BluefoxIcy

Amazon. Go to Amazon, find it cheaper. If it's some guy or a siteless pure-Amazon store selling, too bad. Usually though it's like "Ships from Musician's Friend" or it has "Available from these sellers" and you see who's who. From there, go to the seller's site directly, see if their price matches the Amazon marketplace price. If yes, bypass Amazon and point zZounds at Giardinelli/Music123/etc.

I'm glancing through microphone and instrument preamps and a few are coming to my attention, particularly... http://www.musiciansfriend.com/product/ART-Tube-MP-Project-Series-Tube-MicrophoneInstrument-Preamp?sku=180643 And http://www.musiciansfriend.com/product/ART-Tube-MP-Studio-Mic-Preamp?sku=180581 Anyone use either of these? Right now I don't need one but I'm curious; really I'm going for a fresh Epiphone Valve Junior half-stack and the BitMo Trio mod (has a sweet blues setting I really like), no pedals needed. The only thing that'd draw me to a tube preamp might be the potential to push my attack a little. Play light and you get clean, play harder and you get dirty, play really hard and you get real overdrive. I'd love to make light playing clean but make it really overdrive just a little faster, or maybe start screaming about halfway where it is now. Of course I'm talking about guitar. I'm so tempted to jack a mic into the fucker and overdrive the tube to see what I get; but I'm going to put in some serious voice training before I subject my empty room to my singing.

I'm buying this. (Following link from OCR forums to get them money from zZounds...) http://www.zzounds.com/item--DIMDP138

I'm so getting this when I move out. Err... wtf? I mean, when it comes out. :s Seriously, huge Black Mages fan.

Sound engineers are amazing. For the light saber effect I heard they banged a spoon against the guide wire on a telephone pole, and then slowed the sound down. Whhhoooooooommmmmmmmmmmm....

Funny, commercial software is also notorious for bugs, there was a discussion on this in the channel the other day Open source music software from my point of view needs some serious polish. It's more of an age/feature thing than a real bug thing; that particular area is just young and most of the stuff (Audacity aside) is pretty much someone's personal toy that does the exact task they want and nothing else. Aside from a few good tools out there you're in for a rough ride. That being said, you can file bugs with any upstream project; or more easily, if you grab Ubuntu Studio, you can just dump your bug reports under Ubuntu's project space on Launchpad and they'll work with upstream. If you want to get into that community... let's just say they can use all the guidance they can get. Too bad your computer's aging. If you had like a gig or two of RAM and XP Pro, I'd say install IIS and drop VMware Server in there, install Ubuntu Studio inside a 4 gig disk image and use a Samba mount to get to your local files. I'd by no means tell you to get up and install a new OS (even as a dual boot) for this

Yeah, I heard that too; graphite powder is used as a non-liquid lubricant in space applications (oil boils in zero pressure!) and in some high-speed applications that can't deal with the viscosity of oil. I didn't think the compound itself had low friction, but it makes sense; molecularly, it's sheets of carbon, absolutely smooth surface. I don't normally think of graphite as a hard compound though, but I'm dealing with pencil lead here instead of big chunks more than a millimeter thick. High-polymer 1mm pencil graphite is pretty hard though; and that's just #2, there's some really high polymer pencil lead that you can only get a gray streak out of. A graphite nut is probably a really long (large? graphite's 2D polymer, not 1D like PVC) polymer brick so it's probably really hard; still, nickle-wrapped strings grinding on that is like a FILE if they rock back and forth much. I'll have to see this stuff myself @_@

I'd planned to be buying a second guitar probably around June to October, really; but honestly, I just want to pick up the Slash model, and since it's a limited count run I gotta get it when it's out. The finish is pretty (I love the color on the back!) and the neck does set a bit deeper into the body, this interests me. The graphite nut confuses the shit out of me though; won't that wear like hell? It gets worse, besides. My aunt was just like "OH YOU BOUGHT A GUITAR, I HAVE AN EXTRA GUITAR AND AMP LYING AROUND I DON'T WANT IN MY HOUSE ANYMORE" so I have crap too. But seriously, do you ever NEED more than one guitar? Unless you're going on stage of course; good to have a backup. That's not me.

