Archive for the ‘Equipment’ Category
Not too minutes ago in the town my friends and I were hounded in the street by people fund raising for the latest tsunami survivors of whoever asking for money, this is never fun. If you twin that with the fact that people like you and me always want something for free, people giving out flyers and postcards are still proving to be a great way to promote upcoming gigs and performances at local bars, festivals, nightclubs, theatres or even shopping malls, things even the mighty interwebs will never be able to do. Having a quick blast around the internet for something that was reasonable in price and convenient for both huge super groups, just-starting-out bans or any buisness at all for that matter. I bumped into nextdayflyers.com.
Next Day Flyers will print promotional/club flyers and marketing postcards in a wide variety of sizes from 1/8 of a page to full page (A4).
Tickets for performances can also be custom printed with the date and time of the concert, this I thought would give any local bands that extra push on other local acts to look that bit more professional. Paper options include a thick durable card stock which can have a glossy or matte finish, that seems to be the most serviceable as a gig poster as well as a 100 lb glossy paper. Your own designs can be customized by a nice easy-to-use user friendly graphic design tool on-site and uploaded directly to the Next Day Flyers site, alternatively there is an option to create your layouts using an array of defult templates in the ‘Online Design Center’. All these little easy to use helpful bits have made nextdayflyers.com RouteNote’s weapon of choice.
The turnaround on printed materials is quick and items can be ready as early as the same day. The website is user friendly, offering helpful tools such as online chat and instructional videos, naturally a customer service representative can also be reached by phone.
Guitar Nation Live 2010 is the UK’s biggest Guitar show and has everything any guitarist or musician could wish for. Top Heavy Metal stars, a fantastic exhibition of the best guitar gear from all the leading Brands and names. Plus exclusive concerts, master-classes for all things music and seminars. The event will boast to be a dedicated guitar exhibition of over 120 stands with the biggest names in the business showing the very latest and coolest gear. There’s a range of activities and events including live bands, free guitar lessons and select places will have competitions and groovy prizes. And doors open at 10 in the morning each day.
Saturday 13th November 2010 10.00am to 6.00pm
Sunday 14th November 2010 10.00am to 5.00pm
Discounted tickets are available to purchase in advance (click here) and are on sale now from www.guitarnationlive.co.uk or the Guitar Nation Live team on 0844 3380338. Please note all tickets are subject to a £2.00 booking fee. With extra ticketing options which include:
Guitar Institute presents Steve Vai (Both Days) £55.00
Live & Learn (Both Days) £20.00
Steve Vai Masterclass (Sunday Only) £155.00
Olympia Conference Centre, Hammersmith Road, London
+44 (0)20 7385 1200
There are a lot of people out there who still think vinyl is a million times better than digital music in terms of sound quality. Martin Skelly believes that digital music is lacking in the tactile satisfaction department. To remedy this egregious problem, Skelly designed the Playlist Player, a delightfully backwards sort of music player.
The Playlist Player looks like a record player but works like an MP3 player. After creating playlists on your computer, you load the lists into the player via a memory stick. Each of the color-coded “records” represents a different playlist. Setting a “record” onto the player activates the playlist associated with that color.
Toontrack, together with partner software developers Overloud, have recently released an interesting-looking plug-in processor.
On the surface EZmix is dressed up to look like a channel strip, one that places all its efforts in creating easy quick results during mixing, rather than spending extra hours fiddling. The idea is that you insert an instance of EZmix into a channel in your DAW, and then select from the presets in the plug-in depending on what type of channel you’re processing (drums, bass, vocals, and so on). The plug-in has just three sliders, which control different parameters depending on the preset you’re using, so a vocal preset might have adjustable delay time, delay mix or compressions for example.
Available to buy now from the Toontrack web site, EZmix comes in VST, AU and RTAS, for both Windows and OS X, at a price of £45 including VAT.
The recording studio downstairs here at RouteNote Towers is only a modest affair, certainly no Abbey Road, but making sure everyone involved in the running of the studio or the scheduling of a project can still get complicated. This web app from Gain Studio aims to arrange your business neatly, and make it remotley accessible, so that multiple members of staff can use it even when they’re not offsite. You can also:
- Book sessions and assign rooms, staff, resources etc to each one, then easily edit them.
- Easily track tasks by assigning jobs, tickets, and to-do lists to staff, setting due dates and priorities.
- Track your equipment and reserve it for sessions.
- View calendars for every room, staff member and piece of equipment, or get an overview of the whole studio in one place.
