MIKE PAYNE: Hello everyone. Welcome to Gearwire Crosstalk show or program episode number 32. As always, I'm your very own Mike Payne. This is Britton Wetherald, my buddy, my muse. Okay, not on camera, bro. What did I tell you?

DAN AGOSTO: Aw, that's so [OVERLAPPING].

MIKE PAYNE: And Drew Krag over there.

DREW KRAG: What's up guys?

MIKE PAYNE: How are you doing, Drew?

DREW KRAG: Excellent.

MIKE PAYNE: Good to hear. And of course Dan Agosto. What's going on, man?

DAN AGOSTO: Uh, the -- you know, yeah some rock, some stuff.

MIKE PAYNE: Yeah. Some funk?

DAN AGOSTO: Yeah. Some funk.

MIKE PAYNE: Some Barry White?

DAN AGOSTO: Some rock, some jazz, some stuff.

MIKE PAYNE: Nice. Did you know that jazz was actually in the early '20s in America, the white people were changing it to jass, J-A-S-S, because in Western Africa the word "jazz" was actually a word for sex, so if you called someone jazzy, you were calling them sexy. In a way, people got all freaked out and changed it to J-A-S-S.

DAN AGOSTO: Those white people.

MIKE PAYNE: You know, they ruin everything.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Goddamn crackers!

MIKE PAYNE: What's that?

SPEAKER: It's the other way around.

MIKE PAYNE: Is it the other way around?

SPEAKER: Yeah. It used to be J-A-S-S, and then they changed it to J-A-Z-Z.

MIKE PAYNE: Okay.

BRITTON WETHERALD: You suck, Mike. Goddamn crackers.

[PANELISTS LAUGHING]

SPEAKER: Actually, part of that new fact is that people would come by the club and like cross out the J.

MIKE PAYNE: Okay. Gotcha.

SPEAKER: Yeah. [INAUDIBLE]

MIKE PAYNE: Okay. Nice.

[PANELISTS LAUGHING]

DAN AGOSTO: [PH] Double Bar Burton of Really Rainbow.

[PANELISTS LAUGHING]

BRITTON WETHERALD: Wow!

MIKE PAYNE: Wow, we just -- those -- wow.

DAN AGOSTO: Damn.

MIKE PAYNE: Nice. Hats off. So, a couple of thing we want to talk about this week. First of all, we got some reader mail to take a look at and next we'll go to the Digital Black Raven DRT that's Drum Replacement Therapy, and we've also got the Blue Cat Parametr'EQ.

DAN AGOSTO: Yeah.

MIKE PAYNE: And that's the first time I've pronounced it right so far.

DAN AGOSTO: It's the Parametr'EQ version three.

MIKE PAYNE: Version 3, okay, and there's some cool updates we're going to discuss on that, and last but not least we've got the Guild GAD-30 and the Guild GAD-50, which our very own Drew Krag is going to play, and I guarantee you it's going to sound beautiful, so stick around for that.

BRITTON WETHERALD: And the word of the day is.?

DAN AGOSTO: Restraint.

MIKE PAYNE: Yes, which Britton is going to exercise today. I guarantee it.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Restraint.

MIKE PAYNE: Yes. [LAUGHING] All right, let's get started.

All right. So, first up this week, we got some viewer mail thanks to [PH] Thomas Brodkorb from Oslo, Norway. Thomas, I'm sorry if I slaughtered your name, but getting into Thomas's email:

Hi.

Hi.

First of all, let me thank you guys for a great show.

And I think we all welcome you and thank you for watching along.

I've gotten a lot of inspiration from many Crosstalk episodes, which I have used in my projects. As it is, I am just starting out with the whole recording thing and I love it. In connection with this, I'd really like to see some more material on how-to in recording music, but even more important to me is how not to especially with drums and vocals.

If anyone knows how not to better than Britton Wetherald, I don't even know where else to look.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Ho, ho! Hey-o!

DAN AGOSTO: Woo!

MIKE PAYNE:

I think I'm in a very similar position to many of the viewers regarding the amount of gear available for each project, and so the challenge is to get the raw tracks as good and workable as possible but with limited resources. I really love the episode on how to mix the drum kit but how about you give a few hints and tips on how to get a good set raw drum and vocal tracks to tape? Disc in my case. I'm not thinking only of microphone choices but mostly of different ways of getting good results, as I mentioned, how not to do it. Keep up the good work. By the way, Dan, you're right. Sonar kicks ass.

From again Thomas Brodkorb from Oslo, Norway.

BRITTON WETHERALD: I got a question for you, man.

MIKE PAYNE: For me?

BRITTON WETHERALD: No. No.

MIKE PAYNE: For Thomas?

BRITTON WETHERALD: For Thomas. How's the Norwegian Metal scene?

DAN AGOSTO: I bet it's brutal, man.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Is it brutal?

DREW KRAG: [LAUGHING]

MIKE PAYNE: It is brutal in the best of ways, right?

DAN AGOSTO: Oh yeah. I mean brutality is a good thing [OVERLAPPING]

BRITTON WETHERALD: So here's the deal. We'll answer your question if you import us some Norwegian Black Metal.

