[More software to do the work of CREATING music for you]

http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/07/1550226

For all the non-slashdotters.

So, you can edit individual notes in recorded songs; and now you can have the computer take a melody and write the rest of the song for you. Good job.

I find this distressing, for some reason *cough*worldofnotalenthacks*cough*shittymusiceverywhere*cough*

[Stupid deal: $3000 keyboard]

For $2000.

http://www.musiciansfriend.com/stupid

So what the HELL is the thought process here? "It's not EXACTLY the gear I want but I have a few thousand extra bucks I'd not mind parting with and that last $1000 drop really sold me!"? For $3000 it better damn well be exactly what I want; for $2000 it still better be what I want.

The other day the stupid deal was what, a $400 GS-310 for $125? That I can see. I don't even WANT a GS and I'd be tempted to buy that (I could give it a fret level and dress and sell it on ebay for like $300-$400). I see Valve Jr amps with Special II (ugh why not with a Les Paul 100) for like $250, MF sells 'em for $150 (that's about the cost of the amp).

Anyone want a $2000 keyboard? @_@

[Which guitar is this?]

Quick Google searching shows that Epiphone did indeed make Strat copies (Made in Korea or China),

What the hell? That's a new one on me. Now I've got to go get the history books out and find out more. Laters.

[Which guitar is this?]

A Fender Stratocaster SSS (not an HSS fat-strat) or clone. Maybe a Squier but it should say Fender or Squier on the headstock.

With Epiphone branding?

Is it a counterfeit? XD

EDIT: For the curious, no I didn't really read the post the first time through. I'd like to see more pictures of the guitar, from multiple angles.

[Picks (guitar)]

The point is that you just copy and paste text without knowing anything about it.

I copy and paste text far and few between; and when I do it normally comes with a citation. Typically a link to Slashdot for some stupid shit in current events, but occasionally I'll yank something off Wikipedia or something to settle an irritating argument.

Typically if you see me rambling fluidly in what can only be described as 'bluefox style', it's coming out of my own head. And I don't talk about shit I don't understand (you watch close enough you'll see when I'm working on topics I don't grasp fully; I'll omit bits of information around stuff I'm shaky on, instead of filling it with whatever bullshit I can make up like some people do).

I'm amazed so many people accuse me of cut-and-pasteology but nobody actually bothers to account for where said text comes from; I get accused of Wikipasta a lot too but nobody actually manages to run to Wikipedia and find the block of text I just spouted. It wouldn't work too well anyway; you can't find what's not there.

[Broken forums?]

Was it called LOLCunts? I guess we were all played.

Here's hoping it didn't contain any important laughing cunts.

Laughing cunts? What unit of measurement is that?

[Broken forums?]

Oh good, it's not just me. That means somebody, somewhere, cares.

[Broken forums?]

Could someone please explain to me what I'm missing (besides friends)... also if you know how to shrink this so it doesn't make the thread scroll (sorry)

Image removed for the sake of sanity.

[Picks (guitar)]

Bluefox, once again, stop pretending like you know what you're talking about...

Why don't you stop pretending like I don't? The only thing I've faulted on in this thread so far was the licensing issue with the FR-derived trems; and that was a legal issue, not a technical one.

[Picks (guitar)]

The hell it doesn't. I had to resharpen my knife edges last year.

Also not sure what you mean by "made to evade licensing requirements." The edge series IS licensed from Floyd Rose (Ibanez pays patent licensing fees or royalties), and they say so right on the trems.

-steve

Interesting on the licensing. I heard it was a derivative that doesn't need licensing.

As for the knife, the S series et al uses an Ibanez ZR, rather than an Edge Zero. The ZR uses a ball bearing system, while the Edge Zero uses the ZR design but with a knife. The ZR, consequently, doesn't need sharpening due to the lack of a knife edge.

[Building a sound system from the Ground up]

I want to rise in both skill and equipment to a professional level. I know that purchasing an acoustically correct, studio space with all the furnishings and fixin's is unrealistic.

You'd be surprised what you can do on a budget; but budgets in this arena are like several thousand dollars.

