will's Dream of the Future"
Jade Cocoon 2 - "Holy Ground"
Jade Cocoon 2 - "Merchant"
Jade Cocoon 2 - "Traveler"
Legend of Mana - "Aid"
Legend of Mana - "Bonded by Soul"
Legend of Mana - "City of Flickering Destruction"
Legend of Mana - "Depression Blues"
Legend of Mana - "Nocturne"
Legend of Mana - "Nostalgic Song"
Legend of Mana - "Places of Soul"
Legend of Mana - "The Great Virtue of Gathering Mana's Spirit"
Radical Dreamers - "Epilogue"
Radical Dreamers - "Music Box"
Radical Dreamers - "One Summer Day"
Radical Dreamers - "Strange Presentiment"
Radical Dreamers - "Star Stealing Girl"
Radical Dreamers - "The Frozen Flame"
SaGa Frontier 2 - "Thema"
Secret of Evermore - "Mini-Boss"
Secret of Mana - "A Boy Aims For Wild Fields"
Secret of Mana - "Fear of the Heavens"
Secret of Mana - "I Won't Forget"
Secret of Mana - "Kind Memories"
Secret of Mana - "Rose and Ghost"
Seiken Densetsu 3 - "Angel's Fear"
Seiken Densetsu 3 - "Another Winter"
Seiken Densetsu 3 - "Breezin'"
Seiken Densetsu 3 - "Delicate Affection"
Seiken Densetsu 3 - "Evening Star"
Seiken Densetsu 3 - "Innocent Sea"
Seiken Densetsu 3 - "Innocent Water"
Seiken Densetsu 3 - "Where Angels Fear to Tread"
Suikoden - "Theme of a Moonlit Night"
Super Castlevania IV - "The Caves"
Super Metroid - "Maridia 2"
Tales of Phantasia - "As Time Goes On"
Tales of Phantasia - "Be Absentminded"
Tales of Phantasia - "Desolate Road"
Tales of Phantasia - "Sylphs' Mountain"
Tales of Phantasia - "The Stream of Time"
Terranigma - "Elle"
Terranigma - "Hometown"
Terranigma - "Lhasa ~ Village of Enlightenment"
Terranigma - "Sealed"
Terranigma - "The Underworld"
Treasure of the Rudras - "Intro"
Valkyrie Profile - "All Is Twilight"
Valkyrie Profile - "Behave Irrationally"
Xenogears - "Sorrow"
Xenosaga - "Warmth"

Yeah, I know that's a big list.  I have a habit of starting and not finishing things.  But some are pretty much complete.  If anyone is interested in any of these, let me know and I can try to speed up my work and/or send you my partial tab.  I can pretty much assure the tabs will be accurate and complete.  I'm transcribing these from the original scores and sheet music as much as possible.  Most are being arranged as guitar duets.  Anyway, that's about it for now.
#23
Tab Requests / Tab Requests
June 06, 2007, 05:05:50 PM
Here's a few tabs I'd like to see:

Castlevania 2: Belmont's Revenge - "Cloud Castle" (Gameboy)
Castlevania 2: Belmont's Revenge - "Crystal Castle" (Gameboy)
Castlevania 2: Belmont's Revenge - "Plant Castle" (Gameboy)
Castlevania 2: Belmont's Revenge - "Rock Castle" (Gameboy)
Final Fantasy Legend 2 - "Save the World" (Gameboy)
Final Fantasy V - "Battle With Gilgamesh" (Super Nintendo)
Megaman X - "Spark Mandrill" (Super Nintendo)
Parasite Eve - "Aya's Theme" (PlayStation)

All of these would translate well into hard rock/metal guitar pieces.  I have sheet music for a few of these, if anyone's interested.  I've been working on a number of tabs and have a few completed ones I'll contribute as soon as I can find the time.  Good luck!