[PANELISTS LAUGHING]

DAN AGOSTO: Yeah. From the email, it doesn't sound like he's that into metal. It's I mean...

MIKE PAYNE: Yeah.

DAN AGOSTO: ...he's very --

DREW KRAG: [LAUGHING]

BRITTON WETHERALD: Just send us some freaking Norwegian Black Metal, man.

DREW KRAG: [LAUGHING]

MIKE PAYNE: I think we have to find out what Thomas is into.

DAN AGOSTO: I mean I don't really mind. If you're not metal, that's okay.

BRITTON WETHERALD: To kind of briefly answer your question about what not to do with drums, don't over-mic especially if you're going for a specific sound. There's also don't forget to, you know, add a room mic if you're looking for room tone.

DAN AGOSTO: I think that's actually a mistake. For a lot of amateurs, you know, you're not recording in a great spot and I think the thing you want to do is take the room out of the recording as much as you can.

BRITTON WETHERALD: That's a popular thing but sometimes, you know, you want a good dirty room.

DAN AGOSTO: Yeah, I mean that's true but I mean if you want something sounding like professional, radio professional, I know that's not everyone's bag but if you're looking for that, a lot of times you want to take the room out and then add the room in with DSP.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Sometimes I've heard some really good recordings that are done with just the room tone itself.

DAN AGOSTO: Oh yeah, of course. I mean you have, you know, all the legendary stuff. The things is that like those good recordings, probably the most popular is the drum sound on "When the Levee Breaks". You know, yeah it's like one microphone in a stairwell but it was a particular stairwell and they were recording through some of the best equipment like ever like, you know, assembled.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Who recorded that again.

DAN AGOSTO: I don't know who recorded it but I know they're using like--

MIKE PAYNE: I did.

[PANELISTS LAUGHING]

DAN AGOSTO: I know they were using like, you know, just like the best channel strips. Wonder Audio is the guy who actually made their EQs so I mean -- He didn't make their EQs but he actually bought the transformers that were left and like reverse engineered them, and he makes them now and they're excellent EQs. They're some of the most musical EQs, so I mean you have that and you have excellent preamps and you have a pretty good room.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Yeah but like the thing is rooms it depends. I mean sometimes you get a really crappy room and that's you're correct, you're really correct but I would, you know, like I'm a very big proponent of simple drum mic setups where it's like three to four mics on the drum kit. You know what I mean?

DAN AGOSTO: I like the sound, yeah.

BRITTON WETHERALD: That's kind of my preference, but I also do -- I mean you may not end up using that room tone mic. You may end up deleting the track but just putting the mic there, just in case you want to add a little bit of that, it doesn't hurt.

DAN AGOSTO: I would say if you're room isn't that great, I'm assuming it's not that great because you're just starting out. I mean you may be lucky and have a great room. I would say yeah, if you want to, add a room mic but don't --

BRITTON WETHERALD: Don't lean on it.

DAN AGOSTO: Yeah, and don't, you know, sort of move your priorities to a room mic, you know. Keep your best stuff on the close mics because that's what probably you're going to end up using.

DREW KRAG: I'm with that a little bit.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Yeah, but like and it also depends on the drum sound. I mean there's a lot of factors that you're taking into account. I think --

DAN AGOSTO: And the player too.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Yeah, yeah. One thing that I would definitely say because Dan is right on the money here, you know, like you definitely have a very good point but I think what we needed back track, even before mic setups and everything, is what not to do is not plan. You have to have a good idea of what you want soundwise already. You know what I mean? Like we just had this discussion about sound, you know, like the way you would extract the sound. What you need to do before you do any of this stuff is to go back and go, "Hey, what kind of sound am I looking for? A big sound or a small sound?" Am I looking for a good professional reverb, you know, saturated DSP sound, or am I looking for kind of more of an edgier trashy drum set?

DAN AGOSTO: Yeah, and also, you know, reference CDs that you like as music, I don't know, like if you like, I don't know -- If you're a Nine Inch Nails fan, you know, yeah you're probably going to want to use a distorted room mic and compress the hell out of it, but if you're more into like the Barry White sound...,

[PANELISTS LAUGHING]

BRITTON WETHERALD: Then you're going to want to just --

DAN AGOSTO: ...do close mics and that's it and keep it real dry.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Yeah.

DREW KRAG: And the other thing is --

MIKE PAYNE: I'm kind of doing both personally.

DAN AGOSTO: Yeah.

BRITTON WETHERALD: [DOING A BARRY WHITE IMPRESSION] Whatever you want.

MIKE PAYNE: You know.

DREW KRAG: The other thing is, of course...,

BRITTON WETHERALD: [DOING A BARRY WHITE IMPRESSION] Whatever you want.

DREW KRAG: ...this is pretty obvious but how you tune the kit makes a huge difference on -- of course there's only so much you can do once you've tuned a kit a certain way to make it sound that way, so.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Don't tune it to notes. I'm full of [EXPLETIVE]. I'm sorry.