The Gibsons do have better wood work though (Actual solid piece of wood, a better finishing process, and the signature models have carved or painted designs instead of decals); but I hear the electronics are pretty much crap and burn out under heavy load pretty easily. Also the quality control is said to be bad; different chunks of wood sound different, and apparently Gibson mills out a body from a slab of tone wood with no care to density properties or whatever else (in their defense, how the crap do you check that before making the guitar? How do you make it economic?), puts the stuff together well, and ships it whether the guitar sounds good or not. I've never owned a Gibson, so I wouldn't know. The advice I've heard on the matter is walk into a guitar store, pick up the thing off the shelf, play it, and take it home with you; if the body's made of wood with a density change in the middle in just the right place to screw up the sustain, you put it back and pick up the next one hanging on the wall. I order mine online, I'm obviously not paying attention.

As I understand, the celebrity guitarist "signature" models are actually made to imitate some guy's guitar; then Epiphone calls the guy up and says "Hey look at what we did, do you like it, does it sound good?" and he comes by and tells them to change some stuff and plays with a prototype and such. Some of the people on the Epi forums have like 6000 guitars; a few are excited about the Slash model, a few have said it's a "good guitar" but they'd rather have X or Y's signature Epiphone. The Boneyard and Zakk Wylde signatures have come up a couple times in that respect. Overall what I'm hearing is that they're typically nice guitars with nice upgrades, rather than nice guitars that you then dump your own nice upgrades into; though, in the case of the Slash the neck is extended deeper into the body (better sustain), so it's not simply a base model with a pretty finish and Seymour Duncan pickups. Graphite nut and Seymour Duncan Alnico 2's you can do yourself to a Standard or Studio; changing the fundamental design of the guitar, that's a little different. Caveat: I've gotten to all the relevant posts; however, Epiphone is actively deleting posts. I haven't seen them delete anything about the workmanship of any guitars yet (the place is mainly posts about X guitar is Y crap for this but you can upgrade it with Z after-market part), but a few political criticisms have been deleted after long discussions. Private messages have gotten nailed too (the thread about that's gonna be deleted in a couple hours, if that). Point is, my information source is being shaped by the manufacturer.

Nice, Gibsons go for less than $3000 there? (The Gibson Slash will be like $4000 and there's a Gibson Custom Slash also that's going to be $6800) I hear you on the price though, I'm really interested in getting a Les Paul Studio; those go for $320, but I want the fancy color-changing finish that goes for $400. $1000 for me means I add some expensive pickups, new electronics, tuners, and a $300 stetsbar, and pay a tech to do all the labor and set up the guitar for me. Interestingly, Epiphone was originally going to release the Slash signature LP earlier, but Gibson decided to copy it Gibson's has a bunch of stuff hand-carved though, and is a bit nicer than Epiphones; I'd actually love to get my hands on one (talk about collectable!) but I'm not rich! Ah yeah. I thought about adding a trem to mine but they're expensive; high quality Stetsbar is $300 and a cheap trem that throws the guitar out of tune all the time is $120! Ibanez is nice though; Dragonforce plays those, some of their effects are impossible to reproduce without a particular model of Ibanez' trem.

So I'm planning on getting another guitar in a couple months, when I can actually play pretty well or something. .... or not. April 1 Epiphone is releasing a Les Paul Plus Top limited edition, co-designed by Slash. It actually looks like a pretty nice guitar, street price looks to be $700 but it'll probably hit $1000 (some new changes went in before release...). This thing's got a pretty finish and a graphite nut (... GRAPHITE? wtf?), it's a nice guitar really, I think I can go for it. I'd wait on it (I want a Studio first, really, and DiMarzio Super Distortions) but it's limited quantity. (Gibson's also releasing one, which has better wood workmanship) Anyone comments on the guitar itself? Anyone springing for one of these? http://www.guitarcenter.com/Epiphone-Slash-Signature-Les-Paul-Standard-Plus-Top-Electric-Guitar-515623-i1383192.gc http://www.zzounds.com/item--EPIENSS

If I could figure it out that fast I probably wouldn't have screwed up in the first place Come on, time passes, the exact sequence of events gets fuzzier, it's muddied with my fucked up emotions, and all I can extract from it at this point is that my whole life is one big mistake at my own hands and I need to actually figure out how to behave right. I'm not dangerous; don't dehumanize me like that. At the very least don't put yourself through worrying about it. I'm not forcing you out, and if I'm doing something you can come straight to me with it. Directly. But you're too afraid to do that aren't you? I screwed up, I'm the one that has to deal with it, why are you letting it bother you so much? I liked magfest (I liked the concerts!). I'll be there next year. Are you going to be afraid to show up because I'll be somewhere in the same building for four freaking days? Honestly, I want to resolve this. Maybe you're not ready for that yet. Hell maybe I'm not. But I don't want you to be driven away from anywhere I might just happen to be. There's nothing I can say or do until you're ready to deal with me long enough to get yourself past this; and this isn't the place for that anyway. She's right, I have, I've been up and down constantly though. Sometimes I just don't feel like talking. In my own defense though, I personally think I've shown some kind of improvement; but it's never enough. And it's stalled

