New gear: Sonicake IR loader, Better Than The Book ready for recording guitars (after a turbulant week of servicing) and Jabun's Turing Machine and Generation Supernova album featured in The Tank Tribune No. 36 on Newgrounds.com!

Hi everyone and hope you're having a great week since the last post! It's been an incredibly busy and stressful one over here (and I don't say that lightly) with guitar service work and preparations to start recording guitars for the next Better Than The Book album, but thankfully everything's all sorted and just about ready now! As usual before starting any big recording project I took the time to service my guitars, give them a restring as needed and check the intonation etc... For my Jaguar and Modded Pacifica, it was a routine job, but for my homemade double-neck guitar, after putting it off for years, I decided to finally take the plunge and service the electronic controls as well, aaaand it was a bit of a disaster... From broken parts to ordering news ones, to some of those being broken, to refunds and replacements and the replacements being just as broken, eventually the problem was solved by simply drowning the old original pots (which I was convinced were beyond saving) in cleaning solution, and basically putting all the original parts back in (with a fresh set of capacitors and resistors), and re-soldering the whole guitar control cavity probably 3 times before it was done... Having said that, after an ordeal of a service job, it's sounding better than ever and I will not be making the same mistake again trying to fix it or replace parts unless COMPLETELY necessary. A whole load of wasted time, a bit of wasted money (though I have to commend and thank the shop for the refund and being so understanding with the faulty parts), BUT I'm finally ready to start recording! Phew... let's pray that never happens again...

A brief history of my double-neck "Satin-X" for those of you interested, I built this guitar with my dad and brother (and tools lent by other family members and friends) when I was 15, half a life ago. It's been through a whole load of crazy adventures and repairs over the years (on top of the one above) with the most significant being when the 12-string neck's truss rod (the metal bar which counteracts the tension of the strings) snapped, me cracking the original 6 string bridge whammy block, me snapping a whammy bar and cracking another one if I recall correctly, and replacing the 6 string bridge completely as well as the 6 string tuning heads (the "new" bridge is AMAZING!). The Satin-X is my pride and joy and has been featured on most of my guitar heavy records. I wish it the best health for the years to come, and while this probably won't be the last time I need to repair it, I can always hope!

Back to recording news, my GF Eva gave me a wonderful early birthday present last week which was an IR loader box from recently founded tech company Sonicake! For those of you who don't know, IRs or Impulse Responses are a relatively new technology whereby you send a frequency sweep through a piece of equipment to map out its response then use a "deconvolver" to compare the input and output and generate a snapshot of the effect of the equipment you scanned. This only works for non-dynamic effects, but is ideal for accurately emulating speaker and mic set-ups and reverbs for instance! The technology has been around for a while in software, but this is the first time I'd seen it in hardware for the entry level market, and it does and amazing job! Marketed as a guitar cabinet IR loader (for recreating the sound of guitar speakers), the Sonicake IR box featured 11 slots which come pre-loaded with a nice selection of classic speakers, but in case you want to customise, you can load in your own speaker IRs via USB! I generally use cab sims in IK Multimedia's AmpliTube when recording but it's quite heavy on computer resources so I loaded IR snapshots my favorite AmpliTube cab settings into the IR box instead so I don't need to use the computer which will save me a load of time and computer resources! I can even take the IR box to a gig and D.I into the PA instead of micing a cab if I need to, and know that every place and time I'll be able to play with the same sound AND the sound which was used on the BTTB records (or close to it)! Sounds amazing and I can't wait to start recording with it!

Finally for this week some quick and cool news to share with you today as Jabun's "Turing Machine" (which was released a week ago on Monday) and the upcoming "Generation Supernova" album were featured in The Tank Tribune No. 36 on Newgrounds.com! Thanks so much for featuring the music and sharing the news fellow Newgrounds peeps and check out the issue below for a whole bunch of Newgrounds related news! Have you heard Turing Machine yet?

https://thetanktribune.newgrounds.com/news/post/1152194

Only a few weeks to go until Generation Supernova releases to the world! 

And that about wraps things up for this post! I'm hoping to start recording guitars for Better Than The Book very shortly, and next week will be the first post of the month, so I'm sure there'll be Bandcamp Friday news as well as the usual setting and reflecting on goals to do. Until then, I hope you have a great week, I hope my week's a bit more relaxed than the last one, and thanks as always for supporting JabunAudio and my various projects however you can! Take care, all the best and see you again on April Fools Day!