bitflipper

Can't say it's ever even occurred to me. Sounds like microphone abuse Yeh, I'm definitely going to highpass the recording. My intention is to load the file into Sonar, split it into individual song files and trim the "silence" (and bad jokes) so that I can give the new guy a folder on a thumb drive that also has links to YouTube videos of the original recordings plus lyrics and chord charts. That's a lot of work, but we have only 4 weeks to work in the new guitarist before we have to start cancelling gigs. I refuse to play the 20-minute version of Johnny B. Goode just because we don't have enough material for three 45-minute sets.

Last night we played one of our favorite venues, a winery in the Cascade foothills. The stage is right in the vineyard, surrounded by grapes. Even better, a stage you can drive right up to. I got to use my fancy new crank-up speaker stands for the first time, as there was room to place the subs properly - in front, side-by-side. We left the covers on them. These covers let you do that, with a zippered flap in front that can be folded back and velcroed in place. Putting those covers on is a PIA, as you have to lower the subs into them, *****-end first. We gotta start making enough money to hire a roadie. I am still blown away by how good those RCFs sound. Better than a hack band like us deserves. I set up my TASCAM DR-07 mini recorder on a mic stand out front. The idea is to record our arrangements for the new guitarist, when we find one. Unfortunately, our current guitarist happens to be pretty good. Good enough to set our expectations high, so the search goes on. It was the first time I'd used the DR-07, which I'd bought just for this purpose. I didn't even know if it was working correctly. I set levels and let it run for the entire 2-hour show, hoping for the best. Ended up with a 1.4GB MP3. Never seen a 1.4GB MP3 file before. Turned out what I got was 2 hours of wind noise with some music under it. Enough for our future guitarist to learn the arrangements, though.

It's true. The reason you don't see much spam here is because it's usually gone within minutes of its posting. It is not an automated process. It's because we really hate spam. I am delighted when I get to stomp one, although that only happens when those in time zones to my East have gone to bed for the day. Fortunately for me, even wookies sleep sometimes.

I assumed kittens are implied, along with baby seals and human infants.

No. Kicking puppies, littering, lying to children, taking up two parking spaces, pranking strangers for Instagram, posting revenge porn , telling gullible rubes they're going to hell if they don't buy you a jet, telling noobs that if you don't record at 192KHz you aren't a pro - these are things bad people do. Admitting you can't hear an audible difference between the 14 compressors already in your kit, that's just confidently embracing reality.

Well, I figured the AEA was positioned up high enough to be beyond the reach of any random flying drumsticks - assuming your friend wasn't also practicing his stick-twirls.

Well, I survived the three-hour tour. My daughter, who's far wealthier than me, had booked the boat for a private excursion so it actually went 4 hours. Our guide was knowledgeable and respectful of the whales, clearly an ecologically-sensitive preservationist in spite of his exploitive job. I still have reservations about following whales around. Now I know how movie stars feel when they're just trying to have lunch with a pack of paparazzi lurking about. There were several other whale-watching boats out there (I tried shouting that they couldn't look at them because we'd booked a private tour and those were OUR whales, but they apparently couldn't hear me), all tipping off the other boats as to which pods were where. Still, I'd rather see them swimming free than performing tricks at Sea World. (If you've never seen it, I highly recommend the fantastic documentary "Blackfish". But be forewarned: it's one of those documentaries that will leave you fuming.) We saw them play. We saw them fish. We did not get to see them mutilate any harbor seals, though. They seemed to be content with salmon. As would I. I have to admit, those Orcas are truly majestic. Boats have to stay some distance from them, but the animals have no such restrictions and often came right up to us. We saw a total of 12 of them in 3 different pods, including babies as well as elder giants. It was interesting enough to keep me from falling asleep, despite having only four hours' sleep the night before. I normally veg out on the Sunday after a late gig. I can't veg today, either, as today's chore is unloading the van and setting up for guitarist auditions tomorrow and Wednesday. On that front, we're hopeful because one of the candidates was enthusiastic enough to come to Saturday's gig. Now, if he'd only stuck around for the loadout and helped move gear, I'd have been inclined to offer him the job on the spot.

Sheesh. The way you can casually flex like that makes me jealous. If I owned an Earthworks there's no way I'd let a drumstick near it.

It was either the worst gig in recent memory, or the best. I've decided to classify it as the latter. Now, every band likes to have an audience and hates to play for an empty room. But last night was ridiculous. Packed wall-to-wall. They couldn't have squeezed one more person in there. The fire department would have declared it a safety hazard. I wasn't worried, as the emergency exit was 10 feet from me, so I probably would have survived a stampede. No air conditioning, so sweating buckets. To add to the stress, last night we debuted the new PA system. The drummer couldn't get enough volume out of his monitor, a mystery I didn't solve all night (still learning the new mixer). The drummer complained he wasn't loud enough. The guitarist complained he wasn't loud enough. The singer complained she wasn't loud enough. But by any objective measure, we were exceedingly LOUD across the board, louder than we've ever been. But the crowd was exceedingly loud as well. The PA performed well, though. No distortion with everything except bass (still waiting on a SansAmp DI) going through it. I have become a huge fan of RCF products. I like to buy American-made stuff when I can, but RCF (which is Italian) just puts QSC and JBL to shame. I was horrified at the end of the night to find that people had been using my subs for end tables. My brand-new subs that cost more than my first car, wet with beer. Fortunately, they have a hard finish that's apparently waterproof. Still pissed me off, though. Hit the pillow at 2:00 AM, immediately zonked out and woke up this morning still wearing my glasses. Now I'm off to a 3-hour whale-watching tour. Yes, a 3-hour tour. If you never hear from me again it's because I'm trying to make a radio out of a coconut.

