Daddy’s Blog

   For those of you whom I haven’t cornered yet, or aren’t sick at home with the Swine Flu, this is just a reminder. This Friday we are having our 3rd Annual( wow, time sure does fly) Sabian Day in the Boston Store. It’s happenin’ from 11am ’till 6pm. There will be LOTS of prototype cymbals from all Sabian line’s, mostly with with lots of hammering on them. There will, as usual, be  balloons and special ONE DAY ONLY pricing. While I can’t go into great detail, I can tell you that pricing will be at it’s all time low this year. There will also be a cool giveaway for multiple cymbal purchase. Anyhow, stop in to hit some new, one of a kind things, and remember we’ll take your trades as well. See you Friday

Michael Tocker-drums

So in the last post I talked about Ohms and Wattage rating as it relates to PA speakers and amplifiers. In this part of the post I want to address another common Ohms question. What is the difference between series and parallel wiring inside of a guitar cabinet? Well first off, here’s what that looks like. Then I’ll explain.

Parallel wiring is exactly the same as described in the first post with the examples I provided about PA cabinets. Two matching impedance speakers on the same channel lowers the resistance by half.

Series wiring is two matching impedance speakers wired together to increase resistance. This would be useful if you had a couple of speakers that you wanted to run, but your amplifier was not stable at a lower ohm rating.

Series parallel wiring is very common in guitar cabinets because it allows the cabinet to retain the same resistance as its individual speakers. This makes it easier to match up cabinets and amplifiers without doing a ton of guesswork.

Here is a real world example: Marshall 1960 series cabinets typically are wired 16 ohms internally. This means that when you hook up one 16 ohm Marshall 1960 cab to a Marshall head you use the 16 ohm output. Remember the discussion from the last post where by doubling the number of speakers hooked up to a single channel of a power amp you lower the resistance by half? That’s why the Marshall cabinets are wired 16 ohms. If you want to run a stereo pair of Marshall cabinets (a full stack) there’s two 8 ohm outputs on the back of the head that you run one line into each of the cabs. This allows the amplifier to deliver more power to the two cabinets without risking damage to any component. Not everyone wants to run a full stack, but those who do can utilize the same equipment just by simply adding to their existing setup.

Now, if you ignore everything else that I’ve said up to this point and only remember one thing. This is what I want you to remember. No matter what the wattage rating, ohm rating blah blah blah is on any amp or speaker combination that you’re using, one rule trumps every other.

IF IT SOUNDS BAD IT IS BAD!

Regardless of speaker wattage and amplifier output, one thing remains the same. If it sounds like crap, then you’ve got two potential problems. Either bad matching equipment, or you are expecting too much from equipment that does not work properly together.

For example: You have a 100 watt amplifier and a 100 watt speaker. You may think that because the speakers handling capacity is not exceeded by the power amp then it must be o.k. to crank the crap out of your amp because hey, it can only make 100 watts and that’s what the speaker can handle. That should work fine, right? Completely wrong. Although matching these components mathematically makes sense, the resulting output would be terrible sounding because you are forcing the amplifier to operate at it’s utmost extreme. Therefore, you are overtaxing the amp by turning it up all the way and thus sending a distorted and dirty output signal to the speaker. So no matter how good the speaker is, or how high the wattage handling, this would still sound bad. You could hook a 1,000 watt speaker up to a 100 watt amp and crank it to the max and it will still sound like crap. This a common occurrence that you could call under powering a speaker. It’s also a common misconception that you blow speakers because you push too much power when in fact it’s just the opposite. By under powering a speaker you send the speaker a dirty, distorted, output that will ultimately produce a poor quality sound no matter what you do. By overpowering a speaker (even drastically) you get a much better result. The amplifier does not need to work nearly as hard to deliver the speakers maximum wattage capacity. Therefore, the amplifier is not being overworked and producing a perfect clean, undistorted signal at the current output level. Sure, you could blow the speaker if you cranked it up all the way, but hopefully your ears would stop you from doing that. That’s where I was going with the whole, if it sounds bad, it is bad thing.

