For those who don’t have a USB mic, or have a favourite microphone that you want to use for laptop recording check out this USB to Mic adapter. This little thing is about as small as it gets for a mic pre-amp and converter. It even has hardware monitoring. 16 bit 48K/44.1KHZ Sampling, condensor or dynamic.

Eschew the laptop for the palmtop studio. It’s like a mini-recorder on steroids minus the small testicles.

TASCAM DP-004

• Tascam DP-004
• Boss Micro BR
• Zoom MRS-8
• Sonar V-Studio 100
• Fostex MR-8 MkII

Forget the micro cassette. Once the province of journalist and busy executives the mini-recorder has gone beyond the mere note-taking duties of its ancestors. Take your pick of any of these full featured hand-held recorders:

• Zoom H4 or the cheaper Zoom H2
• M-Audio Microtrack II
• Tascam GT-R1 (For bass and guitar, includes tuner and metronome, amp simulation and effects)
• Edirol R09HR
• Sony PMDC50

Here are  great fieldguides  on field recording from The Vermont Folklife Center.

The new crop of sub-laptops that are cropping up are cheap, light, and small. Perfect for the musician on the go. They don’t take up much room in your gig-bag and when you’re hauling your outfit the last thing you want is more weight. Check out this article on recording music with Linux on an Asus EEE. I recall that some time ago banks were just giving these away if you opened an account. I have use an EEE at work and can testify that it is tiny. Don’t forget to see the related links too.

Oade Brothers Audio is a place to go for digital field recorders, though more for the journalist/archiver/sound guy than the musician. Still, these are beefy things with professional power. Perfect for recording that drumming circle on the men’s-getaway-weekend-retreat-extravaganza.

For you iPodists out there, Alesis has the ProTrack which you can pick up here. Also Belkin has the GoStudio which you can also get here at a 46% savings. Don’t forget the software side of things (iProRecorder, Rectools2)

With the plethora of portable recording solutions available you have little excuse for not archiving your music, wherever you are. So next time you’re at a jam session be sure you have something to capture the spontaneous awesomeness or risk losing it in the mists of time.

The Hapi drum

Check out the Hapi drum …

e|----------------------------------------------|
B|----------------------1-------0--------1---4--|
G|----2----------3b----2---2-------1----2-------|
D|--3---------2-------2--------1-----3----------|
A|--3-------1--1-------------2------------------|
E|----------------------------------------------|

When I came across Songsterr it was like the heavens opened up. Finally a place with full featured tab, the way it was meant to be written. Take a look at this screenshot. It’s beautiful!

Click to see full size

It has note lengths below the bars, full fledged bend and vibrato notation, and the real kicker: IT WILL PLAY THE MUSIC FOR YOU! That’s right, the fancy play button isn’t just for show. You can play, pause, skip around the tab till your heart is bursting with glee. A marker will run along the notation so you know where you are.  Just when you thought it couldn’t get better the songs let you choose which part you want to look at the tab for.

Click to see full size

There are of course two levels of features, the ones that are free and the ones that you pay for. On the list of paid services are: Playing at half speed, Fullscreen mode, Printing,  Part volume control, and Part soloing. The ‘plus’ account is $9.90 per month. I don’t have that much of a need for tab, but if I were in a working cover band I’m sure I’d get my monies worth. If your tired of sloughing through the tons of crappy tab on the internet check into Songsterr, you won’t regret it.

It seems to me that this is one step backward. I remember being asked years ago what physical media would replace disks, and I replied “Solid state”. You see, with the growing capacity and plummeting price of memory chips I thought that in the future, you would put a cartridge in a box to make the music go. I was so wrong. While, yes, some sort of physical media is needed to store whatever music and video information you want to play, it has become antiquated as a way of distributing that information. It’s all done with wires and radio-waves these days.

The future of personal player?

