Nathanael_I

This is not my experience compared to microphones placed other places. What have you found that works? I haven't found it a great place for a microphone. Sounds better then a piezo pickup maybe, but that isn't a high bar.

Suzanne Ciani has a new piano+ synth album out. If you have Spotify, you can click here. It is called "Music for Denali". It is meditative, and minimal, not flashy. If you are looking for jazz pyrotechnics and clever substitutions, this is not your album. But it does create and sustain a worthwhile meditative space, but an active one, not just spaced out ambience. There is movement and interest.

Acoustic guitars are mic'd. Electric is usually mic'd through ISO cab, but I have a Re-amp box and can take DI and then send it back out if desired.

Spotify pays 70% of its income to rights-holders. These rights to popular works are almost exclusively held by the major publishers. The labels are making lots of money streaming back catalog and have zero production costs. Their artists don't get a great split. This is a label/contract problem. The labels own a big chunk of Spotify stock - it was the only way they would consent to licensing the content. They are happy for it to be perceived as a Spotify problem - it deflects attention from their business practices. Winner-takes-all systems are good for them, as there is an almost certainty that any huge hits belong to them anyway under contracts that guarantee they get paid first. Spotify doesn't contract with individual artists. They deal with publishers and distributors only (CD Baby, Tunecore, etc). These little details explain much. What Ek does say is that 43k people are getting paid decent $$ - that may be more than previously, but it has not made everyone's dreams comes true. But, it is always hard to make money off of something that is not scarce. Digital goods are not scarce and digital distribution is not expensive, and most people know that and have expectations set accordingly. Most of the music YouTube channels (even huge ones like Rick Beato) don't earn a living wage off the advertising shared revenue. They are linking viewers to sites to buy books, merchandise, or to a Patreon account. Most "professional money" income went to live performance (by definition scarce), or to movie/video game music (DRM enforced scarcity). The competition for these spots is fierce - hundreds or thousands of qualified people for every opportunity. When I lived in New Jersey, I used to say, "You can't swing an XLR cable without hitting someone with a master's degree from Julliard unable to find work." The easiest thing was to find lessons with someone trained at a truly elite school to the highest standards, but was unable to survive just playing music. It is hard - the old ways are gone. The people making money now, are doing it very differently and have mastered using free online audiences to build a following that is willing to monetize offline. There are more avenues to monetize music than there ever have been. There are also more people chasing them than there ever have been.

I am very much looking forward to the arrival of the Osmose I have on order. It seems to be the most expressive keyboard synthesizer ever made. It seems to be sensitive to the kind of small touches that the Continuum senses, but it still gives normal piano key spacing in a way even the Seaboard does not.

I'm not so sure Behringer's costs are lower. I believe ASM has some affiliation with Medeli, another low cost manufacturer. Well, there is a $500 difference between an ASM Hydrasynth desktop and the keyboard version. So for Medili, its only $500 retail for a 49 note poly-AT keyboard, making it likely $125 of actual build cost given typical 4x COGS "back of the napkin" estimates. Medeli's annual turnover is around $50M. Behringer is about $81M, making them broadly comparable. I think the point still stands that if ASM can produce a poly AT keyboard for a $1300 synth, Behringer is capable of doing so for the same price or less. I think we are going to find in the next several years that making keyboards poly-AT is not that big of a deal - it just isn't something the market demanded, and that once it does, it isn't CS-80 expensive to do so.

I'm sure they can. Ashun Sound Machines sells the Hydrasynth for barely more than half that figure. I'd be certain that Behringer has some of the lowest manufacturing costs in the industry - less than ASM for sure. I don't think any of the new PolyAT keyboards are built like the CS-80. Newer materials, newer sensors, different designs. They are all building them for mass manufacture.

I think if you want to sell things, you need to make it easy for people to buy them. Then you have to tell the people who would care they are there (marketing). I'm not sure that there is a way to just export a bank, post it and expect $$ to roll in. There a lot of sound designers that make their living this way. And they do all the things you are not wanting to do. I do wish you well - I've bought sounds from several developers like "The Unfinished", "Black Octopus", and others. There is a market for this. But it may be not as casual as you are hoping.

