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My broken stuff

Everything around here’s breaking. The first channel on my Presonus Bluetube magically broke during the night. As you can see, the first channel input is pegged to the max even though there’s nothing plugged into channel 1:

Broken stuff 003

And for the past couple of months I’ve been aware the phantom power light on my Behringer Eurorack UB1204-PRO is always on regardless of the switch setting on the back:

Broken stuff 002

(It’s the red light beside the blue one. Spooky!)

I guess I’ll open up the BlueTube and see if there’s anything obviously wrong inside. Wait, first I’ll shake it.

Update: shaking did nothing. I opened it up and there was nothing broken looking. Poked around a bit and tugged on wires and things, powered it back on and now it works again. La-di-da.

Update 2: It broke again after a couple days of working fine. Presonus says $65 + shipping to repair. Blergh.

Posted to , , , , by Brad on 5/09/08 @ 2:04 pm | Comments (3)

Monitor/headphone issue

I’m hoping someone can point me towards what to buy to solve this problem.

For the longest time I’ve been using a mixing board as gain control and a headphone switch for my monitors. Here’s the rough layout:

mixer2

I’ve been aware using a mixing board for this small task is stupid (and a waste of desk space) for a while but I didn’t know what to replace it with. The board’s slowly dying now though so I need to figure out what to replace it with. Here’s what I’ve thought so far:

  • I could plug the Delta 66 sound card directly into the monitors, but then how do I switch to the headphones? I hate dicking around in software to change volume and settings every time I want to do something.
  • I thought a headphone amp like the Behringer HA400 might be what I was looking for but I’d have to feed my sound card output into one of those headphone inputs and that seems sorta gross. Also I don’t need the two extra outputs and would like a mute switch for the monitors.

Aaaand that’s about it. Digging through Behringer’s product list hasn’t helped much. Basically I need two 1/4″ or XLR inputs & outputs, two volume dials and a mute button in a wee little package.

Posted to , , , by Brad on 6/07/07 @ 4:16 pm | Comments (8)

What Happened To Dynamic Range

What Happened To Dynamic Range is an article that’s been making the rounds lately. Bob doesn’t give any examples of modern bands or recordings that he’s talking about so it’s hard to make much of his opinions. And it’s hard not to blow off the entire article after this statement:

The music available today isn’t musical at all.  It’s best described as anti-music.  It’s anti-music because the life is being squashed out of it through over compression during the tracking, mixing, and mastering stages.  It’s simply, non musical. It’s no wonder that consumers don’t want to pay for the CDs being produced today.

Beep beep cranky old man alert. The music you kids listen to isn’t music. There are certainly a lot of styles these days that leave me cold (such as the alterna boy-rock super compressed pitch-corrected and computer harmonised stuff), but I’m also heading into being a cranky old man myself.

I was going to pass this article by and not mention it at all except that I’ve been listening to a lot of albums from the 70s lately and almost across the board I wish they were mixed and mastered more aggressively. Led Zeppelin sounds kind of weak when it should be knocking my head off when it rocks out. I’m listening to Dancing Days here right now and want to run the whole thing through iZotope Ozone and crank it to the max. In particular, the re-master of Fun House kicks so much more ass than the original.

Posted to by Brad on 3/28/06 @ 4:21 pm | Comments (12)

KVRwiki

KVRwiki - the great KVRAudio site has launched a wiki for audio info.

Posted to , , , by Brad on 1/08/06 @ 1:48 pm | Comment

Kid Beyond on Ableton Live

Kid Beyond on Ableton Live - Quicktime movie of a beatboxer and how he uses Ableton Live. Pretty awesome. [via]

Posted to , by Brad on 9/26/05 @ 2:17 pm | Comments (3)

Ninjam - Skype for musicians

Justin Frankel (the creator of Winamp) has a new project called Ninjam. He announced it here today and it’s extremely cool.

Ninjam allows two or more people to jam through the net with real audio (no MIDI goofiness like past internet jamming software). It’s like Skype for musicians, though the music is delayed a few measures to keep everything in sync. You plug your instruments in, the software provides a beat. Then you find out what a crappy guitar player you are.

I had a chance to play around on Ninjam with Justin last night and it worked great. No masterpieces were made — though I got to lay down my brand new crappy guitar tapping skills — but the potential is amazing. And while we we were messing around with guitar and bass, I assume there’s no reason you can’t feed any audio source into there. So it could be keyboards, could be vocals, or it could be copies of Ableton Live jamming together.

I’m told a GUI is being worked on and a release is coming soon. I can’t wait.

Posted to , by Brad on 6/07/05 @ 9:43 am | Comments (26)

MyVirtualBand.com

MyVirtualBand.com - neat site for online music collaboration. (via Scott)

Posted to , , , by Brad on 1/23/05 @ 2:04 pm | Comments (1)

What Goes On - The Beatles Anomalies Page

What Goes On - The Beatles Anomalies Page - an exhaustive list of mistakes/curiosities in the entire Beatles catalog. (via Ask Metafilter)

Posted to , by Brad on 1/11/05 @ 9:08 pm | Comment

Music technology dictionary

Music technology dictionary - a good glossary of music technology terms.

Posted to , by Brad on 11/27/04 @ 11:34 am | Comment

Tweak’s Home Studio Guide

Tweak’s
Home Studio Guide
- this is a fantastic guide to setting up a home studio.

Posted to , , , by Brad on 8/31/04 @ 9:02 pm | Comments (2)

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