Warning: Long ass rant about shit you don't care about

Dude next to me builds multi-thousand-dollar systems. Like, for his home he'll actually build the speaker cabinet, pick the speakers ($300 tweeter, $800 woofers?), get inductor coils to make the crossover (impedance matching device between the speaker's input jack and the speaker itself), get some caps that cost $30 each (TIGHT tolerances), etc. Winds up with a pair of speaker cabinets that are $2200 each, with the same speakers as in a $8000 (each) cabinet, or with better ones with more clarity and response. Picks out his preamps and poweramps specifically too (all tube).

The man does the acoustics of his room too. I mean sound proofing is one thing; but this guy lays out where to put speakers, how to shape the walls, where to put sound board (directly behind speakers, and that's a huge generalization), where to place speakers and how to angle them...

It's scary. I can pick out good components to upgrade a guitar amp, eliminate noise, improve tone response. He can do that in his sleep to hi-fi amps, as well as adjust the tone to whatever he wants it to sound like, and basically glance around a room and tell you what you need to do to it to get the sound you want out of the amp and speakers and how much it's going to cost you.

He's doing things in several grand and he pulls up a single speaker that costs $85000 and goes "Yeah, I like those. But, you know. Mine sound better anyway." His $2200 custom built ones. Not to mention the amps and control system and the acoustics of the room. When he puts in a $100,000 system for somewhere, half the cost is paying for his time... (now you know why I do my own guitar and amp tech work huh?)

For that matter, what does a sound card actually do? Does it solely allow you to hear sound? Or is it a thing where it takes the sound coming from the source and articulates it with varying degrees of nuance and clarity (such as a DJ Mixer and Turntable cartridges)?

It solely allows you to hear sound. The fact that it has an impact on clarity and tone is just a side effect of that; but yes.

Sound cards use silicon op amps and filters and such. As a result, they're susceptible to noise and behave weird from heat. More importantly, they have a frequency response range, internal resolution etc. I can't give you an explanation based in sound card engineering (sorry), but I can hit something in guitar effects pedals and you can try to run with the bare electronics. Ibanez Tube Screamer TS-808, great pedal, uses a JRC4558 op-amp. Some of the later production units used random pin-compatible 4558s from other companies, with different tolerances, noise susceptibility, etc. Result, those particular pedals SOUND LIKE SHIT; but trash a Japanese transistor radio and steal the JRC4558 from it and you can make that shitty pedal sound like a REAL quality TS-808. The same happens with any audio electronics, like sound cards. Hell, even my guitar amp benefits from component layout and signal path length for the SAME CIRCUIT, much less any hi-fi amp or sound card. The tolerance of resistors and caps also makes a huge difference. 30 cent ceramic disc caps sound nothing like a $1.75 mylar film cap.

Drivers for the card work different too. On QOS and Linux everything's real-time and you get under 1mS latency (Molnar's patches are bringing responsiveness to like 10uS); but the tools you want to use are probably on Windows yeah? Consumer grade cards don't do (nasty) things to the OS to get you that real-time response. Even worse, assuming you did have a RTOS, the innards of a sound card can use bucket circuits (buffers!) to slow stuff down for a DSP (ADC, DAC) that can do (say) 20mS of sound in 20mS but can't do 10mS in 10mS (the processing time is bounded, but not linear below a certain resolution). So bading! Your shiny RTOS responds to the sound card in 10 1 millionths of a second; your card responds to your mic or to the OS playing sound in 20mS. Can you live with that? How about 60mS? In practice this is fortunately not much of an issue, until you really do need that 5mS or lower responsiveness (which I don't know when that happens; it sure as hell isn't needed to enjoy 3D games).

I mean. I don't know how technical you want to get. The short answer to everything here is pretty much "Find someone who's hardcore into this stuff, and talk to them for a while, it rubs off." While you can't build a professional grade studio in a few hundred (or thousand!) dollars, you can definitely do better than "I sat down in my bedroom and hooked up some Panasonic speakers to my computer."

