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Author Topic: STRANGE, OTHER-WORLDLY GEAR  (Read 60013 times)

strawberrius

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Re: STRANGE, OTHER-WORLDLY GEAR
« Reply #30 on: February 14, 2005, 10:09:41 PM »

how bout this one:

i have a custom piece built in around 1993 called the "zwicky box"
it originally had a 1/4" in and out and 1 knob (which i always left on 100%) but the knob broke and "zwicky" axed the knob and internally set it at 100%.

this box was my bass sound for years. it is a super LO end adder to an otherwise sterile DI bass sound. somewhere between compression & sub woofish  EQ. playing this thru a Peavey TNT100 was KIKASS live!

designed and built by this forum's zmix, maybe he could shed some light on what exactly this thing does... i believe there are only 2 or 3 out there.
index.php/fa/671/0/
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Fletcher

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Re: STRANGE, OTHER-WORLDLY GEAR
« Reply #31 on: February 17, 2005, 02:31:37 PM »

The only way to get my MXR Phaser/Flangers out of my studio will be to kill me... at least twice... same with the MXR "Mini-Limiters".  Other fun stuff... the Loft 440!! an Acoustilog Analog Delay [Acoustilog was made by a guy named Al Firestein who used to own Sorcer Sound in NYC].

I don't know why you don't dig the Cooper Time Cube... I really think they may be one of the coolest things ever invented.  You had two sides with two different decay times [one was abot 14ms, the other about 16ms] with a frequency response of like 400Hz to about 4kHz... so you could add one side to the other for an overall of around 30ms [but with kind of a verbish quality in some half assed regard] or use it as like a Haas thing split at 14 and 16.  The trick with those is to bring up the return to where you can hear it then back off the send a bit so you can't hear the return... but you notice it big time if you mute the FX returns.
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CN Fletcher

mwagener wrote on Sat, 11 September 2004 14:33
We are selling emotions, there are no emotions in a grid


"Recording engineers are an arrogant bunch.  
If you've spent most of your life with a few thousand dollars worth of musicians in the studio, making a decision every second and a half... and you and  they are going to have to live with it for the rest of your lives, you'll get pretty arrogant too.  It takes a certain amount of balls to do that... something around three"
Malcolm Chisholm

oldgearguy

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Re: STRANGE, OTHER-WORLDLY GEAR
« Reply #32 on: February 18, 2005, 06:03:25 AM »

zmix wrote on Mon, 14 February 2005 17:17

Come on people... DDLs, Dimension Ds, these are not "Strange Other-worldly gear" this stuff is in every decent studio...

How about more obscure stuff?

Has anyone ever used the AMS 'Tape Phase Simulator' ? It is somewhat like the Eventide Instant Phaser, but shorter delay times.  Very popular in the late 1970s (Gary Numan's "Replicas", for example). I have encountered them in the UK and in France, but not in the US...


You mean the DM 2.20?  I have a couple and they are pretty neat.  They can do some surprising things to audio.  I picked mine up from the UK (funky-junk and gearonline.co.uk) back when the exchange rate was better.
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zmix

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the PUL-AL-TEC
« Reply #33 on: February 18, 2005, 09:16:51 AM »

strawberrius wrote on Mon, 14 February 2005 22:09

how bout this one:

i have a custom piece built in around 1993 called the "zwicky box"
it originally had a 1/4" in and out and 1 knob (which i always left on 100%) but the knob broke and "zwicky" axed the knob and internally set it at 100%.

this box was my bass sound for years. it is a super LO end adder to an otherwise sterile DI bass sound. somewhere between compression & sub woofish  EQ. playing this thru a Peavey TNT100 was KIKASS live!

designed and built by this forum's zmix, maybe he could shed some light on what exactly this thing does... i believe there are only 2 or 3 out there.
index.php/fa/671/0/


Wow, that was a while ago! It was a circuit I designed to be like a Pultec EQ into an LA-2A, but was discreet FETs and the size of a pack of Cigarettes...

Now HERE is an obscure piece of gear:


http://members.aol.com/revorecording/Pul-Al-Tec.pdf

The PUL-AL-TEC, a cross between a Pultec, and an Altec 436 limiter...


Brendan Thompson

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Re: STRANGE, OTHER-WORLDLY GEAR
« Reply #34 on: February 18, 2005, 05:26:19 PM »

Fig wrote on Tue, 15 February 2005 04:09

We also have the reverred Mutron Bi-Phase


Manny Chevrolet [pointing to object Butch Vig is holding]: And what is this?

Butch Vig: This is one of the secrets to our secret sound. This is the Mutron Biphase. We run everything through it - everything. It's fabulous.

[Billy pets Mutron Biphase.]

Laughing

Seriously though - I can hear that all over "Siamese Dream". Vocals, guitars, EVERYTHING. They weren't joking.
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Eccentric

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Re: STRANGE, OTHER-WORLDLY GEAR
« Reply #35 on: February 19, 2005, 03:40:56 PM »

One of my weirdest pieces of kit is the MicMix Dynaflanger.
It's a CV- and Envelope-controlled flanger from the 70s which
allows you to mix envelope control with an onboard LFO, as well as external CV sources. Frank Zappa used two of them in his huge guitar rack in the early 80s; Very unique sound and impossible to come by these days.

Also, the EARS FU2...
http://earsnyc.com/FU2.htm
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RMoore

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Re: STRANGE, OTHER-WORLDLY GEAR
« Reply #36 on: February 19, 2005, 05:10:14 PM »

Brendan Thompson wrote on Fri, 18 February 2005 23:26

 Butch Vig: This is one of the secrets to our secret sound. This is the Mutron Biphase. We run everything through it - everything. It's fabulous.

