music ala mesothelioma

Got a piano from some crazy guy off of craigs list. It's a kohler & campbell upright, smallish. So having a piano tuner come out this week - it's pretty flat, but seems like a decent instrument, good for the kids and some recording and messing around. Going to pay close attention to the tuner guy, see if it's something I can handle myself in the future. Excited about that. Came with a bench but it's a couple inches short, it seems, so I'm looking around for a cool adjustable piano bench that doesn't look bad.
Picked up an amazing book called Recording The Beatles from curvebender publishing. Goes through the whol emi studios (abbey road) personnel, all the mixing boards, tape machines, microphones, amps, outboard gear - anything that remotely had a chance to touch the signal the Beatles recorded with thoroughly. And the also it goes into many of the sessions, showing the order of track recording and then bounce paths, special techniques. Lots of fun. One piece of gear that gets talked about quite a bit is the fairchild 660 compressor - picked up a plugin for pro tools that emulates it an have been trying to learn how to use it.
Let's see what else - the Crate Palomino V16 has been fun - been on quite a journey with tubes - tried different 12ax7 combinations, including some telefunken tubes that I have in the Art preamp, but then settled on some jj's. That sounds great, good character, but was still having a hard time with clean sound versatility, so stuck a 12ay7 in the v2 position, and feel good about it - it was too clean in the v1 position - not enough gain, but feel like it's got quite a versatile sweep across the gain now.
Went to the Dallas guitar show, found out my Martin is definitely a 00-18, and probably a 1964 model. Loves it. Oh, also picked up a korg kp2 for cheap, haven't messed with it much, but am psyched about midi-ing it up with the kp3 and getting some shtuff goin' on. The Blue Bottle Rocket mic is great, supposed to get the B6 capsule back from them this week, so curious to see if I can get that c12 sound with micing the bass that Geoff Emerick used on sir Paul. Speaking of the Beatles, have gottent turned on to the mono mix of sgt. peppers - wow alot different, still looking for some better fidelity, but the whole UK/US mono/stereo thing turns out to be pretty significant in mix differences!
Peace out for now......

My project studio

So, I've had a digidesign digi 002 rack for a while and for a couple years rarely did much more than set up little 2 or 4 bar grooves in pro tools and mess around with solos on bass or guitar for a half hour when I felt like playing and then forget about it.

Recently I've decided to actually learn this stuff and have been doing some composition inside pro tools. Wow there sure is alot here - playlists alone are really cool, but then learning how to utilize bussing, understanding compression & eq, etc.. So now I'm using pro tools 8, and have upgraded it with the music production toolkit 2, which gives you a higher track voice count and some nifty plug ins and instruments.

And I've gotten some cool gear to augment the rig - mics now include a Rode NT1-A Condenser , a pair of Rode NT5 Condensers, a Sennheiser e609, AKG C 3000 B Condenser, and am waiting for a Blue Bottle Rocket Stage 1 with Bottle Cap B6 capsule, as well as the requisite Shure SM57 and a Sennheiser MD421 (on loan).

What kind of fired me up was getting a new pair of monitors - Yamaha HS 80M's, which are lovely. My desk is pretty close to the wall, so I have the room control on these set to -2db which kind of pulls the bass back a tad and have also installed a bunch of Auralex along the wall behind the desk, as well as setting the monitors on Aurelex monitor wedges - the monitors sit about a foot from the wall.

I got an ART Digital MPA preamp (the mpa gold with adat lightpipe and s/pdif outputs) which I replaced the the tubes in, which are now Telefunken 12AX7/ECC83 - sounds nice, am still figuring it out.

Picked up a Lexicon MX400 signal processor, which is cool, and I need to give more attention to.

To tie stuff together I got a patch bay - Behringer Ultrapatch Pro, and a Mackie Big Knob, whose coolest feature is that big knob. Still have a Behringer Xenyx 1622FX, which has served me well and taught me alot about signal flow/routing, but am feeling that I should move on from if I want to get better sonic quality.

Besides the Blue mic (which I hope arrives today), am also waiting for a Crate Palomino V16 guitar amp. It is psychologically strange to me to be looking forward to getting a Crate amp, but this little tube amp sounds great and is the perfect size for a home project studio. It will make the Fender Stratocaster I picked up yesterday sound swell, I'm sure.

So, may as well describe run down the rest of my equipment then. Fan of the Korg Kaoss Pad stuff - have a KP3, Kaossilator and mini-KP. They are zany and fun. Alesis SR18 drum machine (yay batteries and better cymbal sounds) which replaced an SR16. Midi controller is an M-Audio Axiom 49, which is just connected by USB to my iMac.

Basswise, I'm mainly playing a pretty frankensteined Mexi-Jazz bass (badass bridge, emg's drop-D tuner) and have a fender precision special (p/j) I put some dimarzios in and swapped the jazz neck for a precision. This goes through my Mark Bass 102p combo, which is an amazing amp, favorite I've ever owned. Also in my chain is an electro-harmonix q-tron+ and an akai e2 headrush - that's just at home set up in the studio/office though - gigging or jamming I just go into a boss chromatic tuner (TU-2) and straight into the amp.

Other nifty doodads include a Zoom H4 handy recorder, a SansAmp Bass Driver DI, a Stylophone ($20!) and a Walter Woods bass amp that is collecting dust and I really should give some TLC.

So in broad strokes, that's what I'm working with now, enough stuff to keep me from getting bored up in here, for sure.

So I'll talk about this stuff individually by and by, but for now peace I'm out....

Hello World

*tap*tap*tap*

Hello, mr. monitor man- hey, a little more bass and could you please lose the reverb. Thanks.

Hi everyone, gonna jump into this vat of blog with you. Feel like talking about music & music gear, messing around with the yard, dental woes literature or whatever else? Drop by once in a while, got plenty of dp and the filtered tap is in the fridge, set your drinks on that table over there, please.