[Building a sound system from the Ground up]

Get an E8400 processor from Intel. 2x3ghz dualcore. "hyperthreading" hasn't been used in years, dunno why blue would even bring that up.

because I've sat in front of "4 thread" (or whatever it's called now) desktop machines that were a dual core Intel with hyperthreading enabled (my last job, we ordered new desktops, they came like this and I killed HT in the bios the first day). I haven't seen a 4 core desktop with HT yet, but I know a lot of recent server hardware has dual 4-core Xeons (8 cores!) with hyperthreading to give 16-way processing.

I don't buy Intel for desktops for the moment (NUMA is more valuable to me than high-speed FSB, but that may change), so I don't know how much stuff still uses it. I might have just hit an edge case, but that was mid-2007. If you just don't/can't get HT, then even better, just don't worry about it.

[Picks (guitar)]

Les Pauls come with tremolos now?

No, people add Les Trem and Bigsby trems to them, or a handful of others (I've seen 5 different ones), and practically anything other than a Stetsbar pretty much throws tuning off immediately. (Mind you someone is trying to add a Bigsby to their Dot... WHY?)

The Floyd-Rose and ZR really are awesome in that respect.

[sound insolation and sound traps]

Bluefox, I have very little tolerance for people here who give advice without paying attention to what is being asked, and who speak at length on topics they understand little about.

I understand quite a bit about what I talk about, just most of it is a little beyond scope. You've called me on not knowing things before, most recently on mapping raw samples to instruments, something I did on my own for a year or so when I was a kid (seemed more like you just don't want to be bothered with anything not mac-style click-and-it-worked). In fact I seem to continuously get accused of not knowing anything about a variety of topics, but only by people who have nothing to offer on that particular topic because they simply have no experience or very shallow experience that never really got that far.

You can say a lot of things about stuff I might say that's less than relevant or (on occasion, yes) inaccurate; but don't dismiss my knowledge and understanding of topics I know full well unless you can actually correct it. I may not be a musician, but the things I say stem from recent research as well as years-passed experience in minor bits of sound engineering and amateur radio operation (try that one time... what is a PNP transistor... how do you calculate electromagnetic wave length.. why the hell do I need to be a technician to talk on the air?), have some damn respect. I don't dismiss your knowledge of music but you always dismiss anything I have from the technical end, without bothering to try to explain why it's wrong (which leads me to believe you don't know, which thus leads me to believe maybe I actually know what I'm talking about).

[Picks (guitar)]

Here's a quick guide to Ibanez trems:

RG series:

Anything that's an RG5xx and up will have a fucking AWESOME trem. Better than an Original Floyd Rose in stability (but maybe a bit stiffer than an OFR).

RG5xx and up all feature the Edge trem (in some variant, Edge Pro, Lo Pro), one of the best you can get of any guitar manufacturer.

The Edge Trem is a Floyd-Rose derivation, made to evade licensing requirements (you have to pay Floyd-Rose to make a trem like theirs). The Edge Zero is also derived from another trem Ibanez makes that uses the SAME design but with ball bearings instead of a knife edge; the original actually has better durability because the knife doesn't dull out over several years of use, why Ibanez changed this is beyond me. But yes, they do play much better than the original Floyd-Rose and hold tuning extremely well.

The only reason I know this really is because the Zero is used on the E-Gen... which I'd like to have really, but nobody carries it. I can probably find the Herman Li signature version for like 3 times as much Too bad it won't make me play like Herman Li eh?

Edit: Ah, right, because it's the Ibanez S, not the E-Gen, when it's not his signature model. Silly me. And oh cool, the Ibanez S uses the ZR, good.

[sound insolation and sound traps]

bluefox I don't think this guy has the capacity of doing ANYTHING like that, first of all. None of what you said was even remotely practical. Did you even read his post? He lives in his parent's house.

Yes I read it. When he moves out he'll probably sheet rock his garage now or something. Who knows?

On a more serious note, you guys are going to give all kinds of silly hackish ways to kinda-sorta do it; I'd like to contribute some good information for later, or for people who might not live with their parents and might forgo asking later because they saw this thread (and you know they will).

Like I said in some other post, we really need some kind of wiki somewhere for this stuff. Maybe I'll just do something on Wikibooks. That could carry "here's how to do it right" "in lieu of that, here's some tricks" kind of layout without pissing anyone off.

(His parents probably don't want him securing extremely flammable foam sound board to his walls either but...)

