Greg Mein
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Posts posted by Greg Mein
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I'm down to using just two interfaces.
On my older MBP (the last 17" that I've mentioned I cling on to because of the UAD expresscard) there is the original Presonus StudioLive 1642 interface. The big plans I had for that have yet to materialize for various reasons however the unit also sees frequent use as just an ordinary mixer around here.
On my newer MBP (2013 model I believe) I use the MOTU 828x thunderbolt unit. Obviously it integrates well with Digital Performer and is a lightweight single space unit that I'll be hauling along when I get some more backing tracks completed.
Otherwise I still have an old Presonus FP10 unit that used to be attached to my desktop Dell XPS i5, I think one of the win10 updates may have rendered it useless but I held onto it because at one point I thought I might be using it for a preamp (it has 8 XLR amped inputs which I believe is rather rare among interfaces in this class). Also in the closet somewhere is the Line 6 KB37 unit. I always liked it and have kept it but it just never seemed to be very handy to use unless you really have need for the keyboard part which I rarely did.
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I have more than about 30 linear feet of shelves filled with old magazines relating to audio and music - Mix, EQ, Electronic Musician, Sound on Sound, dB, R/EP, Recording, Resolution, AES Journal, Pro Audio Review, Audio Media, even a few issues of Device and Polyphony and house mags like the Roland and Korg User Group publications. I really need to get rid of them even though it's fun to read what was hot 40 or 50 years ago. I've been pulling small handfuls at random, putting them in the porcelain-seated reading rooms and thumbing through them in the hope that I'll get inspired to try something old, build something old, or write a new article about something old. I think that by the time I'm about 125 years old, I should be through most of them.
Anybody want some? Free for Media Mail postage.
A couple years ago I had to figure out what to do with 25 years worth of guitar and keyboard magazines. I found a place called One Dollar Scan (1dollarscan.com) based in San Jose. I started with the $15 a month plan but later pumped it up to the $100 a month plan to get it done. They scanned all those magazines into PDF files and discarded the original mags. Now I have a valuable collection that fits on a thumb drive, is easily searchable and will suffer no more rot or decay. It costs a bit of money but for me it was totally worth it.
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I think you came to the right place, I haven't built one but I'm looking at page 127 now.
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There's no vacation for me, the avionics company where I work as a tech marches on albeit with some company initiated safety measures and options. My wife, who does geriatric psychiatry, was already doing "tele-psych" from home two day a week with nursing home patients and is now doing more of her work from home as well. The gig we had scheduled for Saturday night has been cancelled of course but that only affects our own preconceived notion of a "gear and travel fund".
Bars and restaurants are likely suffering the most and we're trying our little bit to help by making carry out orders for our dinners. We have some neighbors that own a fancy restaurant downtown and they are getting hit hard.
I'll spend a lot of my free time continuing to work on my backing tracks, perhaps by the time we gig again I'll have enough done to justify taking that gear along.
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An interesting anecdote just occurred to me, thinking back to the time when mp3.com was the rage, back in the mid to late '90s. I was doing a lot of recording with Sonar then and I sent a disc to a regional college radio station who played a cut from it (I was told but never heard it myself). The song was sitting on mp3.com and suddenly one day I noticed plays had shot through the roof! It leveled off at number 6 or 7 on the instrumental chart nationwide in the USA and stayed in the top 20 there for a week.
The thing about it is that I couldn't really find a drum beat I liked for it and finally eschewed all other avenues and just put the beat in myself with the keyboard. I thought I did a pretty crappy job but there I was with the biggest original music success story I'd ever had.
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I agree with this, but who is buying if no one is generating any income?
My wife needs a better quality mandolin.
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I'm a want to look at it from two different schools of thought; 1. background tracks for my duo and 2. my own song creations.