Let me leave you with a quick analogy. Two cars, one is a 4 cylinder, one is an 8. Both cars are capable of going at least 100 mph. If you want to go 100 mph in the 4 cylinder, you need to mash the throttle right to the floor. The car eventually will get up to speed, but it will be putting way too much strain and wear on the motor to achieve that speed. In the 8 cylinder, you can achieve 100 mph by only pressing the throttle down half way. You’ve got plenty of throttle left, and could go faster than 100 mph, but you don’t need to. You only wanted to see if the car could hit 100. Thus the 8 cylinder motor is relaxed and efficient at that speed, where the 4 cylinder is about to blow up. Make sense? So the moral of the story is, listen listen listen. If you are playing and stuff sounds distorted and bad, then you are potentially risking doing permanent damage to your speakers. So if you aren’t sure when things start to sound bad, give me a call at 800-373-8393 X100 or email bfoley@daddys.com so I can sell you a pair of top of the line ears that will make it much easier for you to hear the difference.

I’m going to skip talking about home studio stuff for today’s post to address a topic that I think is very important. This will hopefully provide everyone with some good information. I’ve had multiple conversations this week with our Daddy’s Junky Music customers about ohms and wattage ratings and it got me thinking that it would be good to post about this so I can present everyone with some helpful information. That and the next time someone asks me this question I can save myself an explanation and just send them to the blog page to read up on it. Of course I’m kidding! I’m always happy and willing to take time to explain anything I can to our customers in the hopes of providing them with the information they need to make educated buying decisions.

So here’s the simplest way I can give you a run down on ohm’s and wattage rating. As a basic rule of thumb, lower ohm’s means more power. Let’s not get into all the technical aspects of how this is achieved and why, but for the purpose of this discussion think of it this way. 2 ohms is louder than 8 ohms. Lower ohms rating means a lower resistance which allows the power amp to deliver more power to the speakers. This applies to all power amp and speaker combination’s regardless of type. So this works with a PA system as well as it does with a guitar or bass amp. The lower the ohm rating on the speaker, the more power the amplifier can deliver.

It’s easiest to think of this in terms of a PA system, so we’ll use that for the example. Most manufacturers include the different wattage ratings of the amp at different ohm’s on the spec sheet. If they don’t include this information then it is likely that they are trying to make something sound more impressive than it is. If the manufacturer says the amp is 10,000 watts, just be sure that you check the wattage rating at 8 ohms, because this is the standard that a large percentage of PA speakers adhere to. If you want to know what the real world output of an amplifier is, then use the 8 ohm rating as your reference point. So, if the amplifier delivers 500 watts at 8 ohms, then it would deliver significantly more at a lower resistance. 8 and 4 ohm’s are the most common ratings for general purpose PA cabinets while the most common ratings for a professional grade PA amplifier would be 8, 4, and 2. I know, I know, it’s wordy and long winded. I’m sorry, but I’m trying to cram a novel worth of information into a 500 word blog. Here are a few real world examples.

If a 2 channel amplifier has a power rating of 500 watts per channel at 8 ohms and you hook up two 8 ohm speakers to the amplifier, one on each channel, then you would have a output of 8 ohms and each speaker would be getting 500 watts.

If that same amplifer has a power rating of 750 watts per channel at 4 ohms and you hook up two 4 ohm speakers to the amplifier, one on each channel, then you would have a output of 4 ohms and each speaker would be getting 750 watts.

Here’s where it gets a little more complicated.

If that same 2 channel amplifier has a power rating of 750 watts per channel at 4 ohms, you can hook up four 8 ohm speakers to the amplifier, two on each channel. Then you will have an output of 4 ohms and each speaker would be getting 375 watts. Adding a pair of speakers lowers the resistance in half provided the speakers are all the same ohm rating.

If that same amplifier has a power rating of 1000 watts per channel at 2 ohms, you can hook up six 8 ohm speakers to the amplifier, three on each channel. Then you will have an output of 2 ohms and each speaker would be getting roughly 333 watts.

Every time you add a pair of speakers, you lower the resistance by half. So one pair of 8 ohm speakers is an 8 ohm draw on the amp, two pairs of 8 ohm speakers is a 4 ohm draw, three pairs of 8 ohm speakers is a 2 ohm draw.

