Why does this pre-amp SUCK!

Cedub and I were sitting in the studio talking about the current level of power required by our Shure 57s. The 57 is the workhorse of the industry and to this day is often the first mic put on a speaker cab for a guitar (next to the 421), we love ‘em and use them all the time.

The problem with the 57 is that you need a strong pre to make them get the level output that you want into your board. Unfortunately we only have one Amek dual-channel pre and this means that if we want more the then two 57s (or any other mic) then we have to use the pre’s built into the D8B.

Sadly, the D8B’s pre’s are weak and don’t give us the level we want on the 57’s unless you are mic a kit, then a snare or tom will rip through just fine. We have been seeing this issue come up a lot with the interview segments of the show because we often need three mics to get our round table discussions.

The last session our levels were so low (and we had them cranked) that I had to end up doing some crazy compression meets limiter magic to get them to sound decent. Luckily it was just conversation, so you can compress the shit out of it and it still sounds passable (especially at 96kbps MP3).

These kinds of discussions only head in one direction, what kind of crazy cool gear do we need to get in the future. The answer is of course a rack of 8 to 16 Neve class-A (or equivalent) pre’s. We have the rack space and it’s located in a convenient place so we can access and adjust with ease from the board. This will allow us the head room we need and also give us more super clean and clear channels for mic-ing the kit and other requirements.

This also fits into our future replacement board which will more then likely be a controller instead of the mixer/control combo. Other worthy investments will be Apogee level DACs and we need a Big Ben or something like it pretty soon too. Mmmmm… word clock. Anyway, we need more pre’s… MORE PRE’SSSSSSS…

96 degrees and no AC

Out of the blue comes this wicked hot day in the bay, and I mean seriously hot. Like a Texas hot, not a wussy San Francisco hot. We had to wrap up this weeks lab report recording and start the editing and mix down process. The issue with being in the studio is that you are surrounded by a ton of heat producing equipment. From computers, to monitors to amps and tubes and everything is like a little mini heater in the room. Mix that with a hot day and you are going to be in there for a long haul.

Maer dropped by around 11am and we knew it was going to be one of the days right off the bat, he had left his segment copy at the house. Luckily, Joni was home and hooked us up with a dupe of the copy. I plugged the U87 in and fuck if it didn’t freak out and start stuttering and popping again. This is like the 4^th time we had this happen. Chris has had enough at this point and we know this thing is just a fucking lemon. Bah, way too expensive to have a lemon on our hands, most sad.

We swapped out the U87 for the AT in the cabinet and dropped in Maer’s vocals. We then ripped the audio and mixed his segment down. From there I started downloading the uploaded segment that Seth put together and sadly my FTP client is brain-dead and downloaded it as text instead of a binary and that meant I had to re-download. Usually not an issue, but both Chris and I now have the worlds SLOWEST dsl so 70 megs takes an hour or so… *sigh*.

I decided to deal with that later and then I sat down to edit the news, at that point I kept getting DP to hang for a while and I was so frustrated and hot I said screw it and walked away for the day. Later that night I found out that one of the audio segments is corrupted so I had to do a little magic editing to make it work. Overall it worked fine and I think the show is pretty damn good. Oh, and I just got a 23” Apple HD Cinema Display. Hazah!

New Toys

I have been looking that the new MOTU Traveler for a while now… drooling over its amazing ability, portability and the fact that it can be 100% firewire powered. Some days I would just dream about getting a Traveler and an X-Session USB controller and think about hooking up a killer live rig for doing shows.

Last week I was booked to play a gig at the False Walls photo exhibit and house warming for the new False Profit headquarters. Dre asked me to play a downtempo set, which I have a nice little selection for, and then I realized, fuck it, go buy the rig. So I ran to RobotSpeak who happened to have all my desired gear in stock and for an unbeatable price.

At the same time I grabbed a copy of Native Instruments Traktor DJ Studio 2.6 so that I could try my hand at laptop djing. That evening (Friday, day before the show) I dropped by the studio and I sat down and ripped some of my favorite tracks from vinyl. Initially I tried ripping it via the Traveler to the laptop, but found that the laptop was a little chunky to handle the playback so I will need to sit down and tweek some settings later on. Anyway, since I was in the studio I just dropped a stereo line to the patch bay and ripped away.

The next day we started wrapping up show 11 for the Lab Report and I then headed home to play with my new rig. After a few hours of learning how to build beat grids, assign controls to the midi rig, and just getting a feel for it I had to whip up a set.

I had a little bit of success with beat-matching with the tool, but I realized that after 8 years of djing everything was hardcoded now and I don’t really think to myself, this is slower or faster I just do it instinctively. Too make a long story shorter I just put together a set using ambient intro/outros together to make a seamless set, called it a day, packed up the rig and headed to the event.

The show turned out really well, everyone thought I was crazy for trying out a new rig after owning it for about 24 hours, but it was fun. I can’t wait to spend more time learning the system because this will allow me to play a ton of music I have never owned on vinyl (nor able to find), play my friends music and also play my own stuff. Should be a lot of fun.