TC Electronics, coming from left field with some mind-blowing guitar hardware! First, they made some nice pedals. Then they made some nice pedals that you can load artist presets into.
Now you can get the presets on your iPhone or Android phone, then “beam” it into your pedals on the fly. This makes writing down knob placement to get your favorite sound a thing of the past. Save all your perfect sounds on your phone. No need for a laptop, nor a usb cable. Sick. Was that a modem?
Crappy music fan videos from every angle! I used to hate that girl in front of me who taped the show with her Blackberry camera, the light shining into my darkness-adjusted eyes. Now I will tell her to go to SwitchCam and upload that shizz so I can watch the video she made without having to tape it myself. Now if they could just get decent recording off the board for it all to sync up perfectly…
My ultimate wish is the ability for the site to create surround mixes from the placement of the mics of all those cameras. It would be insane. Completely immersive, yet still jiggly until image stabilizers are universal.
Holy shmoly. This is what I’ve been dreaming about. Literally. After many, many shows in venues where the sound was horrible, the reverb too loud, the bass too quiet, the monitors completely off and with no time to get the sound guy motivated to work, this is a gift from heaven, nirvana, and Mackie. iPad controlled levels, wirelessly(!!), storage/recall of EQ settings, live 2-track recording directly to iPad, 16 mic pres (!!!) and multiband EQ, Reverb, and Tap Delay… The only thing this doesn’t do is wipe the drool from my chin.
I can’t even talk about it. Because its not even released yet, I’m like a kid on December 24th, waiting impatiently for my sock to be filled by my parents Santa Claus the Red Hot Chili Peppers Mackie. Hey Mackie, I will evaluate for you. Send me one, I’ll review it positively. Promise. I’ll even make a Tim & Eric-style vid, like you did. Awesome.
Say Hello to Hello Music. This is the Groupon of music gear. Everyday at noon, EST, you get an email of four items, instrument or studio-related, at a really decent discount. I myself bought a Taylor Acoustic and some Sennheiser drum mics.
The customer service is great. The shipping times are what they are: a little slow. I don’t know much about their distribution channels but my guitar came from Canada and the mics came from California. The guitar took a few weeks, the mics were a month. So my advice is to sign up, wait for deals, but only buy if you are in no rush. That said, when I did get my guitar, it was great. Packed well, although they didn’t loosen the strings for shipping (I thought that was common sense for shipping a guitar). The mics were fine, but not shrink-wrapped. And again, their policy is a ridiculous 365-day return. Pretty confident you’ll love it, which is a good chance.
Their lines include Orange, Fender, Gibson, Audio Technica, Universal Audio, Shure, AKG, Alesis, Cascade, Jet City, Maxon, RME, Taylor… Its a lazy susan of deals.
On top of the gear, they’ve started offering a range of deals including t-shirt wholesale manufacturing, airplay on Delta airplanes’ in-flight radio, packages for recording, mastering, and production by top industry engineers and professionals in places such as Nashville, New York, and LA. The prices are pretty handsome for getting your music in the to-do list of someone like Jamie from Secret Agent Studios (Nada Surf, House of Pain).
Join up, check out the stuff, and tell them I sent you. Because they also give referral bonuses in addition to the occasional $25 off coupon. Can’t hurt.
Changing format here, folks. And it feels right. I’d rather talk about music primarily. Plus, I read enough about tech all day on Engadget, Gizmodo, Lifehacker, etc. Its just more of the same repeated ad infinitum. Everyone buzzes about the latest quad-core phone or the new IM client.
Meh.
So with this, I’ll focus on guitar and recording gear for the guy like me: into music gear, into cool stuff, and a lot nerdy about it (you are reading a blog on music gear, you know). So Welcome to the new Square Wave. Hope you enjoy! – pj
Starting a new job with SYPartners on Monday, the company most recently recognized for their incredible Think exhibit for IBM at Lincoln Center in New York. (This video is a better intro since unfortunately the exhibit is now over.) Technically, I’ve been here for three months, so its not new. But the role will be (from the title), as will the tasks I’m asked to fulfill. Can’t wait to dig in. This is truly one of the first jobs where I’ve been challenged not by the work, but more by the high level of expectations that are standard in this fine establishment. Its going to be a fun ride, and I’m not afraid. Its refreshing to be in a place where greatness is the norm, not the exception, where people are intelligent, thoughtful, and caring every day. Its rare in this country to come across people in business who will not cut you down for mistakes, but instead look for the systemic problem that caused it. Its also rare for IT budgets to not be slashed in this economy. That was one of the most difficult problems I faced working in IT for most of my time. Having managers recognize the ability of technology to enhance workflows, that’s a rarity. And most rare for those managers to understand and appreciate the fact that investment in that aspect of the business will lift everyone up.
When was the last time your machine was upgraded? Probably not soon enough.
If your goal is getting stuff online in a snap, this post is for you. I’ve been building websites for a while now, and I’ve come across a few types of people that want help building a website, some more advanced than others. Usually, though, if you’ve come to me for help, you’re serious and you have a real need to have an online presence.