The other clever thing you can do is put the subwoofer where you sit and then walk around the room (it is faster than moving the sub around and going back to your listening position). If you ended up getting REW and a measurement mic, this becomes very easy. Put the mic where your head goes, and then just move the sub around until you get best response and flatness ( or again, move the mic stand around and put the sub where your chair is). You may need to buy/make longer cables to go from sub to monitors if that is how you will connect it. It is worth it to make an effort to site the sub well - it's like real estate: location, location, location. When a sub is nicely integrated it is a good thing to have.

Excellent! So cool to see this coming together!

A pair of Avantone's. They work great, and it is very convenient that they have built in amps. Keeps it super simple.

The Seaboard, yes. I was one of the very first purchasers of the Seaboard Grand. I played it at Roger Linn's house before it was even released when they brought it on tour through the Bay Area. I got on the pre-order list on the spot. I was initially very interested in it, but ultimately I did not connect with the instrument, despite finding it more expressive than any keyboard I played. There are several reasons. First, the Seaboard Grands had issues with playing semitones; I couldn't deal. Second, it was frustratingly expressive. What I mean is that it could give much more than a keyboard, particularly on solo lines. But the fine control was just not there compared to an acoustic instrument. The overall touch system just didn't do controllable nuance in a way that I wanted to pour hundreds of hours into. The keys were not sensitive from first touch, there was a resistance that had to "break" and then there was an area of uncontrollable pressure before I could find consistency. This created a particular envelope that wasn't always wanted. I decided that it is more about big gesture, than subtle control. The industrial design is stunning, but the actual sensor is not at instrument grade to encourage hundreds of hours of practice (at least for me). Clearly others have found that to be untrue. The Equator soft synth is very nice, however. I ultimately realized that I either needed it to have keys that were closer to traditional keys (why I am so excited about the Osmose), or I wanted it to be radically expressive and worth the time to master (I believe the Continuum is the best instrument in this category currently). That the Osmose combines a traditional key interface that is clearly very sensitive with the audio engine from the Continuum makes it promising. We will see what the Osmose delivers. Presently the Continuum is the only instrument that seems capable of "classical acoustic instrument" kinds of expression - but it is hid behind the daunting front of having to completely start over on instrumental mastery. That last bit is the hard bit, and what ultimately limits the Seaboard. I remember early on, I took a phone call from one of their investors doing due diligence. I was asked if I saw a future of kids going to music stores for Seaboard lessons instead of piano lessons. I said, definitely not any time soon. There's no model, no example, and nothing to tell parents that it makes any sense as a pursuit. They thought it would transfer directly to piano or vice-versa and that was not my experience at all. It was a new thing, and piano technique really wasn't much help. I suspect someone with clavichord or tracker organ experience would have the best head start on Seaboard technique.

Synthtopia just carriedthe press release. I take this to mean that if a developer of a soft synth wanted, their plugin could now accept MIDI 2.0 data streams using the new developer bits from Steinberg. This is good, now there is a standard way for soft synths to take input. It seems to me that the real innovation needed is on the hardware end, however. Part of what makes analog instruments so expressive is that there's a whole bunch of things all interacting at once in complex ways. There's no reason this couldn't be the case with high-speed sensors, but it just hasn't been the case so far. Osmose is the best hope so far for a keyboard based controller, though the Continuum is clearly "there already" for fine sensitivity in an "arbitrary controller". Grid-based controllers have crossed over into a physical interface enough people are willing to learn. There are virtuoso finger-drummers, and I've seen stage performances where drum grooves that a human could play on a kit were instead performed by someone on an MPC/Ableton Push type controller. It is such a catch-22. A new digital instrument needs to be rewarding enough to practice and master, and not at risk of disappearing before that occurs. It is apparently very hard to get this right, judging from the dearth of high-quality controllers. We just don't have great wind controllers that cost like a pro saxophone and offer similar expressiveness. We don't have superb bowed controllers, etc. So, I guess I'm happy to see the software side - it is always going to be first. But I really want to see innovation on the hardware side - specifically instruments that put out nuanced, complex data streams. We have great synths with massive mod matrices - we need rich flows of data to drive them to really get at their potential. This a "gestalt" thing that the CS-80 got right. But some one will get it. I hope many do.

