The drum buddy is one of the coolest strangest pieces of gear every. One will be up for auction from FRESHKILLS over Marti Gras. We you have several thousand dollars you need to get rid of make a bid.
Monthly Archive for January, 2008
ESP at NAMM announced 50+ new or improved models for 2008. You can read about on the ESP site and follow the link to the images.
Pedal guru Jack Orman has an interesting article on true bypass. In contains actual measurements and facts. Normal this discussion is more mojo based.
About a week ago I started listening to LastFM again after and it seems it was perfect timing. The had a big announcement today.
In short there are going to have full length tracks available for listening. Plus the artist and labels get paid. It might depended on there coming subscription service being good or not but it all sound pretty good. I listen a lot today and other than the track names not matching the music playing for a short time it seems pretty cool to me. If it works right it another postive development for the music business.
If you read CDM and you should you might have read about it already. If not the article is here.
This is pretty cool. We need more interfaces like this. I would take gum over a mouse any day.
To lighten things up a little on Monday(which is Holioday a lot of people our off but not me) here is a list. Apperantly after porn & piracy the only other thing the Internet is good for is lists. There are a lot of them even other worst Album cover list. But this one is great and includes a bunch of horrible artwork I have never seen before. If you don’t ask, “What the hell they were thinking,” let some one else choose your art work for you.
Metanonix makes “different” gear. Different meaning insane. N.O.S in most cases means “vintage” or “classic” in their case once again means insane. They have out done themselves this time with the G-1000. Pricey and probably not very practical but defiantly original.
From the site:
There is nothing like the G-1000. Not even vaguely. It is arcane and radical. It is 100% vacuum tubes, from input to output. It contains 100% new-old-stock (NOS) tubes. Types never seen in guitar amps.
The G-1000 consists of two totally independent amplifiers, with very different preamp sections. One channel is called the HAPPY channel. The other is called the ANGRY channel.
For damn good reason. One sucks your face, the other gnaws your foreskin off.
The HAPPY channel is a more-or-less conventional instrument amp. It has plenty of gain and distortion (if desired), it has a conventional guitar-amp tone control section, and it has reverb. Everything else about it is DEVIANT. It has a PHASE control, which allows mixing of normal and inverted signals—or it may be adjusted to cancel out the original signal and pass only the distortion products….and, it’s all made of unusual tubes. Mostly pentodes, ha ha ha.
The ANGRY channel is well-named. It is designed for instability and raw, berserk distortion effects. It, too, has typical guitar-amp tone controls and reverb. It uses a 6BN6 and two remote-cutoff pentodes. Ask your mother what those are. She’s already tasted your foreskin anyway.
Despite the identical output stages of the two channels, they sound TOTALLY different. In ALL settings.
The output tubes are 6BK5s. Obscure, yes, but great and forgotten. Phase inversion is done with 6GU7s. Various types are used throughout the preamp stages: 6AU6, 6BJ6, 6CB6, 6BN6, 5BQ7, 6AK5, and others. No 12AX7s, of ANY brand. How many tubes? TWENTY-THREE tubes in total. Including eight 6BK5 outputs. It might be the most complex tube guitar amp available today….
The output tubes are in a special self-balancing, self-biasing circuit. It is unique to the G-1000 among guitar amps. It does NOT NEED matched tubes, nor is any kind of bias adjustment needed. Output power is 15 watts per channel, and two speakers (or a stereo speaker) are needed.
Vast ranges of tone are available from the G-1000. We cannot even begin to explain its flexibility. The G-1000 is NOT intended for middle-aged “tone questers”, who believe that they will be able to play like Eric Clapton by simply spending a lot of $$$ on equipment. We HATE those people. The G-1000 is intended for the intrepid experimenter, not the pathetic imitator. Tone questers are invited to DIE.
No, you moron, it’s not available in combo form. Head only.