[Billy pets Mutron Biphase.]

Laughing

Seriously though - I can hear that all over "Siamese Dream". Vocals, guitars, EVERYTHING. They weren't joking.


The Jamaican genius engineer / producer who I rate highly : Lee Perry used one of these (and I believe prior to the Biphase also a regular Mutron phase, DOD etc) & also seemed to run everything through it at a certain point..great sound..

Saw one for sale in Austin TX years ago & thought naw TOO expensive..
Of course now they go for 5 x more...

Click on this link & the tune 'RIVER' by Zap Pow:
http://www.pressure.co.uk/pressuresounds/catalogue/product_d etails.php?product=PS09

Classic Lee Perry  Biphased mix..its great..
Horns, keyboards just a swooshin in the wind
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Ross Hogarth

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Re: STRANGE, OTHER-WORLDLY GEAR
« Reply #37 on: February 21, 2005, 12:47:13 PM »

OK you want weird tweaky gear


The first is called an EMT 156 compressor/limiter
this is a Pulse Width Modulation Mastering compressor that showed up in John Mellencamps studio in the mid eighties on someones suggestion.
At the time it was worth thousands of dollars and no matter how much I fucked with or re re read the manual, neither Don Gehman nor myself could make the thing do something that was worth keeping
I think in the end, it never worked correctly but we could never get Gotham Audio to give us any suggestions on how to see if it was actually broken.
One weird ass piece of gearindex.php/fa/699/0/

next is a piece of gear I still own but don't use much anymore
it is called a B.A.S.E.
Bedidini Audio Spatial Expander
This thing messed so much with phase, you had to make sure to check your use in mono because it would sound super cool wrapping around your head and then go away completely in mono
This was great for expanding reverb returns and making shit so wide it seemed to come out of the outer reaches of your speakers

Now for really messed up,
The Cyclosonics Tri Stereo Panner
This would make things go around and around or in figure 8's or back and forth in the stereo spectrum
Don Smith and I used this on a Eurythmics mix once and when it was taken in to master, the needle was jumping out of the groove and we had to remix half the record because of this box's ability to move the image but in those days if low end had a quotient to this sound the cutting head could not reproduce it
A very cool box though
by the same company that made the dyno my piano Rhodes chorus
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zmix

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Re: STRANGE, OTHER-WORLDLY GEAR
« Reply #38 on: February 21, 2005, 02:46:17 PM »

Ross Hogarth wrote on Mon, 21 February 2005 12:47

OK you want weird tweaky gear


The first is called an EMT 156 compressor/limiter
this is a Pulse Width Modulation Mastering compressor that showed up in John Mellencamps studio in the mid eighties on someones suggestion.
At the time it was worth thousands of dollars and no matter how much I fucked with or re re read the manual, neither Don Gehman nor myself could make the thing do something that was worth keeping
I think in the end, it never worked correctly but we could never get Gotham Audio to give us any suggestions on how to see if it was actually broken.



When working properly a very nice limiter...

One on e-bay right now!

 http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&rd=1&i tem=3781799244&ssPageName=STRK:MEWA:IT

David Kulka

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Re: STRANGE, OTHER-WORLDLY GEAR
« Reply #39 on: February 21, 2005, 08:08:30 PM »

Here's an odd bird.  UREI announced it in '65, but I'm not sure whether any were ever sold.  I think it used a (rotating?) container of oil, but I'm really not sure how it operated...

index.php/fa/703/0/
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compasspnt

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Re: STRANGE, OTHER-WORLDLY GEAR
« Reply #40 on: February 21, 2005, 08:40:41 PM »

Very cool!  I want one!
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zmix

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Re: STRANGE, OTHER-WORLDLY GEAR
« Reply #41 on: February 22, 2005, 09:30:47 AM »

I recall having a discussion with a studio tech about an API compressor which used a motorised potentiometer as the gain reduction element, This was in the late 1980s, and possibly only a prototype.

Magnet

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Re: STRANGE, OTHER-WORLDLY GEAR
« Reply #42 on: February 23, 2005, 11:44:38 PM »

Put my vote in for the Echoplex. Nothing can do what it can. I find it to be very usable for Vocals and any solo instrument.
It's Other-worldy and usable almost everyday. I have 3 echoplexes, 1 korg stage echo and 1 roland space echo. They are all very cool. The Korg has balanced xlr in and out.

magnet
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RMoore

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Re: STRANGE, OTHER-WORLDLY GEAR
« Reply #43 on: February 24, 2005, 07:31:30 AM »

I have a tape echo jones..

3 x Space Echo, various
2 x Echoplex
1 x WEM Copycat
1 x Dynacord
1 x Echocord S62
1 x H&H tape echo

Years ago I once recorded almost a whole album through a Space Echo RE 301,
Every overdub, keyboards, BASS, guitars..etc etc..no joke.
Sounded ok too.

Call me sick but recently I have been using lots of the LOGIC tape echo plug & the scratchy H&H as my main outboard Tape echo...

I'll break out the 'plex on guitars though still..

Still love tape echo on vox especially & guitar..
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McAllister

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Re: STRANGE, OTHER-WORLDLY GEAR
« Reply #44 on: February 24, 2005, 12:05:01 PM »

I am currently hunting for a compressor that changes gears.

Maybe a belt-driven EQ.

But that's just me.

M
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