Shane_B.

I actually almost doubled in size over the years. I'm embarrassed to say how much. In the last 3 years I lost it all and I'm actually thinner now than I was in the picture from 86. I've lost another 15 lb's since I took the current picture. I lost so much weight I had to have corrective surgery to repair the damage I had done. But I'm all good now.

Actually, you've got me beat by 9 years. 2021-1986=35. I find it hard to go quickly count the years going from the 19's to the 20's. I do the same exact thing all the time. It's a MIJ Fender Stratocaster made in 1984 according to the serial on the neck. My EMG's I put in it in the late 80's are starting to sound odd. I was reading that the ones I have are the ones David Gilmour designed his 'signature emg series' off of. I guess I was ahead of my time eh? They sound glassy/harsh/sharp/digital almost. I'm hoping it's just the old caps on the pots, otherwise I'll have to replace them. ☹

Sadly I've gone backwards in my skillz. Heck, I don't even plug it in anymore as you can tell from the new picture. BTW ... I still have the same guitar cord too. It's blue, but it has a yellowish tint to it now from age and smoky bars.

Him in 1986 at 15 years old and 2021 at 50 years old playing the same guitar. What a jerk!

I used to work for my brother back home in the NJ/PA area. He has a cash register/P.O.S., and copier sales and service company. We also did calculators and scales. I remember a time when we would go out and upgrade the old Victor printer calculators with an LCD display. We even sold service contracts on calculators at banks. Times sure have changed. We got a call one time at an old fashioned style general store. Actually this place. It was around 1991 iirc. It was kind of like a swinging door saloon type entrance and the door was always open. The owner called in a panic state one time at his busy lunch time hour. A squirrel got in and they tried to hit it with a broom and get it out of the store. It jumped up on the counter and on top of the cash register and pissed in it. He said it blew up and a big white cloud of smoke came billowing out of it and we had to come right away. I picked it up and brought it back to the shop and miraculously I repaired the main board with parts off of other old damaged boards I kept around for spare parts. It was really common for the IC's to go bad for the LCD displays on those early electronic cash registers so I always kept PCB's around for spare parts. 74SL04 gates were really common. I can remember IC numbers from the 90's but I can't remember what I had for breakfast. Ain't that something? LOL. I went through a lot of them as well as many others. In case you've ever wondered, squirrel piss smells like super concentrated walnut extract. Plus it was burned a little which gave it even greater earthy tones.

What I find ironic about it all is, the stones come from the place that sold them so who the hell are they to be looking down their noses at anyone. And why focus on what happened here well over 150 years ago? It happened to every race at one time or another and is still going on today. Why don't the people in power do something about that? A simple drone strike or two would end it in about 30 minutes. Maybe something a little larger than a drone perhaps. The only reason anyone talks about this now is because the U.S. is the richest and best place to live. And despite what some want the world to believe we're still the land of opportunity and being free. Just take a look at our southern border. Thousands a day literally dying to get in. People want a slice of the pie without working for it now is what the real problem. We have a term for it that I'll get banned for so I'll refrain. All I'll say before this gets deleted is, most myth's/legends/stereotypes are based on some form of truth and peoples actions, not their appearance or accent. And ... 3 ... 2 ... 1 ...

If you're worried about being cancelled after being on the road for 60 years and having hundreds of millions of dollars in the bank then maybe it is time to pack up the gear and stay home. I suppose Paul will have to stop doing Blackbird at his hoot-a-nanny's too. That's not a play on words. The song is actually about the civil rights movement.

I prefer Crazy Carol's singing over this kids guitar playing.

Fix Ed.

One concern that popped in to my mind was I would be afraid I'd pull it off the guitar. I'm so used to the tension of a real bar I feel like I would probably break it. And yes, I was wondering how it would effect the finish too. With all the software innovation now days I can't imagine it would be too hard to isolate the effects of this to the B and E strings to emulate a steel guitar. I'm working on a very old band demo my band and I did back in the early 90's. It's from a Tascam 8 track tape transfer. We mixed down the backup vocals on to a single track. Melodyne is detecting the two vocals on the single track and letting me pitch correct each vocal separately. I would think they could do something like that with this in real time. I saw an interview with Joni Mitchell one time and she said she used something on stage to alter tunings real time. Can't remember if it was hardware or software based.

