Drumdrops

The most hipster bands.
You remember Drumdrops? Oh man. You don't? That's because I sooo olds.
Back in the dawn of Man, there were these LP's of recordings of drums -- just the drums -- to songs that didn't exist. You could buy them and they'd have different tempos and styles of drums you could use to make your clumsy demos with. You'd be kind of stuck with the structure the drummer was playing with but as recording drums is so dang hard and this was the age just before drum machines (JBDM) it was the only way to go.

Now Drumdrops makes drum sample libraries (and loops). Which is, you know, kinda logical.
Their 1963 Premiere kit sounds pretty spectacular. And in the US it's less than $40 (because we pay no VAT and if you sign in you can get 20% off your order).
I've been saying that a late-Beatles drum sound would pretty much satisfy me for the rest of my life. One funny thing about that is that many of those sounds are compressed like crazy. We like to think of over-compression as a relatively more recent phenomena but you can hear some kick drums choke on Abbey Road. In any case, I really dig this Premiere kit. C'est tres groovy.

Quiet That Guitar

The Jet City JetStream ISO is presumably only $300 (if you can find it). It's an isolation cabinet.
This video demonstrates about a 15dB SPL difference.



This video claims a 40dB SPL isolation.



I suppose my biggest concern is making a fairly "boxy" sound with it. Also the Eminence speaker is just never going to be quite as cool as my Celestion Alnico Blues.
But the price sure is right, isn't it? And if you need to rock out at home (I do) it could make a big difference.  (And again, the second video didn't post the first time. It just got deleted from the html when I pressed "publish". Sigh.)

Playing Bass Is Hard

I mean it's really hard. Have you noticed how smooth and controlled Paul McCartney's bass playing is?
He's a really fine bass player.
Me? Not so much. Playing bass is hard.

Warm Day in April

The Delicate Cutters in this brilliant little single-take video.


What causes their drummer to be so handsome?

The Last Word on Flatwound Bass Strings

So one odd thing about flatwound string sets is that they don't have the variety of sizes in sets that roundwound strings have.

The answer is that I got a 5-string set of TI's. Yeah. I know. If I haven't made three more albums by this time next year something is very wrong.

Anyway, here is Ethan on lighter-gauge versions of flatwound strings (starting with 40's).

I find the fish hysterical.

"Here's one:

http://www.bassstringsonline.com/Sadowsky-Black-Label-Flatwound-Bass-Strings--5-String-Set_p_557.html

You could try these:

http://www.bassstringsonline.com/La-Bella-Deep-Talkin-Flat-Wound--5-String-Set_p_220.html

Or get the extra light 4-string set here:

http://www.bassstringsonline.com/La-Bella-Deep-Talkin-Flat-Wound--4-String-Set_p_219.html

And add a B string from here:

http://www.bassstringsonline.com/La-Bella-1954-Original-Flat-Wound-Single-String-Build-your-own-Custom-String-Set_p_1739.html

Or get this 4-string set:

http://www.bassstringsonline.com/Ernie-Ball-Flatwound-Bass--4-String-Set_p_191.html

and add a B string from here:

http://www.bassstringsonline.com/Ernie-Ball-Flatwound-Single-Bass-Strings-Build-your-own-String-Set_p_1324.html

Or build a 40,60,80,100,120 set from here:

http://www.bassstringsonline.com/GHS-Precision-Flats-Flatwound-Bass-Strings--Singles-Build-your-own-String-Set_p_842.html

Or get these, which feel much lighter than they are:

http://www.bassstringsonline.com/Thomastik-Infeld-T-I-JAZZ-Flatwound--5-String-Set_p_239.html

I've never put flats on a 5-string, so I didn't realize that the selection of sets is more limited.  This is where Jason is really useful because he carries singles of so many brands and you can just add a B to a four string set."

Tension

From PBnJBassist (on the Internet):
 If you're looking for low tension flatwounds, I recommend any of the following sets from (get ready) lowest to highest tension, low-tension sets:

Thomastik Infeld 43-100
La Bella FX 39-96
GHS Precision 45-95
Ernie Ball Group IV 40-95
D'Addario Chromes 40-95
Sadowsky Black Label 40-100
D'Addario Chromes 40-100
La Bella 760FL 43-104
GHS Precision 45-105
Fender Super Light 40-100
Rotosound 77 40-100

*Left out other brands due to my unfamiliarity with them. Many apologies to the other flats out there.

