This blog examines, reviews and discusses how worship is being lived out in culture and in the church. We tackle everything from songwriting techniques in corporate worship, to interviewing worship leaders and pastors, to reviewing the last big rock concert.
Well this looks really cool. The new tuner from TC Electronics says it will tune all your strings at the same time, you just strum and it shows which strings are out of tune. If this works as advertised I want one. Selling for only $99, that seems almost too cheap to me. What you think, you gonna buy? Anybody already used it?
There aren’t too many more touchy issues than volume when it comes to worship in the church. Usually the chain of events goes something like, lady in church complains to pastor it’s too loud, pastor tells the sound man to turn it down, sound man gets defensive and says he can’t control the mix with how loud the amps are on stage, sound man yells at the guitar player and guitar player says he can’t get the tone he wants with the amp turned to 1. Then more and more barriers are placed around the drummer for good measure.
Sound familiar? This is where a good SPL dB meter comes into play. It gives you a reading of how loud you are and gives you something consistent to set the mix to. They can range in price from $40 to $250, and for many churches it’s just not worth the money. Well in comes the iPhone and a nice, accurate SPL dB meter for $0.99. You can’t really beat that.
I used it at my church and we got a reading that the pastor was happy with and now we know from week to week what to set to. I’d highly encourage you to get some kind of dB meter, but this iPhone SPL dB meter certainly gets the job done. It even has some configuration options for using external mics, but comes pre-configured for the iPhone internal mic.
Pretend I gave you $1,000 but you had to spend it on music gear. What would you get?
I’d get the new Abelton Suite and have a few hundred left over to buy a decent condenser mic, like a Shure KSM27 or Rode NT-1. What’s next on your list of music goodies?
Record is Propellerhead’s latest software release that finally addresses the much requested feature of audio recording inside of Reason. But instead of adding it to Reason they created a new product. The price sounds right at $299 for all the features they’ve thrown in. Create Digital Music has a wonderful in depth review of Record and this video below gives a nice intro to the product as well. You can sign up for beta testing at www.record-you.com
I’m always on the search for music gear that I want/need/lust after. I also have nowhere close to the amount of money I need to get the gear I thirst after. Craigslist is an obvious place to start when looking for local gear that people are trying to part with. The problem is so are thousands of other people in your area so the chances of you searching just at the right time to score the right gear at the right price aren’t all that great. Enter Craigslist RSS feeds.
You can see that I have a few saved searches and I check everyday to see if any new items come up. I’m usually first to respond when they do. Although now maybe a few more Phoenix people are hip to Craigslist RSS feeds and I have some competition on my hands.
In any case this is a great way to score good deals. Happy shopping.
Guitar players know how live rigs work, you go through phases, tone phases, effects phases, minimalist to surrounding yourself in stompboxes. You sell things only to buy them back a couple years later. Well poor musicians like myself do anyway. So I find myself rebuilding a lot of what I tore down a couple years ago, but this time I have clearer vision to the tone I’m aiming for. I’m pretty close right now, but need a few things.
Current Gear:
My Shopping List:Plenty more on the list long term, but this is my short term list and it’s over $1,000. Don’t tell my wife, she’ll pass out. BUT this is where you come in. If you or any one you know is selling any of this gear used, please pass it by me. I’d rather not get all this new. Or you can goto the ORS Store and buy some gear to help a brutha out. Contribute to my stimulus.
In the last few months my church, Life Connection Church, has successfully setup a recording strategy that allows us to capture and track each channel before it gets to the board. This has many advantages over capturing board mixes. I wanted to share with you what we’ve done on truly a shoe-string budget.
The problems with a board mix are typically quality and flexibility. Starting with quality, your house mix is for just that, your house. This isn’t usually ideal for what sounds good in isolation(headphones) because you’re not mixing for isolation. You’ll find this especially true when mixing for small venues and have to deal with unruly stage volume.
Flexibility is lost when you just have a stereo recording and no tracks available to work with in post-production. There’s not many places to go with a stereo recording, you can do some EQ’ing perhaps but it’s all global, not individual instruments or vocals. So you can see how this impacts quality level.
There are plenty of ways to do this but I’m going to show how we did it. For just over $400 we purchased the PreSonus FireStudio Project firewire recording interface. This has 8 XLR inputs and can be daisy chained with more units to satisfy however many channels you need to capture. So right from the snake we take the channels we want to capture and insert into the PreSonus and then use a 1/4″ patch cables out of the PreSonus unit into the board. Effectively using the PreSonus as an intercept unit, it does no processing (outside of the pre-amp) just passes the signal on to the board. So as far as the FOH is concerned there’s no change besides gain level with the PreSonus preamps.
One hurdle we had to clear was we didn’t have the funds to purchase more than one unit, yet we have about 15 channels in use that we needed to capture for live recording. Here’s where we had to get creative. 8 of those 15 channels were for the drums. So what we did was take the drum sub channel out into the PreSonus so now we take the board mix of the drums and have 1 channel of drums on the PreSonus. We have our drums on their own stereo sub channel on the board so this was as easy as taking the 1/4″ sub outs on the back of the board and routing them to the PreSonus. This isn’t ideal for the same reasons board mixes aren’t ideal, but has worked ok for us. Going forward we’d like to buy another unit dedicated for the drums.
Being able to capture the tracks is one thing, but then what do you capture them to is the other part of the equation. There are numerous software recording tools you could use. PreSonus comes with Cubase but there’s also better options like Logic and Pro Tools. We use a free option, Garage Band for the mac. Eventually we’ll get another unit and then switch to Logic but presently for these demo mixes and for sermon podcasting this is suiting our quality needs just fine.
An important feature here is that this unit works whether you are plugged into a computer and recording or not. No rewiring is necessary when switching between the two.
PreSonus FireStudio Project = $425
1/4″ patch snake = $35
Recording software = $0 (Garage Band)
You can listen to some of the mixes from our setup here and more recently here. You can hear the improvement in quality from the older sample to the more recent one as we get more use with the unit.
Live looping is a technique made more popular recently by people like KT Tunstall, but it’s not really a new concept at all. Basically it consists of one or more musicians capturing live audio in a loop and adding more layers on to the loop throughout the song. Usually accomplished with something like a Boss Loop Station or Electro-Harmonix Super Multi-Track Looper. If done well it can be an incredible thing to see and hear.
Andrew Bird is an incredible musician, vocalist, live looper and whistler. In fact I’ve not heard many give as clean and on pitch whistle as Andrew. Noble Beast is Andrew’s latest album and it sounds incredible.
Here is a video of Andrew performing “A Nervous Tic Motion of the Head to the Left“ live at Bonnaroo in ‘06 showing off his sick live looping skills.
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