I wouldn't go to a store to try a keyboard. Mostly I wouldn't need to. For weighted actions Yamaha and Kawai's best actions are my preference. I have a negative preference for anything Fatar makes that claims to emulate a piano keybed. For unweighted, I wish a Fatar TP-8S. It is their premium action. I have three synths with that action. If I can't get it, I'd rather have a module/desktop/rack. I don't mind the top end Yamaha unweighted action, but why is it narrow? If I was starting out, it would be useful to play things. But I'm not, and so, it isn't.

This. I have two excellent custom drum sets in the studio - one walnut stave and the other an ovangol segmented kit. They have acoustic tone for days and are far more resonant than ply drums from the big brands. This can be good or bad depending on the sound desired, so tuning and head choice gives me a huge range of sounds, as Ronan suggests. A collection of snare drums provides other tonal options at the instrument level. For micing, I get the overheads right as an absolute priority. I favor omni's or wide cardioids from Josephson, Schoeps, etc. I believe the drums should sound great just in the overheads. Then it is kick, because the overheads are normally a little bass shy for a modern drum sound. I mic inside with a Shure Beta 91a, Outer with a Lawson L47FET. Generally, the 91a is high passed to get the transient, and the outer is low passed for the boom. Sometimes I use only one or the other. I also have an Audix kick mic if that kind of sound is wanted from the port in the resonant head. Toms are Earthworks DM20's. Snare is a 57 on top, Aston Origin cardiod underneath. How much of any of these is used depends, but I normally put 10 tracks down when recording drums. But if I'm mixing, the overheads are most of the sound. Snare and kick to taste, everything else is accents. The only thing more important that any of this is a great player behind the kit for the style of music being performed.

Going virtual is not popular with those who are used to attending physically. For those who have never attended physically, virtual participation will be great. They will feel like they have been able to participate for the first time, and will not feel cheated. This second group of people is orders of magnitude larger than the first. Once everyone figures that out, big live trade shows will never be the same. They may have a physical component, but it won't be half as important as the virtual one. (This is probably true already). I think that product overviews like the ones provided by loopop, Mark Doty, or the Hydrasynth review here more than replace a quick demo or preset jam on a noisy tradeshow floor. They are deeper than any print reviews I've read with respect to product features & function. After all you get to see someone manipulating the UI and going into all the menus. Print can't do that. The one weakness of these reviews is that they don't include much player's experience or "good for this, not so good for that" analysis. But at this point, that is no longer very important to me. I know what I'm looking for, and can make my own assessment of how it fits into what I have. A complete walkthrough is something I will spend 30-60 min on for a potentially interesting product. I've gone to tech trade shows for years as a vendor - all over the world. I know the drill. It is fun to see friends and former colleagues. I get that part. But moving past the "it is different", there are also things that are better if you eliminate the necessity of physical presence. Reach and consistency of message being two that immediately come to mind. Many companies are NOT gutted with the switch and are finding new opportunities to touch target customers directly. Now, NAMM is ostensibly for manufacturers and retailers to meet, not for musicians and creators. They all know each other anyway, but it's fun to get together. I get that. It is true in any industry. But virtual is little hinderance to the business side - orders will be placed anyway. For me as a musician, that part of NAMM is meaningless - the show is just a time of year to expect more product announcements. I've thought about going to NAMM many times, but have never been able to muster up any enthusiasm. Within hours of any product announcement, the whole online music world that cares about that kind of product knows. (Even if it isn't NAMM season) Smart companies have already pre-seeded online "review/demos" but even if not, they appear in short order as beta testers and others are allowed to post their videos. It is rare that it takes more than a few days for critical details to emerge as vendors often post directly into forums or comment sections to clarify important points. One thing I've noticed in the live sound world is that companies have made full training classes available online that used to be in person. Engagement has been high. Instead of getting a few minutes in a booth, one can fully understand the product. It is not a case of direct replacement, but of getting different benefits and even deeper engagement. There is the possibility that these different benefits exceed what is lost. I suspect perspective on this will be tied to how "in" or "out" of the NAMM club one was pre-COVID. One group has lost something. The other has only things to gain, and that group is larger. The organizations that understand that and pivot will find new opportunities. But they will be "different" and not a direct replacement.