Remember that all of these gauges are, for the most part, low tension, with Thomastik Infeld (TI) coming in at an average of 34lbs. while La Bella, GHS, and EB & Chromes come in very close with tensions ranging within the 37-39lbs. Once you break into Sadowsky territory and up, the tension is extremely minor with an average "feeling" of 38-42lbs. of tension. Basically, if you want the lightest of the light, go with TI flats, but if 3-5lbs. of tension is not going to be a significant factor with your playing style, then any of these light to light-medium sets are fine, fine choice.  And as always, select accordingly so that your brand matches your sound, as all strings (let alone flatwounds) are not made equally.

A Bass

 The Squire Vintage Modified Jazz Bass V actually.

$329 at Sweetwater. I'm still a bit confused, the pictures don't show the words "Duncan Designed" anywhere on the pickups and the copy (below) says the pickups are "Fender Designed". But all the reviews talk about the Duncan-branded pickups. I dunno.

It comes, presumably, with this set of Fender round-wound strings. Nobody really has much positive to say about those strings (see previous post on bass guitar strings.)

So you know. A thing. For $30 less one could get a 4-string Jazz. I just figured... you know.

These are pictures of the actual instrument.

This is all text from the Sweetwater site:

The 5-string Squier^® Vintage Modified Jazz Bass^® V's offset-waist body and an ultra-slim, fast-action maple neck make this a truly outstanding instrument in its class. Although its soft maple body design and overall appearance are clear nods to the past, the Vintage Modified Jazz Bass V also incorporates some futuristic elements, such as high-end cosmetic touches and sizzling Fender-designed Jazz Bass single-coil pickups. The value-packed 5-string Squier Vintage Modified Jazz Bass V is an excellent entry/intermediate-level instrument for any bassist.

Squier Vintage Modified Jazz Bass V at a Glance:

• Lightweight, "offset-waist" soft maple body
• Neck designed for fast, comfortable playing
• Fender quality at a great Squier value

Lightweight, "offset-waist" soft maple body
Bass guitars are big and that can mean heavy, too. Supremely comfortable whether you're seated or standing, the Squier Vintage Modified Jazz Bass V comes with the distinctive "offset-waist" body, but it's made from maple, which is resonant, but relatively light, which you'll appreciate after several hours up on stage. And with its classic finish, your Squier Vintage Modified Jazz Bass V will command the eyes - as well as the ears - of your fans!

Neck designed for fast, comfortable playing
Made from solid maple, with a maple fingerboard, the neck on Squier's Vintage Modified Jazz Bass V is designed to deliver a smooth and fluid playing experience. The 20 medium-jumbo frets provide you with added playing comfort, so you can continue for hours without hand fatigue. A fast-playing neck is vital when you're holding down the bass line, and Squier understands that. The Vintage Modified Jazz Bass V features a neck and fretboard that ensure you'll never want to put it down.

Fender quality at a great Squier value
Squier Vintage Modified Series electric guitars and basses provide you with renowned FENDER^® quality at an affordable price. The Vintage Modified Series features some of the most time-honored models, including the Stratocaster^®, Telecaster^®, Jazzmaster™, Jaguar^®, Mustang^®, Jazz Bass^®, and the Precision Bass^®. These versatile guitars and basses are offered at the very best Squier value to make Fender quality more available to everyone. If you've been looking for a great guitar or bass to complement your playing, Squier Vintage Modified Series electric guitars and basses have an instrument for you.

Squier Vintage Modified Jazz Bass V Features:

• Fender quality at a great Squier value
• Fat, growling tones from a pair of Fender-designed Jazz Bass pickups
• Comfortable and lightweight maple body with offset-waist
• Modern C-shaped maple neck and fingerboard with block inlays
• 20 medium-jumbo frets
• Top-load bridge
• Open-gear tuners

Get amazing modern tone from this classic-style 5-string Squier Vintage Modified Jazz Bass V!
NOTE: This product is available in the United States only - no international sales.

