Alan Tubbs

Good ribbons are good mics. I use a basement bottom mxl to record a lot of guitar. With a fender twin in a damped room I pick up some goldy oldie tone. Perfect for old style blues or rock.

2 gigs of kurzweil samples may sound better than a 20 gigs of another library, just as you can can record a guitar part in a bad room at 96 kH that sounds worse than a good room at 44.1. Internal sample rates dont define how good a sample sounds as much as how carefully the sample is curated (the new hot word for sampling). An out of tune sample at 96 kH won’t work as well as an in tune sample at 16 bits,

A lot of the pros I know use 48 /44.1. Although it is old, Lavry’s (of Lavry Engineering) white paper showed that the best sample rate was-in th low 60s, after everyone adapted 44.1/48/88.2/96/192K. Higher rates have their own problems and is a waste of recording space since it ain’t better sounding. Look him up on google. It is pretty interesting. But 96k is good for sample storage as opposed to recording. Don’t lose much info as it makes it way to mp3 land. 24 bits is good, again for your DAW. But Make sure that the engine is running in 64 bit when mixing so the engine can take advantage of the extra bits to keep it from truncating the numbers sooner. Older software fix etc. upsampled for the same effect. there is a lot more to samples than just rates. Always remember that first in your signal chain is the instrument and player, then the recoding chain goes room, mic, pre amp, conversion, storage. A flaw in an earlier step just keeps getting worse the longer you try to work around it. I wouldn’t worry about the statistics as how much the sound works for you in context. The best your audience is likely to hear your music on is a CD, that is downstream of your DaAW quality @

I just mutidock all my synths and float it. The only problem with this is there is no way to reorder the multi dock windows tabs linearly. If your first window is a piano that you latter add a reverb on it, you have to side scroll through all the tabs.

Yes. Try the gap alone. You should get a slightly beefier sound driving the unit. And it should be able to amplify your sound by itself. one other facet of recording is your room. It is almost impossible at home to get a balanced room. But with a few pieces of rock wool you can even out the worst elements in your room tone. It also takes a lot of experimenting with the mic and instrument (human voice in this case) to get a decent tone. My cheap favorite method is to cut/stuff rock wool into cheap pillowcases and then put those inside burlap coffee bags. $100 for rockwool, a dollar a shot for Amazon pillowcases and my roaster gave me the burlap bags for free. However, I can’t sew a stitch but my kid does. a few of these in the corners and over the recording/mixing area and either side. You’ll be surprised how much you can cleanup and soak up extra bass .not abbey studios but every little bit helps.

The warm pre is an api style mic. Very upfront, rock n roll sound. Nice fullness from the transformer without sacrificing transients. Simple circuitry. the other main clone these days is of Mr. Neve’s 1073 pre with eq taken from his early solid state mixers. Golden age was the first low cost cloned but had quality control issues. Enter Warm who got better qc plus had good service. Golden age solved their qc problems. I’ve never used one but plenty of people seem to like it. The warm Neve is pretty good but a lot more than $80 more than their api pre. another serious contender is the isa one by focusrite. Kinda splits the difference. A little smooth transformer goodness but not heavy. You can find them on sale for 4 or 5 hundred with luck. Taken from (again) one of Mr. Neves later designs from focusrite when he returned from audio exile after selling his Neve company and signing a non competitive agreement. As he worked toward reproducing an electric signal with no distortion at all he did reach that goal. But without some internal distortion recording engineers found they missed it and how distortion can help cut or fill out a sound. I had one friend who guessed which company it was. He said you could turn up an eq band and feel it doing anything. So Mr Neve introduced Silk to his RND line which adds second and or third order harmonic back into the signal for such help. Mr. Neve never said which brand it was, but …

I replaced my 45 year old Yama amp with a halfler transnova. A lot punchier than the softer Yama, more upfront. Like an api preamp. Interesting. More difference than I thought.

There really ought to be a way to do this w/o hacking the registry.

I use a Yamaha pro system 40+ years old. 10 inch woofer and beryllium tweeters. Needs a new amp, the last time I had it worked on the tech said don’t bother bringing it back in. He couldn’t believe it was still working. So they can last (tho a 70s Yama is probably better built than a 90s mackie). Still, the speakers themselves can last a long time. Amps? I’m ordering an old transnova to replace the Yama. many of the studios I’ve used use barefoot speakers. Great if you can afford it, even the new cheap model. If not, I’ve been out of the speaker market for so long i couldn’t advise.

