Audiobus: Use your music apps together.

What is Audiobus?Audiobus is an award-winning music app for iPhone and iPad which lets you use your other music apps together. Chain effects on your favourite synth, run the output of apps or Audio Units into an app like GarageBand or Loopy, or select a different audio interface output for each app. Route MIDI between apps — drive a synth from a MIDI sequencer, or add an arpeggiator to your MIDI keyboard — or sync with your external MIDI gear. And control your entire setup from a MIDI controller.

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I bought a new guitar!

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Comments

  • @pbelgium said:
    @Edward_Alexander that's a beautiful guitar - which came first, the guitar or the carpet?

    @jebni don't forget to adjust the intonation when changing string gauge - here's a good article on the jazzmaster.

    @Edward_Alexander that is a masterpiece of a guitar! I have a custom art historic shop ‘57 black beauty 1999 reissue and it will be joining me in my coffin.

    @jebni flatwound strings may not be your answer, they are stiffer and harder to bend, and will not sound right for surf. That sound really needs roundwounds. Flats are more for clean jazz and for a quieter fretboard, but rounds get the right growl for surf. I love heavier strings and a wound g and usually play .12-.54, but @espiegel123 is right, it doesn’t necessarily sound better. Especially the neck pickup sounds muddy and bassy with heavy strings so it’s important to place that pickup as low as possible. However, heavy strings on the bridge pickup are awesome! And the feel of heavier gauge is the biggest selling point. But I love a wound g, a thick plain G sucks to play in my opinion.

    I played with Dean Markley Blue Steel 12-54 for many years. I despise D’addario strings, I’ve tried most of them and to me they sound thin tinny an bright, and too floppy for me. Didn’t like their flats either, they didn’t stay in tune for me. When I want a set of 10s the EB slinkies are true and trusted. But, after all these years I feel that I have finally found my favorite strings…

    https://www.ernieball.com/guitar-strings/electric-guitar-strings/nickel-wound-custom-gauge-electric-guitar-strings#P02210

    I love these strings, they are warm and stay in tune. All the gauges have a wound G, check out the 10s, that wound G is only a .20, it may be manageable for you. I now use only these strings, I have the 12s on my Les Paul, 11s on my stiffer strats, and 10s on my predators.

  • Strings that feel light and slinky on most other guitars feel even lighter on a Jazzmaster and other Fender offset guitars. From what I understand, the break angle on bridges typically used on those guitars contributes to that extra slinky feeling. It's not fun to play rhythm guitar on strings that are too slinky. Thus, players usually end up going for 0.11 or heavier gauges on those guitars.

    Nels Cline is one of my favorite Jazzmaster players. He uses 0.12s I like his sound.

    I also like the Sonic Youth tones, but who knows what string gauges they actually used, because of all the non-standard tunings. The Thurston Moore signature Jazzmaster had .010s

  • Thanks all, I’m a rube with all this!

    @pbelgium I saved that article yesterday, coincidentally! Mike Adams is a major reason I went in the offset direction. He seems like a wonderful nerd, and his Fender Play Live Jazzmaster session was hilarious.

  • edited July 2021

    I largely agree with @NeonSilicon about d‘Addario ECG strings (aka Chromes).
    They‘ve become my favourites for 2 reasons: durability and tone.
    Great twang on a Telecaster and smooth fake archtop response on a Walden D351 steel string (that exhibited a „jazzy“ performance even with it’s shitty factory strings on).

    The D351 was probably my greatest score ever in the cheapo domain, just 150bucks, laminated top... but it plays marvellous with those Chromes, equally well using a soundhole pickup or a microphone.
    The strumming sound is as far from a Martin, Gibson or Taylor as can be, but so special that it‘s worth having this guitar for just this single sound (bright, bell-like but without the sizzle a solid spruce top would develope, doesn‘t interfere with breathy vocals).
    I started with 12gauge, but last year tried 11 which was a great (unexpected) improvement as it reduced boom and delivered a more balanced sound.