I didn't even know what room you were in. I was actually by the elevator, hoping to get a chance to talk to you before heading home (mind you, I probably would have done that even if I DID know what room you were in). THAT didn't go as intended either; I kind of broke down :/ I don't copy-paste wikipedia every day. A lot of the large chunks of information I spout on random topics actually comes out of my own head (granted, from weeks/months/years old memories of crap from Google, Wikipedia, other IRC conversations... something called "learning"). And hey, I'm trying to follow the topic more often. I'm trying to do something other than look at porn all day. I'm not entirely sure how to just "go outside and make friends" yet because-- hey, wouldn't you be creeped out if I wandered up to you out of nowhere and started talking to you, if you never seen me before? I have no idea where you're getting this from. It doesn't help that you don't actually want to level with me; instead you just constantly complain and then avoid me. And for the most part I keep my distance, or try to at least, 'cause I know I bug you.

Well I fixed the ground, added a rectifier to the tube filaments, got the Valve Jr. V3 5.2k impedance OT, and threw in JJ tubes. No rebiasing on the EL84 yet. Results are great. I fixed the ground first, which made minimal difference in hum. As soon as I threw the DC rectifier on, however, the hum dropped off massively! It was like getting a whole new amp With this problem solved I moved onto dropping in a JJ tube. I actually threw in the JJ EL84 before changing the OT, a #34 from Eurotubes. A bit more of the hum dissappeared, enough to get my attention (I was only expecting tonal changes). The tone was only a bit better from this though. The V3 OT I threw in made the real difference. The overdrive went from a weird muted-ish muddy sound to a crisp, clear kind of noise; I think I get what people mean when they say their amp has a "crunch" to it now. A JJ 12AX7 gold pin matched/balanced from Eurotubes went in to replace the Sovtek; the clean sound is clean, the overdrive still has great tone, and I like it. I'm seriously considering redoing this with a straight V3 in the future. I could clean up the rectifier (it's not bolted to the chassis, needs longer connectors); add 8 and 16 ohm outputs; add connectors to my filter cap mod (so you can unplug the filter caps and more easily remove the board); and ebay it after picking up a V3. I want to go on and add a tone stack (and gain mod the amp since the tone stack kills gain) eventually, but would rather invest that kind of time into a shiny V3 since the board's more stable for modding. (Mind you, a V3 Valve Junior includes a rectifier exactly where I put mine, and includes the updated output transformer).

I seem to have in about 20 minutes gotten to the point where I can hear minor second, minor third, minor sixth, minor seventh, unison, and octave on the A minor scale; yet I can only tell something is a fourth or a fifth, but not which it is with any accuracy. HMM. MOAR PRACTICE. And then speed mechanics.

I have no idea. This book was like, Unison is an interval of zero (i.e. E fret 5 vs A open); and then I'm looking at fourths and fifths and I'm like "k so 0, 1 ..." and then I look back later and it's counting "0, minor 2, minor 3, 4, 5, minor 6, minor 7, octave" and I wtf'd. It's like how you can do 00 on your TV and get your Gamecube, but there's no channel 1.

Yeah, I've been playing Cliffs of Dover from the official tab book for Ah Via Musicom, and I have the tab for some of Black Sabbath's songs. Some other stuff came from tabs on the net but I've given up on Internet tabs. I did do a little bit of Fretboard Mastery; the very first part of that is listening exercises to identify intervals. I've got 4ths, 5ths, unisons, and octaves down to an art; I'm starting to hear firsts just by trying to play songs by ear (I still suck at it and confuse them for a second or third; I can hear it's less than a fourth). This is actually pretty awesome, 'cause I just belted out a chunk of Super Mario 64 music on my first try without much trouble and a good idea of what exactly the next note should be, or at least I hit close all the time and only needed one or two tries to refine it. Actually the book itself answered my original question o.o; It said to pick it up for maybe an hour a day, fool around with it, then discard it and go do something else like play songs or do speed drills. That book also says not to take it too seriously and regard anything you get out of it as "extra credit" for guitar playing. *shrug* se la gail. Edit: Argh 0 is unison, then first interval is a major second. what the hell?