Currently I'm trying to build some backing tracks for covers gigs so I want to emulate that which already exists and is widely known while at the same time keeping it in a support role behind my wife and I as we remain the focal points. It's interesting and challenging but not what I call fun. Overall I want to keep tempo reasonably consistent but with occasional variation where it's truly expected. Most of the material we cover was clearly not recorded to a click but constantly varying tempo from measure to measure is not practical, necessary or even desired in this circumstance. It's a long list of songs I'm trying to get this done on and each seems to have unique challenges. I'm constantly at battle with my OCD here!
When I can get back to creating my own music (which I'm waaaaayy behind on doing!) then I'm totally up for experimentation and I see some great suggestions and helpful advice posted here which I'll certainly explore. And yes, there's a good chance that I'll get a real drummer to come over as well!
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My only committed gig now is the duo with my wife, I believe she and our hosts have inquired at Nautifish and a couple other places. It doesn't matter that much to me, I stay away from the booking side and, to be honest, I'd just as soon relax and have fun when we're down there.
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I took IK at their word when they recommended backing up the downloads
I typically try to be vigilant about that but things get hectic and wow, I've got backup drives for this and that scattered all over around here! At least I'm down to only four computers now (the ones that are mine anyway). I did finally find my ST sound backups in zip form later.
It costs to download those huge files again also but using Jam Points it was only 6 or 7 dollars.
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So currently I'm spending my precious free time creating backing tracks for our duo gig. The tried and true method for me is DP (currently Ver9) on MBP w/ MOTU interface (828x). As a terrible drummer the most difficult part for me is getting drum beats as close as possible and to that end I'm willing to cheat in any manner available. At this point I've decided to use Superior Drummer 3 for my drum tracks. Great sound and behaves well as a plug in.
Sometimes I may be satisfied with midi files I find and cannibalize. Other times the SD3 midi packs provide what I need (I just bought a new 6 pack of those) but there is also a feature in SD3 for pasting in audio drum tracks and having the software "convert" them to midi, I haven't found that very helpful up to this point but have only tried it on one stereo drum isolated track I was able to find. This software almost looks like it could be helpful but I can't really determine from what I've seen so far, any thoughts on that?
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Iroad trip to Lake of the Ozarks for gigs, since that's where a lot of people go.
Friends of ours have a house on the lake and we go down a couple times during the season, we've been looking into booking a gig at one of the places there.
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I just realized I don't have ST3 installed on this MBP I'm going to use for our duo's backing tracks, that's changing now..........well..........after I finish downloading all the gigabytes of sound files again!
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We went to Cancun for the last week of February when coronavirus was just becoming a thing. We passed through Atlanta on the way out and back. Flights and airports were full and I didn't see many "cough filters" on people. No one seemed to be very concerned, the "scare" mainly had to do with China then I suppose. In mid January I was contacted by my supervisor at work wanting to know if we'd traveled through any airports over the Christmas/New Years break. We had traveled to Charleston SC during that time once again passing through the Atlanta airport but that didn't register any concerns apparently.
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It's a remarkably vibrant music scene up here in the Cedar Rapids/Iowa City area. Local bands are always busy with plenty of venues to play at around town and the surrounding area. I've been in a number of bands and done some other music gigs since moving here in '91. My observation is that guitar players (and there are some very good ones around) far out number other instrumentalists and also most bands are fairly "old school" with the music selection and performance. These are interesting days perhaps in the difference between current popular music and what bands can actually play in that while popular music appears to be heavily sequenced/synthesized most bands are still primarily guitar based classic rock/blues/funk focused acts. Regardless, bands are overall doing pretty well at keeping busy.
The last band I was in actually did focus on doing current pop hits for a large portion of the set list and I was enlisted for my keyboard and sequencing skills. I'm certain they were the most popular band in the area as we commanded a higher price than any other band I know of and always had a sound company on hire. I enjoyed playing in the group and we did some amazing gigs but things began to change for me after I got married and I needed to take a break from the busy band schedule.
Currently my wife and I do a duo act which is a lot of fun. I'm putting together some backing tracks for us and I expect us to keep doing this for quite some time.
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I'm looking forward to having a listen soon!