    Chromes are very bright the 1st month, perform „regular great“ up to 1 year and then remain „usable“ for a couple of years (I‘ve retired the 1st set after 4 years iirc).
    As mentioned Chromes are fairly brutal to bend with 10 as thinnest gauge and that special kind of steel. I wouldn‘t mind too much... because they are of course great to slide...

  • edited July 2021

    This track features the red Korg Pandora PX1B (pocket bass preamp/fx unit), but the guitar parts are the Walden D351 western with Chromes. o:)

    And the Telecaster with same kind of strings (10gauge) through a Boss ME-5 with just the reverb section of the pedal active.

  • @pbelgium BTW, I have a Tune-o-matic style bridge on mine, and after I raised it a bit (it came with the action too low for my taste), I had to reverse the saddle of the G string to get it to intone correctly — it ran out of room to adjust! Perhaps this is because my bridge has a different radius to the neck? When these kinds of things happen on my hollowbody, I just move the bridge to wherever I want! :smiley:

  • @Telefunky Good combination of warmth and sheen! I must admit that I was so sonically impoverished that I only realised that sounds could have this complexity when I read that Michael Stipe described his own voice as “very warm”, when all I could hear was the way his mouth shaped his voice.

    @GovernorSilver My entire guitar experience is with a floating, fairly high bridge that requires enough tension to keep it place. Perhaps this explains my offset attraction!

  • The in-between roundwound sets from Daddario may be worth a look. EXL110BT (10-46) for 'Balanced Tension', where each individual's string tension feels similar. Or EXL110+ (10.5-48). Nice on semi-hollows or for fingerstyle or blues bends. Roundwound NPS, so good all-around performer. Inexpensive, so try juststrings for individual strings too.

    DR and Thomastik-Infeld make them too, but watch out for their roundcores, since those feel slinkier but are tough to keep in tune, versus the more-common, stiffer hexcore strings.

  • @jebni said:
    @Telefunky Good combination of warmth and sheen!

    thanks :) in case you refer to the reverbed Telecaster... that was a long way to success.
    The ME-5 sounds great through headphones, but recording line or phones outs washes away all the magic experienced just the moment before.
    A total mystery and even the circuit diagram didn‘t offer a clue.
    My last resort was the fact that headphones represent an inductive load (opposed to a line-in as capacitive load) and so I replaced them by a pair of vintage transformers with matching impedance... and that was it
    (about 30 Ohm input into 3k Ohm output into both Audient ID22 return channels for the stereo image).

    The Walden was simply tracked by an ioDock with JamUp AmpSim and got some Valhalla Übermod Echo in postpro.

  • @jebni said:
    @GovernorSilver My entire guitar experience is with a floating, fairly high bridge that requires enough tension to keep it place. Perhaps this explains my offset attraction!

    I started out playing electric guitars with Strat-style bridges.

    Then I got Tele and semi-hollow guitars with fixed bridges.

    The American Pro II Jazzmaster is the first guitar I've bought in years that has a vibrato bridge. I really like the smooth travel of the whammy. It's a key aspect of those wavering chords used in the music My Bloody Valentine and other dream pop/shoegaze acts. As a fan of those acts, as well as Nels Cline, who plays very different music, it was inevitable that I would get a Jazzmaster sooner or later.

    Besides the smooth whammy action not available on Strats (which feel a stiffer, not so smooth, to me), it's really fun to pick behind the bridge for certain ringing harmonics. Those harmonics pop out and ring more than the ones I get when I pick behind the bridge on my D'Angelico Deluxe SS, and there they can be bent a bit with the whammy.

    The bridge pickup was a little too close to the strings imo. I think the Fender factory set it that way to compensate for the factory .009 strings producing less volume than, say .011 or even .010. The V-Mod 2 is plenty loud without having to be set up so close to the strings like that. The problem of the pickup being too close is that the magnet pulls more on the strings, reducing sustain. So I started lowering the pickup. Jazzmasters aren't designed to sustain for days like a Les Paul of course - but no need to give up sustain just because of the pickup settings.

  • @GovernorSilver I raised the bridge pickup as an experiment and decided to keep mine low. And I just started noodling a behind-the-brige riff that just might turn into something!

