update and new gear

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alesis sr-18 drum machine 9/10

I was a big user of the alesis sr-16 drum machine which hasn't changed in ten years or so until the release of the sr-18. street price around $259 though you can find it for $200 or so if you look hard enough. ok, the sr-18 has much better sounding drum sounds in all kinds of styles than the sr-16. they also added lots of percussion sounds and even a bass track. The bass track I found rather silly and useless,however guess to play along with its ok. Thank goodness you can mute the bass track. It syncs to midi very well and the drum sounds realistic. It also has a ton of drum kits so one pattern can sound like lots of different kits. It acts like an sr-16 in many ways. It has the magic fill button which gives you drum fills on command and drum variations.sweet!!! foot controllable via pedal. The drum pattern themselves are usually laid out by default in 4 measures which is kind of long and I prefer the old 2 measure patterns of the sr-16 then the fills come in real well. but no big deal, as you can copy and then change any pattern. Also, new is a roll button which allows you to do drum rolls. By itself it sounds great, but mix the sr-18 with drum samples or other drum machines and it is simply awesome!!!

Alesis sr-16 drum machine 9/10

The alesis sr-16 is a different beast than the new sr-18 which is just a great drum machine. the patterns are simpler but punchier and the fills are great and the drums sound not as good as the sr-18 especially the cymbals, but the core drum sounds are very good.They are different enough that the sr-16 is definitely worth while to use. In fact, After selling mine long ago, I was able to find a used one for about $60.00 or so. The fills are great as I mentioned but again when mixed with the sr-18 and/or session drummer, ez drummer or acid drum samples, it is just amazing,especially for recording.

Lexicon Jamman rackmount phrase sampler/ looper 10/10

This unit was discontinued in the 90's and are rather hard to find and go for some high prices .What is it? Well it is a rackmount phrase sampler looper. It comes stock with 8 seconds of looping time but can be expanded to 32 seconds. In one word these are simply AMAZING!!! I own 4 of these for the simple reason that they are for all practically the only looper that actually syncs to midi!!! Perfectly every time!! To this day,not one looper can sync to MIDI worth a dammn. I found out the hard way after getting burned on the roland rc-50 ultimate looper (pooper is more like it) and even the electroharmonix 2880 looper. weak these other units have midi jacks too but cant sync worth squat. the exception may be the gibson echoplex buts its pricey and not as simple as the jamman. For me they make playing and looping bass tracks on the fly effortless as well as phrases and backwards looping. but its main force is the way that it just takes anything you play into it and syncs to midi clock (no song pointer,mtc or smtpe crap). Just your basic midi clock like a drum machine. the morons over at digitech came out a few years later after acquiring lexicon with a digitech jamman pedal which is a piece of crap, as they removed the best part of the lexicon jamman, you got it, the midi sync capabilities. this is perhaps the biggest blunder in music gear history!!!!!!! fools. In any case, if run across one of these grab it as they are rare and getting rarer and are not made anymore and nobody has duplicated its midi sync capabilities. In fact there is a stinker engineering design among us which is a midi sync method employed by the roland rc-50 and the electroharmonix which requires sending starts and then independently trying to resize loops and it just doesn't work worth a damn.IT is downright embarrassing when I tried using these compared to my lexicon units. the lexicon kept a constant synced tempo while the rc50 and 2880 were losing sync and changing their tempos constantly.who is the brilliant doufus engineer who thought that one up and sadly these poor sap companies are using it and then wondering why their sales are lagging when they could have copied a super simple lexicon jamman rackmount unit that came and went sadly.

Mackie 1642-vlz3 4 bus mixer 10/10

this a 16 ch 4 bus mixer with ten mic pre ch's and the rest are stereo ch's. direct outs, insert, 2 auxes and 4 subgroups. Perfect fro the home recording studio. I know of no one who uses more than ten mic's at a time for a home studio. Even with drums you could do a sub mix. Well, I got this unit after missing the mackie 32x8 8bus I sold.sounds amazing on recordings and mic pre's are super.The sound quality of the mackie is just incredible!! highly recommended

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.