Well,

you haven’t seen me for two days, have you?

Certainly you couldn’t care less, I know, and you’re right 🙂

But I was working on this “tune”, if we can call it so (and I don’t know).

Thing is, that last sunday Avid’s Mr. Chris Townsend had gotten in touch with me regarding my use of Eleven Rack. He had seen a couple of my videos (maybe less) and he said he liked them. So he said that they would give me a beta version in advance to the General Availability for the public of the latest update for the Eleven Rack (it’s a pay-for update and they gave me a perfectly working beta for free!).

Eleven Rack is a splendid piece of Hardware and Software – a modeler, they call it – that emulates the whole signal path from guitar to “tape” (hard disk), that is, amplifier, effects, cabinets, microphones and many super cool other functions. We had talked about it a bit when I was using it so much last summer.

Mr. Townsend and his Team just released a much awaited update to the software (firmware) of the machine, that allows for even more things than before, with new amps, effects and… speaker breakup.

See, a very important thing with Marshall – but any other type of driven heads and cabinets – is that its speakers also “break up” (i.e., distort) to the incredible power of its amps. That additional drive/distortion is an important part/component of the final tone that we hear and love on all records.

So they added it. They had to rework the internal algorythms, as it is a very calculus (CPU) intensive operation. So it hadn’t been possible to squeeze it in earlier. They now did it, and Mr. Townsend kindly asked me to test it.

Understand my joy and excitement: speaker breakup is one of my most desireable features to achieve, as I – with an attenuator – rarely can achieve it with my real amps and cabinets. I try and simulate it adding a lot of bass on the amp head (and then taking it away in post equalization) but I don’t know what I really achieve (laughs).

So I did this little thing here. I had a blast. A very intese one, as it took me two days of work to do, but I owed it to them.

Judge for yourself what you think of their “sound”. I used exclusively their model of Plexi 50W (I think it’s a 1987) that I boosted with a compressor in front of it (a modeled compressor, inside Eleven Rack) as I now do with my Marshalls. Cabinet used is a 25w 4×12 and microphone is an U67 off axis. Basically, exactly how I do it for real here.

I love the result. Gave me a chance – because of its ease of use, its immediacy of operation, interface and straight design (always wanted to tell them how I love the design of the Rack, it’s SO intuitive) – to do my thing thowing in this two minutes of rock of mine.

Details will follow (now I need to eat!)