  • Now, about the angle of my Jazzmaster neck. Given that the Fender offsets are apparently supposed to mimic the bridge/tailpiece configuration of a hollowbody, I looked at my hollowbody and can see that the neck is angled back to line everything up with incline of the bridge and pickups.

    Should all Jazzmaster necks be shimmed to angle the neck similarly? And if that’s the case, why didn’t they just design the neck pocket differently?

    Sorry, you guys are the only people I’ve talked to about guitars for almost 30 years :)

  • edited July 2021

    Usually on a Gibson-style tune-o-matic bridge and tailpiece, the strings sit much higher off the body compared to a plank-style bolt-on guitar like a Fender. So the Gibson necks are usually angled back away from the body a fair bit. This can change the sound and feel too. A more severe break angle can give the attack a more snappy percussive quality, while lowering the hardware can mellow out the attack.

    Your Jazzmaster may have a shim in the back of the neck joint - usually a piece of index card or playing card (or thin pick), to make the action a bit lower. Angling the neck joint requires precision cutting tools, and that costs more to manufacture.

    Fender's solution was to add a micro-tilt mechanism (neck-angle bolt) that's accessible from the neck plate.
    https://www.fender.com/articles/tech-talk/how-micro-tilt-majorly-affects-your-action

  • edited July 2021

    @jebni said:
    @GovernorSilver I raised the bridge pickup as an experiment and decided to keep mine low. And I just started noodling a behind-the-brige riff that just might turn into something!

    You mentioned Mike Adams so you may have seen this already but if not, here's his behind-the-bridge video. Also something about setup :

    There's an obvious problem with his video. He has a whole stable of offset guitars to get different behind the bridge notes. It makes you want to start your own stable.... BIG PROBLEM!!!

    And yes, I watched his video on pickup height, and gleaned from that I can just use my ear to judge if the pickup height sounds good enough or not.

  • enjoy! she's pretty

  • @ocelot said:
    Angling the neck joint requires precision cutting tools, and that costs more to manufacture.

    I’ve heard of more jury-rigged solutions, but I should probably take it to the shop :)

    @GovernorSilver Love that Mike Adams. And has he been working out with his amp-lifting regimen a bit more lately? Hmmm.

  • edited July 2021

    Jazzmaster update: I shimmed the neck back half a degree with one of those overpriced pre-made StewMac shims, lifted the bridge a couple of millimetres, and strung it with flatwound 11s, but with a G from a set of 10s.

    Intonation became a LOT easier (the bridge saddles all happen to sit more in the middle — some needed to sit at the opposite, extreme ends of the bridge before), and it keeps in tune far better. I’d put graphite in the nut before this recent setup reset, which improved things, but this new regime has made a much bigger difference to the tuning stability.

    Sustain seems just slightly more muted with the flats, but since the baseline for sustain here is ridiculously good, I’m not too fussed. @JoyceRoadStudios I’m not after some kind of heavy Dick Dale surf — more of a surf-influenced, mellower, Khraungbin sort of sound, and I think these will do me fine. Apparently the surf world is divided between rounds and flats.

  • One thing I do remember now, though, is what my problem with wound Gs was in the first place: it wasn’t that they were too hard to bend as such, but that the bending didn’t make as much of a difference with the G — relative to the other strings. I wasn’t about to try too much Gilmourish G-string triple-bends, but…

  • @jebni said:
    Jazzmaster update: I shimmed the neck back half a degree with one of those overpriced pre-made StewMac shims, lifted the bridge a couple of millimetres, and strung it with flatwound 11s, but with a G from a set of 10s.

    Intonation became a LOT easier (the bridge saddles all happen to sit more in the middle — some needed to sit at the opposite, extreme ends of the bridge before), and it keeps in tune far better. I’d put graphite in the nut before this recent setup reset, which improved things, but this new regime has made a much bigger difference to the tuning stability.

    Sustain seems just slightly more muted with the flats, but since the baseline for sustain here is ridiculously good, I’m not too fussed. @JoyceRoadStudios I’m not after some kind of heavy Dick Dale surf — more of a surf-influenced, mellower, Khraungbin sort of sound, and I think these will do me fine. Apparently the surf world is divided between rounds and flats.

