Wait, what...?

Must be some other sort of Opeth.

Edit: Wait, what?

It's the newest Opeth DVD.

just re-overclocked my rig. New motherboard and new ram, got it back to 3.6 ghz, pushed the ram up to 1700mhz (from 1500), put in a new fan, and now i'm typing on a clicky, blank key, Das Keyboard Ultimate. Lovin it. The click is like my favorite thing about it, and the keys are very very light to press down

My typing would become quite bizarre if my keyboard did not have letters onnit.

yupp

Fantastically nerdy.

I could probably manage without letters on my keyboard. I think

Working with the Hackintosh has been enough of a game-changer that I think I'm going to forgo the Allen & Heath desk for now and go for monitauring and room treatment instead.

Really, gamechanger in what fashion?

Sonics. Not workflow so much- though being able to sweep the EQ on the Waves SSL plugin in realtime and not have my computer go "whatcha doin' there? " is a real bonus.

It's so stupidly overpowered I can fudge tape and a console channel strip on everything and still have all the rest of my toys to mix as normal. The cumulative result of the former is a change for the better. Yes, it's a workaround, and it isn't to my ears all the way there- more on that in a bit- but it is a qualitative improvement re: sonic character and, IMO, separation between the individual mix elements. I don't feel like I'm fighting the sounds anymore, nor do I have to worry about my computer crapping out with what I throw at it. I do feel, right now, that I could improve on what I do with a better listening environment.

Now, there's a lot of advantages to the A&H board- thus "I think". 16-24 channels of analog summing, insert points, and DAW control, with the channel controls switchable between analog and DAW controller functions. (No moving faders/recall though, and I do like that about the 01V Garda has at our space.) But I don't know if where I'm at at the moment, without too much fun outboard to patch in, that it would make as substantial a qualitative difference as a killer set of monitors and treating the room. And given how I work, I don't need a ton of mic ins for tracking; not at my house anyhow.

I think taking measurements, crunching the numbers and DIY-ing (with the help of more mechanically inclined persons) room treatment is the way to go on that score, and for half the price of the A&H desk- not an easy piece to score used (it, as we've discussed, is probably the best thing in its price range for all it does in one box, and people don't want to sell them) I could score some killer monitors. If I want to go the analog summing route with the other half to see what a difference it makes sonically, I still have a lot of options open, and easier to find (or start building...) used. It is a tough call, but it's a matter of what would make the biggest improvement.

That being said, mixing with a mouse doesn't get any cooler even with a super-manly system. It's still the equivalent of cooking with a lighter.

I dig it. Bang for buck is pretty much from here on in, always going to be mousebased anyhow. Endresult-wise, you are surely to benefit more sonically from a better monitoring environment, first.

With modern computer/modeling tech, hardware based mixing environments will pretty much always be more about comfortability than sound quality, IMO. Not to be discounted, but like, everything in its time and place. There is a definite scale of diminishing returns. Makes a lot of sense, IMO to put sound feedback quality in front of whizzbang intuitive mixing comfort(i.e. hands on faders and knobs, real cables patching real devices, etc).

Even though the hardware toys are neat as hell.

A control surface or two would be really nice, but at this point it's hard to justify something that doesn't actually pass audio. The Mackie Controls would be fine- they seem sturdy and reliable (as one would expect). Anything pricier than that seems silly to me (Euphonix, SSL...) because of the aforementioned little bit about nothing being routed through it.

Re: modeling technology- the reason I came to this conclusion is the cumulative effect of being able to apply it to everything. The mix I did for Mike's band, I have between 80-90 plugins running before I've done much of anything at all besides assign stuff to groups. Faux tape and console on every track, Soundtoys Decapitator on all the subgroups. And now we're getting somewhere. 40 channels of shiny shit starts to sound pretty shiny from the beginning. Then comes all the fun stuff (and replacing all the drums ). Just for fun, I should save this back to Logic 8 and load it up on my laptop to see if I merely get a system overload error message or if Logic straight-up crashes.

That being said, I still need hardware that's more sexy than converters and speaker cables, which are emphatically no fun at all. Mics, preamps, oppressors... and I really would like some way to patch in the Geiger Counter and hit that button they don't tell you about in the manual that toggles through god-knows-what sometimes...

I just bought all the Soundtoys plugins a while ago. Decapitator fucking rules. Uses half the CPU as Trash too... which is good since my system has a 2.1ghz dual core AthlonX2.

Decapitator was pretty CPU-intensive on my old laptop; I can only imagine what Trash is like!

I EchoBoy and FilterFreak, too. I don't go nuts with Decapitator; I just like the color it adds, even with the drive at 1 or 0.

It depends on what I'm using it on whether I go ape shit with it. On a snare drum, I'll put the drive on 10 on the P mode with punisher on and move the wet knob around until it sounds like I want it to.

Filthing up a snare drum never hurt anything. Gotta say, the ability to parallel distort with it is pretty spiffy.

Definitely one of it's best features.




My neighbor heard me playing guitar and I gave him a gear tour, and he brought his Engl Savage up for me to tinker with.

I think I like it.

Well sir. You have a cool neighbour.

Yeah, his son plays drums, he plays guitar, and his daughter plays piano.


Funny thing is, his kids are my age.

teim to maek band?!