[PANELISTS LAUGHING]

DREW KRAG: Think about it specifically. Like what Dan and Britton said, think about specifically what you're looking for and tune your drum kit accordingly because once it's recorded there's not much you can do to change, like you said, the pitch or.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Well, you can actually tune your drum kit to notes, which is interesting, but I don't actually recommend it at this stage of the game, even thinking about that because it is really kind of one of those things that.

DAN AGOSTO: They got like drum tuners and things you can place on the drums to help you out, and actually a drummer that came over to record at my place actually tuned the drums for me and they sounded and recorded amazing, y, after that and their notes. Another thing is you tune to notes that like your band is...

BRITTON WETHERALD: Playing.

DAN AGOSTO: Used to playing and like notes in the scale.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Yeah.

DREW KRAG: And above that, experiment with where you put the drums in the room. You know, even if you don't have a good room, every room has its sweet spots, even the bad ones.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Well, if you're going to close mic, ring out your toms. I forgot to say that.

[PANELISTS LAUGHING]

DAN AGOSTO: Ring them out?

BRITTON WETHERALD: Yeah, ring them out like get the sweet spot like angle them properly.

DAN AGOSTO: Oh yeah, and yeah what Drew said about it, if you are using less fewer mics, where you place the drums in the room is extremely important like a lot of people will find that they'll get -- that they'll have too much like hi-hat and they can't really control it.

DREW KRAG: Yeah.

DAN AGOSTO: So what you need to do is actually move the drum set further away from walls because what you're getting is high-frequency reflection off the walls and that's actually a common problem, so you want to be further away from walls if the sound is sort of brittle sounding and you're getting too much like cymbals, particularly the hi-hat, which is mostly the most problematic cymbal. Yeah.

DREW KRAG: Higher ceilings are nice if you have the option.

DAN AGOSTO: Yeah, not many people do that.

MIKE PAYNE: I don't.

BRITTON WETHERALD: I don't either. I had to get rid of the foam wall thing because it was like bugging me.

DAN AGOSTO: Yeah. It's a little ratty. It's been on the road.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Yeah, dude. It was like starting to like come apart and it's been near my mouth and it's just like --

[PANELISTS LAUGHING]

MIKE PAYNE: It's been loved. It's smelled like [SOUNDS LIKE] buddhasey.

DREW KRAG: Eew.

MIKE PAYNE: Anyway.

[PANELISTS LAUGHING]

DAN AGOSTO: Yuck.

DREW KRAG: Don't want to know.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Uncomfortable silence.

DAN AGOSTO: Well --

MIKE PAYNE: So, moving right along, the next topic of discussion is the Digital Black Raven Drum Replacement Therapy. We've got a demo of that and we're going to check it out, and essentially it's just a drum replacement plugin.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Kind of like sound replacer?

MIKE PAYNE: Kind of like sound replacer.

DAN AGOSTO: Pretty much exactly. Yeah.

MIKE PAYNE: Price U.S. is around $70 and it's pretty interesting. Let's take a look at it.

DAN AGOSTO: Yeah. First of all, these are all ready pretty good. We have the -- I have stereo mixes of these, not a big deal. What Raven is going to do is actually make it into mono, so we're all set there. Actually, let's just give these drums a listen. We recorded this at Studio Chicago. This is my old band. This is just the drums, and you're going to hear, you know, the snare is not exactly what we want.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING RECORDED DRUM TRACK]

DAN AGOSTO: Here it sounds like a garbage can.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Yeah. It's like a tin can.

DAN AGOSTO: What I think happened is the engineer EQed the snare to tape. I wasn't engineering this, so we kind of got [OVERLAPPING].

BRITTON WETHERALD: That's something I -- That's something that really kin of bugs me is when people do things to tape like --

DAN AGOSTO: I particularly like doing things to tape. I won't do it in like a real important thing for someone else, you know, like but when I know what I want, you know, I know what I want, and then I can save, you know, the -- Basically, if you EQ and compress the snare on the way in, then you can use that EQ and compression on something else on the way out. That's my philosophy.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Well, I mean in the case of digital recording, it's true. I'm actually thinking just like in a logical setup. You know what I mean? Just like this is kind of has to do with recording philosophy for me right now is that when you record straight to tape, just like let's say you have multiple takes, all with the EQs and stuff like that, you know, I tend to go I don't want to do it straight to tape because I would like if I do want to keep something I can either just and you know I need to free it up later, I can always bounce it to another track, and then just erase the track.

DAN AGOSTO: Yeah. See, actually this was done on an SSL board and he used I think a Pulltec EQ on it, but he just took out all the low end so whatever. No big deal.

MIKE PAYNE: Let's check it out.

DREW KRAG: Yeah.

BRITTON WETHERALD: That's why I don't do it to the tape.

DAN AGOSTO: Let's see.

[PANELISTS LAUGHING]

BRITTON WETHERALD: I'm serious.

DAN AGOSTO: So, let's open Raven, there it is, and if I play back our track again.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING RECORDED DRUM TRACK]

DAN AGOSTO: Oh, hear that the snare track is basically going. So, what I'm going to do -- Now, this has like capabilities for like multiple velocity switches and all that and it's really awesome for that, but right now I don't think we're going to really have time to do all that, so what I'm going to do is just load in a snare and then I'm going to load in one that I know has, you know, some low end characteristics.

