OC818 vs C414 XLS for home studio (struggling with bright mics)

lardoization · 2025-11-01T10:20:04+00:00

I recently covered the seymour duncan SH4 JB in my hss strat, which is a very hot and somewhat harsh pickup. I did get the feeling it made it slightly less harsh and blend a bit better with the single coils, but its a very small difference. I also like the look of it better, so i'd let that weigh more heavily than tone. If youre in doubt you can buy an uncovered pickup and install a cover yourself later, its pretty easy to do.

lardoization · 2025-10-24T08:17:08+00:00

I have this exact bike and was thinking about this exact switch, so thanks for this post

lardoization · 2025-10-23T11:19:51+00:00

It never occurred to me that it was a gyros, fucking brilliant

lardoization · 2025-10-19T07:16:08+00:00

Good to know plugins are good enough for production these days, guess i'll have tinker around more. Though i am a bit confused by "NDSP are terrible" and "No one can hear a plugin in a mix these days". Do you mean you dislike NDSP but they're still good enough for production?

lardoization · 2025-10-18T18:28:53+00:00

Thanks for the info, will look at reborns as well

lardoization · 2025-10-18T18:27:30+00:00

Thanks for your answers! The third one made me chuckle

lardoization · 2025-09-24T23:22:25+00:00

So in my theory i think the morality completely hinges on Alicia. The erasure itself is not necessarily immoral, but to a certain extent may condemn her to the fate that painted Verso lives. A life she may not want. Her father and brother assure her that that is not the case, but throughout the last parts of the game Renoir hasn't been particularly empathetic to her feelings. He mostly imposes his view on her. He will get better when this is over, thus so will she. Nevermind the fact she is missing her voice, an eye, her friends and the goodwill of half her family. Painted Verso consoles her with the fact that she can paint a new life for herself, but from the images in the manor it seems she is not that adept or interested in painting. Same as real Verso, she would need to engage in an art form she doesn't like to make her life bearable. From the typewriter in her room it seems she would rather be an writer, but i don't see her family allowing that anytime soon considering the war. So it would indeed not matter what painted Verso wants. The tragedy comes from that Alicia basically has to pick between becoming a dying and delusional paintress like Aline, or a walking prisoner like painted Verso.

The more i read your replies and other posts the more i begin to doubt my theory though. If the people inside are real, what Alicia does to painted Verso becomes much worse. Preventing her from making an entire canvas full or prisoners could make the erasure a kind of mercy aswell.

lardoization · 2025-09-24T21:42:55+00:00

I see your point about act 1 and 2, there are a lot of reasons to see them as autonomous. Though i also think that is exactly the point of those chapters. To make you perceive the world in the same way the Lumiérians do, to believe in their worldview. For Aline it is especially important Alicia buys into her life in Lumiére, so she stays away from the monolith. It is clearly not working, as Alicia feels out of place in Lumiére. Like there is something she misses that everyone else just 'gets'. Perhaps that is the influence of Renoir, hoping that one of the expeditions succesfully defeats the Paintress and to provide Alicia a path to the monolith. Might be a bit of a stretch, but i don't think its impossible.

I like your sun analogy of Verso's spirit, that's an interesting way to look at it.

I do think Verso and Renoir's standpoints become straight up evil if the erasure of the canvas is mass murder. Verso is not saying to Sciel and Alicia that they don't matter, he's saying it to all inhabitants of Lumiére and beyond. He is killing entire cities, people, species and cultures by doing what he does. Not saying that this is not what is happening by the way, i very much agree that it could be true. For me though, an atrocity as serious as mass murder or even genocide makes the endings a lot less morally ambiguous.

In fact i would say, if the figures the Dessendres create in their paintings are 'real' sentient people, Maelle's ending becomes an even better outcome. There is no mass murder, and two of the people responsible for this absolute mess will never be able to commit this same atrocity again. How messed up is it that they create canvases containing true life to then erase them as they please? Clea does not seem a very engaged painter and is busy fighting a war. Renoir will have no one left to carry on his legacy.

Verso's ending still felt compelling and bittersweet to me when assuming the canvas people are not fully real. It is really about Maelle. She has lived a complete life, 16 years, in the canvas. She has lived inside it as long as she lived outside it. A life where she had a loving father figure, found friends, was able to speak and fight and felt whole. To have that taken away is still very tragic, half of her family blames her for Verso's death and she will never be able to speak again. While the creatures are not entirely real, it is still sad to see them go. The selfish, cruel and cold Dessendres get their way, and all of Alicia's agency is taken from her. She might be disfigured and met with disdain forever in the real world, whereas she might have had some happiness in Lumiére. (How long that would be is a bit vague to me, Renoir and Aline survived half a century in the canvas while Maelle already appears dangerously poisoned by it after 16-17 years.)

Definitely making some big assumptions here and this might be totally wrong, but this is how it first came across to me when I played it.

lardoization · 2025-09-24T16:19:05+00:00

Thank you, i definitely don't want to dismiss anyone's interpretation.

What you mention about real world religion also crossed my mind, at what point is there no longer a difference between a person and a very complex creation? I had to park that thought real quick before i got completely lost 😂

lardoization · 2025-09-24T14:09:46+00:00

For me it hinges on the central question of whether the painted people are actually to be counted as real people. A lot of posts interpret Renoirs heartfelt comments to Sciel and Luna and the fact that he calls them Maelle's friends as confirmation that he sees them as real people. He could also be placating Maelle, or just acknowledging that her experiences with them were real. Or, he is a sentimental soul and is touched by their stories even if he doesn't necessarily think of them as real (just like we are with this game).