Firstly, are you mostly likely one of these: 1) Bright Whipper Snapper – smart, self-starter, ready to try and break it, then fix it; 2) Begrudger – needs a website for business but doesn’t want to because its tedious and confusing; 3) Type A – knows what s/he needs for online presence Now.
For the whipper snapper, here’s my generalized recipe for online posting nirvana with links (repeat as necessary):
Yes, this is extremely simplified. The average person doesn’t know which CMS is right, how to design for it, what it takes to “login” or “post”. But you’ll figure it out!
Hey Begrudger, we all went to school right? How many years did that take? College itself, where I’d guess the bulk of our adult thinking started, took four years. And you want a website up in a week? Its totally doable. Will it be perfect? Heck no. But that’s why you start to learn. If you can learn to build websites in 4 years, even part time, you will be so far along in this world.
So Begrudger, here’s my more specific method that will get you online and rocking asap, with the web designer holding your hand along the way:
T-shirt: $25. CD: $15. Sticker/Button pack: $5.
Being able to accept a credit card from the drunk guy at the gig who spent his cash on beer: Priceless.
Or $45 – 2.75% = $43.76
Being an independent musician, there’s a business savvy that’s necessary. The old days of cash transactions may still have a holdover in certain places. But with an artist relying more on merch sales than the door money, and that merch production usually coming out of the band’s pockets, that artist needs to be able to take in money by any means necessary. This includes taking plastic.
Enter into the scene a relatively mature technology: the Square reader. Plug this little device into your iOS or Android device and you are now able to take in the $50 purchase of all that merch from that guy who wants your entire catalog, but doesn’t like cash or the internet, from anywhere with ease. At a minimal cost of 2.75% of each swipe transaction, bands can stay liquid no matter where they are, even if their cash runs short (translation: money in your atm card=gas in van). Its a little bit more money to punch in the numbers by hand (which makes no sense), but either way, you can take plastic like a real store!!
With the retail version of the dongle at $10 at Radioshack, and that coming back as $10 in credit towards your transactions, it seems like a done deal for immediate gratification. Otherwise the reader is free at Square but you have to wait for it to be shipped. Either way, having that option at the club can mean more money per show. Rock and swipe!
Being an IT person, I get a lot of calls of people looking for help with x, y and z. Most of them are very, very simple tasks and I almost feel bad having to come out to help someone with such a simple fix. Because of that, I usually try to do it on the phone. Problem with that is I also usually end up interrupting a meal, spending an inordinate amount of time, or not being able to solve it by memory without my own computer in front of me.
To remedy those issues, I have to travel to and from the person’s place, spend time talking about it again, hoping they can recreate the issue, then fixing it. That’s the quickest part, the final bit, usually. Check system prefs or control panel, plug it in, etc., done.
I’m really excited to start seeing remote desktop software that is free and simple. Now available is the beta of Google’s plugin for their Chrome browser that allows desktop sharing from anywhere to anywhere. Like join.me and logmein.com, it functional and quick. I’m looking forward to implementing these connections to help people wherever they need it. Because there’s nothing worse than having to spend 3 hours to restart a computer, especially your parents’. Amiright nerds?
I went to see Ray Kurzweil’s Transcendent Man film this evening in the Time Warner building in NYC. Started out with a mediocre cocktail hour and some people snagged Ray for a few questions. The theater was packed, however, and it was obvious the fondue and champagne were not the main attraction. About 100+ people were patiently waiting for the film to begin and after a short introduction by the president of the World Technology Network, an exec from Time, a hello from Ray and Barry Ptolemy, the director, it did.
It was an interesting film about the man behind so many ingenious inventions (including the famous keyboard with his name on it), and how his philosophy towards technology is affected by his emotions. If you don’t know much about him, I suggest The Age of Spiritual Machines and The Age of Intelligent Machines, to start. What’s most critical to understanding this man and his theories are not necessarily gleaned from these books, though. These books follow his trend, and proclaim it rationally, of Kurzweil’s analysis of trends in technology. He loves the exponential patterns and searches for them everywhere, but finds them most relevant and possible in modern computer technology. Like Moore’s Law, he believes that improvements will accelerate according to a given exponential amount. That growth, in turn, will be the key to allowing the merging of flesh and computing tech to somehow render humans smarter than ever imaginable, or AI to be able to help us get there. He charts that it will happen in the next 25 years. His argument is strong and his track record is good. I would love to backup my thoughts. Let’s hope in 25 years, there’s something still worthwhile going on up there.
I got to hand it to the guy for being such an optimist. The film definitely shows some harsh criticism by his peers for his positive outlook on what the future holds. It should be expected as its hard to be the only original thinker in room full of followers. Getting on a soapbox and saying there’s so much to look forward to and immortal life can be a reality is basically asking for naysayers to put in their 2 cents. That’s the risk one runs. It doesn’t mean, however, that everyone else need scoff at him. There’s a lot worse to believe in in this world. I would have liked to see him being more proactive in developing that technology that he says is the wave of the future, but its not one thing for one man to build. It is simply the way things are going. So we all have to wait patiently for technology to evolve and be able to grant us the things we could only dream of. I think its happening already, since I watched this film on liquid skin today, for example. Until then, I’ll wait for it to happen, keep reading cool books and watching movies like Tron where I can escape reality for some dreaming.
