Are who?

August 29, 2009, 00:04 -05 by chris
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This is why I loves me some Intrywebs:

Ehru on Craigslist:Forty dollars (and it ain’t one of the cheap ones, either – brass ‘n ivory, baby…).

Ehru instructional videos on YouTube: Zero dollars.

Wikipedia article on Ehrus informing me that the two strings are tuned to the same “D” and “A” as a violin, thereby enabling me to be rocking on a new instrument within an hour: Priceless.

If there’s one way to build calluses on your fretting hand after not practicing for a while, it’s playing an instrument that not only has no frets, but no fretboard – the strings are suspended in midair – for several hours in the fervor of “new toy” excitement. (I have to stop for the evening. My pointer hurts.) I have a feeling practicing on this thing for a while is going to make picking up the violin seem easy in comparison. So I promise the new album won’t sound entirely like The House of Flying Daggers soundtrack.

Like the city in Alaska?

August 25, 2009, 12:37 -05 by chris
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Juno-106 chips removed and replaced, little trim-pots for “VCA offset”, “VCF resonance”, “VCF frequency”, “VCF width”, etc., trimmed and calibrated x6, and all is well. It didn’t take long to abandon the “hey, let’s desolder all the VCF/VCA chips and spend two weeks soaking them in a coffee can full of acetone, carefully peeling the resin coatings off, then putting them back” idea, as 1) the little buggers are really tedious to get out with all their legs intact unless you have the patience of a saint, which I don’t, and a better solder-sucker than you can buy at the local Radio Shack, 2) after the first hour of desoldering and re-soldering, my personality type quickly arrives at the conclusion that it’s better to just spend the money to buy more replacement chips instead of spending all this time dicking around with desoldering braid and tweezers, and 3) I want to use the thing now, not in a couple weeks. So i just replaced the two ICs that were bad for now, and resigned myself to replacing the stupid things on an as-needed basis (they’re only half original-equipment now, so three more and it’ll be totally ‘overhauled’).

Synths repaired: 1. House fires started: 0. Chips permanently destroyed (at least, enough of the little metal-fatigued legs damaged as to make them not worth the trouble of salvaging) in the process when I ran out of patience and decided to just wiggle them back and forth until the legs snapped off: 2. Voices that seem like they’re on the verge of going in the future, so I should order a few more spares for next time: 1.

Zen and the art of synthesizer maintenance

August 18, 2009, 14:11 -05 by chris
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“Working on music equipment” counts as “working on music”, right?

Whomever designs certain models of Line 6 “Variax” guitars is a sadist, an engineering genius, or both. You have to remove the neck to partially remove the pickguard to carefully disconnect several snap-on ribbon-cable-style connectors to finish removing the pickguard to access the electronics – you can’t remove the pickguard all the way until you disconnect the ribbon cables; you have to hold it “hovering” about an inch from the body while doing so, as the cables aren’t long enough, and aren’t kindly placed all along just one side, which would allow one to ‘flip the lid’ like you can on a (well designed) synth. 

And then you have to fish another little red-and-black-means-power cable with snap-on connector through a metal shielding cage and back with tweezers. Tweezers.

Two guitars field-disassembled, repaired, and reassembled: check. Akai AX-60 repaired: check. Juno-106 repaired: negative. Got the thing opened up and the board with the voice and problematic VCF-VCA ICs pulled, but ran out of time before getting all the chips desoldered and pulled for the “soak your 80017a’s in acetone to strip the resin” trick that’s all the rage these days. So it may be be a week or two before I find out if I’ve fixed the thing, or destroyed it. Roland SH-09 key contacts cleaned: rescheduled for a later date.

At least I was able to swap the stock pickguards between the two to arrive at much-improved “black ‘n white” and “black ‘n red”, which in some imaginary, alternate universe gains some sort of “cred” for making my to-hell-with-the-purists “what the hell are you doing using that clearance-bin fake digital guitar, boy? You say that thing hooks up to a computer?” bits of glorified kindling look a bit more like old Melody Maker and Duo Jet color schemes to the undiscerning, non-guitar-wanker eye. Because being a proper indie-post-punk-hipster-whatever is all about caring very much about pretending not to care.

Want.