Pretty simple indeed.

I never said it wasn't time consuming, hard work, or mildly costly. The sheet rock would probably fall into the $100 range and the insulation around $100-$150 ($30 for 8.5 x 15 ft). And of course then you have the issue of painting or wallpapering (another $50-$100 job). If you pay someone to do it, tack $1000 or so on ($30/hr for 40 hours will get you $1200 right?).

Hmm. If I wasn't trying to move out so damn soon I'd get dad to help me soundproof my room. This is pretty much a weekend project, it just costs $400 to do it. (the door and new windows are costly; but you can omit the door, and if you have anything other than vinyl framed double pane windows you're living in a hot room in the summer and a cold room in the winter, trust me on this, I live in a suck ass room like that.)

zircon's right about the blankets and carpets; you might also look into using uneven surfaces for the walls (put up some of that egg carton shaped foam, or hell egg cartons built into a large sheet); but that's more for getting rid of uneven sustain than really dampening (improves acoustic qualities of the room). I need to look into what to use to do this properly actually...

[Picks (guitar)]

I have done a truss rod adjustment before. The frets were buzzing so I bent the neck up a little bit so it formed more of a ) than a |

Eeeee, the relief should be slight; you need precision tools to measure it (hey, a playing card counts!). If you need that much adjustment, check out your frets and see if they need leveling. This is pretty tedious, but doable; you need to take the strings off, flatten the neck (truss rod), and then use a perfecly flat block of wood (ruler etc) to level across 3 frets. If the wood block rocks over the center fret, then one of the other frets (or both) is low; if the center fret can't be touched, one (or both) of the other frets is high. "low" and "high" don't really much have meaning... the key term is "level" because they all need to be the same height.

Fixing such a problem is costly, or difficult and dangerous. Maybe $100 for a fret leveling and dressing job if you're lucky.

My action is really high though.

So fix it. Is it a Gibson type, like Epiphone or such? If so, you can use two 0.60mm picks or something else that's 1.2mm to gauge distance between fret 12 and the high e'; and two 1.0mm or a 2.0mm or something else about 1.98mm thick for the low E.

My action used to be really high too; I wound up lowering the action back down FIRST, then lowering the pickups (yes, I was buzzing on them!) and truss rod adjusting. It still buzzes a little but that's because I need to fret level; overall though it buzzes much less while being much lower than when I got it!

I have not been too pleased with my guitar. Crappy bridge trem. Why the hell do they put trems that suck on perfectly good guitars? I wish I would have known when I bought it.

Most trems suck. I hear the trems that ship with Fender models are good, to the point that Fender redesigned the trem at one point and found it nowhere near as good so switched back. Most trems you get on Les Pauls suck and just throw it out of tune. Some Ibanez guitars have excellent trems.

If your bridge trem seems pretty solid and it's just throwing your guitar out of tune it might actually be the nut. If you have a plastic nut I recommend you switch it out for a graphite nut (or bone and use silicon lube i.e. Nut Sauce, but that eats through nitrocellulose so if you get it on the finish it sucks), trem or not. These actually keep the guitar in better tune anyway, because when you tune you don't get a little extra tension behind the nut, and then do bends and get a little extra under the string (and a de-tuned string), and then bend behind the nut... too much friction on the nut (plastic, nylon) does that, and you can imagine the hell this plays when you're yanking the strings with a trem.

In the worst case, you can usually get a fixed bridge for whatever you have; some players don't care about the trem (I do my vibrato by hand, it's HARD compared to using a trem and thus restricts exactly what fanciness I can do), but some use it as an essential part of their playing style. I will probably not add trems to guitars that don't come with them (like the Sheraton I want), but keep them on ones that do (like the Strat I want).

What kind of guitar do you have?

[sound insolation and sound traps]

The proper way to soundproof a room is pretty simple.

• Start with bare wall. That means, yes, the sheet rock comes down and you're looking at the electrical work and insulation.
  
• Thick fiberglass insulation. The rolls of really fluffy stuff, a tiny bit thicker than your walls. Pack that in there, the denser it is the more it'll dampen sound (but denser means, yes, it insulates heat less efficiently).
  
