Soup von jephjacques

How old is Dr. Case meant to be? Given the grey hair she’d appear to be at least middle-aged but you didn’t give her any wrinkles like you did for Marten’s parents et al. Does the stress of working with Hannelore’s father just make people prematurely grey?

She’s in her 40s, I think, she just went grey earlyish. I am 31 and already getting grey hairs :

Sometimes my dog lets out a loud fart and she immediately looks at her butt and sniffs at it like she doesn’t know what happened. Does Shelby ever do this, or is she smart enough to know what farting is?

Nah, Shelby is nonchalant about even her noisiest toots.

So is it safe to assume Hannerlore considers Marten and Marigold her best friends?

Yep!

“Watching other people play video games on the Internet…” By which you mean just playthroughs or Let’s Plays? (Or TASes…)

Let’s Plays.

I’ve never been much of a metal fan, but “Meade’s Army” has me really interested in hearing more instrumental metal. I think it’s the screaming ‘vocals’ I’ve not liked before but I really enjoy the instrumental stuff you do. Any recommendations of other artists to try out that are instrumental-only?

Isis (has some vocals), Pelican, Russian Circles

how do you feel about the bonercat tumblr?

best tumblr

Hey Jeph, here’s a personal question for you: I know you battle with depression currently, and that you’re on meds. They they SSRIs, or TCAs? Have you tried different meds before settling on Celexa? What were the effects that made you switch off? Second, have you ever considered ECT? If not, what dissuaded/contraindicated it? If you have tried it, how did it go? If it’s too personal of a question, I understand, but I’m a medical student, and I’d love to get some first hand feedback.

SSRIs, I’ve been on Prozac too but it messed with my head too much. Lowered my inhibitions in a bad way. Never done ECT, Celexa has worked well for me thus far.

It just struck me how Hannelore and her dad didn’t hug when they saw each other, even though it’s probably been years since she’s been back. Is it the OCD? Okay, sorry. Stupid question. It just really impacted me, almost as much as seeing her in her empty room. No physical contact! ahhhhhhhhhh!

Her dad knows how she feels about physical contact. Also, I don’t imagine he’s much of a toucher himself.

What are some upcoming conventions you’ll be at for people on the east coast to meet you?

Topatoco open house, ECCC, TCAF, VanCAF, C2E2, Calgary Expo, SDCC, SPX…I’ll put up a proper list this year for a change.

every time I listen to your music its better than the last time I listened to it, which usually goes the other way around with musicians, how do you do it?

I dunno, I just write the songs as they come to me, and try not to repeat myself too much.

I noticed that your Tumblr page is set up through your own domain name. I’ve been looking into setting up my own blog that way, and I wanted to ask how you set up your own. Did you buy the domain name from another site, and if so how much does it cost?

I bought my domain name through Hover.com and then changed its nameservers to point to Tumblr’s. It’s pretty easy. I pay like $12/year.

Spaceship owns shares in ECT, which is awesome, and totally in keeping with your in-universe “equal rights for AIs” attitude. Do you think AI ownership of shares has ever been used as a loophole by devious businessmen?

I’m sure it’s been tried, but I imagine it’s as tightly-regulated as anything else involving shares etc.

So I recently started a blog (an actual blog, not a tumblr), and was wondering how you determine how many readers you have? Do you just look at pageviews each day? Although that would obviously be correlated with number of readers, it’s not going to be exactly equal to your number of readers. So is there some better way to tell, or is pageviews all you can really use?

I generally just go by my Project Wonderful stats on pageviews etc. There’s no way to tell exactly how many actual people visit a given site, you just have to go on pageviews/unique IP addresses, etc.

Dude Meade’s Army is brutal.

Thanks! m/

Who is the legal owner of Momo’s chassis?

Momo. Marigold purchased it, but if an AI inhabits a chassis of any kind, that chassis is legally considered to be part of their person.

you sir, are intimidating looking

I know :. The piercings probably aren’t helping, either.

What is the best type/brand of pipe tobacco?

My current favorite is Lane Limited 1Q. But smoking is bad and you shouldn’t do it.

I read on Girls With Slingshots that you’re going to be at C2E2 in April. Is it true? If so, I can’t wait to meet you. I’ll try not to a total fanboy. No promises. lol

Yup! It will be a Party.

Can I just nerd out for a moment and tell you that, as a girl who genuinely likes Yaoi both for, ehm, personal enjoyment, as well as the sheer what the fuck that Japan can crank out - I adore that you’re a straight man who can make light of it and see the funny side without being all ‘ew ugh’ about it. Every yaoi joke you make, ESPECIALLY THE ONE ABOUT THE BLAZER, TIE, AND NO SHIRT, is so TRUE that it’s impossible not to laugh. RESPECT.

