The Heights

Current Members

Current Members

Guitar - Jerad Acosta
Guitar - Raul Barajas
Drums - Jon O
Vocals - Star

What it is!

This is a place for past and present musical endeavors of mine. Some of these are one off project based samples, others the culmination of months writing and rehearsing, others still have much definition embeded soul searching.

~ Jerad Acosta

Why do I create?

Introducing the unessential

The unnecessary has an interesting place in our lives. Surely we are gluttunous creatures with plenty of excess. Among the hoggish slop of redundance and the encumbering wealth of consumerism is a very specific form of unessential I am calling out here.

A very refined excess that is cultured by nature; culture in-fact is so bound with it, it is defined by and along with this most uneeded of creations. I am carving here a place to examine music, or more broadly, art and why it is we endeavor so tirelessly to create, spend so frivolously to consume, and place such importance on something so not needed, by you or anyone for that matter.

Discovery of the trivial reveals vast subtlety

I can toil for hours over days to work out a musical phrase to be just so. Just so I feel this phrase has actualized. Become itself, ready to take off on its own. Musical creation is a process of discovery for me. I can relate to the paleontologist just as much the scultor when writing my own music.

I have no stadium of academia to broadcast discovery.
No fountain or fair to display my efforts yield.
In each I learn, lost in ignorance.
In any I build, sacrificed to subtle revision.

The significance of an object for which we have no need.
A subject which is all things, construed, about;
one thing, culture, self ensued genius.
And no thing, merely ephemeral cascades of pressure.
In-between eternal stalls of static uniqueness.

thoughts for spare change

So eager and ready are we to define ourselves our times our lives by music. Music which lends itself impervious to definition or omnipotent structure. Music is not one thing or another; it is not one form or style or another; it encompasses all, each round with enough room for explorers to wonder, acheologists to unravel, and sculptors to praise.

So why is it that I take part in the non-sense that is creating more of something we don’t need for no one to consume? I do it in order to take upon myself its shapeless form, timeless age, and infinite permutations and practice godliness as I build with the physical, in time, a causal instance of a reality.

The Perfect Guitar Rig

I have recently decided to build a new guitar rig. This would include effects pedals selected to sculpt my dream tones, a multi-effects pedal for range in areas I had not prioritized or decide later to explore, an amplifier, amplifier models (usually handled by the multi-effects, however, a surge in cheap easy to program audio chip platforms has made amp modeling a very exciting venue of its own), a guitar, and some gear such as a capo, strings, stands and cases.

Before starting I had expected to spend an afternoon to outline what I wanted followed by a few hours of browsing the internet for reviews and pricing. Here I am months into my search for the right rig and I am further from an answer than when I had started off.

Catching up with what is cool

It has been over a decade since I last invested in a suite of musical equipment, let alone anymore than the odd pair of strings or capo. I went through something like this before. In high school it was simple, big amp big guitar. Marshall Fullstack and [Kramer Explorer] [Kramer Explorer], I had the valvestate 100 and a silver metallic Explorer. A few years of not playing went by until I joined my next band [The Correct Sadists] [The Correct Sadists]

In catching up and then keeping up with so many creative and technical innovations going on with effects pedals and amplifier modeling - not to mention the entire digital audio workstation (daw) revolution that has occured on personal computers and even tablets [GarageBand for iOS] [GarageBand for iOS] - I have become enamored with a new landscape and all the possibilities it opens my music playing to. Much of this domain has nothing to do with what I want to play and a vast majority are priced far from my value-to-cost evaluation.

Collect Consume and Carry On

To capture the value of my new knowledge I have committed myself to collecting reviews, prices and writing my own summaries here.

To better design a process for the creation of a new music rig - selection and acquition - I have decides to layout the rhetoric and steps in league with my research as it continues. You could expect learning and exploration, a never ending processes, to very much be inline with the constant state of fluxation a musician’s setup or rig is at all times. Always evolving in style, collecting new gear, tossing old. This fits the paradigm of an anthropological study of contemporary music creation, instruments and their tools.

So here’s to the academics and economics of my affiliation with music creation..