It might be dead, or it might not. I don't know. Our editor, David Baer, has retired and doesn't want to do it anymore. To be honest, his job was a chore that I wouldn't have wanted. Whether somebody steps up to take on his role remains to be seen. For myself, I stopped writing for them a few months ago upon realizing that plugins and sample libraries just don't excite me anymore. I've got so many! It was nice getting freebies, but at some point (talking to you, bapu) you really do have enough.

You could duplicate it pretty easily with any mono synth, including an ARP. Or any modern soft synth like Zebra or Diva. Here's a free (and pretty good, though 32-bit) Minimoog emulation that can do it. Basically just a slow portamento and two notes from the lowest key to the highest, and some increasing frequency modulation via the mod wheel at the end. Probably a square wave.

Much less embarrassing than a list of all the plugins I paid for and never used.

Possible solution

I hadn't noticed this new icon until today...I think it means "stop already!". Now, to be fair to Simon, having the ability to do parallel processing within the fx bin would be a nice feature to have. I probably wouldn't use it, but I'm sure somebody would. And then come here asking why their reverb sounds so weird.

I wouldn't worry too much about recommended specs. As others have noted above, the recommended specs are just that - recommendations. Not requirements. Of course, if you run on a potato you're gonna have to be creative sometimes, e.g. freezing tracks, using large buffers and holding off on mastering until the end. But we've all been there and know it's do-able. My guess is that if your system handles CbB OK today it will handle Next, even if Next is not as heavily optimized as Sonar is due to it being multi-platform.

Please do! I'd like to read that.

Most jobs involve the monetization of your head. Not all, but most of them.

Fortunately, I live in my own universe. Don't try to refute that with logic. The fact that I happen to know your name just means there are a few small rips in the space-time continuum. Rips that I made myself and that I could seal at any time, if I wanted to. I am currently working on banishing Elon Musk back to his home planet.

I'm just looking forward to when it stops feeling like sandpaper. Or at least a finer grit. And then there's the dilemma of where to stop shaving. Plus when I look in the mirror, the face in the reflection looks like somebody who's about to start a fight over a spilled beer. On the upside, with the money I'm saving on shampoo I'm gonna buy myself a new beanie for Christmas.

I have started wearing a hat again. In August! Next week I'll be going on a whale-watching tour. Hats will be the order of the day, both for warmth and sun protection. (I should note that I have ethical concerns about whale watching; I think we should leave the Orcas alone. But my daughter's visiting from Colorado and wanted to do it so her kids could experience it.)

I believe that amp is his personal stage monitor and probably feeding FoH from a line out off the amp. I say that because there is no obvious microphone visible, and there is no cable plugged into the front panel where you'd normally plug in your guitar. In fact, the input jack seems to be covered with tape. Plus every time he does a tone change it's from his pedalboard. When he switches guitars the tech, sitting next to said pedalboard, has already plugged it in. The Leslie is clearly an amp sim on the floor, possibly the same electronics used for all of his other tones. But what do I know? I'm just a keyboard player.

I was going to ask if anyone could identify that guitar. All I could make out in the video was "Yamaha" on the headstock. Pretty much everything on that stage was a Yamaha product. I couldn't identify the line array elements, but they're probably Yamaha, too. Wanna bet he's got a sweet endorsement deal? He was obviously a Strat guy in his early days. Except for his surfboard period. Anybody else notice that his guitar tech was sitting beside him the whole time? At first, I was trying to figure out what instrument he was playing, then got a side shot of him tuning the other guitar and then handing it off. Usually, techs hide backstage and just run out when needed to swap instruments. I'm guessing that guy does way more than just tune guitars. He's probably a hotshot player himself, maybe even a luthier on the side. And still had to submit a resume along with 100 other people to get the gig.

Some old-school fusion for your Sunday listening enjoyment. Great band, great live mix. With his versatility, subtlety, tasteful use of fx and amazing control, this guy's the Japanese Jeff Beck. These days I always check out the amplification and sound system. This is kind of my ideal stage setup: no amps other than floor wedges, mains in stereo and not cluttered with excessive low bass.

Nah. The same way you don't throw out unfashionable clothes, you just store them until they're fashionable again, time resets everything. Keeping my dome shaved is too much work, and my next haircut will likely be in June 2024. The red pigment visible in my thumbnail, however, will unfortunately never return. It was a most pleasant gig. 80 degrees, partly overcast. Nice stage, outdoors in a really cool parklike area behind a diner alongside the North Cascades Highway, a popular summertime tourist route that takes you from the Pacific Ocean to the Cascade Mountains. Many in our audience were motorists who'd heard the music from the highway and pulled in for dinner. That made our employers happy. They gave us food, always a sure way to a musician's heart. Probably literally, in this case. The mood was further enhanced by the gentle incense of a distant wildfire. Mmm, summertime in the Pacific Northwest.

First rock band I ever saw cover a Broadway musical number...sort of. Hadn't heard of them before catching them at a teen dance in Banbury, Oxfordshire, 1969. The following year, Emerson would form ELP in same mold as The Nice. This was actually a Top 40 hit in the UK.