It’s very important to remember not to exceed the lowest ohm rating of your amp. So if you have an amplifier that is only stable at 8 ohms and not less, then do not hook up more than one pair of 8 ohm speakers to it. You could blow it up.

Confused? So am I. I think exceeded the amount of information that I wanted to put out there for the day so I’m going to go now. Stay tuned for the next post and I’ll cover some other aspects of ohm’s law and wattage ratings for you. If you have any specific questions about this or any other gear related topic, please don’t hesitate to contact me at 800-373-8393 X100 or email bfoley@daddys.com

For those of you out there who follow the blog, you’ve noticed that I haven’t posted in a while. First off I want to apologize for the absence, but allow me to explain briefly what’s been going on. I have recently been promoted to oversee all of the online departments for the entire company. It’s been a ton of work getting organized, and it’s not going to be easy, but it’s going to be well worth the effort. In addition to offering my help for our customers with their sales needs and product questions, I now handle all of the emails and customer service calls for our online support department. I will also be handling our eBay department as well. This includes our online eBay store and all of the auctions that we run weekly. I’m very excited about this new opportunity to have a positive effect on our business. I will work hard to provide only the highest level of customer service, support, and attention to detail for our customers. Now that we’ve got that out of the way, on to the good stuff. MORE GEAR!

The studio live is a 16 channel digital mixer. This mixer has 16 XLR inputs, 4 sub groups and is fully compatible via the fire-wire output with the majority of the DAW software that is currently on the market. One of the other really cool features of this mixer too, is that it has a host of digital effects built in. Remember a few posts ago where I was talking about how less cabling means less signal loss? This is one major advantage of having built in effects. This mixer has compression, limiting, gating, reverb, delay, and dual 31 band EQ’s. These are just a few samples of the features that you get with this mixer. To see it and all the gory details, Click Here.

Another nice feature of this mixer is that you can daisy chain, or add, an additional 8 mic pre’s by hooking up something like a Presonus Firestudio Tube to the other fire-wire input. You can also daisy chain a second Studio Live mixer so you can run a simultaneous 32 channels. This is the perfect product if you need a mixer that will double as a live or recording mixer with built in effects. I’ve got a customer of mine who lives on the west coast who is probably going to be picking one of these mixers up soon. He’s currently in the process of building a studio, and we’ve been talking a lot about a lot of different things. So starting with this post I’m going to be going over some of the other aspects of building a home recording studio to give you guys some insight on other things you might want to consider. We’ll be talking about sound-proofing, snakes and cabling, software, computers and a few other related topics. I’ll basically cover the majority of the items that myself and Dr. Franks are going to be putting to work in his newly built home recording studio. We’ve already talked about studio monitors and interfaces so we’ll skip those topics, but there will be plenty to talk about over the course of the next several posts. As always, give me a call or email if you have any questions, or if there’s anything you’d like to see me talk about here on the gear blog. 800-373-8393 X100 or email bfoley@daddys.com

So my most favorite funnyman , Kevin James, is filming another movie in Boston right now.( King of Queens..best comedy series ever. If you disagree, you probably haven’t seen it.Yeah, I own all 9 season’s on DVD.so..) After the huge success of Mall Cop, they’re hoping for a two-peat w/The Zookeeper. Well, you may ask, what does this have to do with drums or any musical gear for that matter. Well, I’ll tell ya right now. The movie folks rented a bass amp, a guitar and a drum set to use in a scene from in the movie. I’ve been sworn to silence as to which scene the gear is used in , but have been told that it’s an important seen, one which won’t end up on the cutting room floor. The drums “featured” are a GMS CL Maple kit( USA shells) w/a 20″ kick, 10″, 12″, and 14″ toms and a 14″ snare. There is also a full set of hardware. The drums are now sitting back in the Boston store  ,complete w/dust added by the crew for special effect, and are available for sale. Things to say to your friends after this blockbuster movie to be is released in the theaters. ” Hey , see those drums up there? They’re mine now” or “Do those drums look familiar to you?” I can’t promise you any residuals or fame and fortune, just a cool drum set with a story. If you are interested in the drums, give me a call and maybe we can work something out.( item # GMS07069)

Michael Tocker-drums

PS.We love trades.