How could anybody not think yaoi is hilarious

I notice you RARELY do filler, which is something I admire (and, quite frankly, kind of amazes me). How do you manage it? Does it come from a sense of responsibility? Do you get a bunch of hatemail from crazies on the occasions you’re forced to put in filler?

It’s my job, so I would feel really guilty about taking any days off if I didn’t absolutely have to. It would probably negatively affect my traffic, too! I don’t generally get complaints when I do, which is nice.

what is your favorite background object to draw in QC?

hate drawing backgrounds so much

Hey, where can I download your albums and can I use a Laser card?

Deathmole.bandcamp.com

Hey Jeph. I’m a writer, and my writing has a bigger following than I expected it ever would. Lately it seems that nobody ever has anything positive to say; I can’t tell if I’m just a bad writer or if people are nitpicking, and it’s really getting me down. I find myself constantly wondering, as I write, if it’s good enough for them, and it never is. How do you deal with that? (If you answer this, please don’t put my name on it. :( )

If you’re happy with what you’re doing, that has to be good enough. If you only write to please other people, you’ll never be happy. It can be hard to ignore the haters sometimes, but it goes with the territory and you’ve just gotta let it go.

Are the security personnel on the station Navy, Air Force, some sort of UN security force, or private security?

USAF. I thought about making a seperate, fictional “space branch” of the armed forces but then I’d have to make up new uniforms and I am lazy.

“How do you get that guitar tone?” is a question I get asked pretty often. So I thought it would be fun to do a quick walkthrough of my recording setup and the way I build guitar parts. We’ll be dealing entirely with high-gain metal-guitar distortion here, but a lot of the principles I use work equally well with other tones.

First, the gear: I use a Fractal Audio Systems Axe-FX ultra, a super-fancy amp modeling guitar preamp. In the past I used a Line 6 POD, and got great results with that as well (every guitarist should own a POD, they’re the single best piece of gear you can buy for under $1000, no exaggeration).

The Axe-FX is hooked up to a PreSonus Firebox preamp/recording interface, which plugs into my computer. I record everything in Apple’s Logic Pro, but there are plenty of other good options for digital audio recording, like Garageband or Cubase or Ableton Live or ProTools.

As for guitars, I own way too many. For this exercise, we’ll be using my Gibson Les Paul standard. If you’re looking to get a good metal tone, humbucking pickups are absolutely required, so the Les Paul is a good choice.

You’ll notice I mentioned nothing about amplifiers or mics. That’s because I get exactly the sound I want, entirely digitally. Living in the future is great.

Anyway, that’s the basic setup. On to the tone tweaking!

The first step is finding a couple guitar tones you like. Now, there’s all sorts of different opinions on how to get A Good Guitar Tone, and everybody’s ears are different, so it’s a very subjective thing. Personally, I like to crank up the gain, turn the mids down (but not completely off!) and turn up the bass and treble.

On the Axe-FX, I generally use the “Das Metal” amp model with a 4x12 V30 speaker cabinet and the R121 mic model (protip: put a TS808 drive pedal before the amp in the signal chain and mess around with its settings.) Back when I used a Line 6 POD, I really liked the JCM800 and “Line 6 Insane” models.

I use two different guitar tones when I’m building a distorted sound. I find that using mixing different sounds gives you a fuller, richer final result. You can also use less gain on each sound, which will make the final mix sound clearer and tighter (I don’t ever actually use less gain, though).

The first sound has more bass and midrange, and lower highs:

Tone 1

The second sound has less midrange, and more top-end:

Tone 2

I use at least three different tracks for my basic rhythm tone- one panned left, one panned right, and one in the center. The center track is “Tone 1” and the left and right tracks are both “Tone 2.” Multitracking like this gives you a nice, full sound. Like this:

Left, Right, Center

You can add more guitar tracks if you want, as long as it doesn’t start to sound muddy. Sometimes I’ll add another track on the left and right to fill things out even more. I’ve also added drums to give you some idea of the final sound:

2x Left, 2x Right, 1x Center, drumz

Sounds pretty good! But I’m not done yet. Through years of fucking around with effects, first in GarageBand and now in Logic, I’ve found that adding some global compression to the final mix really pumps everything up and makes it sound huge. This might be recording-professional heresy or whatever, but it sounds good to me. I use the “Multipressor” effect in Logic to boost the bass and high frequencies and cut the mids a little bit more. The final result is a typical Deathmøle kind of sound:

Final Mix

So that’s the basics of how I do distorted guitars! From here, the sky’s the limit- I often have three to six more guitar tracks playing different things on top of the rhythm stuff. Hopefully this little guide has provided you with some inspiration for recording your own stuff!