I have been trying to tag the CD for Fretboard Mastery in Musicbrainz (89 tracks!) and I've had a chance to look through the book. I have books on Rhythm and Lead guitar in metal (technique, muting, hammer-ons, bends, pentatonic minor scale, etc) and lead speed mechanics (speed drills.. can you play Flight of the Bumblebee?!); but Fretboard Mastery is different from those. It goes into intervals, scales, chords, arpeggios, etc, with diagrams of the fretboard and fingerings accompanied by a bunch of listening exercises where you're supposed to hear a clean or distorted guitar and identify scales, chords, intervals, etc. All the books I have are all on technique. Rhythm and Lead guitar books show you how to do basic things like muting, fingering chords, or vibrato; the Guitar Tricks book shows how to do weird crap like bending the neck or bending behind the string or two-handed tapping. Fretboard Mastery seems to be centered instead around ... well, pretty much not learning songs. It explains everything about scales and chords in relation to the fretboard and seems to try to make the reader/listener come out able to listen to any set of notes and go "That's in A minor pentatonic and it's played here on the fretboard and here's how you do it" and just play. I'm going to go through some of it, as well as continue on the rhythm and lead guitar techniques. How important is this stuff in relation to speed training, basic technique, and just flat out playing songs? Should I be putting more emphasis on this, or spend more time working through Speed Mechanics for Lead Guitar trying to get up to the point where I can rapid hammer-on/pull-off and play Flight of the Bumblebee? Or should I be playing songs more often to try to apply the technique I have to 'real life' (close enough) and get used to actually playing?

Shrine of the Starry Night, Dragon Quest Monsters. Oh cool larry found the GBS http://snesmusic.org/hoot/kingshriek/DragonQuestMonsters.7z Seems to be track 14, though it also seems to be missing notes! (I think some of the notes fade quiet, and then another is supposed to strike; I'd have to find the game and play it to check though). Actually sometimes you can even hear it quiet! Might be that Meridian Advance can't understand wtf to do with stereo... (gameboy had stereo headphone output!)

Cube's definitely on my list. I'm modding up the VJ though (I got a crap V1, see other thread on this), which is of course.. what I do. Gotta have a little fun huh? Side note: I bought some Hearos High-Fi earplugs. THEY WORK AS ADVERTISED. They're awesome and I'm sitting directly in front of this damn amp that's blasting sonic death at me (that thing is LOUD, 5 watts what the hell?). I tried without plugs, after about 30 seconds my ears felt like I was stabbed. In the head. And the green 50 cent earplugs I got from MAGFest make it sound like I'm underwater X_X