MIKE PAYNE: Can you preview them?

DAN AGOSTO: No. You kind of have to just bring them in.

MIKE PAYNE: Boo.

DAN AGOSTO: Yeah. It would be nice to have a previewing option on the Raven but let's see how it does.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING RECORDED DRUM TRACK WITH THE DIGITAL BLACK RAVEN DRUM REPLACEMENT THERAPY ENGAGED]

BRITTON WETHERALD: What the [EXPLETIVE]!

MIKE PAYNE: That's a little loud.

DAN AGOSTO: But as you can see, it's replacing it. One of the things I did notice about this is that it outputs -- the volume it outputs is really loud, and it just distorts the track.

DREW KRAG: Without saying [LAUGHING]!

DAN AGOSTO: So that was surprising.

DREW KRAG: I don't think Mike Payne is ever going to hear again.

MIKE PAYNE: That’s why I took my headphones away down earlier.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Oh!

DREW KRAG: See?

MIKE PAYNE: Yeah.

DAN AGOSTO: So we got that sample going. It's a little robust.

MIKE PAYNE: And I got tired of hearing him talk.

DREW KRAG: [LAUGHING]

DAN AGOSTO: Sorry about that, guys.

[PANELISTS LAUGHING]

DAN AGOSTO: But anyway, as you can see we just added it in there. We're not really having much of a problem because it was recorded pretty well

BRITTON WETHERALD: Right.

DAN AGOSTO: There is a little bit of weird triggering going on, so what I'm gonna do is actually raise, it's called the mass time, mass time, and what that does is it sets a certain amount of time after the trigger where another trigger can't happen.

DREW KRAG: Ah.

MIKE PAYNE: Gotcha.

DAN AGOSTO: So that kind of takes care of some of those things, but also I'm going to need to lower the threshold just a little bit.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING RECORDED DRUM TRACK WITH THE DIGITAL BLACK RAVEN DRUM REPLACEMENT THERAPY ENGAGED]

DREW KRAG: Sounds like there's a little snare drum ensemble.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING RECORDED DRUM TRACK WITH THE DIGITAL BLACK RAVEN DRUM REPLACEMENT THERAPY ENGAGED]

DAN AGOSTO: It needs to go down more, the threshold.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING RECORDED DRUM TRACK WITH THE DIGITAL BLACK RAVEN DRUM REPLACEMENT THERAPY ENGAGED]

DAN AGOSTO: Maybe I'll lower this a little bit.

BRITTON WETHERALD: You should just insert a blue screen with the koala dancing going, "Waiting for technical difficulties." [LAUGHING]

DAN AGOSTO: Okay, so actually what I did is made it so that there's only one velocity switch because we were missing a lot of the triggers.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Whoa.

DAN AGOSTO: As you can hear it's all weird now.

MIKE PAYNE: Right.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Yeah.

MIKE PAYNE: Now, can you compare this to the original?

DAN AGOSTO: You can, but I'm just raising the threshold right now.

MIKE PAYNE: Right.

DAN AGOSTO: So that we're getting less of those ghost hits.

DREW KRAG: Yeah.

DAN AGOSTO: As you can hear, it sounds a little behind too, but we'll deal with that later. But what we can do is there's a mix up here, and you can sort of mix between the two tracks, so.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING RECORDED DRUM TRACK WITH THE DIGITAL BLACK RAVEN DRUM REPLACEMENT THERAPY BYPASSED]

DAN AGOSTO: That's just our regular drum track.

DREW KRAG: Sure.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING RECORDED DRUM TRACK WITH THE DIGITAL BLACK RAVEN DRUM REPLACEMENT THERAPY ENGAGED]

DAN AGOSTO: Now we're mixing in some of that sample.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Whoa.

DAN AGOSTO: So as you can see, it's not exactly perfect. If I had time to tweak this a lot...

MIKE PAYNE: Yeah.

DAN AGOSTO: We could really get it, you know, down, so but basically just to take care of the timing problem, what I'm going to do is highlight the entire thing, turn off looping, and just set it all the way to wet to the sample, and mix it down. That'll just take a second.

DREW KRAG: [SCAT SINGING]

DAN AGOSTO: But yeah I mean it's sort of a cheap way to get like the Pro Tools Drum Replacer. You can do this with -- There's AudioSnap in Sonar 6. There's all sorts of different things, but if you're using something like lower end, say like, you know, Home Studio by Cakewalk, n-Track, Reaper. This will run in those types of programs and will take care of that. So, our thing is all bounced down, and basically what I'm going to do is just take it and bring some of the beginning off, turn looping back on, and just kind of listen. I'll solo the snare and our sample and we'll just listen to it in here.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING PROCESSED SNARE TRACK]

DAN AGOSTO: Take off --

DREW KRAG: The popcorn's done.

MIKE PAYNE: Actually, that's a really bad portion to listen to. He's doing like a blast beat. That's why I'll never hear.

BRITTON WETHERALD: This is what happens when you do not record your snare right the first time.

