Is There Still Any Love For Any Rack Pieces?

[DrewJD82]

Ha, someone left their drums at my house in 2014 and never picked them up.

That stuff blows my mind, man. That’s exactly why I was so worried, I’ve had it happen as well in the past where my former band was auditioning guitarists for a while, we had an old Ibanez Roadstar and a Crate Blue Voodoo half stack left behind by two different guys. After like a year the Crate dude dropped by announced to pick his stuff up but the Roadstar dude never showed, it became my backup guitar for a little while.

So I’m just thinking “Great, this ‘drummer’ is going to go on a coke binge and sell my sh*t or spill booze all over it, or move and I’ll never see my sh*t again.” My eyes lit up when I saw it at my buddy’s house a few weeks ago, thankfully!

 

[Elric]

Nope. They have some kind of chip/disk they sold that had some artist presets but I don’t think there was a way to back it up.

Manual:

https://mediadl.musictribe.com/download/software/tcelectronic/tc_electronic_g-force_manual_english.pdf

Page 29. You can do sysex dump and restore. Most older units support that. It is basically a full backup of the device. You basically connect it to a computer and record the dump. To restore it you put it in receive mode and 'play' the dump back to the device and it reprograms it.

 

[DrewJD82]

Manual:

https://mediadl.musictribe.com/download/software/tcelectronic/tc_electronic_g-force_manual_english.pdf

Page 29. You can do sysex dump and restore. Most older units support that. It is basically a full backup of the device. You basically connect it to a computer and record the dump. To restore it you put it in receive mode and 'play' the dump back to the device and it reprograms it.

Damn, as many times as I’ve read that manual, I never paid attention to that section. Finding those cards back in the day was a rarity and I never even thought of a MIDI backup. Hahahaha with my luck I’d have done it on some old laptop I had and then would have to go get it repaired before I could locate the MIDI file.

 

[Alex Kenivel]

Damn, as many times as I’ve read that manual, I never paid attention to that section. Finding those cards back in the day was a rarity and I never even thought of a MIDI backup. Hahahaha with my luck I’d have done it on some old laptop I had and then would have to go get it repaired before I could locate the MIDI file.

You'd need a backup of the hard disk with the backup on it, backed up on your current backup drive.

I've got some creative gold stored on broken laptops sitting in my garage that I'll probably never fix, meanwhile rack units 4x their age are used almost daily!

 

[Elric]

You'd need a backup of the hard disk with the backup on it, backed up on your current backup drive.

I've got some creative gold stored on broken laptops sitting in my garage that I'll probably never fix, meanwhile rack units 4x their age are used almost daily!

LOL, yeah, I faithfully backed up a bunch of my old stuff: GSP-5, Valve-Fx, ADA MP-1, Roland GP-100, Boss Vf-1, all come to mind; using SYSEX bulk dumps.

I think I even had an occasion to use one or two of them to do restores when the coin battery that was backing up the memory went out (remember the bad old days when data was stored to battery backed RAM rather than persistent storage?). I think that might have happened to both my GSP-5 and the ADA...

I'm sure there's a hard disk with data from one or all those bad boys somewhere in my garage as well.

I back up my modern gear too, of course (3 Fractals and QC (this week)); but it's been pretty easy ever since the POD days when companies started providing specific tools that just drop the thing into dump mode and record it directly rather than the user having to boot it with some special key sequence or dive into some utility menu to initiate.

Good times.

 

[andergtr]

While there are tons of MIDI footcontrollers available these days that do a lot more, I still want to get my hands on an RS-10. That thing caused me so much confusion in my younger years because I had no f*cking clue what it did and just figured it was a box of magic that allowed Vai and Petrucci to sound as awesome as they did. I think Matt V. snagged the last one from Bob a few years back.

i have one i am not using...with the expander. name your price and pay for shipping.

 

[DrewJD82]

i have one i am not using...with the expander. name your price and pay for shipping.

I’ll hit you up this weekend!!!!!

 

[tonedover]

I had a nice piece with a huge rack for a couple years but the level of maintenance it required was atrocious … and if even put a beer near it, it would become a public disaster.

 

[JerEvil]

I rack…

 

[Baba]

I rack…

Good lordt, that's a lot of tone

 

[blackie13]

New to this...

So awesome...!!!!!

 

[FuzzyAce]

It's a good time to hold onto a lot of those preamps, especially with all the cab IR availability.