More of my obsessive modding; this is all pretty much in planning. I'll tell you how it goes when I get all the stuff put together right. If you got any good ideas, lemme hear it. (Yes guys, I'm still planning on buying that Roland Cube 15X. And I've got a couple of components I have to get around to soldering into my guitar.) I got a Valve Junior Combo amp, but I think it's a V1. It's a great sounding amp but it's got some nasty buzz; nothing I can't fix. Anyone here into modding your own amps? A little history on the Valve Junior. First off it's a tube amplifier, so... yeah. If you've never had a tube amp, you can try to find a Valve Junior (head or combo -- remember, combos like mine put stress on the tubes; you may want the head if you have a speaker cabinet!) but make sure it's got a 15 digit serial number because it will sound MUCH better; these are the V3, they have better circuitry, better stock tubes, and the OT is matched to the tubes properly. Valve Jr. V1 used Sovtek tubes (like mine). Horrible sounding crap. They also use star grounding for the input jack (more on this later). They ALSO use an OT Transformer with 7.5k impedance (WRONG! More on this later). Cruddy tubes, bad grounding, loads of hum. Valve Jr. V2 used a Sovtek 12AX7 (preamp) and an Electro Harmonix EL84 (power amp) tube. The grounding I'm told is better. The transformer still has 7.5k impedance. Valve Jr. V3 uses an Electro Harmonix 12AX7 and a JJ EL84. The grounding is fixed, and they use a 5k impedance transformer that sounds close to a Hammond 125DSE (more on this later). Case in point: The V3 isn't a $1600 Marshall tube amp, but it sounds much better than the V1 and V2. Too bad I'm stuck with the V1's Sovtek tubes, bad grounding, and mismatched OT, right? Not to mention all the Valve Juniors are a little overbiased and muddy the sound coming out of the EL84. POINT 1: RETUBING AND REBIASING Eurotubes.com sells JJ tubes, tested for gain and harmonics and microphonics and all kinds of things. These guys get the stock, pull each tube OUT of the box, throw it into one of their amps, and play with it for a little while to determine how it sounds. (Hey an hour jam session isn't going to kill something that's supposed to last a year) They then rate the power tubes based on where they start to break up; from here they'll recommend specific tubes for specific amps and playing styles, so you can tell them you're a bluesy king of guy and have a VJ or Fender or Marshall or whatnot and they'll pick the tube that'll break up at the right volume and give the right tone. Or you could just ask them for an EL84 #36 or #28 or whatever, if you know the grade you want. I hit this place up for a JJ EL84 and a matched and balanced JJ ECC83S Gold Pin 12AX7, and pretty much told them where I want the 12AX7 to start to distort. The 12AX7 is the hard part; I'm probably going to go through a few different grades before I find the "right" sound (which is mostly personal opinion anyway), but I'll let them pick a good starting point. When the tubes get here, I'm going to have a technician down the street rebias my amp. I could do the work myself but... it involves doing some measurements with the amp on (HIGH VOLTAGE! WOO! ...k amperage kills, not volts), jamming the leads of a meter into the power tube's socket (so, the exact area where all the really high power current goes through), and then doing a bunch of calculations and trying to match something to a specific voltage based on E=I/R (Ohm's Law). Soldering in the right resistor is the easy part-- the only part I can do. Edit: When retubing, remember to use contact cleaner on each of the pins of the NEW tube before inserting (it'll clean the contacts on your amp). Also make sure all the contacts in the socket are tight; if not, re-tension them using a tiny eyeglass screwdriver or such to bend them inward a bit so they'll grab and hold. Bad contact causes all kinds of nasty stuff; in amps, it can cause tubes to crackle, overheat, or blow once in a while (wisdom I gleaned from some guy who's been servicing amps and has swapped tubes in thousands of them over the years; these may be things you never see, but they do happen). POINT 2: BAD GROUNDING Star grounding. In electronics, star grounding involves taking each ground point and running a jumper from that point to a common ground. You can solder the ends of all these together, and you have what looks like a star. Think star topology in networking. In signal processing circuits, you typically don't star ground the parts of the circuit that the signal travels across. Specifically, you wouldn't ground the input jack directly to the case; you'd ground it to the ground point on the next part of the signal circuit, which would get grounded to the next ground point, which would then go to the case (ground). For example, in a guitar (all signal electronics), the ground on the pickups goes to the back of the vol pot. The vol pot has a pin that grounds (voltage divider; part of the signal goes to ground, the other part goes out to the circuit), which also grounds there. You then jump that to the back of the tone pot. The output jack ground also jumps to the back of the tone pot. Somewhere here (usually the output jack's ground pin) you jump ONE wire to ground (usually the bridge). This ground circuit follows parallel to the hot lead; hot exits via the output jack's hot lead, and ground exits via the output jack's ground. In the Valve Junior, they grounded the input jack's ground pin to the case. This is wrong. It has to ground to the next ground point in the signal processing circuit, so that the ground path runs parallel to the hot path; the hot path from the input jack (i.e. the signal) should not reach any gain electronics (for example, TUBES) very far from the electronics' ground point. Epiphone created a nasty ground loop and this creates all kinds of nasty buzz and hum. Easy enough fix. I found something online where somebody modded this one out; he didn't insulate the input ground from the case though (wrong), so I'm either cutting the appropriate trace or desoldering the appropriate wire, depending on what I see when I get in there. POINT 3: INCORRECT OT IMPEDANCE Those tubes should be hooked up to an OT with an impedance of 5k (don't ask me why, I don't know; I read up on it and found this out). Epiphone's V3 Valve Junior uses an OT with an impedance of 5k; this sounds very close to the Hammond 125DSE that most people replace the original OT in the V2 and V1 with. I ordered a Hammond 125ESE (better frequency response) from Angela.com; this was not a fun process, I phone-ordered it because they don't have a secure way to pass credit card information to them (i.e. plain text e-mail was the primary method). $36 plus around $10 shipping; I could drive to the place (it's in Annapolis, not too far away) but it'd cost me more than $10 in gas. I'll replace the existing OT before I have the amp rebiased, and drop in the new tubes like right before taking it to the tech. Closing So what do we have here? Valve Junior - $130 JJ 12AX7 Gold Pin Matched/Balanced - $23 JJ EL84 - $10 Hammond 125ESE - $36 Rebiasing - $48 Shipping - $20 So $130 amp with $69 of mods, $48 of labor, and $20 of shipping costs. $199 if you can do it all yourself, $247 if not, $267 in the end for me. I still want to mod a 3-band equalizer into this thing but I'll have to research that first; that's probably going to be some $17 a pot + $4 of resistors and capacitors and jumper wires for each knob, so $63? (It's a tube amp; messing with the tone pot on your guitar drives it nuts, an EQ is going to give you a LOT of control). References Do your own damn research. Here's some of what I got. Epiphone Forums http://www.valvejunior.com/ http://www.thegearpage.net/board/archive/index.php/t-185780.html Google Some people in ##electronics Some random people I know that know electronics a little luck