Slotmusic sounds like any other mp3 player with the exception that instead of plugging in the player to your computer to load it up, you have to plug in a microSD card to your computer… and then plug the card into the player. Somehow I don’t think adding in an intermediary step to the proccess is a feature. Sure, the whole point of having these cards is that you can buy them preloaded with music, or swap out the 1GB worth of music for another GB when you need a change of playlists. But let’s be honest here, say you have an average file size of 5MB per song, a 1GB player would then hold approximately 200 songs. At 3 minutes a song that’s 10 hours of music that you could listen to straight without ever repeating. If the player had a 10 hour battery life I would be impressed. The idea that I would need to switch over 1GB cards is silly. It doesn’t work with how people use their players; which is to cram it full of songs they like, listen to it a few hours a day then change it up every couple of days. For the true music junkies, who have buds grafted into their ears, it’s worth it to shell out for a few extra GB to meet their needs.

Here’s another point. MicroSD cards are tiny. They are appropriately sized for losing. I don’t want to keep track of something that is less than the size of a postage stamp.  Then there is the issue of price. These preload cards are going for around $15. I remember when CD’s first got a toehold in the consumer market. They went for around $14, which was about 50% more than what one used to pay for tapes and records. It was said that the jacked price would come down to the $9 level once CD’s became more ubiquitous. I think you all know how that story ended. Given that album lengths are roughly 10 songs, you would be paying $1.50 a song. Of course you’re paying over the $1 a song model that iTunes has going on, that extra 50 cents per song is going towards paying for the card (or lining the pockets of the fat cats).

Don’t get me started on the enviromental impact. Instead of buying one storage device that lasts the lifetime of the player, you are potentially buying additional storage devices throughout the lifetime of the player. So much wasted energy and materials in production, transportation, packaging.

The only thing they have right is the price of the player.  At $20 one might think of picking it up, but if you wait 3 months I’ll bet you can pick up a typical 1GB player for that price anyway. Save your money, slotMusic is going nowhere.

http://www.harpkit.com

There are so many DIY stompbox sites out there, I’m amazed that this hasn’t been done before. There is an opensource DSP effect prototyper called Coyote-1 which is offered by Howler Audio though I don’t see any actual pictures of the unit anywhere on the site. If anyone has bought one, let me know they exist.

The beavis board is designed to give you a platform for learning and building. If you can follow along with simple instructions, you can start building and modding a classic and new stompbox circuits.

Read more …

The strings that I put on are D’Addario Chromes High Finish Ribbon Wound Electric Guitar Strings. That’s quite the mouthful. I’m impressed with the sound. Though they aren’t as bright as my usual strings they do offer a warm, clean tone devoid of finger squeaks. Admittedly the lack of ridges is somewhat odd to get used to. After 18 years of playing with strings that have some grip I need to adjust to how my fingers now glide around. In a way it’s better for noodling around the blues scales. I can move my fingers into position faster and more smoothly. My hand just slips around on the fretboard throwing in grace notes and glissandos where ever I please.

The extra cost has always stopped me from buying ribbon wound strings, but now I may reconsider my purchasing decisions. Maybe I’ll pick up string cleaner in order to make them last longer. If you’ve never tried flat wound strings before I suggest you don’t wait 18 years like I did. The way they alter your sound and playing is worth the few extra dollars to investigate.

Get some strings…

While this thing costs more than my amplifier you get what you pay for. This was brought into sharp focus when I compared it with some Boss pedals. The Classic Booster + Distortion sound was like a fine cream while the others I tried were coffee whitener. The incorporated noise gate was really nice; it took out all my finger noise. There are enough settings to get a wide range of sounds making it a versatile pedal to have in the chain.

If you’re saving up your hard earned money to buy some distortion for your guitar, then I’d recommend you take this one out for a test drive. You may forgo the the cheaper pedals and save a little longer to get this. I know I’ll be socking away to have it.

Get Effects…

I was about to give up on the thought of a software metronome altogether when I got weird. Not only is it free, but it is much more usable and flexible that any other program I tried. With the ability to use nearly fifty sounds it’s like having a mini drumkit. I just pick out some of the many samples and go to town. If I’m just doing finger exercises then I use it straight up. But the real beauty of this is its ability to do arbitrary time signatures, a feature you don’t really find elsewhere. If you want to get the hang of playing in 5/4 then do yourself a favour and download this.

http://www.pinkandaint.com/weirdmet.shtml