Those are some mighty big shoes to fill. Thank you! Thanks! There's nothing wrong with using samples. What you did is excellent, samples or no samples. I struggle with midi and everything I try to do sounds really bad, but I have never invested in a good sample library either. Thank you. I've said it before and I'll say it again, I turned my radio off when music died in 1978. Especially country. Thanks for the kind words. Sorry it took so long to reply. I've been wading around 20" of blown insulation in my attic for the last week rewiring part of my house for a remodel and haven't been on much. Still going to be busy for the next month or so. I need to be done by the end of Nov. for Thanksgiving here in the U.S.. Relatives will start piling in around then and I need to get finished before then. BTW ... I forgot to give credit for that song. I never share that version, I have it up on youtube set to private to share on facebook with credits on it and I forgot to give credit here. A guy named Blaze Foley wrote and recorded that song. I did a cover of it. Merle Haggard covered it also, but I prefer the original Blaze Foley version. That guy was the real deal. Lived hard. IIRC one of his relatives shot him.

It's a whammy bar and more. I see it works great on an Acoustisonic. ??? But seriously, this would be fun and very useful to have. Too bad you can't set it to work with only one or two strings to get that Clarence White sound.

It's really good. I like that type of music a lot. It puts me in a calm mood and creates an atmosphere I like. I did this a few years ago. It's not my latest creation but probably the best I've done in a very long time. I was in a zone and I couldn't replicate the guitar melody again if my life depended on it. I can't sing or play this well at all anymore actually. I recorded it for my dog Maggie when she died a few years back. She was at my side 24/7 and in my studio for every recording I made during the 14 years she was alive. Just a simple recording I did on my Tascam 8 Track and transferred to my DAW to mix/master/upload.

Pfft. This thread is so last month. Like, oh my gawd.

It's actually the same plugin. You just have to actually know what you are doing to undo the damage that someone did who didn't know what they were doing. I really liked V-Vocal. It seems I could do things with it that were more useful to me than what I can do with Melodyne. More in Mel but what was on vvocal seemed to serve me better if that makes any sense. Probably not. Lol

Happy birthday!

I like the surface mount resistors for pedals.

I really like John 5. While I greatly dislike Marilynn Manson and he was his guitar player for a while, I really like his solo stuff and the story of why he only plays Telecasters. He grew up watching Hee Haw with his father and thought the only guitar there was were Telecasters and that's how it started. I can't ever recall any other player doing the type of music he does with a Tele. Part of the reason is the silver pickup rings like a bell. Once the joke portion ends he and The Creatures do an incredible version of I Got Rhythm.

I've had several doctors tell me if I lost weight I'd live to be well over 100. Apparently I have excellent genes and all my labs come back textbook perfect. So like a damn fool I went and lost weight.

I started playing out young. I was 12 or 13? Can't remember now. I've known the drummer in my last band since I was 6. He's 74 now and I'm 50. He can still sing really well. He records a lot at home using my old copy of SPE 8.5. I tried to get him on CbB so we could collaborate more easily but he's stuck in his ways. He puts his music to video's and posts on Facebook. He takes photo's and video's of our home town and posts on the town's Facebook page. He really enjoys it. If I hadn't have moved away he and I would still be playing out. But once he's gone, I am done with music for good. Nothing will be the same for me and I dread the day. He's the last person in my life that I share this passion with. I have dozens if not hundreds of hours of recordings he and I have done since the mid 80's on 4 track, 8 track, live in the band, and on our DAW's but I won't be able to listen to them ever again when he's gone. I like going back and listening to us talking on the tape masters and hear how I grew up and got better over the years. You are 100% right about it being healthy. His wife passed away and so did the lady he met long after his wife passed. He's been through a lot and music has absolutely helped him. He's still as sharp as he always was and still has his voice so I hope he'll be around for a good long time still. He's always trying to talk me in to leaving MO and moving back to NJ but I just can't do that. Believe me, I want to, but I can't.