To be fair I don't know much about EQing besides you can mess with the tones to get a different sound. How to effectively use that... I'm no sound engineer. Dad's Fender has volume, gain (volume through an overdrive pre-amp circuit, just to cause overdrive), bass/mid/treb EQ, and reverb. The Roland cube has more built-in effects, same 3-band EQ. The ironic thing is I know how (electrically) to properly control tone/volume. Volume should use logarithmic potentiometers (because of how sound gets produced and how we hear; doubling the power won't double the volume). Tone should use linear ones, and the tone knob affects specific frequencies depending on the type of capacitor sitting in line with its hot lead. Throw a bigger cap into the hot lead and you kill more highs; bypass the pot (solder across hot-in/hot-out) with an RC circuit using a smaller cap and a resistor in the right range, and you can make an upper bound on the band the tone controls (i.e. go to the bottom of the mid, and then use the tank to make treble bypass the pot). In reality, when I want the 3-knob EQ I can design, build, and solder in the circuit myself (with a hard bypass switch, of course; extra circuitry through pots means uneven signal attenuation, affects the basic tone). Epiphone actually brags that people "trick out" their tube amps on their info page for the Head model; they're easy to get inside of and easy to jigger around. Like I said, I have a solid state fender readily available in the next room; and I'll buy the Roland Cube later because it does look like a really nice practice amp. I just haven't had a chance to really play with a tube amp, but the one I've heard sounded nice and they look pretty interesting technically. Burning curiosity and all.

Hmm. I think I might just go with the Epiphone Valve Junior. The Roland Cube looks really nice; but my dad's got a Fender solid state versus the Marshall full tube system the dude next door has, and the little mini amps I have are all solid state. The tube amp sounds better, or at least it's nice to have something that sounds different. I guess I'll get the tube amp now and grab the Roland Cube later, or maybe the Trademark 30. Both look like really nice amps to have. Thanks

Yeah, I'm seeing pretty much "Marshall has a good clean sound" versus "Marshall is a pile of shit compared to the Roland Cube" out there. The general consensus seems to be Roland. I've seen the 30 for $300, which is not really a direct replacement (it's 3 times more powerful and I hear the Trademarks are loud for their wattage to begin with); but everything I've seen says that the amp has an excellent sound to it. Stuff I'll keep in mind for long term; a hobby can be a hobby even if it's an expensive hobby Epiphone has a tube amp for $130 but ... it's pretty basic. Then again we're talking about tube amps here, you get those for concerts and they're usually a lot bigger than that little box and cost $1600 or so. Still, I hear tubes have a much clearer sound (and you get real overdrive if you turn the volume up high enough!). It makes sense because (from an electrical engineering perspective) silicone circuits hit a certain signal level and just plateau (you want 11? No, >=10 ==10) whereas germanium and vacuum tube circuits start to fail when exceeding their operating conditions based on efficiency changes (in the case of tubes, the hot plate gets too hot, the cold plate warms up and stops accepting electrons as easily, and the signal degrades); if your silicon diode can't switch fast enough at a given (high) frequency or has too much capacitance for a certain part of the signal you simply lose that part of the signal, while tubes decay differently and don't really care until you overdrive them. This is also why an (almost) identical circuit using Germanium diodes produces an overdrive effect, while silicon diodes produce distortion. I wonder if I could learn enough electronics to mod a Roland into a tube amp... really it's pretty simple if you happen to be an EE, tubes are diodes; overdrive circuit uses 2 diodes and an op-amp, which is basically an IC that contains a certain diode circuit (I originally designed one when I was 15, then dad was like "use a 7558" and explained op-amps to me). The only issue is proper size tubes and power regulation... ... I think I've stepped out of scope here somewhere. :s