So in this part of the blog I wanted to show you guys a few of the pieces that Godsmack has used in their personal studio here in New England. A couple of these items were used on the road and in the studio, but the first one in particular was used exclusively in the bands studio. Remember if you want to view all of the gear or bid on any of the stuff we’ve been covering in the blog, CLICK HERE!

Say hello to the Allen & Heath ML3000. This is a very high quality 32 Channel 8 Sub mixer with a ton of routing options. This mixer has excellent quality pre-amps that make it a perfect mixer to use when recording. It still has some of the tape on it labeling the channels that the band used in the studio. Included with the auction is the giant Godsmack labeled road case underneath it. Every home studio needs a good mixer and this one certainly qualifies. One other unique feature of this mixer is that each individual channel strip, or every bank of 8 channels can be removed and repaired and replaced independently of the other modules. Very cool. Now when you have a elaborate studio set up where an entire band is recording it’s important to have a proper way to monitor what everyone is playing without being really loud. It’s hard on you to record for hours at full volume. It’s a good way to kill your ears and an even better way to get completely burnt out and tired after a long session. That’s where the next piece comes in.

This is the Furman HDS6 Headphone Distribution System. Long title, I know. Here’s what it does. That big rack mount piece in the picture is the brain of the unit. This is the piece that you plug your audio signals into. Each one of those little boxes is a personal headphone mixer that you put on a mic stand or tabletop near where you are playing. By having the controls on that mini mixer you can change the volume of the musicians relative to your volume. So let’s say for example the guitar is too loud. You can turn just the guitar down to get it to sit in the mix properly. Cool right? What’s even cooler is that you connect all these pieces together using standard CAT5 cable so you don’t have to spend a ton of money on long runs of audio cable to go to and from all the boxes. Lastly for this post the signal chain wouldn’t be complete without a pair of studio monitors.

These are the Yamaha MSP5’s. They are a small but powerful pair of active monitors. An active monitor has all the proper amplification and crossovers built into the box. They even feature a convenient front panel volume control. These are magnetically shielded so you can place them next to a conventional CRT (cathode ray tube) monitor without messing with the picture. Flat panel monitors like LCD’s and Plasmas are not effected by magnets so if you have a flat panel monitor it doesn’t matter anyway. Do they even make CRT monitors anymore? Regardless, this is the last but certainly not the least important piece in the signal path. I’ll be back on Monday with some more information on some of these products. Remember, I’m always available for all your gear related questions by calling 800-373-8393 X100 or emailing bfoley@daddys.com.

For part 2 of the Godsmack gear blog I wanted to go over a few more of the of the guitar centric items that we got from the band. CLICK HERE to see the auctions! It’s interesting how much live sound has changed over the years. It used to be big stacks of amps and cabinets on stage with a long row of floor monitors up front, but now all that has changed. Nowadays, when you see a big stack of cabinets on stage they are often not even producing any sound at all! The sound engineers will mic up cabinets under the stage or off stage and isolate them so they can control the sound. They send that signal to front of house that gets pumped out over the PA system. Bands are using monitors less and less on stage and making the switch to in-ear monitors so they have more freedom to move around on stage, and they can also use the in-ear monitors to create a perfect mix for themselves personally without altering the sound on stage or having any impact at all on the rest of the band. This process has been made much easier by quality rack mountable effects and versatile switching systems like the one you see here.

The Digital Music Corp ground control is an advanced rack mountable, floor pedal controlled switching system. On the back of the rack mount unit is a couple of rows of 1/4″ inputs and outputs. You can route your signal through multiple amps and effects and then control how they are switched right from the Ground Control floor pedal. This provides the user with a ton of flexibility. Let’s say you have three different amp heads, two rack mount effects, and five pedal effects. You can use the GCX system to switch between any combination of these amps, effects, and pedals on the fly. When I started working at Daddy’s Junky Music many years ago now, this type of product didn’t exist. The demand for innovation ultimately led to this type of a design and it’s is very widely used and accepted by a large number of bands, both casual and professional. Now let’s take a quick look at one of the rack effects that they used.

