Pro Sound Blog

Here’s a blog post about a cool waterproof case made by OtterBox. These are great for storing professional audio or video or small high tech items.

An audio engineer could fit several microphones, digital recorders or other stuff in this case to protect them from dust or moisture.

Wow I guess the millions of hits on my kit take their toll. I was setting up for a gig a couple of nights ago and my ride cymbal was a little off alignment. I grabbed it to adjust the boom arm and the boom arm snapped in two! This is a piece of steel which is 1/2″ thick! I barely grabbed it too. I suppose a couple of decades of pounding on the thing weakened the steel or something. Maybe it was frozen but still that’s wild.

Apple just announced the latest rendition of the Mac Pro. For fun, I build the most bad-ass, expanded, upgraded version I could on the Apple web site.

Total Cost: $27,340.90

I was at the guitar store yesterday when I saw this bass hanging in the repair shop. It’s made out of legos. HOW COOL!

Today I was a drummer, not a sound guy, computer geek or whatever. I was a drummer. It felt good too…

Now that I’m back in the gig rotation somewhat it was time to make a trip to the local drum shop. This shop is run by two long time pals. What’s cool about this place is….well, it’s a drum shop. They don’t sell guitars or PA systems. They sell drums.

I had a wonderful Ludwig brass snare drum from 1962 or so in my gig kit for close to 20 years. I bought the thing for $15 from a guy who didn’t want it anymore and didn’t know what he had.

That Ludwig snare was the loudest, sweetest, most responsive drum ever. I could play licks on that thing I’d never be able to pull off with other snares. Unfortunately that drum, my Top New Beat HH cymbals and the snare case were ripped off about a year ago. I would have gladly given up my entire drum kit rather than losing that snare.

I’ve been playing gigs with my other $15 early 60’s Ludwig snare but this one was made of steel and not brass (though they both look exactly the same with a chrome finish). This one is about 20 pounds lighter than my old one. It sounds great but isn’t “magic” like my old brass one was.

So today I decided I’d find a replacement for that old lost snare. My first thought was a Ludwig Black Beauty. The Black Beauty is the exact same drum as the one I lost, only it’s black instead of chrome. Ludwig is still making them amazingly. I tried the 2006 model, along with about 6 other snares today. I tried a copper Ludwig snare from the early 70’s which I could have picked up for around $100. It didn’t “sing” the way I wanted. I also tried a few other metal Ludwigs, Gretsch’s etc. My final decision was between a 5″ solid copper Copper Shell Collector Series by DW and that 2006 Black Beauty.

I put them both on a kit and bashed them like I normally would at a gig. BASHED them. Both drums sounded amazing. Neither sounded like my old brass baby but they sounded amazing in their own different ways. I finally ended up deciding to pick up the DW. It is a beauty. It weighs about 300 pounds. Sean, my sales guy & buddy said this one would be a little more durable on the road and it was about $100 less than the BB was.

I also picked up a new gig bag for the DW since my old snare GB was ripped off as well. Threw in new heads for the whole gig kit and oh, I had to pay for the sticks I demo’d with since I beat ‘em up pretty bad.

Gig tomorrow night. First time with the new solid copper snare. A report will follow (hopefully with many women flashing the band…hot women this time though).

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.

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?”

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

Since my switch from the dreaded blogger lame ass blogging software to Wordpress I’m now able to take advantage of some new features here.

I’m now working on categorizing all the posts. I have 8 categories currently:

Boneheads: A category dedicated to stupid people and the things they do.
Gear: Recording gear, musicial instruments, computers or any gear I deal with.
Gigs: Stories about my gigs or other peoples gigs.
Random: A blanket category when nothing else works.
Rants: When shit pisses me off I use this category.
Recording: Recording studio war stories, recording techniques etc.
Uncategorized: Means I have yet to decide what category to put the post in.

Now some posts may have multiple categories. For example: A dumbass musician jumps on my stage and plays my drums. He’s drunk and he breaks my snare head and won’t get away from my kit. That post alone could be a combined boneheads, gear, gigs, musicians and rants. I can already see that the boneheads and musicians categories will be selected together many times.

I’m about 25% of the way through categorizing the old posts so be patient.