Toys Toys Toys

None of you care, but I do....

I sold all my guitar gear, except my guitars! Well most of it anyway. I was getting tired of hauling this huge wood pedalboard around. As much as I liked my setup, and was dialing it in, it was becomging difficult to use.

As friend, widely considered by this friend to be the "Eric Clapton" of IHOP-KC, helped me through something I had always struggled with; namely using the old school, MAGNETIC PICKUPS on my hyper expensive, custom guitar.

You know what these are, most every electric guitar has them. However, I never used them. I used the digital pickups secretly installed, and controlled synthesizers and "modeled" guitars and amplifiers. For the last several years, I used these pretty much all the time. And when I tried to use my own normal magnetic pickups, it sounded awful.

Then I took my guitar to Guitar Hell----I mean Center. I plaed it through the next generation of my gear, as well as through a normal old electric guitar amp.

What a difference! Even though this amp was a little beat up etc... the sound was sweet and rich. So then I took it over to Claptons house, and played it through his super cool and expensive amp. Wow. Then Mr Clapton played it! LOL. Then I realized what I was missing. Mostly talent and skill, but also real electric guitar tone!

So I realized it is probably time to update. But how? Then Mr friend says "Check out this stuff". I demoed it, and Im sold.

Then I checked out the synth they offer. Native Instruments makes what seems to be the industry standard Sampler and Synths. A Sampler is essentially a toolt hat plays back samples of sounds. And the samples are insane. There is over 50 GB of samples. Just to give you an idea, I have a flute sound. Each note is "sampled" 8 times, at different dynamics, or volumes. This sound is so realistic that as I change volume and aatack, the tone of the flute changes. When I play soft, you can actually hear the air and the click of the keys. As I play harder, the flute gets more sharp and bright.

There are tons of insturments, sampled Grand pianos, somuch stuff.

The synths that come with this are too wild. There is 11 different ones, so modeled after classic analog synths, and some wild digital stuff that IC ant even explain. Think The Matrix movies, because they were made using the same synth.

Then I have Hammond B3 organs that are so realistic, and a drum sampler that is far beyond what I ever thought to get.

This all adds up to an incredible palatte of sounds, that are far more realisitic and at a level of quality that is far out of my league. This is going to be very fun.

However, after selling most of my stuff, Im finding that I might not have scaled my set up down. Although I have a laptop, I also have a foot controller, and a midi converter, along with an external hard drive! SO I might have made a bigger mess, but I do have an awesome setup,a nd I will work on simplifying it.

All this just to play for intercessors! LOL. I cannot wait to get out into the regular world as well.