Been doing it for 20+ years. I do presently have zero business travel, which is unusual, historically speaking. But I've had a dedicated workspace in my home for a long time.

Or is one of the high profile guys who rents a room in a studio complex, and is just using what is in the room....

If you slide it down the stairs as suggested, you could also use a come-along and just ratchet it down the stairs, nice and easy. No stress, no strain if you can find something to anchor the come-along to....

Great post Nathanael!!!! I am nitpicking - especially since this is a recording forum. In the last 10 years there has been tremedous progress in reducing noise in high ISO settings, allowing photographers to take great looking images that were not possible previously. What my full frame Canon 5d from 2006 could do at 800 ISO, my humble Rebel T2i from 2011 could do at 1600 but with less pattern noise. Newer cameras can easily deliver quality images at 12,500 ISO and very acceptable work at 25,000 ISO. Photographers can now shoot in "available darkness" without unacceptable noise issues. The sensors and the processors have improved. The refresh rate of an electronic viewfinder has improved by orders of magnitude as well, making mirrorless cameras a viable option for professionals. There is better tech for lens coatings too, the Zeiss Otus lenses came out 7 years ago and are ridiclulously good but newer lenses at much lower prices are starting to catch up. So, I disagree. You are quite correct as to the usefulness of these advances. I have enjoyed them too. From the standpoint of human perception vs. progress of tech, I'll nitpick back. These advances have increased the usable envelope, yes, but relative to human perception, the resolution, color science etc has remained perfectly adequate. People were shooting magazine spreads and gallery images that would fully stand up today. But I'll agree that I could have been more specific to make the analogy tighter! Would I want to give up the noise performance and go back? Heck no. Same in audio land. Noise reduction in audio is now easy and almost artifact free, especially at modest settings. Zeiss lenses... ah. Yes, things of beauty. I wish a set of CP3 cinema primes... But here too, those Otus lenses are so good, they are at the limit of what physics and even sensors can use. The larger point is still that we are at a place where the tech is definitely at the limit of human performance, but still subject to human preference. (I prefer Zeiss lenses too...but my $$ is in audio mostly). Video sensors haven't quite caught up. Our visual sense is the most bandwidth intensive sense we have, and the tech won't quite keep up there. But that will happen soon - within 5 years at prices many can afford in the first world.

So cool! A few hours cleaning and it will be visually transformed. I've re-capped a Leslie tube amp and replaced diodes and a burned resistor. It was a pretty easy project, and then all the noise was gone. I just bought a re-cap kit from one of the B-3 repair shops online and it went as planned. The consoles are a whole different thing mechanically. But if you can borrow someone's air compressor and do the initial "blow out" outdoors, that would help.

Interestingly, Sound on Sound is featuring Lady Gaga's engineer and latest album this month. She has a U47 that she loves (score one for the continued relevance of great transducers). It goes into a vintage 1073 (making Nowhereman's point about distortion), a Tube-Tech CL-1B opto-compressor, and then straight into ProTools. Her engineer takes those three things everywhere Lady Gaga goes. She records in her house, on the tour bus, in studios, hotels, etc. In production, it is all plugins. So, for a huge name, we have : $15-20k for the U47; $3-5k for the 1073, and $3.6k for the opto-compressor. He uses a laptop and an unspecified interface to get into PT - the interface isn't even important to the sound. (I suspect it is a UAD interface since he makes heavy use of their plugins). So an international level artist with unlimited money has an optimized input chain for less than $30k. You can get a nice piano for that, but are nowhere near the high end. So even the high end budget isn't all that high. The democratization of audio quality is real. Cutting that real U47 down to an excellent modern mic would put the whole chain under $10k. There would be some difference in audio - the right U47's do have magic - but the album would still get made and go platinum.

