Back in October 2008 I did a post that estimated the cost of getting all the gear to have a recording rig for your big band. Now, lets take a look at if things have changed. The original post I went with an Alesis HD24 which was $1600 then. Its the same price now. For [Continue]

This summer, Mackie unveiled a new line Onyx-i firewire mixers that you could, with the purchase of a $50 driver, run Pro Tools M-Powered 8 with. You don’t need to own a M-Audio interface. It would just “work”. A lot of people thought Mackie was going to get a taste of Digidesign’s lawyer division in [Continue]

The Apple iPhone/iTouch software market is amazing. Games, tuners (like the great Strobe tuner). Even AutoTune things like I Am T-Pain. Now, there is the Pitch Primer for the platform. It is amazing. Transcription tool? Sure it could be. Amazing practice tool? YES! Amazing idea? YES! It is easiest to see a demo of it. [Continue]

I finally got around to watching some of the things that had been piling up from Netflixs. One of them was Tom Dowd and the Language Of Music. The description is a little misleading: “Rarely do we get a chance to see a feature-length documentary about a true unsung hero. Tom Dowd was an innovative [Continue]

So, I’ve been working on this CD for a big band I play in. I have no idea how much it cost to get the person to record it, multitrack, and a couple of sessions. I’m thinking at least $6,000….if not more. So, say you have ProTools (or something similar) that can handle 30 tracks [Continue]

Don LaFontaine, the man who provided the sonorous voice for more than 5,000 movie trailers, died Monday at age 68. LaFontaine was known as the “king of the movie trailers,” having done the trailer voiceovers for films such as Terminator, Fatal Attraction, Cheaper by the Dozen, Batman Returns and his personal favourite, The Elephant [Continue]

I just picked up a Samson Q1U for a student as a going away present. He wants to do some webcam lessons or something (we’ll see how that goes…….yeah). Anyhow, there are a number of USB microphones out, or adapters for Microphones to USB. The Samson was a well under $100 mic that includes a [Continue]

Finally, a professional mobile solution for recording on an iPod. The Alesis Protrack sounds good… ProTrack provides convenient, direct-to-iPod stereo digital recording to iPod in a portable, handheld form factor. Users can capture live audio anywhere and anytime with their iPod or iPod nano. ProTrack’s smart design integrates the iPod [Continue]

AKG has a new mic out, the AKG C214. From the press release: Based on one of the most successful studio mics released by AKG, the C 414 model, and using all the feedback that during 30 years they have received from its users (maybe they could release a new version earlier, but…), AKG has [Continue]

The SOS Forums had this interesting thread about a bloke who can turn his guest room into a studio in about 10 minutes. My studio set up consists of a control room/office which is unusual in that it has no parallel surfaces, even a sloping roof. This room is loosely triangular being a maximum of [Continue]

As frequent readers of Jazz-Sax.Com will know, I won a pretty awesome M-Audio package. I really did not have the “horse power” to use it until my G4 PowerMac decided to die. Followed by my G4 Cube (though that was probably more me messing around with it than it just dying on it’s own accord. [Continue]

Gearjunkies.com has opened a neat new little site called Gearjunkies UserStudios. Here, people can flaunt their pro, semi-pro, project, or home studios. Though, right now, it seems that a lot of info is left out such as microphones, computers used, etc. But it was just launched, so, hopefully, that will be coming soon. [Continue]

I came across this article from Hometracked.com. Pitch correction software has applications from restoration and mix-rescue to outright distortion of a voice or instrument. I’ll discuss some of the more tasteful uses of these auto-tune tools (whether the original from Antares, or a variant like the free GSnap) below. But first I thought [Continue]

I got into recording a while ago, my first interface being an original MOTU 828. That thing works great. However, it is not supported in ProTools, and I kind of want to start using ProTools more. Plus, I want to move it to my home studio to hopefully make it easier to record virtual tracks [Continue]

The NAMM show kicked off the other day. So far, I haven’t seen anything that pops out “Whoa, that’s neat” to me. Some interesting things are: New line of AKG Headphones. I use AKG headphones, and they are excellent. Tascam DR-1 Portable Recorder, Yamaha Pocketrak 2G, and Marantz Digital Performer 6 Lots of recording devices [Continue]