Category: Home Studio Gear

The things we can use to bottle up our tone and put it on display for all to marvel at!

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New Arrivals For January 2020

Almost no new gear for me, this month. The gear budget had to go on some urgent car maintenance instead. I can’t complain; the car’s been almost completely trouble-free until now. It’s just one of those things as it gets older (120,000 miles and counting!)

I don’t feel that I missed out, though. Volumes on eBay are definitely up, but not back to the levels of a year ago. If anything, there’s been more interesting guitars than interesting (to me!) pedals … and plenty of people piling on and bidding hard on those pedals.

A couple of items I’d ordered last year did arrive this month. Here’s what I got.

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#HomeTone Thoughts Before Winter NAMM 2020

Winter NAMM is almost here. It’s one of the most high-profile guitars & gear trade shows in the world, and traditionally, many manufacturers use it to announce or launch their major new products of the year.

YouTube is going to be dominated by NAMM show floor coverage for the next few weeks. If you want to see everything that will be displayed at the show, subscribe to one of the YouTube channels I recently recommended.

From a #HomeTone perspective, what are the gaps in the market that I’m hoping to see filled by new products?

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Studio Diary #15: Revisiting Old Gear

I’m currently getting my home studio more organised, and along the way I’m sharing my thought process, decisions, discoveries and regrets.

One of the benefits of this autumn’s home studio mini-revamp is that it’s now pretty easy to use any piece of gear that I’ve currently got. I’ve been taking advantage of that, by revisiting old pieces of gear that didn’t get much use in the past.

Thanks to the cleaner cabling, I’m finally able to hear this gear at its very best. And – spoiler alert! – I’m rapidly falling in love with a couple of items that I never got on with first time around.

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New Arrivals For November

My home studio revamp is in full swing. I’m hoping to complete it this month, so that I can spend the winter months getting to grips with it all and starting to record music for myself once again.

The second hand market on eBay has picked up a little since the horror show that was October. It feels like the number of items is up a little, but I haven’t really felt tempted by any of the items put up for sale.

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Studio Diary #13: The Planet Waves / D’addario Cable Station Cables … Aren’t Very Reusable

I’m currently getting my home studio more organised, and along the way I’m sharing my thought process, decisions, discoveries and regrets.

For the past few years, I’ve been using the D’Addario (formerly Planet Waves) Cable Station system to make my own solderless patch cables. I like it because it gives me the convenience of making custom-length cables, and I rarely make a dud cable.

I used to have a huge pedal board with 20 pedals on it. I tore that down earlier in the year, giving me a lot of Cable Station connectors and cable to try and reuse – along with some new connectors that I ordered in for the studio revamp.

The results have been mixed.

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