DREW KRAG: [LAUGHING]

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING PROCESSED SNARE TRACK]

BRITTON WETHERALD: Do you really want to spend...

MIKE PAYNE: There we go.

BRITTON WETHERALD: ...hours on a mix doing this.

MIKE PAYNE: Let's listen to that.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING PROCESSED SNARE TRACK]

DAN AGOSTO: Oh, here we go. I'm just going to move it forward a little bit.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING PROCESSED SNARE TRACK]

DAN AGOSTO: I'm nudging it.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING PROCESSED SNARE TRACK]

DREW KRAG: There you go.

DAN AGOSTO: So now it's getting lined up better. That's pretty good.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Yeah.

DAN AGOSTO: And then just un-solo everything.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING PROCESSED SNARE TRACK ALONG WITH OTHER DRUM TRACKS]

DAN AGOSTO: So it's a little better.

MIKE PAYNE: Yeah.

DREW KRAG: It is.

DAN AGOSTO: We can definitely tweak it more to make it sound better but you can see it's a pretty easy drum replacement program.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Yeah. I'm -- It's like Auto-Tune for drums, man.

DAN AGOSTO: Yeah. I'm not into the drum replacement stuff, but every once in a while it can save a mix. You already are going to spend a lot of time tweaking as you could see because I mean we just spent like, you know, seriously, three or five minutes doing that.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Yeah, but when you got a drummer that does like to do a lot of rolls and stuff like that --

DAN AGOSTO: Yeah, it's really not going to work.

DREW KRAG: Yeah. You can't replace that.

DAN AGOSTO: Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get the multitrack of some of my newer stuff where the drumming is a bit more regular. This is sort of a tech-hardcore band so it doesn't really fit for this, but there's another way that we can sort of try to treat this, and that's with EQ, and that'll bring us to our next session.

MIKE PAYNE: And next we have the Blue Cat Audio Param -- How do you pronounce that?

DAN AGOSTO: It's Parametr'EQ [PRONOUNCED "PAH-RAH-MEH-TRIK-U"].

MIKE PAYNE: Parametr'EQ? Okay. Gotcha.

DAN AGOSTO: So, I'm just going to delete this track, go up to.

BRITTON WETHERALD: One of these days, I really hope we actually get some hardware up in here.

[PANELISTS LAUGHING]

MIKE PAYNE: Hardware schmardware.

DAN AGOSTO: Okay. This is the Parametr'EQ 3. This is the new version.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Didn't we already cover this?

DAN AGOSTO: We looked at the Parametr'EQ 2, but this has some new stuff, and actually --

DREW KRAG: Oh, you're going to love this, Britton.

BRITTON WETHERALD: This is so much rehashing.

DREW KRAG: You're going to love this [LAUGHING].

DAN AGOSTO: Oh God, can we hold on a second? The display is not letting s see the bottom, which is like the most important part.

BRITTON WETHERALD: What does it say, "[EXPLETIVE] you, Britton!"? [LAUGHING]

[PANELISTS LAUGHING]

DAN AGOSTO: It has a non-linear control. Maybe if I hide this thing and start in here. All right. So here we see the new Parametr'EQ. Yeah, we did look at the Parametr'EQ 2. This is the Parametr'EQ 3. It has some new stuff.

BRITTON WETHERALD: If you're saying it's the nonlinear thing, then it's the only new thing.

DAN AGOSTO: Well also, with a lot of EQs like these have the bands are all bypassable, like a lot of EQs, but if you have like a big bump in one region, and then, you know, you unbypass it or you bypass it you can get like a click, this sort of eases you into it, so let's just sort of check out how it does that. Let's just listen to the snare.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYS SNARE DRUM TRACK]

DAN AGOSTO: And turn.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYS SNARE DRUM TRACK PROCESSED WITH BLUE CAT AUDIO PARAMETR'EQ]

DAN AGOSTO: So you hear that? If I bypass the band, we're not going to hear any click.

DREW KRAG: Cool.

DAN AGOSTO: So, it's good for your speakers in that respect.

DREW KRAG: That's true

DAN AGOSTO: The other thing is it adds window opacity so you can kind of see through it. That's kind of slick. Most of the Blue Cat plugins do that now, or all the new ones will, but the main thing for me is nonlinear setting where if you start turning it up you get a certain percentage of just strangeness, so if we turn this on. And what I'm going to do is bump up around, I don't know, what do you say, 300 put to the snare?

DAN AGOSTO: And we're doing it so we should probably do it in the mix.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYS SNARE DRUM TRACK PROCESSED WITH BLUE CAT AUDIO PARAMETR'EQ]

DAN AGOSTO: That's starting to sound bad.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYS SNARE DRUM TRACK PROCESSED WITH BLUE CAT AUDIO PARAMETR'EQ]

DAN AGOSTO: I want to widen that Q out a little bit maybe. And so, right now, what it's doing, if we turn this nonlinearity up, it's doing some sort of compression to it.

MIKE PAYNE: Mmm hmm.