Specification	Detail
Body Type	Jazz
Left-/Right-handed	Right-handed
Number of Strings	5
Color	Natural
Body Material	Soft maple
Body Finish	Polyurethane
Scale Length	34"
Number of Frets	20 medium jumbo
Fingerboard Material	Maple, 9.5" radius
Fingerboard Inlay	Black blocks
Neck Material	Maple, bolt-on
Neck Shape	C shape
Nut Width	1.875"
Bridge/Tailpiece	5-String Standard Vintage-Style with Single Groove Saddles
Tuners	Knurled chrome dome tuners
Number of Pickups	2
Neck Pickup	Fender-Designed Jazz Bass single-coil
Middle Pickup	No Middle Pickup
Bridge Pickup	Fender-Designed Jazz Bass single-coil
Controls	2 x Volume, Master Tone
Strings	Fender USA 7350/5M, (.045-.125)
Case Included	No case included
Manufacturer Part Number	0306760521

Bass Strings

Ethan discusses flat-wound bass strings. Published here for your edification.

"With flats, the question of nickel vs. stainless is less of an issue. The issues become more about tension, tone and how smooth they feel.  Flats can sorta run the gamut with D'Addario Chromes being among the brightest sounding and highest tension, GHS and LaBella being among the darkest sounding (LaBella also has very high tension) and a whole bunch of options in the middle. Ernie Ball flats are a nice in-between flat with medium tension and a tone not too bright or too dark. Cheap, too. Not very popular, but I'm not sure why. I've used them on my fretless P-bass for years. I go one gauge lighter than my usual for rounds: 40 - 100 instead of 45 - 105.

"An interesting brand in the flats department also worth consideration is Thomastic Infeld - a German company best known for it's double bass strings that also makes strings for anything that needs them. TI Jazz Flats are by far the most flexible and lowest tension of the flats on the market and they have a pronounced midrange and more sustain than a lot of other flats. The result is a string that still sounds like a flatwound, but has some characteristics of rounds as well. They're very expensive and they're only available in one gauge, but they last nearly forever - literally years. Some players find them to be a little too floppy. I like them on certain basses and I think they'd work great on a Jazz Bass.

"Another consideration might be compression wound strings: Roundwounds which are then pressed through rollers to make the outer wrap an oval instead of round. They feel smoother than rounds and don't sustain as much, but they sound more like rounds than flats. GHS Pressurewounds and Ken Smith Compressors are very similar (both made by GHS, in fact, but to slightly different specs) and I like the Compressors a little better.

"There are also groundwounds (also known as half-rounds) where the outer wrap is ground flat.  The idea is that you get the best of both worlds, but in my experience - and I've given them several chances on various basses - you really get the worst of both worlds.  They feel smooth, but not smooth enough, you lose the sustain but don't gain the strong fundamental, they just kinda suck.

"Strings are a hot topic with the Internets, and if you go to Talkbass and search under "best flatwound", "best flats" or "favorite flats" or some such thing you could grow old reading it all.  There is some very good information buried in there, though. When you decide what you want, http://www.bassstringsonline.com/ is the place to go. Jason is knowledgeable, nice and he has the best prices.  He's cool about answering questions, too.

"I'm sure there are those who might think my string preferences are rubbish.

For instance, D'Addario Chromes are extremely popular flats, but I don't care for them at all. Thomastic-Infeld flats, on the other hand, have loads of proponents and loads of detractors.  They are a love-it-or-hate-it kind of string. I currently have them on a '51 reissue P-bass, but it was a poor choice, IMO. I like the way they feel and the way they sound, but I should have put them on a Jazz Bass. It would have been a better fit.  

"I've been meaning to try both Pyramid flats (another expensive, German option) and Sadowsky flats, which are getting a lot of love on Talkbass.

"Also, when playing flats, the decision arises of whether or not to use a foam mute near the bridge. Usually, I do use one, but I like to use one that is not very wide and touches the strings only lightly.  I like to take the extra ring off without killing all the sustain. Best to experiment by cutting a piece of foam into several sizes and try muting by different amounts and at different distances from the bridge until you find a combination you like. On some basses, I don't use one at all.  Bob Babbit, who played on about a zillion hit records, uses a P-bass with LaBella flats and mutes with a sink sponge - an entire freakin' sink sponge! - about half way between the pickup and the bridge. Most reggae players use flats on Jazz Basses and forego the mute.

Threebly

Any excuse to post this baby otter and I'll take it.

With an acoustic drum kit, one generally wants to record some elements to separate tracks in order to not have the sound bleeding from various close microphones when they're otherwise not doing anything.
For instance, on tom drum tracks (back in the olden days of analog tape) one would actually listen through a whole song and erase all of the sound on those tracks between drum fills. The result was to help reduce the squonky squishy sound the mics at the toms would add to (say) cymbal tracks.
I think that with entirely sampled drums I nominally need to only work with six tracks.

