Warning: BAD guitar playing ahead. Really bad.
I think this might be the last generation of traditional guitar rigs (meaning a tube amp, a 4×12, and a microphone). Digital amps have gone from unconvincing crap to a real alternative for people who care about tone. The only downside at the moment is that they all have metal on the brain – that is, there aren’t many good amp sims for people who understand that Spinal Tap is meant to be a joke.
Free, decent emulations currently exist for the Bogner Ecstasy (LePou’s LeXTac), the Mesa Boogie Single Rectifier (LePou’s LeCTo), the Peavey 5150 (Nick Crow’s 8505, LePou’s X50), the ENGL Powerball (Lepou’s Le456), the ENGL e530 (LePou’s TSE X30), and some weird hybrid digital amps, like LePou’s HyBrit (which is based off a combination of Marshall SLP59 and JCM800 circuitry), and the (awesome sounding) LeGioN, which was derived from Engl’s general approach to guitar amps.
See the common thread? Except for the Ecstasy and (perhaps) the HyBrit, these are all high-gain amps. If you want to play an iconic low-gain amp like the Vox AC30 on your computer, you’re shit out of luck…unless there’s some commercial option I don’t know about. Nobody seems to care about emulating bass amps, either.
Regardless, I tried to recreate some tones that are a bit more diverse than Meshuggah or Periphery. These were all recorded with an ESP LTD guitar with a DiMarzio X2N in the bridge, and then into some free amp sims and impulse responses. I haven’t even made an attempt to get into the same tuning as these songs, which affects the tone a bit. And some of them were meant to be quad-tracked, but I only dual-tracked them.
Motley Crue tone:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/25331585/motleycruetone-001.mp3
Forget Slash. The holy trinity of 80s hair metal guitarists is Eddie Van Halen, Nuno Bettencourt, and Mick Mars. Mars’s tone is a logical progression of Aerosmith’s and on Dr Feelgood it sounds really fucking excellent. That record, by the way, was responsible for Metallica hiring Bob Rock to produce their albums from 1991-2003. This supports my theory that every metal musician is at most six degrees separate from St Anger.
Generic 90s punk rock tone (think Green Day or Bad Religion):
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/25331585/90spunkrocktone.mp3
Billie Joe Armstrong used a modified Marshall 1959 SLP when recording Dookie. He and Rob Cavallo went for a really dry and sterile sound on that album, but I put some reverb on this. It didn’t sound full enough without it.
Linkin Park Hybrid Theory tone
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/25331585/linkinpark-001.mp3
Whether you think Linkin Park is a cool band or purveyors of a formula that was already old when the eldest member’s fingers were developing in the womb, I really like Brad Delson’s tone. Crushing, yet strangely organic and alive. Sort of a middle road between “scratchy, underproduced, and annoying” (see: Slipknot, Korn), and “digitally processed into oblivion” (see: Rammstein).
Nine Inch Nail’s Broken Tone
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/25331585/nintone.mp3
This is the guitar part from “Pinion”, which I like for its pulsing, lurching power, and its example of what can be done with chromatic notes. Trent Reznor is famous as a producer, but he’s been known to do interesting things with guitars from time to time. He eschewed tradition and did some really lo-fi things for NIN’s early work (like plugging a Zoom distortion pedal directly into the mixing desk). On the Broken EP, I believe he used he used a Marshall JMP-1. To recreate his sound, I used an amp sim with no cab impulse.
Reader’s advisory: old news + I was not involved.
A few months ago, a promising science fiction author called Benjanun Sriduangkaew was exposed as the secret identity of notorious troll/cyberbully Requires Hate (who has also gone by the name of Winterfox, ACrackedMoon, and several others).
I was a regular reader of Requires Hate. I actually planned to submit one of my books for a Requires Hate review, but I didn’t have any ready in time. Everyone’s shocked that this person gained so much traction in “da scene”. Nobody can see the truth: that the problem lies with them, and the community they created.
Over the past few years, we’ve seen the rise of the “social justice” movement, which combats sexism, racism, and oppression (or thinks it does). For years, it was a harmless tumor, confined to places like LiveJournal and SomethingAwful. But Tumblr and Twitter shot it full of steroids, and it has metastasized into a proud, fierce, non-gender-binary cancer.
In CS Lewis’s city of Tashbaan, the less important bow and scrape for the more important. In the social justice, the less oppressed bow and scrape for the more oppressed. There’s not much more too it. If you have light skin, or a penis, disagreement with a minority (or someone who claims they’re a minority) is very unwise, as you are silencing them, erasing them, forcing them out of the discourse, denying their lived experiences, et cetera.
