Category: Series

All of the recurring features – #CoffeeAndKlon, First Impressions, #LongTermReview, New Arrivals – all in one place.

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Studio Diary #26: Rehearse, Rehearse, REHEARSE!

This year, I’m aiming to record four pieces of original music that I wrote in the early 1990s. They’ll be performed on acoustic guitar, and I’ll be doing the engineering, production and mixing myself.

Four songs on an acoustic guitar doesn’t sound like much, does it? After all, your average guitar YouTuber probably has to bang out at least one piece a week, every week. And this awesome chap is on track to record and upload 100 songs.

So why am I only aiming for just the four songs? And how is it going? The clue’s in the title.

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Studio Diary #25: The Roland SPD-SX and Universal Audio Luna

MIDI drums and drum samples. Love ’em or hate ’em, they’re a fact of life for just about everyone who records music at home. And, just as most of us can’t accommodate the noise of a real drum kit in the house, most of us have nowhere to keep a digital drum kit either. We’re left with using much smaller percussion pads, or we compromise and use something we can sort-of play like Roland’s SPD-SX.

But how do you get them into Universal Audio’s LUNA DAW in the first place? When I googled, I couldn’t find any instructions anywhere on how to do this.

So I wrote my own.

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New Arrivals: October 2020

This month is mostly defined by constraints.

I had to replace the car last month. Unfortunately, with everything that’s going on in the world right now, there’s a lot of unusual shortages, and I just couldn’t get replacement parts to keep my car on the road. That puts a significant limit on how much I can spare to spend on hobbies for a bit.

Secondly, we’re back in lockdown. We can travel, we’re just very limited on where we’re legally allowed to travel to. [By the end of the month, the local lockdown had become a full lockdown once again – Ed] Normally, this time of year, we’d be visiting far-flung guitar shops to hunt for unusual items and surprises. That’s just not an option right now.

Finally, there just isn’t that much interesting (to me) gear hitting the second hand market right now. All too often, the items that do catch my eye are priced optimistically, and I’m not yet sure if this is a temporary thing, or whether prices are going to remain this high in the long term.

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