Of course you can also manage staff calendars etc on Google Calendar or even Outlook, and having all your studio’s co-ordination happen online can be a problem if your internet connection goes down, but this does seem a neat way of collating all the necessary information and making sure everyone’s on the same page. The basic version, for smaller studios (like ours) is free, but if you’re managing a massive organisation with tens of projects and multiple simultaneous recording sessions you’ll need to pay for a premium version (up to $399 a month!). That said, they’re running a month’s free trial at the moment, so you don’t lose anything by taking a look.
If you didn’t win the Little Phatty in the competition we mentioned a while back, and you still haven’t saved up to buy one, then Xhun Audio has released a product they’re calling the LittleOne – a complete software emulation of the Moog synthesiser. The VST is a darn sight cheaper than the hardware at a mere €45, and gives you a version that you can run in the studio or take with you to gigs on your laptop…
Here are the specs:
The Moog Little Phatty Physical Modeling emulation
An all-in-one complete synthesis setup!
Two aliasing-free analog modeled oscillators with continuous selection mode ( like the original ) between Triangle, Saw, Square, Pulse
A 4-Pole Low Pass filter modeled on the classic Moog Ladder, featuring the original frequency responses and overload control
Two 4-Stage ( ADSR ) envelope generators
Modulation LFO with the original waveforms and frequency ranges ( 0.2~500 Hz )
Monophonic/polyphonic mode , pitch bend ranges and more – all accessible from LittleOne LED display
128 ready-to-use presets from classic analog to contemporary cutting-edge dance to psychoacoustic sounds and SFX
XSQ16M, a build-in 16-step MIDI sequencer
GATED!, a build-in 16-step trancegate effect
Two master effects slots with the possibility to choose between delay, reverb, and tube distortion
Full MIDI CC#s mapping (according to the original Little Phatty CC#s specs)
One for all the home producers and mixers out there – if you’ve not burnt through your Christmas bonus yet, you might be interested to learn that audiophile equipment designers CEntrance have released a new USB headphone amp, that they’re calling DACport. For the not-exactly-cheap price of $500, you can get your hands on a tiny, portable USB powered unit that will slip into your pocket or laptop case.
“DACport is an audiophile-quality, stereo 24-bit / 96kHz Digital-to-Analogue converter (DAC) with exceptional jitter management, resulting in extreme clarity and revealing musical detail. Its professional 1/4″ output offers the highest quality headphone connection.”
Key Features:
- Audiophile-grade D/A converter plays 24-bit/96 kHz HD music natively, with bit-for-bit accuracy.
- Headphone amp, designed for hours of listening without fatigue offers clarity, soundstage and detail.
- No drivers needed. Plug ‘n play operation with most laptops, nettops and music servers.
- No power adapter needed. DACport uses USB power and works anywhere you take your laptop.
- Stereo, 1/4-inch headphone jack, perfect for the most advanced headphones on the market.
The USB interface is Windows/Mac/Linux compatible, and draws power straight from the USB, and is very portable for a Class A headphone amp. Sound on Sound have a little feature on it here.
Valleywag have been running a cheeky competition to try and ferret out evidence of the rumoured Apple iTablet – a more or less hypothetical XXL version of the iPod Touch. Far from being just an accessory to your desktop, this is supposed to be more like a halfway house between your iPod/smartphone and a Laptop computer. A portable monitor with a touch screen interface and no keyboard (although it will likely have plenty of connectors to attach peripherals) that will run modestly sized applications and interface with files that have been saved on an online ‘cloud’ like the ones Google and others have recently announced.
Apple haven’t taken kindly to their offering cash prizes of up to $100,000 for photos or demos of the project, and have sent over a stroppy letter demanding that Valleywag take down the competition post. A bad move, as VW have taken this as confirmation of the project’s existence in a ‘the lady doth protest too much’ way. As a consolation prize for what they consider to be a confirmation not conforming to their stated criteria, they’ve sent the lawyer a £25 Zune marketplace voucher. [smileyface.jpg]
The Audio Can has a single mini-jack input to accommodate portable music sources, and several cans can be daisy-chained together for the ultimate in surround technology. Imagine the shopping cart theater! Presently only available form ebay for around $44, you can order the Audio Can with a fashionable gray, yellow, or green label. Why not collect all three?
The Audio Can from designer Dean Brown is not a headphone; it’s an actual can that used to house normal things like cat food. Brown was apparently inspired by the old can and string telephone (a device long known for its excellent fidelity) and he decided to replace the beans with a 9V battery powered amplifier and a top-firing speaker.
Lets hope it doesn’t sound too tinny!
