To prevent excessive chopping and changing I set myself a target of keeping new toys for four years. The Motu 1248 has just reached this benchmark so, in theory, is open to be upgraded and it’s a good moment to have a retrospective. The four year target is a bit of a blunt instrument, it’s… Read More »
An ongoing list of equipment used on the For Folk’s Sake sessions. Rev. Simpkins There were a few reasons for doing this outside, but I’m glad I did and it turned out nicely. This is really the session that made me think it would be good to get out more. This was car based, so… Read More »
A small collection of results from playing with USB powerbanks. USB power is a really interesting way of powering devices: there’s lots of capacity options, charging is easy and they’re reusable across devices. And prices are low compared to NP-F batteries and certainly first party batteries for devices. The biggest issue is finding quality options… Read More »
The For Folk’s Sake sessions went on a long pause during the various UK lockdowns, but now things are mostly back to normal I’ve started recording again. The first person in for this new run was Basia Bartz. Basia was previously here alongside Catherine Rudie, where I was intrigued by the combination of violin with… Read More »
For completely legitimate reasons other than “I was bored in Lockdown” I commited to an CPU & motherboard upgrade on my studio machine, previously an Intel i7-6700. I considered AMD, but stayed with Intel in the end. Mostly this was out of fear of PCI & USB stability issues, and slightly that I wanted to… Read More »
My studio PC is an i7-6700, which is fast enough for audio work but a bit underpowered for video editing. For a potential upgrade I’d like to consider something AMD Ryzen based. Going AMD means I’d have to give up on my upgrade to Thunderbolt, but that’s only a nice-to-have so I can live with… Read More »
It’s audio interface upgrade time at the studio. I’ve swapped my Focusrite Scarlett 18i20 (2nd gen) for a MOTU 1248. There were a few motivations for this. One was to expand/improve the support for external mic amps. Another was to improve how I handle headphone mixing for live monitoring. With the Scarlett I could offer… Read More »
I (fairly) recently splurged and bought a DPA 4011ES for instrument recording. You can sort of view this as the big brother of the DPA 4099 I’ve been using previously. I’ve used the 4011ES for a few sessions now and I’m still getting the hang of it (for one thing it’s very bass heavy). But… Read More »
I’ve just published a new session video with Zoe Konez, which you can see below. Zoe has been in before, and although she’s not the first person to return what makes this interesting is that Zoe was the very first person to do a session with me, and comparing the two really shows the distance… Read More »
Of all the equipment I use as part of my session recordings, the clip-on microphones I use for acoustic instruments generate the most interest from performers. So, I thought it was worth putting a post together with a bit more detail. The microphones are by Danish brand DPA. DPA use both product names and number codes,… Read More »