DAN AGOSTO: I'm not sure if you can hear that but we can also turn it to distortion.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYS SNARE DRUM TRACK PROCESSED WITH BLUE CAT AUDIO PARAMETR'EQ]

DAN AGOSTO: And if I start adding a lot of this, you'll hear that we're really.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Move it up a little though, higher frequency spectrum.

DAN AGOSTO: Yeah, yeah.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYS SNARE DRUM TRACK PROCESSED WITH BLUE CAT AUDIO PARAMETR'EQ]

DAN AGOSTO: There's also a zoom in for like you can go up to 40 dB on this, which is kind of ridiculous.

DREW KRAG: That is ridiculous.

DAN AGOSTO: But you can also like zoom in the window so you can get real precise.

MIKE PAYNE: Nice.

DAN AGOSTO: I can just want exactly 5 dB, you know. Yeah, this kind of distortion I think sounds really good when boosting the low end but let's see what happens when we boost high ends. I'm going to go up here to band 5. I think it starts to sound a little brittle when you're adding high end with that nonlinear thing going.

BRITTON WETHERALD: It sounds like a saltine cracker.

DAN AGOSTO: Yeah. See what it's doing? This is just the high boost. I'm, going to just widen the bandwidth a little bit to be fair to it because when you boost, usually when you use a higher bandwidth then you cut the lower bandwidth, a general EQ rule, but yeah. What I'm going to do is change this to the compression and see how that cleans up a little bit and actually also turn down the nonlinear percentage a little bit, and so that's no high boost, this is with the high boost. It's much. I'm doing this a lot more than I probably should just to show you guys.

BRITTON WETHERALD: You're actually showing that's like a major flaw with plugin EQs, and it's that the highs are extremely extremely brittle.

DAN AGOSTO: Yeah. One thing that we can do though is oversample.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYS SNARE DRUM TRACK PROCESSED WITH BLUE CAT AUDIO PARAMETR'EQ]

DAN AGOSTO: Did you hear that change?

BRITTON WETHERALD: Yeah.

DAN AGOSTO: And oversampling is what you want to do when you're doing a lot of high like upper frequency boosting, so what I'm going to do is boost this high and it's oversampled so it's going to be a smoother high end boost as you can probably here. It's more than I would choose to do, and now I'm going to turn off oversampling.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Yeah. You can hear a big difference.

MIKE PAYNE: Yeah.

BRITTON WETHERALD: It does smooth it out a bit. It's still -- I mean like it's just the problem with any plugin EQ though.

DAN AGOSTO: Exactly. I mean this is not going to give you the sound of like a real nice passive EQ. It's probably not even going to get you the sound of a super-high-end plugin.

MIKE PAYNE: And what's the price difference?

DAN AGOSTO: I believe this is under a hundred bucks on its own.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Yeah, I mean it's good for a budget studio. This is a great solution for --

DAN AGOSTO: Yeah. It's got tons of options. It's not really a bad-sounding EQ but like I said -- more like both of us have said -- you really just got to choose carefully what you do with these EQs, and that' with hardware and software.

BRITTON WETHERALD: That's with everything.

DAN AGOSTO: It's sometimes a little more hyped than software, yeah, and compression. You're going to apply it to pretty much any DSP audio signal processing in general. Too much is usually too much unless you're doing something where you're going for that.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Well yeah. You know, there's times where you're doing you need to compress the living god out of something. You know what I mean? Just flatten the hell out of it just to get like a certain, you know, sound, but I mean that's more of a mixing philosophy of like, again, going back to the beginning of the point of what are you going for as far as the sound and how you record it, you know, accordingly. And then you process it accordingly. So, I mean that's just some other stuff.

DAN AGOSTO: Well overall, I think this is a real nice EQ. There are two other versions. We have them but we're not going to look at them right now. There'll be videos of them, and make sure you check those out. I'm going to do a screencast of them.

MIKE PAYNE: Nice.

DAN AGOSTO: But there's also the stereo EQ which has two bands that you can either link. This is the mono version but you can use it over a stereo signal like we did today, but there's a stereo one where you can treat each channel separately, and there's also the widening which is M-S matrix, so you can treat the center channel again.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Is it an M-S matrix imaging system?

DAN AGOSTO: Well, all it does is there's - it has two channels ust like left and right. Instead of left to right, it's center and sides or mid and sides.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Mid-sides.

DAN AGOSTO: So, you can EQ the sides separate from the center channel. And it's probably more of a mastering tool.

BRITTON WETHERALD: This is my question about that though. Is it an emulation of an M-S matrix?

DAN AGOSTO: What do you mean?

BRITTON WETHERALD: Like you're saying that it has like an imaging like, you know, instead of stereo, like it has M-S. Is it that you have to record an M-S first?

DAN AGOSTO: No, no, no. You can treat any stereo signal that you want but you can also treat a matrixed M-S signal. I think you would need a decoder though.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Man that's I don't know about that, man.

DAN AGOSTO: Well --

BRITTON WETHERALD: I don't know, boss.

[PANELISTS LAUGHING]

DAN AGOSTO: I think you're taking it out of context like. You're talking basically about for our viewers who may not know. Having a matrix like two-channel thing where the...

