My buddy Matt and I are planning on attending what should be a killer night of Metal on February 3rd. That night has on tap In Flames, Trivium and Devil Driver.
Devil Driver is a very cool metal band with on of the most unique sounding singers in the metal world…
My pal Matt is at the NAMM show and sends me this email and picture:
OK, so I'm talking to this hardcore-looking guy at the Steinberg booth today. We're talking about how cool Cubase is when he mentions he plays in a band called, "Devil Driver". I shit my pants, and then told him that we were planning to come see the show in SLC on the 3rd of February. He shit his pants right after I pulled my phone off my hip and showed him that I had "Devil Driver" written into my Feb. 3rd schedule. He said he'd get us tickets. Then he said that when he's done with this tour, they're going out with Opeth. He gave me his phone number and said anytime he's in town, he'd be happy to get us tickets.
I love this job!
Matt
mediaguru Gigs, Musicians
Last weekend I had the pleasure of recording an amazing conert pianist. This lady is a stroke doctor during the day and a pianist on the side. She’s so serious about piano that she flies to New York and even to Paris to take lessons.
The setup
The hall is a great smaller venue which seats about 200 very comfortably. There isn’t a bad seat in the house and the atmosphere is great.
It’s quite simple, a Steinway in the middle of the stage.
There are may different ways to record a gig like this. If you want more of the “live” sound you could to an XY stereo mic configuration in front of the piano or even in front of the stage to get more of the ambience and the audience. I chose a more close micing approach because we were more concerned with the quality of the piano sound than the audience.
I used two Audio Technica 4050 large diaphragm condenser mics for a stereo image. I placed one over the low end strings and one over the high end. The concept is they’d share the center range and the left and right would be low and high tones respectively. I didn’t worry about a perfect 90 degree angle XY because they were far enough apart and so close to the source.
Since the recording was only two channels I was able to bring a nice small setup. I used an M-Audio USB Duo as my preamp. The Duo just hooks into the USB on my 17″ Apple Powerbook. My recording software of choice is Cubase SX.
My Cubase capture settings were 32 bit recording at 44,100 sampling rate.
Backup Backup
The small silver device to the right of my rig picture is a minidisc recorder. Whenever I do gigs like this where it’s live and you only get one shot at the recording, I run a 2nd capture device. If the laptop crashes or there’s a problem with the capture, I have a backup on the minidisc. The MD would certainly not be as high quality, but I’d have something.
The result
The performer was awesome and my rig captured her perfectly. I didn’t even get a sound check but my guess on her levels was perfect. I didn’t even adjust my input gain at all. The very peak of her volume level was 1 or 2 dB below peak.
mediaguru Gear, Recording
If you’re having an affair make sure you know who’s watching. In this article, a guy busts his live-in girl friend for having sex with someone else because his parrot “Ziggy” was reapeating the girlfriend’s voice…
mediaguru Random
Check out this search engine. Very cool:
http://www.snap.com
mediaguru Random
A good friend notified me that since the switch to the new format the comments weren’t turned on. So now they are.
Here’s the deal with commenting here. You have to register an account. That may sound like a pain in the ass at first but it is really great. You only do it once and you don’t have to input anything ever again unless you’re not logged in. This in my opinion is better than requiring commenters to type in those graphical spam verification codes and getting them wrong two or three times…
mediaguru Random
Apple has announced the first of their laptops that have intel chips called “MacBooks.” These are about 4x faster than the old ones. Good thing I just bought one about 4 months ago.
For probably the first time ever, I bet Apple’s laptops are faster than their desktops.
Better dump your old powerbooks on ebay fast.
And how dumb sounding is “macbook?”
mediaguru Gear
I’ve finally finished categorizing all the posts. That took a while. But now you can click on the category “boneheads” and be sure to get some entertaining material.
In categorizing I found some old posts that have several stories inside of each post. I may take those and split them into seperate new posts down the road.
mediaguru Random
My inside views here are those of a rock & roll drummer and studio engineer.
Stop over to Goerge Sessum’s blog Musick to see the insider view of a jazz bass player.
Check out some of his music samples. This dude can play.
mediaguru Musicians
Hello fellow musicians and friends! It has been since September 2005 that the Pro Sound Blog Forum has been running. A hacker brought the site down completely. I had the same thing happen to two other forums I ran on the same forum software. One forum was quite large and I HAD to figure out how to recover it.
Long story short, I’ve recovered all the users and posts and installed a different forum software that is less “popular” and hopefully less prone to hacking. The only items missing are most likely attached image files and avatars so you’ll need to reload them. Other than that all is working! I’ll be working to make the “look” into something better down the road.
This board was never the biggest on the web, but it was a great spot for some very talented and smart musicians to talk about their trade. So I invite you to come back to the forum and let’s get this board rolling again!
The forum is now in a new web location: http://forum.prosoundblog.com
mediaguru Gear, Gigs, Musicians, Random, Recording
I’ve now gotten rid of all the forum software on all my sites that runs on phpbb. I’m sick of them being hacked. I’ve got a new forum engine, and I can get a large portion of the Pro Sound Blog Forum back. I just might do it for the hell of it. Stay tuned.
mediaguru Random