Options, Options are complicated

Exploring possible options created a combinatorics problem with the solution set of

Set of possible solutions for my guitar rig:
S= {(pedal #1),(pedal #2), … ,(pedal #n),(multi effects pedal),(amp modeler [rack, pedal, daw]),(guitar)}

This would look something like:

and while listing out all the possible combinations is far from ideal - inspite of common sense I still managed to collect a lot of possible combinations.

We can take this layout to start our next bit of serious process: naming definitions. Or naming chunks of the set that I either know I want or have a good idea that I will need.

| pedal #1 | pedal #2 | pedal #n | multi effects pedal | amp modeler [rack, pedal, daw] | guitar |
| Fuzz pedal | Modulation pedal | Looper pedal | multi effects pedal (with usb for daw and amp modeling) | amp modeler in multi effects and daw | guitar |
| … | … | … | … | … | … |
| … | … | … | … | … | … |

My first considerations

Some of the sets I created can be seen below:

Starting The Real Process

Now that my notes have caughten up with where things are I can start over again and really do things the right way. By right way I mean using process to create a flow which spits out ideal setups for me to go with. Something that can scale. I want to create my guitar rig and music rig as well as be able to select pieces of my rigs to use in specific scenarios - Open Mic night, band practice, song writing, solo jamming, …

To build a process that does this for us we must tell it what we intend to do with the end result. What am I going to be doing with the rig this process creates for me?

To guide our process I will add limiting factors such as budget that I can afford to spend, size and sophistication of the equipment I intend to get based on this processes.

Define Usage

I feel best in this world when I have just sync’d up with band I am jamming with. My guitar rig should emphasize the band practice and jam aspects. That means no rack gear or overly complicated units. Floor pedals and a robust amplifier capable of producing quality sound at many levels - not just loud nor quiet.

Who Sounds Good

A great way to get started is by getting a couple of your favorite artists, groups, and songs then research the gear used to make those tones and peaces.

Artist - [Jack White] [jw]
- Elliot Smith

Group - Tool
- Radiohead

Song - [For The Damaged Coda] [ftdc] - [Cradles by Sub Urban] [cradles sub urban] - [I’m Gone by Oliver Tree] [im gone oliver tree] - [Cash Machine by Oliver Tree] [cash machine oliver tree]

Who Does IT

Artists that do it for you may not sound how you want to project yourself tonally. This is great. It validates the themes behind your creativity while leaving room for you to interpret the dialogue into a draft of your own tone creative flare and fancy.

Artist - Oliver Tree - [I’m Gone] [im gone oliver tree]
- [Cash Machine] [cash machine oliver tree]
- Sub Urban
- [Cradles by Sub Urban] [cradles sub urban]
- CUCO
- [Lover is a day] [CUCO lover is a day]
- Rex Orange County
- [Corduroy Dreams] [corduroy dreams]

Outline Budget and Size

Just like my rig is ever growing with the addition of new gear and equipment so should my budget. Finding ways to finance this budget would provide excellent metrics for available expenses.

I am going to aim for all my essential pieces to be under $1000 and to have a summary plan for items and time for the next $1000 to $3000.

Budget: $1000

The greatest jam sesh’s have one things in common, The All Took Place!
They can take place any time and nearly any where, often popping up like a good free style - based on where you are at the moment and using what you have available - that means using gear that is easy to travel with and that you will be likely to have on you when that moments notice comes and you find out the neighbor to the pad you are chilling at plays drums and like to mess with odd signatures. Seeing your guitar with you and overhearing Tool playing in the background you are invited over to an impromptu jam sesh. You do not have time to go home or to the studio and grab a special pedal set or amp, and you don’t want to lug around eccentric peaces meant for specific one-off moments.

Size: travels easy and plays a robust repretoir and dynamic range of sounds.

What The Fuzz

With the setup I am expecting - accentuating pedals with neutral amplification - Overdrive and Fuzz will be handled by the pedal board and not the amplifier.

Distortion taken care of

With all the amplifier modelings in the multi effects pedal, we can sit comfortably knowing heavy distortion from the Marshall JCM to the Mesa Rectifiers will be well covered. Additionally, Vox and Orange amplifier models along with the vintage botique tube amps will make for a dynamic selection of overdrive options.