BRITTON WETHERALD: Mid-side.

DAN AGOSTO: Where the mid is on one channel, and the side is on another, and you can bring in more of the sides. It's a stereo mic'ing technique. If you bring in more of the sides, it brings in more the room, or you could --

BRITTON WETHERALD: Very useful for room recording.

MIKE PAYNE: So, we've got the Guild AE-30.

[DREW KRAG PLAYING THE GUILD GAD-30]

MIKE PAYNE: Was that right? Is it AE?

DAN AGOSTO: GAD.

MIKE PAYNE: I just threw out two letters. I just threw out two letters. All right, we got the Guild GA-30, right there on my man's hands.

DREW KRAG: Yes.

MIKE PAYNE: And we've also got the GA-50 right behind that which we're going to be checking out. So, what do you think about that GA-30 there Mr. Drew?

BRITTON WETHERALD: [LAUGHING]

DREW KRAG: It's not bad. The price is good. I have to say that I don't really like rhythm playing on this guitar very much. It's a very large bodied instrument. There you go, there's my cheat sheet.

[CREW LAUGHING UPON BRITTON WETHERALD FLASHING DREW KRAG'S CHEAT SHEET]

SPEAKER: There you go. What is that? Let's see that again.

DREW KRAG: That's good.

MIKE PAYNE: Your fingers are covering it.

DREW KRAG: That's good.

DAN AGOSTO: Spruce top.

DREW KRAG: So, there's all the specs. It's got a spruce top, mahogany back and sides. The mahogany generally gives it -- it's a harder wood so it gives it more controlled tone. One thing I have to say, if you're buying any of these guitars that are from China or anywhere overseas, please get them set up the second you get them in the States because obviously shipping a guitar like this halfway across the world, a lot of things happen to it. This particular guitar is very high action right now due to the trip here. It could use some new set of strings as well, but this guitar is good for a couple of things, and I'm going to talk about what it is good for. I like it for lead playing, particularly --

[DREW KRAG PLAYING THE GUILD GAD-30]

DREW KRAG: Kind of like a Gypsy kind of lead tone.

MIKE PAYNE: Like a Django Reinhardt?

DAN AGOSTO: Sort of.

DREW KRAG: Sort of.

DAN AGOSTO: Mango Reinhardt.

DREW KRAG: Not exactly. It's not exactly a Dell'Arte but for a low-budget solution it's pretty darn close, and it has a hole which will allow you to mount a pickup to it properly [OVERLAPPING].

MIKE PAYNE: What else was there? Mango Reinhardt?

DAN AGOSTO: Mango stew.

MIKE PAYNE: Mango stew. [LAUGHING]

[DREW KRAG PLAYING THE GUILD GAD-30]

BRITTON WETHERALD: So, it's mainly designed from an orchestra-type guitar, right?

DREW KRAG: Yeah. It is. It's a big full-body guitar but it's not very thick. Look at it.

DAN AGOSTO: Yeah. It's got kind of a scooped out sound as I've said, you know, one of the other times, but it's made I think to, you know, just kind of carry over other stuff, and it's earlier Britton was playing with the GAD-50 and Drew was playing some lead lines on the 30, and they just kind of complemented each other really well. So yeah, it's got kind of this low-end bump in a weird murky region which kind of makes it not so great for rhythm.

DREW KRAG: It's got a heart, but I like it a lot for finger-picking. I like kind of a dark sound. I like to play a lot of dark things when I finger-pick and this guitar definitely complements that.

[DREW KRAG PLAYING THE GUILD GAD-30]

MIKE PAYNE: It sounded a little funny.

DAN AGOSTO: Welcome to the dark side.

[DREW KRAG PLAYING THE GUILD GAD-30]

DAN AGOSTO: Drew Krag.

BRITTON WETHERALD: I'm thinking about guitars.

DREW KRAG: We are talking about guitars

BRITTON WETHERALD: Or cat power.

MIKE PAYNE: [LAUGHING]

[DREW KRAG PLAYING THE GUILD GAD-30]

MIKE PAYNE: Oh, cat power.

DREW KRAG: You know, that's a pretty cool tone if you're into -- if maybe you're like in a metal ensemble that you want to do like an acoustic trip or something.

DAN AGOSTO: [IN A COOKIE MONSTER VOICE] Ooh!

DREW KRAG: I don't know.

BRITTON WETHERALD: What like Staind? Was that the group? Staind?

[DREW KRAG PLAYING THE GUILD GAD-30]

DAN AGOSTO: What? Acoustic metal.

MIKE PAYNE: Was there an E there or was it just S-T-I -- S-T-A-I-N-D?

DAN AGOSTO: I think it was just --

MIKE PAYNE: With a D? Oh, man.

DAN AGOSTO: There was no E? That dude was such a loser.

MIKE PAYNE: Yeah. He was.

DREW KRAG: So you can hear the lowest string are kind of a throaty --

[DREW KRAG PLAYING THE GUILD GAD-30]

DAN AGOSTO: Yeah. It has vocal qualities.

DREW KRAG: Yeah. So, it's not a bad guitar by any means. I don't really recommend it for rhythm playing. Definitely some leads and some finger-picking.