August 11, 2009, 17:35 -05 by chris
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A no-MIDI-onboard version with patch points already handily broken out into a side panel as standard, and it’s cheaper than the version with onboard MIDI and only one extra (other than the obvious keyboard-to-oscillator-pitch one) CV-controllable destination, and it’s cheaper than the Analogue Solutions Telemark? Oh yeah.

Already have the Doepfer MIDI-to-CV box for the SH-09 sitting around, so… Not like I’m looking around trying to figure out what to sell to justify pre-ordering one of these things or anything…

The Sepiachord Companion

August 5, 2009, 14:32 -05 by chris
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Doing a compilation mastering gig this week for our friends at Sepiachord, who will be releasing their first commercially-released comp, The Sepiachord Companion, on Devil’s Ruin Records. I must say, “mastering” is sure a heck of a lot easier when you don’t have to (and shouldn’t) do much, if anything – the majority of the tracks are already “there” for the most part (or of the “that’s the deliberate character of the recording, don’t mess with it” variety) that it’s just a matter of bumping things up or down a fraction of a dB here or there so things sound ‘in context’ volume-wise from track to track, playing with the timing of the ‘pause’ between tracks so it sounds musical, and pressing the shiny red button (or in the case of this music, perhaps that’s rusty brown lever), and going off to listen on different playback systems. Not the sort of thing I would have expected to actually be fun, but in this case it (“it” being the “do no harm” school of mastering) is.

Success!

August 1, 2009, 20:13 -05 by chris
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The new versions of Logic, Waveburner, and Mainstage were totally worth the wait, IMHO. I’m just glad there’s a PPC-compatible version that I’ll be happy to “live with” for a while. That desktop background is a vacation snapshot from a hotel balcony in Amsterdam.

Mea maxima culpa…

July 28, 2009, 15:10 -05 by chris
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Well, well, well. Looks like I may have hit the ‘rant’ button with excessive haste, as “not supported” does not necessarily mean “it won’t work”, according to others who’ve already installed Logic 9 Studio (which is still a Universal Binary, it’s just not “advertised” as such, and you can’t call tech support and complain if you have problems – which I never have. Called tech support, that is…) on their even-older-than-mine G5 setups.

So it’s off to the Apple Store to pay another tithe to the Church of Jobs for the LP9 update, after ordering one of these (the one that came with the G5 is getting pretty gross, between the usual keyboard plaque, cat hair, and stickum from a set of rapidly deteriorating Editor’s Keys stickers for Logic), because I’m a cheap bastard as far as paying $119.99 for an actual “Logic Keyboard”, and keyboard covers are meant to cover up existing gunk, not keep it from getting in there in the first place…uh, right?

Plus, attaching one of those shiny new Mac Pro “slim” keyboards to the G5 would feel a little like putting a “Type R” sticker and coffee-can-sized tailpipe on an old Honda DX automatic.

All of which is a bit of a relief, as far as temporary reprieves from forced-multi-thousand-dollar-planned-obsolescence-hardware-upgrades go, as I’ve got enough sunk into Universal Audio, Native Instruments, Sonnox, and the rest to merit sticking it out as long as I can with the existing rig, and need to first figure out if this whole “pouring a slab and building a dedicated double-wall studio outbuilding from the ground up” (and, as yet another aside, damn you, stupid, stupid Steve Vai, for already calling your home studio the “Harmony Hut”, you fair-weather poseur of a fan of the second-best scene from Addams Family Values – the first being Wednesday and her fellow “Indians” taking their revenge on the Camp Chippewa “The First Thanksgiving” Parent’s-Day play, of course – you… now I have to think of something else lest plans be mistaken as an homage to wheedle-wheedle-wheedley-dee Guitar Hero histrionics…) is really going to be a workable, budgetable solution to the impending “gotta get all this gear out of the spare bedroom before it’s no longer a spare bedroom, and do it the two-thousand-layers-of-caulked-sheetrock Rod Gervais way while we’re at it” problem, before buying another computer that costs more than pouring a slab. 

Music production advice of the decade

August 20, 2008, 12:38 -05 by chris
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“What a bloody stupid design. What’s the point of it being designed like that, if you can’t even put your drink on it?”- Kate Moss, on mixing console design