cruisinon2

This question will never be satisfactory answered...because there really is no answer. It's all subjective. You're always gonna get the same two responses, in roughly equally numbers: 1) Nothing will ever be better than tubes. and 2) Today's modelers are so good that the best ears in the business sometimes have trouble telling the difference. It boils down to your personal preference. You can get excellent results either way.

IQ is gender-neutral, and we all fall somewhere on a continuum between Einstein and a bag of rocks. The Einsteins are generally gainfully employed in some research field that most of us have never heard of, and the bags of rocks run for office. The top of the bell curve sits right at 100...most people hover somewhere within 10% of that number. If you fall WAY over on the right side of the curve, you can read "A Brief History of Time" without passing out in a puddle of drool, and you actually understand things like general relativity and string theory...way to the left, and you've probably got one finger permanently lodged 2 knuckles deep in a nostril, and you're watching Dr. Phil. ;)

If those JBL's you have are the LSR305's, then there's nothing "crappy" about them...you bought nice monitors. If the low end seems a bit muddy, it's likely because of whatever surface you've got them sitting on. Low frequencies tend to become more pronounced through "coupling"...the speaker vibrates, and then whatever surface it's in contact with (desk, table, etc)vibrates as well, and the whole mess essentially becomes a giant sub-woofer. There are several options: 1) Speaker stands. No contact with other surfaces, no coupling. 2) Acoustic isolation pads...they accomplish the same thing as the stands, they just sit underneath the monitors and suck up the low end to prevent coupling. Makes a HUGE difference. Sweetwater has a set for $50. 3) Or if I'm right about the speakers you've got, there are low and high frequency trim settings on the back of those things. Switch the LF to -2dB and see if that clears up the low end a bit.

Well let's face it...any guitar player who says he/she wouldn't like to be able to play faster is lying. However, having technical ability does not necessarily make one "musical". They're 2 different skills sets...it's left brain/right brain stuff. Players who have both are few and far between. SRV had vibrato technique that was a little weird, almost awkward when you watch it close-up, but nobody's gonna accuse him of not being a soulful, melodic player. By the same token there are a million players out there who could run rings around him technically, but sound like a typewriter...

I think she gives most of us a run for our money... https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qZ48cguV004

Well, not to put too fine a point on it, but it's advertising. Lord only knows how much "secret sauce" was dumped on those tracks to get them to sound the way they do...how were they recorded, how much post-EQ, fx, etc. They wanna sell guitars. Lackluster sound clips wouldn't help much.

The problem with these discussions is that terms like "thicker" are open to interpretation, and don't really convey much. They tend to mean different things to different people. We all have an idea in our heads about the sound we're looking for, but finding adjectives that make any sort of discussion meaningful is notoriously difficult, if not impossible...even when you're talking to other musicians. Fortunately, the answer is always the same anyway: If you don't like what you're hearing, try something else. My solutions won't necessarily work for you, and vice versa. Even if it's an amp model that doesn't necessarily "make sense" for the kind of tone you're after, load it up anyway and fiddle with it for a while. Cab and mic models make an enormous difference as well. Keep turning knobs until it sounds good.

Fear not...I hear next month they're having another contest for hipster, skinny jeans-wearing, coffee house dwellers with "substance". Acoustic only. Tearful renditions of anything by James Taylor get 3 bonus points towards your final score. ;)

There's nothing wrong with the guitar. Guitars don't like the cold, or heat for that matter...extremes in temperature are generally not good. Everything contracts in the cold, especially the strings...hence them going sharp. You ever try and play an outdoor gig on a cool evening? Much below 60 degrees, and staying in tune becomes a real pain in the a$$...

No. It sends command/control data along with audio, to a variety of other L6 devices. http://line6.com/l6link/

If only... But the time for minding one's own business and keeping your mouth shut has long since passed. An entire generation now broadcasts to the world pictures of what they had for lunch, and the socks they just bought. Given this typical day-to-day behavior, you think something like this would be kept on the QT? Half the populace can't resist posting social media status updates detailing the time, duration, and qualitative assessment of the last dump the took. There's no way they could keep something as juicy as free model packs under their hats. They'd stroke out from a "Look at me!" deficiency.

The "I'm better/smarter/more enlightened" crowd always seems to have trouble doing that. The unrelenting desire for external validation through being thought of as the smartest guy in the room won't allow it. They gotta spread their wisdom "for the greater good".

Can we please have a thread pinned at the top titled "No one has a blessed clue what's coming next"? It'll save us all a lot of time...

This is just a guess, but Will Rogers never met you, did he?

The pitch shifter is not polyphonic. It's intended for single note lines. Chords are always gonna be a problem.

The contractor that sells them to the Navy calls them "passive humidifiers"...they can charge more that way. ;)

Two words: "wife clock". ;)

Lol...Let nothing stop the mythical "premium cable" narrative!!! One of the most successful, and longest running scams in history. ;)

This is the most comical part. Pushing 9 grand?!?! How many hookers does it come with? You can go home with 4 really nice LP's for that money. I like them as much as the next guy, but Gibson has balls demanding that much...

Nobody can answer that for you. All anyone can tell you with any certainty, is you should be able to get "close". How close depends largely on you, and learning to use whatever gear you have. I've been chasing an Eric Johnson-ish tone for 20 years. I can get in the ballpark, but I'll never nail it 100%...not even if I had all his personal gear. Because I'm not him. Gear is only part of the equation. It's that simple. Records aren't jigsaw puzzles. Isolate any one piece, and that piece itself changes. No track sounds the same solo, compared to sitting in a full mix with everything else. If you had access to the masters from ANY album that you think has amazing guitar tones, and you were to solo just the guitar tracks, I guarantee you won't hear the same tone that you associate with that album that you've been listening to since you were a kid. EQ the kick drum differently, the guitars might not sound the same anymore, raise/lower the bass and the guitars might not sound the same anymore...etc etc. It's all part of one giant "organism", if you will.

Yes and no...as far as I'm concerned the type or "style" of guitar (Strat/Tele/LP/etc) matters a whole lot more than the name scrawled on the headstock. And "signature" models, imho are usually little more than cosmetically prettier versions of virtually identical guitars that they justify charging an extra $1K for, because it says "James Hetfield" on it somewhere. Some people will tell you that good tools make good work, and there's some truth to that. But there are caveats...SRV (allegedly) bought his "No. 1" Strat for $100 in a pawn shop. In other words, you have to have some level of skill, as well as an abstract understanding of HOW to generate a certain tone(s), and experienced enough ears to be able to make subtle distinctions between the way different things sound....otherwise, all the expensive gear in the world isn't gonna help you.

Mustang Shelby GT500 for me...

Looks the same for me...

To the best of my knowledge, the only way for that amp to receive commands is by turning the knobs...it would be like trying to send a text message to an old rotary phone.

You could ask either of those questions...or you could ask if we're alone in the universe, if Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, or whether or not decaf coffee is as tasty as the real thing. And the answer will always be the same: cavernous, thundering silence.