Greg Mein

My wife bought me a pair of Sony MDR7506 for Christmas. She found them on my amazon wish list. I'd forgotten I even had them there but I certainly put them on my list after reading a review or recommendation sometime in the last few years. I haven't unpackaged them yet but I plan to use them when I'm working in the front room with a MBP and the UAD Apollo Solo recording and/or mixing some things.

I feel the need to give a shout out about this movie. The star of the show, Curran Barker, is the son of a guy I went to high school with and his dad makes a brief cameo in the film as the "chicken pot pie guy". The movie is available to watch free on Tubi. I last saw Brian at our high school reunion a few years ago. My wife and I set up some gear and did some playing there. Brian came up and jumped on keyboards for a tune at one point, he's quite good. I told my wife I wanted to watch the film and she was a bit hesitant, afraid it would be boring or cheaply done but that is not the case at all. The production and acting rival any comparable feature film and it's quite entertaining and fun. It doesn't break any new ground in terms of an underlying story and there's not a great deal of action or drama but it's not that kind of a movie. It's set in the post WWII big band era, 1947/48 and follows a group of high school students who, with the assistance of teachers/administrators, set out to form a swing band and enter a battle of the bands competition in southern CA. This is where the show really excels, the musicianship and presentation of the music is simply outstanding! I'm not a big band guy at all (my mother would have loved this movie) but I really enjoyed this show a lot, my wife might have liked it even better. I'd like to give a hardy recommendation to my fellow musicians and music lovers to seek this show out!

We have the 1920 Steinway model O baby grand, it's really not even a question.

I sent a reply to my man, Keaton, from the original email. Received a response today from Mark (Keaton is out today he writes) with a new link however that one didn't work either. I wrote back and got a response right away, "Apologies.. let me check back with merch on this for you." Update: they fixed the link and I've downloaded now, cool!

That leads to the same dead link as the original email, I'll need to message my bud Keaton there it appears.

Update is not available at the Sweetwater site or in my order history where the only alternative is "Buy It Again". The activation code from the original email is now a dead link also.

Radio is only listened to in the truck where most trips are around town short anyway. There is a classic rock station from Vegas and another from St George that come in decent most of the time here. Yes, it's the same worn out stuff but traffic reports are helpful if I'm headed to Vegas. I have a USB stick full of tunes in the truck as well which is very convenient and gets used a lot on longer trips but now the phone is also becoming more of an option as well. On cross country trips it's nice to download some podcasts or playlists but it requires pre-prep and I often drop the ball on that.

There were a few that caught my attention but generally it seems that things I'm looking for don't go on sale. Not specifically a BF/CM deal but there was a 15% off deal from Guitar Center I used to buy a couple of Xvive U4 in-ear monitor units. These came to my attention just two or three months ago when I was researching options for our duo gig. I didn't leap on them then because we didn't have anything scheduled at the time. Back then the price was really appealing at $183 but between now and then the price had shot up to $225! Now we're scheduled for a NYE gig so I used the GC deal to get them back down to within about $10 of their original price. Then yesterday I saw that Amplitube 5 Max was on sale for $100 at the online retail outfits so I went to the source where I'm a reasonably well known customer and they let me use 30 "jam points" out of my pile there to bring it down to $70. I thought that was a good deal and look forward to trying it out. How about you, did you jump on any good or great deals?

I'm sure I have less than a couple hundred CD's and about as many LP's. I put my wife's Bose radio out in the garage when we moved here with the idea that I would play CD's while working out there and I did, but after a while I became more aware of streaming and that is just easier. Now if I'm out there I gravitate towards listening to 'modern new wave' on Spotify using my iphone and a bluetooth speaker. A local guy, who is a drummer, gave me a record player and at some point I'll listen to some old records when the mood is right but as long as I have the storage space I'll keep all that stuff for nostalgia or posterity if nothing else.

I don't much entertain the idea of learning any new instruments although I have a fiddle and banjo I might still tinker with. I'm happy with my skills on guitar, keys, bass and vocals while home recording is only getting better as computers and software continue to become more powerful. It's the inverse of an aging problem and is more fun than ever although I probably spend too much time learning too many programs. The aging problem definitely comes in for live gigging however. Slogging all the gear for our duo is annoying and the system I put together requires a lot of setup/teardown time. I'm looking at moving to in-ear monitors for us. Although I've had a love/hate relationship with in-ears in the past I believe I can eliminate both our instrument amps and the little monitor we use (which also provides our click) if I switch. I don't want to hijack the thread but today I discovered the U4 In-Ear Monitor Wireless System. My research is leading me to believe this could be a great solution for us and the price can't be beat. Anyone have experience with this brand or system?

That's a great tip, I just subscribed, thanks! I've been a member of the Logic Users Group for many years although my visits there have been rare over the last few years. Just a little while ago I went to pull out a book on Ableton Live I knew I had stashed away and happened upon a book I'd forgotten I had, The Power in Logic Pro written by Dot Bustelo. She writes that she was part of the "worldwide logic team" working for Apple and Emagic before. It's a bit dated perhaps but I hope to find some useful info in there.

I've recently started using Logic again after a several year absence. I had used Logic Pro 9 enough to get a couple songs completed and then I "upgraded" the OS to 10.13 and it killed the program! I'm still not entirely over that but I had Logic X preinstalled on the MBP I bought in 2021 and have finally started working in it a little. It's comprehensive and reasonably easy to work with so far but I'm a relatively experienced DAW user having created many songs over the years most notably with 12tone/Cakewalk/Sonar, Reason and Digital Performer (which continues to be my preference due to my experience with it). The one I still haven't accomplished anything with yet is Ableton Live where I've gone from ver 8 up to 11.