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I've got a huge closet of shirts, got rid of a few the other day. I'll bet at least half of them are Harley shirts, I've bought them at shops all over the country and a few from outside, the most recent were a sleeveless tee and nice long sleeve collared shirts from the Harley store in Cancun where we just got back from vacation. At gigs I normally wear one of my nice collared short sleeve Harley shirts. In warmer weather or outdoors I'll probably wear a sleeveless Harley shirt. A few of my Harley tees have a musical theme going on; Cleveland - R & R Hall of Fame, Memphis - Graceland, Nashville - Music City, etc..
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As a technician and keyboard/guitar player I'm fascinated by the science and technical aspects of sound. Over the years I've modded guitar amps, studied synths and delved into computer programming but it's often turned into a wormhole for me. Currently I'm trying to keep the more technical aspects of it all more peripheral because the time I can spend at it is somewhat limited.
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Cakewalk was my favorite DAW early on (early for me was '91). Before getting a computer I actually used a hardware sequencer briefly. It started shortly after I began my new job as an electronic tech. I went to a co-worker friend's place, got a demonstration of his computer sequencing setup and my future flashed before my eyes!
I rode the computer/cakewalk upgrade train for probably a decade before deciding I needed to incorporate sequencing into live band things. I quickly discovered that Cakewalk on a PC laptop was not a terribly efficient method in that environment and switched over to MBP's and DP. After investing the time to relearn everything with that setup I just stuck with it.
I wouldn't rule out going back to using Cakewalk but my music making time is limited and I don't have much desire to be mixing it up with different DAW programs.
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Hey Greg - the first thing I'd suggest is to make sure all your tracks have a consistent frequency response.
I appreciate the great suggestions! I'd recorded quite a few songs but it's been years. I'm finally spending some time recording again and will essentially do it all ITB. Due to a couple moves in recent years I'd sold off most outboard gear I had. As a hobbyist I can take my time and do as much experimenting as I like and frankly, it's just more convenient for me to keep most of it in the software. I guess what I'm really trying to do is get as much clarity and separation as I can on tracks. I've spent a lot of time on just one song but I'm hoping to develop an overall method that I can use as I record more.
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I'm actually just trying to adjust individual tracks right now but wondering if you can break down your "stages". Messing with my latest song I've been trying to adjust EQ according to a chart I pulled from the Sweetwater site.
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I had temporary tattoos made up of the band logo. On break I would go around and apply them to attractive girls, preferably in groups, and take a picture, then ask to add them on Facebook so I could tag them. Our page was loaded every weekend with pictures of attractive people having fun wearing our logo. Since they were tagged, all their friends who might not know about us all sw the pictures and were drawn to our page as well.
Brilliant!
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Great photos, thanks for sharing that!
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I figured out a long time ago that attempting to make a living from music was never likely to be practical for me. Fortunately my wife and I are well educated (her much more so than me!) and have steady employment with solid careers that we actually enjoy most of the time. To live in the manner we're accustomed too would undoubtedly require serious royalty money from a number of hit songs to help subsidize our little duo gigs! At this point we're not far from being able to retire comfortably.
We do enjoy playing however and intend to keep doing it as long as possible. It's a hobby for us but the money we do make is applied to our vacation and travel fund, the proceeds from our recent gigs have allowed us to pay for 1/2 the cost of an all-inclusive trip to Cancun we're taking in February. There's always a possibility that I would consider joining a band again but I'm not likely to consider it until I've retired from full time employment and would be able to go on the road with a professional group making attractive income.
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It's a great forum and currently the main one I visit. It often feels a world away from the hit and run nature and increasingly political world of facebook.
Audio Interface Roll Call
in Craig Anderton's Sound, Studio, and Stage
Posted
I essentially did it as a convenience update when I began using this MBP on live gigs (went from an 828mk3). This MBP has SSD which was a very noticeable difference from the MBP I'd been using so at the same time I also bought an external thunderbolt SSD for my music files. I figured I was in pretty good shape for anything I could throw at it then but the key to this setup has always been stability for live use. Audio recording on this setup has been minimal.
So, although there was a significant boost in performance, I believe the SSD drives had more impact for my purposes.