Speakers are available from other suppliers.Artwork on the amp’s front panel by Dave Lovelace, of “Retarded Animal Babies” infamy. (http://www.umop.com)
Oh, the amp’s name? The idea came from Mike Brown of Livewire Synthesizers. Blame him. (It came from one of Dave Lovelace’s cartoons. Yes, the Fucking Fucker is a real, live cartoon character. A super-villain, come to think of it.)
G-1000 is made on a custom basis only and should be available in late 2008. Expected retail price is US $ 5000.
Traverso is a DAW released under a GPL license. Which means of course it is free. While there maybe a lot free instruments and effects but this not a lot of free DAW’s out there. Traverso I think would be good for people needing something quick easy. It is not like Reaper or Audacity. It in its own niche. I think it would be good for those the need something to record to multi-track podcast or add some audio to a web video. It does support a lot of audio file formats which is handy but only supports LV2 plugins which is not. I don’t think this is a serious tool yet for those really serious about recording and music production. But this kinds of project can certainly grow into something wonderful. Now though it would be a good tool for some one needing a quick and easy DAW.From the site:
A complete suite
Traverso is a complete solution from recording to CD Mastering. By supplying many common tools in one package, you don’t have to learn how to use lots of applications with different user interfaces. This considerably lowers the learning curve, letting you get your audio processing work done faster!
Robust non-linear audio processing
A unique approach to non-linear audio processing was developed for Traverso to provide extremely solid and robust audio processing and editing. Adding and removal of effects plugins, moving Audio Clips and creating new Tracks during playback are all perfectly safe, giving you instant feedback on your work!
de la mancha has a nice collection of freeware plugins. The newest release Octav8r is a pitch shifter on steroids. It is really well thought out any versatile. From the site:
Octav8r is a 7-node pitch-shifter that generates 6 differently pitched stereo versions of the audio input added to a ‘dry’ non-shifted signal to generate a richly layered sound. Each node has its own volume envelope and variable state filter plus send controls to vibrato, chorus, delay and reverb effects. The envelopes can be triggered by midi, audio gate or looped in sync with the host tempo.The primary idea of Octav8r is to create multiple pitch-shifted layers of the incoming audio. With some twiddling you can get creative with panning to generate separation around the stereo field, use envelopes to bring each node in and out at different times and use chorus, delay and reverb to make each node sit differently in the mix. You can use the tempo-sync envelope trigger to create rhythmic gating or pulsing and the envelope toggles to make only some nodes modulated whilst others stay constant. Most controls have midi CC and midi learn support, so with some automation or midi knob twiddling, you can make the output really move around.
features
· 6 pitch-shifting nodes, with octave shifting (-3 to +3) and semitone shifting (-12 to +12, to 0.001 semitones)
· All nodes have independent volume, pan, ADSR envelope, variable state filter, vibrato, chorus, delay and reverb controls
· Node 0 is the ‘dry’ audio at incoming pitch, which also has pan, ADSR, chorus, delay and reverb
· Envelopes can be triggered by midi note, audio gate, a tempo-sync loop or bypassed
· Envelope contours can be changed and set to restart or pick-up at retrigger
· Mix level can be adjusted between dry and pitch-shifted nodes
· Each node can be fine tuned for pitch shift method and buffer size
· Each node, envelope and effect can be switched off to save CPU
· Midi CC support and midi learn for most controls
· 38 presets
· Multi-out version for hosts that can support this feature
A very cool effect that comes with a very reasonable price tag of $15. Which should be even more reasonable to those across the pond with stronger currencies. I like kind of thing a lot. And hope to see more of it. Some finical rewards and incentives for part time developer is a good thing. Developers get rewarded and the consumer gets access to to affordable software. It has work in other areas successfully like utilities and games when devs have had some kind of a mix free and paid software. I don’t think or want free plugins to go away but when a single person or small group of people sell there own product is a good thing successfully, even as a sideline, it is only going to help.
Check out Octav8r it might just be worth the $15 to you. The other free plugins are worth a try also especially the excellent basic64 & truc.