• Put up some really thick sheet rock, get the thickest stuff you can find. None of that 1/4 inch stuff, 1/2 inch or 3/4 inch if you can!
  
• The same goes for ceiling; hang a sheet rock ceiling.
  
• The door will have to weather-seal so that air can't blow in and out under it, just like your front door or the doors on a concert hall.
  
• Use linoleum floor (it's soft-ish and sound dampening) or throw down a rug/carpet (carpet SUCKS it collects dust and causes allergen crap to go into the air when walked on).
  
• Use vinyl-framed double-pane or triple-pane windows to dampen sound going through those too.
  

Guy I work with is really big into sound systems, builds his own speakers and amps and such. Builds complex sound rooms with specific acoustic properties. I asked him how to soundproof a room like last week. It's simple, it's a lot of work though.

[Guitar Pro help]

one could not play a chord comprising of ... two frets that are too far away.

No idea on Guitar Pro; but someone did give me a song titled "the impossible to play song" so I could pass it on to fix a libpoppler PDF rendering bug. (Razorfret..) I proceeded to play it, but yes with two hands. Wound up using my thumb and pinky to hold a plec to pick strings.

I can't imagine why a Windows program wouldn't just pop up a box going, "Warning: This is impossible. Are you sure?" (A Unix program of course will assume you know what you're doing better than it does; while a Mac will try to fix it so it 'just works' and just fail every time)

[Building a sound system from the Ground up]

Yes.

Music is high memory bandwidth (multi-gigabyte working set). Match and balance your processor and ram. I love AMD but there's no DDR667 1333MHz FSB option; this is CRITICAL for high memory bandwidth applications, so get an Intel. Also you should find something that has at least 2MB L2 cache, but aim for 4MB if you can; avoid less than 512K L1, aim for 1M of L1 if you can (on these big working sets, the optimal L1 level is rather high... typical workloads are more than fine on like 350K). If you want to know why, read this up to part 4: http://lwn.net/Articles/250967/

DO NOT HYPERTHREAD. (multi-core != hyperthreading, hyperthreading is stupid and multi-core isn't) Turn that shit off in bios.

You won't get a Xeon (no server hardware) so try to get whatever the latest CoreWhatever architecture is that uses the 65nm process (should be any), unless Intel already released 45nm process dies. The narrower process will reduce noise. And I don't mean fan noise-- but yes they're cooler-- I mean noise. Bigger process means more voltage running through the semiconductors to keep them charged, which means more EMI, which means more cross over noise (not cross talk, but similar) into other components like your sound card.

DO NOT keep onboard video. Use an external video card. On-board video using shared memory HARASSES your memory bus, causing MASSIVE latency issues. (on a similar line, I don't know what the slow south bridge based PCI hard disk controllers do to your memory bus during DMA; I would like to know if using a PCI Express based SATA card helps reduce memory bus pressure but I can't claim to have any idea on this)

General systems architecture for what I know about the workload.

[Picks (guitar)]

Since I learned quite a bit from the guitar strings thread, I figured I would start this thread too.

You sound like you don't know much about guitars I don't know much about playing, haha...

We really need a wiki on this stuff. TS probably has something for this, I don't know.

You would be surprised at how much a guitar is almost but not entirely unlike a lump of wood with strings attached. Low-end guitars (Epiphones for example) come with crap electronics, like tone pots that go from 0 to 10 REALLY FAST such that everything above 2 on the dial is full tone. Fret wire (the metal things on the neck) has a huge impact on tone and FEEL (string bends? Vibrato?) depending not just on how it's seated (i.e. if you can wiggle it and it's obviously not right), but also on if you POLISH IT SMOOTH AND SHINY. The nut has a huge tone and tuning impact, try graphite if you have a cheap plastic (NYLON?!) nut and you'll understand ... bone has an even better tone but more friction (tuning is easier on graphite).

Here's a list of things I can do to a guitar now...

• Intonation adjustment - Adjusts string length at the bridge. Pitch comes from string length and tension (tension affects speed of sound in a string, hence the wave length and thus pitch of a sound formed). The tuners adjust tension. Tension open gives you an E, but tension at 12 might give you an Eb if the string is too long, or E# if it's too short. By moving the bridge saddles, you can set the string length and thus correct the intonation so that every fret position rings the correct note. I use a strobe-on-string tuner to tune, but have to use a chromatic tuner to intonate (NARW).
  
