We’re getting back into the swing of things, what with Brian returning from China after his gig with Public Enemy (and his time spent delving into the Chinese punk rock scene…maybe I can twist his arm and get him to write a bit about that for the blog). As to my end of things, I’ve finally put the November issue of EQ magazine to bed, and added the final touches to the latest issue of the Harmony Central Confidential newsletter (which goes out to 100,000 subscribers…imagine that).
But the cool EV2 news for today is that Brian brought over his new Slingerland drum set, which he got in a color to match the Digital Les Paul. Here’s a picture:
He spent most of today tuning and stretching the kit, it’s not quite “broken in” yet. Compared to his older set, it seems just a shade less loud, but with a much more balanced sound overall. It sounds like it’s going to be far easier to record, and we really need to get our recording act together, pronto. I’ll probably start off with a dynamic on the kick, condenser overhead at Brian’s forehead level and pointing at the snare, and another condenser on the bottom of the snare, flipped out of phase.
The other good news was that I now have a DigiTech VL4 for my vocals. This is a step up from the VL2 in that it has four voices and a lot more options. I’m doing a Pro Review of it over at www.harmony-central.com, so I’m able to get into it really deeply. We’ll find out how it works out over the course of the blog.
However, the bad news is that I’m not finding an easy way to switch patches within Sonar while keeping CPU power down. It seems that when I call up a new song, there’s some bad mojo between the E-Mu 1616 interface and Sonar, where they lose contact. I’m going to dig into this more over the weekend, because I don’t want to be stuck with one DLP sound for a set—that’s kind of like having a Porsche and never taking it out of second gear.