Message Board

You can't do much wrong with a JLM audio preamp, for clean the Baby Animal neutral would be nice - i wanted to look at his site but had trouble to get there. Then the Sound Skulptor MP599 is in a similar vein than the old ISA preamps and have top notch Lundahl transformers and some other nice featur...

I found the Vic Firth headphones rather flimsy when one drummer brought his pair. No wonder they break easily. Tried out the Monoprice headphones because i was curious - don't sound good, not even for the money, cheap plastic, breaking easy. The extreme isolation headphones are so-so, the upper mode...

By the way, here's what i learnt to align mics on amps: have the guitar player plug/unplug. Buzz, crackle, bang. Zoom in on the waveform, move one of the mics, record again, closer, repeat, now they combine nicely. I know many of you know that already but it doesn't hurt for the two people stumbling...

All about making people happy at the end of the day! That's exactly the point, getting how the band perceive themselves (C), hearing where they are (A) and finding a way to bridge A-B-C. If the band is not happy, you didn't get to C. It helps when the band is not too deluded to where their "C" is ;...

surprising to hear people suggest using two amps etc. etc. etc. when it's stated that band wants to sound like themselves Of course it doesn't happen without the band knowing what's going on. I don't use it to re-invent the sound of the band but to translate the sheer force of a show into something...

I have often done bands like this, without guitar overdubs and to get more wall of sound out of a single guitar i split it to two or more amps. One is the original amp, it sounds like the band sounds. One has maybe a bit less distortion, to let the attack of notes and chords through better and the t...

I got a few nice mics and a number of others. For loud/shouted/screaming vocals in dense mixes/rock i prefer to tickle a tube pre into slight compression/overdrive of the creamy variety. That adds some overtones which will help the vocals stay afloat in the mix with distorted guitars and if i add so...

1176, of course. Then the Ocean Way (in reverb mode) does things convincing enough for me, but it's such a CPU hog (i got a dual processor card) i just render the track to stay free of trouble with some of the more hungry other plugins which gave me trouble, even if all of them were way under 90% lo...

I built an iso box for my machine - big enough so the heat has some room, made from sandwiched woodchip to cut down on resonances (a 1.5 inch fixed to a 0.6 inch (or so) board). It didn't even need a fan, because it's big enough. Also heavy. Houses my ancient G4 tower, which sits on another board th...

I built the host and got three of the little things, which were the Cinemag transformer and driver, the "15ips" and the JFET if i get it right. All pretty simple to build, if you already did the occasional pedal or mic pre. Of the three i like the JFET the most, but each their own. It would be nice ...

If it HAS to be synced to a machine and only then you use click. If you do pre-production, let the band play through the song like they feel the song should be and check the bpm for every part of the arrangement and prepare a click track from that, it takes people who like to be in the illusion of c...

I may be crazy, but distance alone is not all there is - i find it easier to have my drumtracks in phase when i have (for example) all mics that point downwards in the same angle, say, all straight down - versus overheads pointed here, tom mics pointed there and so on.

At mixdown i usually have a "smash bus" i automate things into. Tracking with some distortion depends what i want, if it's buttery overtones over a wider dynamic range it will be a tube input somewhere. If it's over a narrower dynamic target, a lot of gear is open for abuse. For a bunch of different...

In Bob Orbans words: "The design started out as the successor to the Orban 642. The improvement was a complex crosscoupled feedback arrangement that allowed reciprocal curves to +/-16dB EQ, yet still allowed an infinite notch. The whole thing required a MAJOR optimization to solve all of the relevan...

There's way too little about stealing candy from kids as a means of keeping the studio lights on in TAPE OP. Please, Larry.