This is a Line 6 Filter Pro. This is a one space rack mount filter effect with stereo inputs, outputs, and full midi control. The Filter Pro has a variety of effects and a built in Synth type effect. If any of you have ever used a bass or guitar synth, auto wah, or envelope filter then you already have a solid idea of what this unit does. It’s basically just more variations of these different types of effects and a ton more control options. They also sold us a handful of effect pedals. I’m not going to go into great detail on each individual pedal because most of you will know what they are already.There are tons of other pieces that we got from them. I’m going to post again later today and go over some of the studio gear that they had. There’s a lot of good stuff on the eBay auction page. Scroll to the top of this blog and click where it says CLICK HERE and it will take you directly to the auction pages. If you have any questions about any of the topics covered in the gear blog or any gear related questions in general, just drop me a line at 800-373-8393 X100 or email bfoley@daddys.com.

So a few days ago I mentioned that we were going to be putting all the Godsmack equipment that we purchased from Sully up on auction.CLICK HERE! to see the massive list of items! Today I’m going to show you guys a few of the pieces of guitar gear that we got from them and give you some basic information about them. It’s cool to think that we literally have a number of items that the band used to record their songs and sell millions of copies of their records with. The first item that I wanted to show you is the Mesa Boogie Triple Rectifier Solo Head.The Mesa Boogie Triple Rectifier has three independent foot switchable channels, with separate EQ and Gain controls on each channel. Each channel also features switchable modes. Channel one can be “clean” or “pushed”. Channel two and three has “raw”, “vintage high gain”, and “modern high gain” modes. This amplifier has a total of 150 watts of power, and you can select either 6l6 or EL34 operation to further customize your tone. I could go into tons more detail describing this amplifier and all the options that it has, but it would take more space than I should take up in the blog. Suffice it to say, this is a staple in modern heavy music and many, many bands, not just Godsmack have used Mesa Recitifier’s to record and tour. Starting bid on the Triple Rectifier is $999.99. Well worth it. In conjunction with the Mesa Triple Rectifier we got half a dozen Mesa 4fb cabs. These cabs have Celestion vintage 30 speakers, they are 280 watts, and offer 4, 8, or 16 ohm operation. They can be used as a mono or stereo cabinet.

These cabinets have been customized to suit the bands needs. First off, they had custom chrome grills made to make the cabinets stand out on stage. A wall of these together would certainly be impressive looking on stage. Secondly, they attached a chrome microphone adapter to the speaker baffle. That way, they don’t have to mess around with extra stands and setup. You can just attach your mic clip and mic of choice and go. I thought this was a great idea. Anytime you can simplify the setup and tear down your doing yourself a favor, and especially in the case of a touring band like Godsmack, time is of the essence. Simplifying the setup is worth its weight in gold. Say nothing of the fact that the adapter is in the perfect place for properly capturing all the subtle overtones created by the speaker when it starts to overdrive. Such a simple thing that I never thought of until I saw it on their Mesa cabs. Very smart modification. The Mesa Cabs range in starting price from only $399.99 to $499.99 based on condition and whether or not they had the chrome grill and mic adapter extras. They also sold us four of the Fender MH412ST 400 watt Metalhead enclosures.

Now, I’m not going to lie, I wasn’t expecting much from these cabinets, especially when I had just finished ripping through the Mesa 4×12’s using the Triple Rectifier. I have to say though, after I got done blowing my head clean off my shoulders and my hearing came back, I was mighty impressed. To start with, these cabs are rugged. The metal edging not only gives them kind of a cool look, it’s a very smart design. No more broken corners and no more fraying of the tolex on the edge of the cabinets either. All in all a very good sounding cab and by comparison to some of the other heavy duty offerings out there in the world they are relatively inexpensive. Especially if you consider that if you’re one of our local customers, you can pick one of these bad boys up at a starting bid of $249.99. That’s a lot of cab for the money. If your a local Daddy’s customer, we offer in store pickup on our eBay auctions for $10. That way you can save on shipping costs because these things are extremely heavy.  Stay tuned for the next few days to get some more of the details on all the equipment that we got from Sully and Godsmack. If anyone has any specific questions relating to the gear that we purchased from them, just give me a call at 800-373-8393 X100 or email bfoley@daddys.com for more information.