DAN AGOSTO: It's not the most versatile thing but --

MIKE PAYNE: Let's check out that GAD-50.

DREW KRAG: There you go.

DAN AGOSTO: Jinx.

DREW KRAG: So this is kind of an opposite end of the spectrum. As you can see, a typical dreadnought-style body.

BRITTON WETHERALD: [LAUGHING] You're going to kill me.

DREW KRAG: Spruce top, Indian rosewood sides and back, that's what gives it its very warm.

[DREW KRAG PLAYING THE GUILD GAD-50]

DAN AGOSTO: Mmm rosewood.

[DREW KRAG PLAYING THE GUILD GAD-50]

DREW KRAG: As you can hear, there's a slight buzz on this guitar.

[DREW KRAG PLAYING THE GUILD GAD-50]

BRITTON WETHERALD: There.

DREW KRAG: But like I said, this guitar came all the way from, where?

MIKE PAYNE: China.

DREW KRAG: China. So, I mean that's a long way for a guitar to come, you know, [OVERLAPPING].

BRITTON WETHERALD: Probably from Bangkok [LAUGHING]!

MIKE PAYNE: It's Thailand, dude.

DREW KRAG: It's Thailand.

DAN AGOSTO: I don't know. Bangladesh?

[PANELISTS LAUGHING]

DAN AGOSTO: But yeah, as you can hear, it has sort of a problem with that E string in the upper registers. I would guess that something with the bridge that can be fixed with a setup. And yeah, like Drew was saying, when you get a guitar like this, you do want to get it set up real early because that problem's most likely going to get worse if you just let it, you know, stick around, or you know you can just keep it in its case for a while an maybe that'll fix it.

MIKE PAYNE: Like if you're a collector.

DAN AGOSTO: Yeah.

BRITTON WETHERALD: I hate collectors.

DAN AGOSTO: Why?

MIKE PAYNE: Britton hates collectors.

DAN AGOSTO: I'm freaking out, dude. You said, "I hate", something.

MIKE PAYNE: Yeah.

DAN AGOSTO: Um.

MIKE PAYNE: And you're freaking in?

DAN AGOSTO: Yeah, I'm freaking in.

MIKE PAYNE: Right.

BRITTON WETHERALD: I mean I could go into that some more, but let's just not, okay? Let's just not.

MIKE PAYNE: Wow. You're practicing restraint, Britton. I'm impressed.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Today's word is restraint.

MIKE PAYNE: Yeah.

DAN AGOSTO: Aah!

MIKE PAYNE: But you guys, it's cool.

DAN AGOSTO: Oh.

BRITTON WETHERALD: All right, well it's a very nice sounding guitar.

DAN AGOSTO: Yeah. This guitar I really like it. It's sort of when you pick it up, it just has that tone like it's an older guitar or something that's been played a bit.

MIKE PAYNE: It's very relaxing and rewarding to hear.

DAN AGOSTO: Yeah. Real visceral.

MIKE PAYNE: Yeah.

DAN AGOSTO: I felt very...

BRITTON WETHERALD: Relaxed.

DAN AGOSTO: ...at peace.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Yes. You were one with the world.

DAN AGOSTO: When Buddha.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Yeah.

DAN AGOSTO: And I think a lot of that has to do --

BRITTON WETHERALD: Fucking Buddha.

DAN AGOSTO: I think a lot of that has to do with the scalloped bracing. Usually there's two different types of bracing, standard bracing and scalloped bracing. Scalloped bracing just has sort of a thinner bracing in parts. The bracing is cut into two to allow more free vibrations so usually you get a lot more subharmonic content out of a guitar like that, and it makes you sound like full and stuff.

[DREW KRAG PLAYING THE GUILD GAD-50]

DREW KRAG: Yeah. Very full-sounding guitar.

MIKE PAYNE: Yeah. It's nice sounding.

DAN AGOSTO: I would say that if you have played guitar for a little while and you're looking to upgrade but you can't quite get over that thousand-dollar mark, this would be a really good guitar to check out. It's just, you know, you pick it up and you start strumming and it just feels real nice.

MIKE PAYNE: I just had déjà vu.

DAN AGOSTO: Really?

MIKE PAYNE: Yeah.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Wait, I hate collectors. Aah.

[DREW KRAG PLAYING THE GUILD GAD-50]

[PANELISTS LAUGHING]

DAN AGOSTO: All right.

BRITTON WETHERALD: All right.

DREW KRAG: Not bad for the money.

MIKE PAYNE: Sound beautiful.

DREW KRAG: Very warm.

MIKE PAYNE: Well, that concludes Crosstalk show or program. Thanks everybody for watching. Again, I'm Mike Payne, this is Britton Wetherald, that's Drew Krag over there with the guitar in his hand, and of course next to me is our very own Dan Agosto.

BRITTON WETHERALD: And that's some super [OVERLAPPING].

DAN AGOSTO: Diabetes.

MIKE PAYNE: Diabetes.

DREW KRAG: [INDISCERNIBLE]

MIKE PAYNE: [CLAPS]

DAN AGOSTO: All right.