my suggestion

I'm for it too. We've been discussing about those topics, but never in a way Danbo here proposes. The threads may be scattered all over the forums though!

James Lee wrote: I  Reverend Rocco with stock (discontinued original) humbuckers,

Great job James. I've been searching for the tab.... Grrrr!

Do you have a photo of your Rocco? I searched the Reverend web-site and got a serious case of the drools. You nailed that Fripp tone.

Tell us about the mellotron backing track. The drum sound was okay.

Mmm - a guitar gallery!

Haven't got these online yet, but my little guitar collection comprises;

1) Tatra classical guitar (nylon strings) that I bought brand new in 1976 for £20

2) Satellite Fender Precision copy, sunburst, complete with both hoods. Looks good, never could get the thing in tune...

3) Westone Thunder 1A, black. I LOVE this guitar!!! Holds its tune perfectly, has the perfect neck width - slightly wider than a strat, but narrower than a Les Paul, incredibly low action (OK, I tweaked it...) and the active circuitry - my favourite part of which is the coil splitter, which renders the twin humbuckers into single coils. The range of different sounds I can get out of this guitar means that I've never really lusted after anything else.

4) Ovation acoustic (can't remember model number...).

5) Yamaha classical guitar (don't know too much about this one, as I rarely get it out of its case. I inherited it...).

6) Fender Katana bass. My main axe. A metalheadz dream - out Rickys a Ricky, soudwise. Looks like a flying V with one of the wings cut off, or a Randy Rhodes style Jackson. They've got a cult following...

http://www.strat-central.com/katana.htm

FAO James Lee - Regarding mellotron sounds - your using sonar, so just go for G-Media's super M-Tron vst instrument. If you're using sonar 3.0 you can host the m-tron and as far as I know they now do a standalone version anyway. It rocks!!! and their are three or four tape banks available. It's cheap too - abhout £30 sterling.

Also check out their ImpOscar version of the old Oscar synth from the early 80s. It's astounding!! Though Native Instruments' Pro-53 is similarly fab

I'm currently working with a bunch of stuff. Pentium 4 3ghz, 1gig ram, cubase sx, monitored through a roland vs2840 and alesis active monitors

native instruments b4 (hammond), g-media imposcar, a great rhodes sample in reason and some cheesy string synth downloads, a roland jv1010 with vintage keys card for keyboards

garritan personal orchestra for strings overload

guitars: fender tele, a bunch of honher strat copies (which kick ass) and epiphone g1275 double neck 6 &12, a vintage amg1 resonator, a tanglewood 12 string acoustic, a yamaha fg365se elecrto-acoustic 6 string and a yamaha sa245 classical and cimar and hohner basses

too many toys - not enough techno- savvy, hence zero productivity - DOH!

anyone looking for advice help suggestions and free downloads of vast instruments effects etc should check out kvr-vst.com it is a fantastic resource. Also the people at betamonkeymusic.com have the best rock drum samples I've heard and they're cheap and Chris is a nice guy. They're also soon to bring out some weird timing samples specifically for prog.

Hope this is of help

What you need is Acid

Sonar is good for final tweaks and mixdowns, but Acid is better by far for multitrack recording, and I use Magix (horrible name, but dirt cheap and a very useful tool) for when I need to do loads of cut/copy paste operations, because Acid can be a pain.

Hmmm a DAW debate. Cubase v Sonar v Reason v etc etc

Reason - great for some sequencing and drum editing etc as a Rewire but crucially no audio!! But i love its reverb, it's cool

as for the rest, i like drum programming in fruity loops for some bizarre reason but wouldn't bother with it for anything else. Cubase SX I'm using but it lile all the other major DAWs is complicated and i'm thick soooo...

I'll either entrust all the engineering end to my much more techno-friendly mate or else for quick and dirty recording (and i can't recommend this highly enough) I'll go with Traktion. It's cheap, incredibly cheerful, has the best workflow you can find and supports pretty much everything (rewire, vsts etc) It also has a freeze function, which took most of the big budget DAWs ages to incorporate.

I guarantee you will have a track up and running in Tracktion in 10 minutes.

All this for 80 odd bucks! Can't go wrong. It's the computer equivalent of having a tape deck and a tandy mic.

Check it out at http://www.mackie.com/products/tracktion/ and www.tracktionfaction.com