    I've used the overpriced StewMac shims on three guitars. I highly recommend them over any of the credit card-matchbook type solutions. They are much safer for the neck and neck pocket. The price is a bit hard to take though.

    You can get used to the wrapped G's for bending but you do have that pretty cool wiggle stick on the Jazzmaster to do the bendy stuff with. Go, more Jeff Beck than Gilmour.

  • edited October 2021

    Turns out that having a Tune-o-Matic/Adjust-o-Matic bridge on a Fender offset isn’t the best: tuning stability with the vibrato system was less than reliable.

    Not being the kind of person who wanted to invest in the kind of surgery a Mastery or Staytrem bridge entails (apparently Staytrem used to make ToM/AoM-compatible thimbles, but no longer does), I ended up getting a cheap ($25) Chinese roller bridge drop-in replacement for my ToM posts (the fatter ones), and lo, it is much improved!

    I found that I had to really shop around to get something with the exact post measurements to fit, but the one I chose just dropped straight onto my existing posts, no problems. Impressed.

    Result: more stability, even more resonance! Maybe it’s placebo, but for $25, I’m pretty happy.

  • edited October 2021

    The bridge the came stock on my American Professional II Jazzmaster seems to be working out fine on that guitar - that might be worth a look when the time comes to experiment with another bridge again.

    I initially thought it was a Mustang bridge, but I believe it's listed on the Fender site as a Jazzmaster/Jaguar bridge , with Mustang saddles.

  • edited November 2021

    This seems like the place for this. I was more than generous to myself this year as far as gear and software goes and had told myself I was done and had all that I needed. Then I saw this guitar and said “I must have this.” It was easy to justify. I’m getting older and while I am in pretty good shape for my age, lifting and moving heavy things is not my strong suit. I have an older Ibanez Radius model that, compared to most guitars I’ve picked up, is relatively light. This new axe is super light and the angled frets, multi-scale I think the technical name is, are noticeably easier to play. I’m looking forward to being able to play this for at least another 25 years.

    The tones I am getting out of this are fantastic. The electronics make this a very versatile instrument. The low E sustains for ever. The neck feels super comfortable. No buzzing at all and harmonics ring out nicely. We just moved and I haven’t had a chance to run it through all my new Amplitude stuff on my Mini, but through my little Marshall practice amp and through the Nembrini apps on my pad, it is sounding wonderful! I wish this configuration came in some other colors, I try to keep color in my studio area, otherwise I’m loving this thing. I call her “Hope.”

    Edit: Doh. Ibanez QX52.

  • McDMcD
    edited November 2021

    @Sawiton said:

    I don't see the vendor/maker in the photo or text... who makes it?
    And please send my cat home... he knows the way. I wondered where he takes off to
    at night. He often comes home with something he killed but he looks happy at your place.

  • edited November 2021

    @McD said:

    I don't see the vendor/maker in the photo or text... who makes it?

    It an Ibanez from their Q series ; maybe a QX52-BKF.

  • @McD Ibanez QX52. Maybe one of the other two black cats might wander your way, but I doubt it is this guy. He rarely leaves my side. 🙂

  • @supanorton said:
    I’ve wanted one like this since i was 14. The wait is over.

    I was thinking about leaving the pick guard off, but I’ve decided to put it on, probably later today. I couldn’t be happier with it.

    Looks very nice. Mine has had the pick guard and tone knobs off for about 25 years. I never touched the tones anyway and I prefer the pick guard to be out of the way.

  • @u0421793 said:

    @chandroji said:

    @Daveypoo said:
    Gorgeous! Got an SG that I love - always thought I was a Strat guy until I upgraded and now I'm a Gibson convert!

    I don’t know why but the SG was on my wishlist all of my guitar life since the 70‘s because I love the shape and Zappa... 😎
    It’s a beautiful guitar but quite heavy I think.

    I just own a Strat when I need an electric guitar for some reason. I prefer to play acoustic. 😊

    I always liked the idea of an SG.

    Me too. So I bought one. Now I don't. Seems to me a very different guitar to play. No good for me coming from Les Paul, Strat, Ernie Ball territory.

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