It was easy enough to ignore. Now if rock clubs would have died, that would have been a problem!

The last band I was in was a very popular dance variety band. There were several 70's era disco songs, typically incorporated into medleys, but the only one that comes to mind right away was Love Rollercoaster. The mid to late 70's were my high school years. I was part of the stoner crowd and disco was antithesis to our existence, we were hard rock. It's safe to admit now though, I always had kind of a soft spot for KC and the Sunshine Band.

Recently I've been spending a lot of time trying to relearn some older hardware/software while also trying to learn some newer and less familiar stuff, it's quite an exercise but it remains to be seen whether it'll boost my creativity at all. Yesterday, for example, I was working on getting my Roland FA08 incorporated into my older recording setup. Apparently I'd never used it for recording before which checks out because I'd bought it to use with the last band I was in and haven't turned it on since I'd left, two or three years ago. I couldn't get it to receive midi being sent from the midi timepiece, frustrating but no matter, it'll work better with the USB driver installed anyway. It did but now I'm getting some strange behavior; sequence randomly starts/stops, chunks change, etc.. It threw me off but fortunately I've had enough experience with DP at this point that before long a light bulb came on and I checked the Commands. Sometime in the past transport control commands that had originally been assigned to a little AKAI KB37 I used for live gigs found their way onto the computer that had never been used outside the house and were responding to input from "any". Moving forward though I'm revisiting some tracks I'd started recording a couple years ago and have come up with some new ideas to incorporate.

If you're not using a 1977 Shovelhead with a kick start why even bother?

It dawned on me after the UAD Apollo Solo arrived that it's probably a good idea to have a T3 drive to go along with it and I spent another pile of cash to get a SanDisk Professional G-DRIVE Pro 1TB NVMe Thunderbolt 3 Portable External SSD, supposed to transfer up to 2800MB/s. Should be at my mailbox now and so, yet again, it begins... My MOTU 828x, DP10 and 2017 MBP with the expensive Apple adapters for interface and drives works fine and will likely remain dedicated to my live rig. We haven't done any gigs for a while and we don't currently have anything scheduled but I'd like to tweak and add some more tunes. And then my old system is still firewire based with a 2012 17" MBP, the original Presonus SL1642 mixer/interface and a UAD expresscard. The big plans I had when I got this stuff never materialized due to life events but I recently got this hooked up in the new room and it seems to work as good as it ever did although it's hard to figure why I'd spend much time using it now. One of the biggest issues I'll be looking at now is all my software (Arturia, AAS, Waves, Superior Drummer, and on and on etc.), it's installed/licensed here and there between these systems and I'll be busy sorting all that out. I suspect that my story rings of familiarity amongst folks here!

Yes this is disappointing, I've been using the MOTU interfaces along with DP for many years now but their hardware seems to be falling behind. They have small USC-C interfaces but I need the 8 in/out models for my live rig.

I've looked at those, could possibly be a good replacement for the MOTU 828x (I actually have two) I use in my live rig. I don't have any problems but it's annoying having to use the T2 to T3 adapters. I'm so tired of trying to keep up and since what I've got works it's hard to justify the expense at this point however.

The Apollo Solo arrived today, it's a handy little unit. I've installed software and only barely tried it out so far. I'm reading the manual some and hope to get up to speed soon, I need to relearn a lot of things I've forgotten about Logic and some other programs and check out Luna. It loaded up with the included plug-ins plus the ones I'd bought years ago, just what I'd hoped for. I waited over a year to buy an interface for my '21 MBP but now I'll have a nice little portable setup for my personal recording projects separate from the rig I use for live gigs. I pulled out the studio boom, attached my Studio Projects CI and rolled it up under the hood of the Steinway. I've been anxious to try recording this piano for a long time.

Informative article, appreciate that!

I was under the impression that thunderbolt 3 and USB-C were basically the same thing hardware wise.

I've looked at these off and on for a while now but it had been really tough trying to make any decisions on what, or even if, I wanted to go there. Years of constant computer/hardware/interface/software changes/updates has left me with three completely different computer based recording setups I'll abbreviate as vintage big, live gig, and modern compact. It's the 'modern compact' system I've made a decision on today. I had Logic installed when my newest MBP arrived in '21 but have yet to use it because I never setup an interface. I could have used one of my MOTU 828x units but I really didn't want to be backwards with thunderbolt 2 and also thought it would be nice to be more compact and portable. There are a number of options but today I ordered a Universal Audio Apollo Solo Heritage Edition. It checks the compact boxes; small, lightweight and bus powered. It should offer top tier sound quality and then there's an added bonus in that I should be able to re-enlist my UAD plug-ins from the 'vintage big' system. So if you've leapt into the Thunderbolt 3 interface world, what did you select and why?

Last September we moved to a town that is 1/10 the size of where we were living so obviously gigging is not a primary motivating factor for us, however, there is one place where we do gigs "regularly". I use quotes because we travel extensively and are not always available. This weekend will be rather unique for us, we'll be playing at our good friend's bar in Winslow AZ where we've organized a little birthday bash. It's not even a paying gig, we're just doing it as part of a gathering of friends in celebration. I'll probably take a guitar down to the corner at some point for a photo op.