• Truss rod adjustment - Dangerous. Easy, but dangerous. The neck should, under tension (tuned, minus the G string, which you can loosen), have a certain bow to it. Pin the low E string at fret 1 and 17, and at fret 7 you should have between 0.005 and 0.015 inches of space (a playing card is 0.011 inches) between the fret wire and the string. Because of how a string vibrates, the neck needs this slight bow to avoid collision with the string during playing (creates buzzing) at proper action. Note: This is a simple matter of turning a truss rod nut an eighth turn one way or another, and then retesting. Too much distance without letting the neck settle for a day will break it (keep it under half a turn). If the nut doesn't want to turn (it wants to turn in one direction, if not both), don't force it because it will snap the rod and now you're looking at a huge and costly repair that might just cost more than your guitar.
  
• Action adjustment - Raise the bridge up and down to raise string height. On a Gibson (epiphone etc), use these specs. I use 2 1.0mm dunlop picks at Fret 12 to gauge low E (1.98mm), and 2 0.60mm dunlop picks for the high e' (on a Les Paul electric). From the top of the fret wire, of course.
  
• Nut replacenemt - Crack the existing nut off with a hammer, scrape off the glue, shim up or file down the new nut (see action adjustment at the nut on the prior link), and put it all together. I can't file/shape my own nuts yet but I need $100 of tools first....
  
• Electronics - Come on, I do my own amp tech work. I can solder. More importantly, I can design circuits for my guitar to affect the tone (super bright "telecasting mode" on my Les Paul Special II for example, using a bypass similar to the one Fender uses in the Telecaster and a resistor to simulate the difference in windings), and replace pots/pickups/switches.
  
• Fret polish - Easiest thing ever. Take a piece of emery cloth (black stuff, it's super fine sandpaper) and buff your frets smooth and shiny. String bends never been easier when the string glides instead of dragging.
  

Stuff I'm working on, but can't do yet because it's risky/hard/artisan/luthier stuff... probably learn some of this on $10 spare parts (hell, nut blanks cost $5)

• Refret - Remove existing fret metal, replace with fresh fret wire. It's a complex process involving fret leveling and dressing, shaping, crowning, and a lot of careful attention to the fingerboard to repair any damage. A last resort repair really.
  
• Fret leveling and dressing - When you tap in a fret it might be deeper than another fret, so the other fret is higher. Not good, strings buzz. To fix this you level the frets with FILES, and then you have to go about shaping the crown back on, and smoothing it out with a fine sandpaper, and then buff it with emery cloth. Something that needs to be done, should have been done at the factory but often isn't.
  
• Routing - Yeah, I'm not drilling holes into the guitar body to add more electronics, sorry.
  
• Shape a nut - A blank comes as a rectangular block of bone or graphite, which you file into the shape to fit the guitar. Yeah, ok, too much work.
  
• File a nut - After shaping (or buying a pre-shaped nut), you have to file the string slots into the nut. Not really hard, but I need a $75 pack of tools to do it. I want to do this, I have a different method of filing than pre-slotted nuts use that I want to use.
  

Then there's relicing and body repair and all kinds of stuff I don't really want to deal with.

The thing you'll find is that the amp, strings, pick, and playing style all contribute to what you hear. The guitar itself contributes too; no two guitars sound the same, even as far as some low-end Squiers and Epiphones sound great and some high-end Fenders and Gibsons sound like junk just because of characteristics of the specific block of wood used. On the guitar, you can change pick-ups or strings or go down to changing the nut material; but you could do as simple as just polishing frets, adjusting string height, intonation, truss rod, and once you set it up right it sounds better and plays way easier.

Amps aren't much different, we swap resistors from 68k to 10k and throw 0.022uF caps in to replace like 0.100uF caps and suddenly a cheap amp sounds like a quiet Marshall. I actually like playing with amps better (you can die doing this), but guitars aren't too terribly complex either. Learning to play one is the hardest part.

