Wednesday, March 4, 2009

revelations!!!! gear

Revelations

I am stunned to find in my experimentation with gear that sometimes the simple setup wins out over the complex setup. In this case, a fancy Emu sound card and Sony Sonar Daw VS. a Roland vs890 (stand alone 8 track 24 bit digital recorder with digital mixer). Ok, the DAW system costs about $1000.00 if you count the software and a cheap pc, mayb e more with a decent pc.t's modern and state of the art if you will in terms of recording. The roland vs890 is about 11 years old, yet boasts similar technical specs as the DAW (digital audio workstation on a pc hah). 24 bits in this case at 48k then converted down to 44.1 16buit for cd replication.

I recorded the exact same thing on both systems. First let's talk about setup time. It took a good hour or two to get the sonar all set up and ready to go with samples loaded. The roland stand alone daw took about 15 minutes. Now, amazingly, the results were almost identical. I could not tell the difference after recording or mastering for that matter!!! Hard to believe. The plus side for the sonar software was it sure looked cool to have the the meteres going and the graphic mixing console and all the plug ins. But for simplicity, the roland is jsut as easy as could be to record on , though I then had to transfer the mix to soundforge softare and master it that way. Took about the same amount of time as it did for the sonar software to mixdown.

Anyway, this is great news. I plan on using both. the sonar, does offer more features such as plugin's on individual tracks and all this amazing midi sequencer triggering samples (aka session drummer and other samples). I am also thrilled with the roland that actually sounded better on guitars than the sonar is still amazing with its pristine sound quality. Anyway, this was an eye opening experience.

tube vs solid state amp for guitar
I have always favored tube amps for guitar. they have a smoothness and feel about them. however, this was until I used a true amp modeler like the pod xt live (from line 6). all of a sudden, solid state sounds so much better with it than a tube amp. ?Now I am using some crate tube amps and it could be the speakers which aren't the best, but the solid state sound sounds better and it makes sense as the line 6 is modeling/emulating different kinds of tube amps and for recording it is just a perfect controllable sound. I am still torn between the two. I love just plugging in to a tube amp to get that really nice chimey glassy tube sound, but with the pod and tube amp it just not meant to work with that.

So, this is definite and it is hard to come to grips with. Everyone raves about tube amps,but usi ng the pod xt live into a tube amp is just not where its at as far as optimum tone. In fact, a cheapo solid state combo amp will sound ten times better. tighter and less noisy too. So, here I have learned a big lesson. Just because everyone says this is the best, it is not always the case. I have 3 of these crate tube combo's and they are extremely loud and that is great if your playing in a band with a drummer going nuts and so on, but in the studio it is not ideal at all. IT all comes down to the modeling. I suppose if you are using a tube amp direct with some pedals that works,but don't run a modeler through it. SO I will definitely sell two of my tube combo amps and keep one when I want to go direct into the amp.

netgear vs dlink router
By the way, I was using a dlink 614+ 2.4 ghz internet router in my studio to connect pc's and found that the connection was droppping out and to transfer audio files from one pc to another took ages!!! the company described the unit as reaching its end of life cycle, though I was comptia a+certified so surely I coul get it working....not!!! I did get it to sputter for a while but it would take ages to transfer files. Finally I went out and bought a netgear router (one of those white ones) and it did the trick. I highly recommedn the netgear wireless routers, thye are really great and fast too. D-link was a real dissapointment for me. Now my studio pc's are humming on a network and it works great.

Mixer
After having the luxury of having an 8 buss mixer which i sold the mackie 32x8, I do miss that ease whith which you route things together and audio signals to whatever you wanted. In particular, I enjoyed just being able to hit a swtich and route the signal from my studio monitors to my p.a. systtem for drums and bass. So I am looking into the purchase of a new mixer perhaps.

Other Gear
Other gear I am intersted in is 2 solid state combo amps, 2 avatar 2x12 cabs with celestions, an alesis sr-16 drum machine which is always fun especially with software to trigger drum samples, perhaps the new sr-18 they just came out with which is an upgrade of the sr-16. then I am intersted in a solid state power amp for guitar (maybe a rocktron velocity). Also, the digitech gsp-1101 looks and sounds very interesting or/and the pod xt3live. Anyway, these are things I am looking at, but it all depends on price and so on and next week it wil be something else hahaha. Anyway, I now know exactly the direction I need to go in music gear wise after a lot of expensive experimentation and that's 1/2 the battle.but the experimentation of new gear is a must to try to get a better sound and it may open musical doors for you as well. Howeve, I am glad I held on to my main setup which turns out to be the right thing for me and so I can expand on that.