 

[2112]

Just got this wired up. Scored the switchblade for a great price locally and it's FANTASTIC. Makes everything so much easier to have setup and ready to use.

Will have to do a video with it over the next few weeks.

 

[JiveTurkey]

Just got this wired up. Scored the switchblade for a great price locally and it's FANTASTIC. Makes everything so much easier to have setup and ready to use.

Will have to do a video with it over the next few weeks.

View attachment 8629

 

[Cirrus]

Not a big user of Rack gear outside of a studio context. in 2009-2010 I gave a 10u rack with effects loop switchers, pedal shelves, and a handful of rack processors, and I did own a Helix Rack for 18 months, but I find it quite an awkward setup on stage since by its nature it requires so much ancillary *stuff* - foot controllers, remote switchers, power supplies, the weight of the rack case etc - just to make it work. So I decided it makes sense if you have the gigs to justify that much stuff, and I didn't even when we were playing decent size clubs several times a month.

I do have an old Korg A3 coming in the post, but that's just for a bit of fun, can't imagine gigging it.

 

[Eagle]

Just got this wired up. Scored the switchblade for a great price locally and it's FANTASTIC. Makes everything so much easier to have setup and ready to use.

Will have to do a video with it over the next few weeks.

View attachment 8629

How do you feel the H90 holds up tonally against the 2290, PCM70 and the H3000 . I personally think badly.

 

[santiall]

Just got this wired up. Scored the switchblade for a great price locally and it's FANTASTIC. Makes everything so much easier to have setup and ready to use.

Will have to do a video with it over the next few weeks.

View attachment 8629

Lexicon reverb vs SPX reverb? I've been always fan of the SPX2000 reverbs but my experience with the Lexicons is quite limited...

 

[2112]

How do you feel the H90 holds up tonally against the 2290, PCM70 and the H3000 . I personally think badly.

The big improvement on the H90 over the H9 are the SP2016 reverbs, which I much prefer over the stock H9/Space reverbs, and the new polyphonic pitch algorithms like PrismShift. The SP2016 reverbs have a different character to the Lex stuff but they have a classic "rack like" character to me.

The H90 detune definitely sounds different to the H3000 and you can't get the 2290 style phase inverted delays out of any of the modes, although the standard digital delay mode will do it every second repeat if set up right which is weird. The H90 BBD style delay and vintage digital are very good IMO. Undulator, Black Hole, Crystals and more are super fun in their own right on the H90.

Overall it's a mixed bag - if you like the H9/Factor series it's a big improvement sound and feature wise. If you want to get really close to the classic character effects each rack unit is known for but without the cost and size then Fractal gets a lot closer.

Lexicon reverb vs SPX reverb? I've been always fan of the SPX2000 reverbs but my experience with the Lexicons is quite limited...

The SPX90 is pretty metallic and grainy compared to the much smoother Lex stuff, but that's not necessarily a bad thing is the SPX early reflections and rooms sound pretty awesome for fattening up crunchy guitars in a mix. The PCM70 Rich plate is THE sound of the Lynch Mob/Queensryche tones I love from that era though.

The SPX90 detune isn't as tight or smooth as an Eventide but it's awesome on guitars and keys. An SPX unit is probably the cheapest and easiest way for anyone who wants to dabble with a single rack piece to get some authentic 80's grease in their tone. Valhalla Vintage Verb and the UA224/480 plugins do an awesome job if you want some Lex flavour on your recordings though.

 

[blackie13]

I just got a Sony DPS M7 and I think that its gonna kick the SPX900 out of the rack...

Detune and chorus ensemble (symphonic style) are just amazing...

 

[santiall]

The SPX90 is pretty metallic and grainy compared to the much smoother Lex stuff, but that's not necessarily a bad thing is the SPX early reflections and rooms sound pretty awesome for fattening up crunchy guitars in a mix. The PCM70 Rich plate is THE sound of the Lynch Mob/Queensryche tones I love from that era though.

The SPX90 detune isn't as tight or smooth as an Eventide but it's awesome on guitars and keys. An SPX unit is probably the cheapest and easiest way for anyone who wants to dabble with a single rack piece to get some authentic 80's grease in their tone. Valhalla Vintage Verb and the UA224/480 plugins do an awesome job if you want some Lex flavour on your recordings though.

I have a SPX2000 and what they call Rev-X algorithms are pretty good. I guess someday I'll have to get a PCMxx to compare haha