Obviously, these kinds of communities are very vulnerable to sociopaths, and manipulators, and Requires Hate leveraged her Oppressed Person status to the full. She was a woman, she was queer, and she was Asian. That’s a pretty strong hand. Maybe the ace-high straight Social Justice Poker. You had to listen to her, because you were privileged and she was not.
One of the victims of Requires Hate’s taunting was Kari Sperring, who apparently attempted suicide because of it. I find that…unhealthy. Abnormal. Why would you let an internet troll have that much power over you? I think it’s because of social justice. Sperring wasn’t able to brush those comments off, because Requires Hate outranked her. Arguing with a member of THREE marginalised groups? No way. That would have made her a bad person, an oppressor. Only one way out…the medicine cabinet.
4chan wish they had a trolling thermonuke this powerful. All they can do is leak your naked selfies.
Hopefully people will have learned a lesson from Requires Hate…that societies should not act like the saddest, most downtrodden class of saps deserves to be running things. There’s men who volunteer at rape shelters and women who’s biggest concern is shopping for oversized sunglasses. And being black – even an actually oppressed black – doesn’t mean you know a damn thing about racism, just as getting shot doesn’t confer understanding of ballistics or catching a cold doesn’t make you an expert on immunology. These are complicated topics, and I want to hear smart viewpoints, wherever they come from, not “lived-in” viewpoints. The idea is got-a-cool-toy-banned-by-rectally-inserting-it grade stupid.
As for Benjanun Sriduangkaew, I wish she’d stuck around. She got busted, posted a groveling apology, and is now keeping a low profile. I think she should have stuck to her guns. “Yeah, I was Requires Hate, and here’s news: I regret nothing. You’re trash, your favorite books suck, and if that makes you try to kill yourself, take a fucking seat. You haven’t seen anything yet.”
It’s true, I am nerdy. But not “rolls a twenty-one sided die while mumbling about dexterity” nerdy. We’re talking “Batman, isolated from the world in his Fortress of Solitude” nerdy. I’m nerdy to the extreme.
Just how nerdy am I? Well, let’s count the ways.
I own torrented copies of the following Star Wars films: The New Hope, The Emperor Strikes Back, A Phantom Menace, Assault of the Clones, and Return of the Sith. I still have to get that other movie (Revenge of the Jedi, or whatever), but I was running out of space on my DVR and needed to leave room for the Holiday Special.
Torrents, by the way, are secret hacking devices that access a site called The Pirate Bay using a hacker protocol called “IP Pinging”. The owner of The Pirate Bay then buys a copy of the thing you want, and streams it to your computer. Very cool. It’s easy to blur the line between right and wrong when you use a torrent, but that’s just part and parcel of living in a digital cyberpunk world. When I torrent something, I wear black sunglasses, and pretend there’s green text crawling up them like in the Wazowskis’ Matrix movies.
How batfucking insanely awesome are those movies? The special effects are just off the hook. In particular, the wire work is so intricate that it’s easy to forget that Neon, Brinity, and Murpheus are plastic mannequins. They look exactly like real people, especially when delivering lines like “if you take the blue suppository, you wake up and believe whatever you want to believe. If you take the red suppository, I show you how deep my rabbit hole goes.”
I discovered a plot hole, however. If Ne-Yo is the One, why don’t the machines just invent a Two?
I also love Star Track. There’s something about the character of Charles Xavier that really resonates with me, like we were destined to be friends but have been separated by a layer of cellulose. His moodiness. His cool. His quick wit, always ready with a snappy verbal riposte like “live long, and prosper.” Ouch, get some ointment for that burn! Star Fleck also makes it easy to see who the good and bad guys are. For example, the villains usually wear red shirts, so you can cheer when they die.
But that’s just the very peak of the bottomless abyss of my nerdiness. Harry Potter, The Big Bang Theory, Avatar (the cartoon, not the Peter Jackson movie), you name it, I’m there, wearing the T-shirt, getting to second base with the official licensed hugging pillow, bumping official nerd bands like Weezer on my Beats By Dre, holding forth on how it went to shit five episodes before the debut of the season 1 premier.
People ask me “hey, you’re so nerdy, don’t you ever find that it puts people off?” Well, I’d be lying if I said I don’t sometimes conceal the true depths of my geekiness, like how I read JRR Token’s Lords of the Ring books. Yeah, he ripped off the idea of elves and orcs from Dungeons and Dragons, but who cares, they’re so much fun! Lately I’ve been learning Sindarin, the Elvish language. Here’s some of my homework: ??????????. Get on my level.