1. Kick
2. Snare
3. Toms L
4. Toms R
5. Cymbals L
6. Cymbals R

Now note that the "cymbals" are not "overheads" as they would be in a normal recording of acoustic drums. They're actually separate of, and divorced from, the toms. But let's back up a moment.
The kick and the snare are almost always given their own tracks for a couple reasons. One is that the sound of each of those drums is typically extremely important to the overall sound of the drums and of the piece of music being performed (in our case, rock music).
But the other thing is that they can do a marvelous job colliding with other instruments. The kick absolutely needs to work with the bass (guitar or keyboards) in order to complement rather than compete with the low end.
The snare drum is typically in a fight with the singer although in almost all the music I've done lately we've been instrumental so the snare is just arguing with guitars. This argument is easier to calm down if you can equalize and compress the snare separately from the rest of the drum kit (especially the kick drum).
So -- why split up the toms from the cymbals? Well, it's mostly because the toms will likely get more compression and more reverb than the cymbals. They'll certainly get different compression from one another. Could we put toms and cymbals on the same track? Well, yeah. In fact there (used to be a) school of thought where you'd put cymbals and maybe hihat on the kick track because you wouldn't have to worry as much about them interfering with one another. But that's only when you were on an analog machine and desperate for tracks. Those days are long gone.
This is just some rehearsing betwixt Lily, Greg, and me. Lily is on drums. Sometimes I'm on bass, other times on guitar. I'll let you guess which is which.

Kids These Days

Look at this. Just look at this thing. Sixteen analog inputs. Fourteen analog outputs. A gazillion more digital. And all for fifteen hundred bucks. Good grief.

I can't even begin to express how important input metering is on channels. Especially for live sound.

The Behringer X32 Producer solves many of life's problems.
When I look back on my time in audio I realize that I've spent a lot of effort trying to get cheap mixers (read: more expensive than $1500) to work for me. Sure, on high-end mixers there were always enough outputs (strangely, inputs is almost never the problem outputs is). And now you can just buy one of these Behringer things and have all the routing you've always needed.
Yup, all the time I'd spent on mixers back in the day where I was frustrated there was at the time a solution. It just wasn't cheap. The solution was several tens of thousands of dollars. And it wasn't 'till nigh on the end of my career that I was working on those mixing boards.

Anybody remember these things?

Looking at this makes me sick to my stomach.

Thinking about that Yamaha PM1000 the New York Shakespeare Festival used to have just makes me shudder. Three generations later with the PM3000 they still couldn't get it to sound good. But everybody specified them in the late 80's early 90's because when you flipped the power switch they turned on. And in the world of pro audio, just getting the thing to turn on was half the battle.
When I was using a PM1000 it was hopelessly out-of-date at the time (Macbeth with Raul Julia if you must know).
While I was there it got replaced with a DDA mixer which was vastly, oh so vastly, better. Sheesh.

Electronic Kits

You know what you can't do on an electronic drum kit? Cymbal scrapes.
There's some other drum special effects you can't do but for all intents and porpoises you can basically do whatever you need to.
Here's a dude giving a fairly good overview of the sounds and playability of the Alesis DM10 Studio kit. You know, by playing it.
You know what the downside of an electronic drum kit is? At the high end at least?
They're #&*$($&)#)! expensive!
Why would I pay more on a dumb electronic drum kit than I've paid for all my guitars? Good grief.
I mean really. Sure, there are some cheap and mid-priced ones. But to get pro you have to spend some real bank. There is no Yamaha drum kit between about $1800 and $4300. The stupid "brain" of the kits -- the actual thing which makes the sounds -- the only one of those which have more than two outputs (which is honestly pretty critical to recording) are at least $1500 in the Yamaha and the Roland range. The Roland is actually over two grand thank-you-very-much.

Sure. There's the Alesis.
For me, as long as the triggering works well, we can use the sounds from a computer via MIDI. Actually. Huh. That opens up our options quite a bit doesn't it? I think having a continuously variable hi hat is important. And who doesn't want three zones on the ride? But if we're just pouring MIDI into a computer we don't have to worry about multiple outputs from the drum module itself (and you pay a monster premium for more than two outputs, let me tell ya.)
The other thing about the Alesis which is interesting is that although nobody really likes the stock heads it's fairly simple to put on new mesh heads. So there's that.