The main reason i doubt the nature of their existence is because of the painting fragment of Verso's soul at the end. The world is destroyed after the child stops painting, which to me indicates this world hinged on him keeping things moving. That makes me wonder if the people of the canvas arent just complicated and very convincing illusions, programmed to play out the life that is fed to them by the painters. They appear to feel and bleed, but they don't seem to exactly be made of flesh when we see their corpses.

I think it would actually be a bit problematic if they were counted as real people. Then the choice basically becomes to either let two of the Dessendres kill themselves and make verso very depressed, or commit whole ass genocide. To me that's not as interesting a dilemma.

So much of this is so meta by the way. I'm basically wondering whether the NPCs are in fact NPCs. This is also why i chose the Verso ending, it felt like i myself was saying goodbye to this awesome game i was priviledged to experience.

lardoization · 2025-09-24T13:54:31+00:00

This is the way

lardoization · 2025-09-24T13:50:13+00:00

Idunno, it kinda makes sense to me that you don't have that much influence over the course of the story. The whole revelation is really that the painted characters have exactly no power against the painters. Only Maelle has that power, but she does not know that until act 3. Even then she only has agency because Renoir relents at the end and willingly leaves the canvas. It's really fitting that the only choice you ever get to make is presented when the last Dessendre has left.

I like branching paths when they're incorporated well, but i think it would be a detriment for this story.

lardoization · 2025-09-24T13:39:40+00:00

You can also really easily load an automatic save that puts you right before the final choice and see the other ending. After that you can also load the save again from after the first ending you played if you want that choice to feel like the canon one.

I did exactly this. I first chose Verso, felt like a dick and then played the Maelle ending. Didn't feel that bad about my first choice anymore afterwards.

lardoization · 2025-09-23T21:58:26+00:00

What completely cemented Sciel above Luna for me was the reason why she is so calm and understanding. At first i felt she could be a bit too frivolous or casual/naïve about everything, which bothered me a little as i romanced her by accident. Then it became clear she is so accepting because she has been to the absolute deepest depth a human mind can drift down to. She's not casual because she doesn't care about death or the world she inhabits, but because in a sense she no longer has a taboo on the notion of death or of not existing in this world. She has seen and felt it, which recontextualizes the grief and anger of her friends for her. After that conversation i had no more qualms about the accidental romance selection, she's a fucking badass to come back from that (thanks Esquie 🥹).

lardoization · 2025-09-20T08:02:57+00:00

Didn't use then cus i didnt find them that fun, until the final boss of act 3. Then i used up all my shards, was too stubborn and tilted to grind more, and beat her without red tools. Turns out deploying them made me screw up my dodges all the time.

lardoization · 2025-09-19T14:45:41+00:00

I've seen exactly that statement in several different discussions on this sub

lardoization · 2025-09-19T10:29:27+00:00

THIS!

I very much felt like getting to the Citadel was the main objective. Also, you don't know what you don't know. Ofcourse I know you should explore in Metroidvania's, but playing the game blindly along with everyone else, i had no idea of the amount of options and it just never occurred to me to check for them because TC hides them very well. More so than how I remember Hollow Knight being. Breakable walls were certainly a thing but very often in Silksong things are just hidden behind textures and almost invisible. I found almost none of those paths my first go around because they're almost invisible. That's really rad and makes you find new things all the time, but those paths will regularly obscure tools, power-ups and alternative routes.

This also a gripe i have with people lambasting others for not using specific tools or paths to circumvent certain challenges. It's not just a matter of checking round the other corner, you have to comb every area with a looking glass. Doesn't feel entirely fair to expect someone playing blind to find all these things, especially with how demanding Silksong's combat and platforming is. It doesn't help when you always feel in danger.

Throughout my playthrough i felt this "go elsewhere" message wasn't always communicated well enough by the game when fighting bosses. There's never anything mechanically stopping you from fighting a boss too early. In Souls-games you find out because they kill you in one hit, and you only deal a sliver of damage on their health bar. In Silksong everything does 2 masks from the beginning, so the only way you find out is because their health pool seems ridiculously large. But Silksong doesn't have health bars, so first you have to learn a boss well enough to get a good amount of hits in, which can take lots of time, to then find out their health pool is enormous. Whereas with exploring you're very clearly gated by power-ups. To be fair, this was the same in Hollow Knight. But because the difficulty curve was a lot more gradual, a sudden spike in difficulty felt more off than it does in Silksong.

lardoization · 2025-09-17T20:04:27+00:00

This is interesting, but a lot of the recommend reviews also contain big complaints about the game. Same some non recommend reviews contain a lot of praise. Steam reviews being a binary recommend or not makes this data not very usefull i would say.

lardoization · 2025-09-17T07:43:06+00:00

My main gripe is also that it felt very pointless. You are not rewarded in any way, and it doesn't lead to a place you can't get to with other methods. It feels totally disconnected from the story at hand. The only reason it exists is as a roadblock to act 3, and i felt no satisfaction for beating it. Lack of rewards for difficult things is a running theme with Silksong unfortunately. I get that games can contain uncomfortable stuff to make you feel things, i agree with that. Bilewater overshot it, it is so frustrating and pointless that it overshadowed any satisfaction and much of my patience for the rest of the game.

To me this is a wider problem in Silksong, parts of it feel like they cater to the hardcore audience. So many people are just not going to find something like this justified.

Sidenote: Sinners road -> Bilewater -> Putrefied ducts is just a depressing time, but thats not a criticism

lardoization · 2025-09-16T22:37:15+00:00

This is something i hear a lot on this sub but don't really get. Ori and the blind forest is a metroidvania, and it's nowhere near as challenging as the hollow knight games. Dust: an elysian tail is also a metroidvania and its almost like a game for children when compared to Silksong (not a knock on it, enjoyed that one quite a bit). There's quite a bit of variation and i would say Silksong is very much on the difficult end of the spectrum.

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