At work, believe it or not.

Boosted, of course.

This technique is BRIGHT, but totally fucking awesome. Why have I never tried this?


One thing of note: This is not dialed in for the mic'ing technique. It's dialed in for me to jam in between jobs. So if it were dialed in better, it would sound better.

The Bravo is loaded with the stock Blue Marvel and has old worn out JJ tubes in it, and a pretty gnarly strip of missing tolex on the front where it took a ride down a flight of concrete steps at one time


This was actually my first guitar amp, and that's all the gain it has without pulling the gain knob and introducing a bunch of fizztacular diodes into the ass end of the circuit. Just enough gain for a guy who enjoys beating his guitar to death.


http://dl.dropbox.com/u/8290798/fredman.mp3

What are you using for an interface at work?

Pair of 57s as per usual with that? I've had good luck with very mismatched mics in a similar configuration. Are you getting any weird phasing issues?

Sounds pretty pissed. Remind me what the Fredman technique is again? The name is familiar but i have forgotten.

And i am feeling too lazy to google it at the moment.

It's been around for a while, but it was popularized by some Euro-metal stuff coming out of Studio Fredman some time ago. Properly, it's a pair of 57s, one straight on the center of the cone, the other off-axis and angled.

Actually, the proper position is the straight mic at the glue on the dust cap and the angled mic at the same spot but aimed at the center of the dust cap. Kind of about a 15 degree angle? Somewhere about there. I've got them about 3 inches off the grill cloth in this clip. Might bring it in closer to use proximity effect to my advantage here. No low mids. And yes, 57s.

No strange phasing issues, when I flip the phase on the tracks all that comes out is around 4k, some nasty shit there that's getting cancelled.

And I'm using my Tascam interface. US-1800 I think? Super cheap thing. My Profire 2626 won't work with my netbook, no firewire, and the 2626 is having strange poppy clicky noises on playback for some reason or other... even with a 2048 buffer size.

Maybe need a hard drive defrag?

I have been reasonably cranky with firewire in general lately myself. It just isn't consistently solid enough for me to feel all that confident in it. Like, it works 85-90% of the time without a hitch, but that last 10-15% is a bit too much, especially when it is most likely to occur in environments other than the tried and tested one in my basement, out on location in some bands practice space i need to record.

I am broke though, and it is what i have, so i will continue to use it obviously, but the first spare $300 i come across, that i don't need to turn around immediately and buy heating oil with, is going towards the USB-based interface experiment.

Also, the US-1800 is the one i am eyeing, how do you like it?

For the money it kicks ass. It has quite a few downsides though... like the headphone amp is super noisy and kind of weak, and you can only turn phantom power on half the inputs at once, rather than turning it on on individual inputs. At a buffer size of 176 (my normal setting for tracking) it has a latency of 3ms on my PC, which is fucking win. The mic pres are decent at worst, and they have kind of a cool character when you drive them hard. Nothing special, just cool. I'd like to try some other mic pres with it, though... I used to use an ART TubeMP (I think? Not sure, it was a hundred bucks and had a 12ax7) with my old Line 6 UX2 and I dug it but I no longer have that.

Oh, and the instrument input hates high output pickups... even the Dirty Fingers in my 335 make it clip unless I turn the level all the way down. However, I've never seen this issue in a review of the thing, so YMMV

Must research mic pres now.


EDIT: It was a Presonus TubePre.

Do you mean you can only have phantom power on half of them at a time, or that you can only turn it on or off for half at a time?

Meaning: can you set all XLRs to have phantom power at the same time?

In truth, my long term desire would be to gut the thing and build my own interface out of it, using the USB and drivers(the things i cannot DIY) as the heart of the newbeast.

Alternately, i would go perhaps for the US-2000, which has "higher quality" everything, though, otherwise, a similar basic i/o and feature set.

I haven't tried turning it on on all of them. I think you can, but you can have 4 inputs powered, or 8, or none. I think that's how it works.


If I was going to DIY I'd get the cheapest thing possible. All you need are USB capability and drivers, and the 1800 thus far has proven to me to be pretty damn stable.




Also, you mentioned defragging earlier... I have my PC set to auto defrag every Wednesday morning at 1:00am, so that is not the issue. Something's fucked in the 2626. It does it on my netbook too. I hear this is a very common problem with these interfaces...

Yarr, one of the things i like most about the newer Windows is that the scheduled defrags actually seem to work correctly for a change.

So probably it is just the firewire losing and regaining sync or something.

Weirdly, a solution for stabilizing sync loss(and this may not even do anything at all on *your* system) for my particular setup was when i hooked up a cable from the main mix out on my interface(i use the control room out for my speakers, and wasn't using the analog main mix out) into the line/mic in on my computer. The main mix is turned all the way down so no actual audio is going into the PC line in(it would be coming in digitally through the 1394 anyhow) but for some fucking reason, this stabilizes the sync massively. I think it has something to do with circuit ground isolation or something, and tying the PC ground to the interface ground seems to help, or something? Totally ghetto bodge. Before i figured it out though, i couldn't get the fucking thing working solidly enough at all. Whereas now it works about 85-90% of the time, before, it was more like 40-50%, a total DICEII roll.

I'll try that... thanks man!