[Strings (guitar)]

let me know how the GBXL strings work once you get them.

Thanks

I have ordered 1 package of dr tite-fits

I will.

Remember to adjust your intonation when you change strings. That will make a huge difference in sound; it won't stop suck strings from sounding muddy and bad, but bad intonation means the guitar's never really in tune (i.e. E fret 12 != E).

I can't get to it right now, but search YouTube for a video "How Audio Intonation" I think, this one says google:

... this is for a Les Paul but you'll get the idea.

[Picks (guitar)]

I find that the 1.14mm Extra Heavy Dunlop Tortex ones work best for lead; these are "Sharp" i.e. the tip is more of a triangle, and really helps when I'm trying to do speed leading (which is hard because I'm really bad at it after only 3 months of practice!).

0.60mm Dunlop Tortex mediums work great for rhythm, especially if you're trying to strum really fast. I prefer 1.0mm Tortex for this though, because of the noise the 0.60mm picks make. Thinner picks pass through the strings easier though, which you want when doing this kind of stuff. I have used the 1.14mm ones too, but you MUST rotate them and use a ROUNDED edge or the pointy tip will get caught more and dump too much energy into one of the strings it hits (like I said, I love these for lead). It's also really, really hard anyway; I used the extra heavies to test my amp after soldering in some new stuff (I'm not done yet!), wound up playing the rhythm from Thrash the Plank really fast, the extra heavy flew right out of my hand 3 times (not to mention I couldn't play it at ALL) before I picked up a medium and found out it's braindead easy.

A lot of players I talk to say they like medium or light Celluloid. Personally I hate the damn things (ditched my crappy Gibson picks ages ago); but they're softer, they pass through the strings easier. You can play faster with them, but you can't dig as hard as you can with heavy or hard (metal, bone, delrin) picks and thus your attack is limited (similar to how you can play faster with light strings, but you can't get the same brightness/volume as with mediums or heavies).

Honestly I picked up heavy picks to turn the difficulty up to 11 and force myself to handle the pick properly (you're not supposed to squeeze it in a death grip); but I found I really liked them far better than mediums, and wound up moving into extra heavy territory. I did try copper (pennies, including copper-zinc pennies); it drags on the strings, feels bad, but might work if I polished it down smooth. 2mm metal picks do exist; I would rather do a 1.14mm bone pick for my next experiment (sized/shaped like the ones I use now, but with unbleached bone).

Edit: Uh yeah. There was a point but.. pick up a bunch of stuff -- Celluloids, delrins (tortex), bone or metal or pennies if you can find them/want to hurt your strings a little (PENNIES?)-- and play with it. Use what you like. (also a 1983 penny is pure copper, a newer one is copper plated zinc).

[8.5 gigs of free samples]

You have to map those IMIS samples yourself, which I don't think most people here know how to do

No kidding. I did that with modplug, it's such a pain, as I explained.

and they're FLAC, which is idiotic since most samplers don't support that and you'd have to convert them all back to WAV manually. Not worth it IMO.

The main set used to be WAV but now FLAC. You can drop the whole directory on a mass-converter. FLACDrop will run through the whole directory and output a directory of WAVs if you drag it onto it IIRC. Remember flute and piano and other clean instruments compress like 3:1 or better in FLAC too; I used to get 5:1 on a lot of Uematsu's orchestral pieces, contrast typical 2:1. It's a transport issue... you should be able to appreciate what would happen if (for instance) every MP3 on OCR was 5 times bigger right?

http://www.rarewares.org/lossless.php

(mind you, I don't do any work; I'm too lazy to use flacdrop, I'd write a script in bash or in cygwin in windows, probably 1 line... 'find . -name \*.flac -exec flac -d {} \;' and let it do the work for me; but that's a little advanced)

[8.5 gigs of free samples]

Bluefox have you actually used a sampler plugin before?

Are you kidding? Modplug never had that stuff, I had to cut/trim/crop/whatever and then set up the loop points and attack envelopes myself, and tune it manually against a 523.251Hz sinewave! (Modplug only liked to tune against C5 instead of A4 440Hz or something stupid)

... that would be a 'no' but with snow uphill both ways.