Low cost Ambisonic mics solve this for all acoustic music. People will once again realize the space affects sound, and that not everything is well-served by close micing. Classical recordists already think this way. But for others, who don't think acoustically, it opens a wonderful world of possibility. The music mixers who have done even urban rap/hip-hop in Atmos comment that the best thing is how little they use compression. Because there is more "room" for every signal, a lot of the EQ and compression used to "carve out space" simply isn't needed and the overall presentation is richer and more dynamic. The interesting thing about surround is that once you experience it properly, stereo is no longer that neat as an effect. We hear continuously, not from two points. The adoption issue has been cost and the effort to align a system properly. The surround effect also does not "scale up" well using simple analog amps and speakers, this has kept it from being used in venues. This is why the headphone advances will be what leads to broader adoption. The problem is bounded in useful ways. At the very high end of the live experience, beam steering and other things are making true immersive audio possible at the level of 2000+ people in a Broadway theatre, so the game is changing rapidly. None of this is relevant for bar band kind of music making. But that environment has never led audio quality.

We do not have opposing viewpoints. This is true, and we have a limitless supply of distortion boxes, plugins, etc to mangle signals in all kinds of ways. Digital, analog, it really is limitless. But none of this changes the fact that our recording medium is capable of storing and reproducing whatever distortion human perception likes beyond our ability to hear it. Instruments will continue to evolve, sound preferences and what we consider to be emotionally relevant will evolve. We don't generally find the songs of the 1830's emotionally relevant anymore. What we find in good taste, and preferable will never be static. My point is only that recording technology is no longer meaningful in this dialog. Early in the technology lifecycle, the medium itself had limits and pushing them yielded a change in meaning. The technical limits no longer do that. So the search for human meaning through exploration will simply move in different directions. It may be more complex rhythms, harmonies, different pitch organization, new timbres... Whatever result someone wants can be had up to the limits of human perception. What things we perceive we want is a limitless field of exploration - but it is a separate thing.

There is a lot of work going into headphone/personal immersive audio. I think you are correct in that personal VR driven experiences will drive immersive audio adoption at the consumer level. Over the next several years, I think this will be a solved issue. Manufacturing is already cheap. Consumers are already migrating to higher end headphone experiences vs. buying big room systems. At the level of entertainment, any facility with multiple speakers will become immersive to some degree. Movie theaters are already well on their way. Broadway theaters are pushing the edge of immersive audio used as a creative tool. They change audio "space" as part of the experience, audio follows actors on stage, etc. Its very sophisticated, and only possible with advanced digital tools, processors, and automation. Even some DJ type club systems are experimenting with immersive elements - they generally already have speakers deployed all over the room. It's just buying a digital processor box to enable it. For creators, there will be a push towards delivery in immersive formats. All the vendors: DAW, speaker makers, ambisonic mics, etc. will all see an opportunity to upsell us on being a part of this move. Note that the Dolby Atmos software is another $300 on top of DAW license. 7.1.2 (the standard Atmos "bed") is more speakers than even a composer with a 5.1 system uses. The bedroom creators won't bother buying a bunch of speakers - they will wait for the headphone stuff to mature and participate that way. But because we hear more than stereo delivers, there will be a push to immersive. We can hear the difference, and it is way better, so all the marketing muscle will push that direction. Avid is already doing this - their pro seminars in Nashville and LA are pushing immersive audio, Dolby Atmos, the desireability of their hardware consoles with surround panning, etc. If all you want to do is record great audio, you don't need any of this. An Avid S1 and a Dock will fully get you there...