Tone. At Home.
“The Hermit’s Cave” is my little home recording studio. This is a general catch-all tag for anything about me and my gear.
Thanks to its association with That Pedal Show, the Keeley Electronics D&M Drive has to be one of the most well-known drive pedals to launch in recent years.
I’ve finally taken the plunge and bought myself one. What do I think of it? Here’s my first impressions of this award-winning pedal.
Continue reading “First Impressions: Keeley D&M Drive”Back in May 2020, my pre-ordered Mythos Lark drive pedal arrived. It’s been on the practice board most of the time since then, sharing time with various other tweed-tone pedals that I’ve been looking at.
How has it gotten on? Here’s my First Impressions of this drive pedal. It’s a bit of a long read …
Continue reading “First Impressions: Mythos Pedals’ Lark (Rhett Shull Signature) Overdrive Pedal”When the UK lockdown began in late March, a lot of musicians lost the majority – if not all – of their income. I was in a position to help, so I started buying an album every single Monday.
I lasted about 12 weeks before I stopped.
What was it like, and why did I stop doing it every single week? Here’s my thoughts on what I learned.
Continue reading “What I Learned From Buying Music Every Week”I’m keeping an eye on eBay for extra-unusual items, just in case. This month, though, is all about overcoming my fears, and starting to make good use of what I’ve already got.
Here’s everything that arrived this month, with first impressions to follow.
Continue reading “New Arrivals For June 2020”The thing I hate most about digital recording? Latency. Even though I’m about as far away from a technically-accomplished player as you can get, I really struggle with coping with latency when I’m recording with Reaper. It’s the main reason that I bought my first UAD Apollo interface back in 2016.
So when Universal Audio announced LUNA, and made a huge song-and-dance about how it enables recording with virtually zero latency, I had to try it.
That was at the end of April 2020. I’ve been using it on-and-off throughout May, and scribbling down notes as I went along.
When you read this, please remember that it’s perfectly possible that some of these points may have been addressed in more recent releases of LUNA. UAD seem to be doing a great job of getting regular updates out for users.
That kinda hints that I ran into a lot of pain points with LUNA …
Continue reading “First Impressions: Universal Audio’s LUNA DAW”My green Strat is back from the shop. It’s been in for some more mods. What have I had done to it this time, and am I happy with the results of the upgrades I asked for?
Continue reading “The Green Strat Is Back”At the start of the month, I tried D’Addario XT strings for the first time. With the end of the month almost here, I thought I’d write a quick follow-up about how I’m getting on with them.
They’re coming off both guitars, just as soon as I’ve got replacement strings.
Continue reading “Followup: D’Addario XT Strings”Above all others, there’s one tweed-tone pedal that I haven’t yet tried. It might not be the very first tweed-tone pedal, but it’s certainly the earliest one that I know about. It’s a pedal that’s rumoured to have graced the boards of many successful recording and touring artists.
And finally, after years of watching them go for very high prices, I finally won one on eBay. Was it worth the wait? Or will it remain forever in the shadow of my beloved SHOD?
Continue reading “First Impressions: Boss FBM-1 Fender 59 Bassman Overdrive Pedal”Recently, I picked up a BMan preamp for my Synergy rig. How did I get on with it? Read on for my First Impressions.
Continue reading “First Impressions: Synergy BMan”Back in April, I bought my first set of studio monitors for my little home studio. They went onto my desk straight away, and I’ve been using them pretty regularly since.
Read on for my First Impressions of them.
Continue reading “First Impressions: Tannoy Gold 5 Studio Monitors”