The extra resolution of oversampling does help internally when applying effects. But no hardware captures 64/bit audio.

Love eventide software, too. Good stuff and it is affordable when on sale..

Where is the deals section anyway? Not listed. Is it in a sub forum?

Looks like it could be a winner.

Audient d44, Tascam 7000, Tascam 20x20. 2 different computers and using the 20x20 as an audient expander via light pipe. I bet you find some of every interface.

One thing about audio quality the differential between pro and consumer tools these days is it ain’t as large as the old days. A modern cheap interface is a lot closer in sound to the big boys these days. You can do quality work with most modern units. You could in the past too but you needed skill and experience to get good sound from 1/32 of an inch of tape and it still wasn’t the same.

The audio quality is completely dependent upon your audio interface - not just for output but the quality of recording. in general, similarly priced units preform similarity. There are only so many ways to make a dollar preamp, and only a couple of chip manufacturers so everyone’s interfaces use the same designs and parts. Drivers are different, but most are competent these days. a $100 interface is pretty good these days but have one pre and maybe only one record channel. The least expensive “ pro” unit is a pci unit from lynx that costs &250 to $400 a channel. Burls go for $2500 for stereo input and as much as output. more typically, I use an audient unit. Good quality ( Burr Brown chips) solid drivers. You can find their cheaper units reasonable if a few dollars higher. I’ve used Tascam which are fine, as were Roland interfaces. one caveat is to use a responsible dealer. If you do have driver/software problems just switch to another company that your computer plays nice with.

The whole line of Yamaha mox synths basically have the interface built in. It works, but back when I had reviewed them, I got it working but mostly used my regular interface. The latency was ok and was usable but I didn’t want to muck around with it much. there should be explicit instructions to get it working, which, if I recall involves downloading the driver as above. I used it as an output but never recorded audio thru the mox to the computer. But it should be able to do that, just as I recorded the synths output. I can’t remember about the midi and driving internal softsynths. Sorry I can’t remember much about the process about getting it hooked up, but you choose the stienberg drivers in cakewalk.

Haven’t used it but it has some good reviews. Is it a full voltage tube?

No supervisors here, it is peer to peer. But some peers are superior than others. ? Scook is the man.

Turn the knob on your hardware unit.

Microtech gefell 930. East German Neumann. Original M7 capsule like the Neumann 47, 67 etc. doesn’t give you anything more than what you put in it. Great replication that works on just about anything. Right at a grand.

Jesse, the warm thing is just something to watch. It can happen but isn’t a sure thing and Warm stuff works great together most of the time. It helps my chain usually includes an RND portico ii. On the female vox capture above I had the RND comp set fast like an 1176 (kind of) and went out to the wa2a. Like I said, gorgeous tone and whenever she pushed her voice it got even better sounding, tube saturation sitting on the edge of distortion but not crossing that line. warm brings classic tones to modern recordings at a price many more can afford. It emulates, not copies the tone which I can live with since I can afford it. My wife would shoot me if I spent $2-3K on a UA 1176 since I could never recoup that cost as a business. I’ve got a nice “home” studio, not commercial business. rock on, Jesse. @

Their 1176 is probably their best emulation since it is so simple. I was just listening to an old song with the la2a and I don’t know if I achieved a real la2a sound but the effect is Heavenly. Just the perfect amount of bloom in the female vox. if you have only or mostly used transformerless pres etc it is really an eye opening experience to drive better units into saturation. It is lovely. The first time I used the 1176 at home I had to smile getting a facsimile of the sound I’d heard on records all my life. the only negative thing specifically about Warm is their sound, mostly from the similar sounding cinemag transformer add to the sound. Warm and thick sometimes is too much if you use multiple Warm units in-line.

A better amp for $800 or less. This last yama lasted 45 years and I don’t think I’ve got another 45 in me.? thanks

SOLVED, I had bought Sound Forge 11 but never used it. It has its own assembler and burning program built in. Tres cool. Thanks for all the suggestions. @