Performance, longevity, all the members are constantly creating new music as solo artists and they are working on new music as a group. I'm not sure what more you could do than still be making new music, be the longest running band in history, and playing to sold out stadiums for 60 years to be considered creative. BTW, I'm not really a fan. I like a few of their songs but I really couldn't name more than 3 or 4, if that. Angie, 19th Nervous Breakdown, Ruby Tuesday ... and ... uh, I'm thinking ... Oh, Satisfaction. Used to do that one. Who didn't.

Uh ... The Rolling Stones.

I upgraded to Melodyne Studio 5 a few months ago and just got a chance to give it a try last night. I tried it on an old band demo that had the backups mixed down on to one track on the tape machine. Melodyne scanned the mixed down transfer and separated the two vocal parts that were in a single wave file and I was able to fix pitch problems on each individual vocal. It completely blew my mind. TPAIN has a Twitch channel. He's been coming up in my recommended list lately. It's interesting to see how he mixes and works on his music. Not my cup of tea but I can respect the process and the fact that some people like it.

Priorities change over time. For me the closer I get to the finish line the less important music is to me. So I guess I do believe age is a factor but for many different reasons and every situation is different. I still have that urge to record and I still love music, but it's habit and muscle memory. I actually bought a guitar a few weeks ago. It came broken and I returned it and in the end after a bunch of hassle I just told them to cancel the order. I was even looking at midi controllers. But I hesitate because I know once I get these things they'll just sit there collecting dust just making good future yard sale items after my death. Or end up in a landfill. I'd rather be working on remodeling my fixer upper house, or mowing the lawn, chopping trees and splitting firewood, harvesting and selling my seasonal crops I grow on my tiny little acreage, saving what's left of my hearing. I was way more in to recording and music when I worked 14 hours a day 6 days a week. I had to to relieve all that stress. My wife is glued to her books and Kindle to this day, I was glued to my music. Then my wife and I both lost our jobs up in Iowa but she was lucky enough to find another one in the Kansas City area. It was the 2nd time in my life I had to start over from zero and I didn't make it the second time because of age and the changing hiring climate which I shouldn't get in to here. You'd think being the #1 tech in a 3 state marketplace for a fortune 500 company would carry some weight but nope. The world has changed. So I do my own thing now and I'm happier. Hell, I lost well over 100lb's. Closer to 2 if I were to be painfully/embarrassingly honest. The stress was literally killing me. Now that I don't have that, I focus on other things. I spent 5 hours remixing and fixing an old band demo last night but that was the first time I was able to concentrate on music in a very very long time. I rushed a song back in January. It took me a day to record, mix, and master a song that normally would have taken me months. And then I completely lost interest. Maybe it's depression, maybe it's the world and the horrible people living in it, maybe it's age? I don't know. But I've certainly lost my zest for life and music. I look forward to going to bed and getting a good nights sleep and taking a normal dump in the morning. Seriously. People throw in my face all the time about not working a 9-5 (or in my case it was a 7am to whenever you got home which was usually after 9pm) job and they don't know how I can stand being home all the time. I can honestly tell you I am busier now than I was when I drove 50,000 miles a year running service calls 6 days a week, but I'm busy taking care of my own world now not someone else's. The other thing is, the music I love is all but dead and I don't have an audience anymore. I can sit here and perform and record for myself but what's the point? My wife couldn't care any less about music so what's the point? I have 68 people on my Facebook page. All friends from high school and family. I keep a small tight circle. I get maybe 5 likes from a few cousins maybe so I don't even waste my time creating and posting there anymore. My brother who is a musician too never even responds so why bother anymore. Without someone to play my creations for I really don't see the point. All I do is obsess over the process. The real joy is playing it for someone who enjoys the end product and I have nobody left.

"The answer is: neither is silent. They work together as a digraph in the word scent to create the /s/ sound." ??