Re: What are you buying, What's on its way?

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Just barely pre-COVID I picked up an ancient Harmony Rocket tenor guitar conversion. I still have this and love this, have made a lot of music on it, but it is decrepit and fully hollow and generally not something I'd want to play out with. So I picked up a Fender "Alternate Reality" Tenor Tele, as a more solid thing to take places. But it turns out true tenors are just too small for me (my Harmony does not have its original neck, and the replacement is skinny like a tenor, but it has a longer scale length), plus like two weeks after I bought the Tenor Tele it became immediately clear that Playing Shows and Touring could be taken off my plate of worries for a while.

When I went to sell it I found that in just about a year, the Tenor Teles had risen like 50-100% in price, I guess from being such a limited series. So I got to sell for a minor profit, which never happens with Mexican Fenders you paid retail for a year ago.

Other moves since pandemic/since the forum died have mostly been about recording. I'm still not ready to take on open-reel tape machines, not a multitrack machine anyway (might be prudent to get a stereo deck eventually for actual master tape creation). But after some experimenting over the winter I've decided I want to move OTB as much as possible. I'm working towards using my DAW as a tape machine I don't have to clean or align, just doing as little in the digital domain as possible.

I can still mix or process as much ITB as I ever want without repatching much or at all. Which means I don't have to spend money on a Yamaha or TC multi-effect for the couple times a decade I need a pitch-shift effect or something. But for everything else, if I want, I can make a record while looking mostly out my window instead of at a computer screen—a thing I've gotten sensitive to now that we can only ever be on the computer anymore.

So here's what I got for the rack (I got a rack):
DBX 163X
Alesis Microverb II that came from Europe and has a Cow Tools prong end and I have to look into whether I really can set these to the correct voltage and use a different adapter or if I was mistaken
Symetrix 525 with Valley People VCAs
Yamaha E1005

Then I traded my Tascam M-312 board in a trade that a friend suggested years ago: my somewhat smaller M-series board for his Teac Model 15 24:8 console. He got it from the building manager at our old workplace, it was in his garage or basement for recording jams, but originally the console was bought by and installed at a radio station in a small town nearby. As much as I was enjoying my mixer/interface setup and hadn't planned on upgrading them, remembering this offer kind of changed the game for the OTB setup I was theorizing. So we made the trade! It works nearly perfectly and it is the size and weight of a Mini Cooper and it's the best (in terms of the money spent on the M-series board initially) $180 I've ever spent.

At this point I picked up a BSS DPR-404 for the rack, to cover some of the extra input channels I suddenly had.

My interface had been a Roland Studio-Capture and it was, again, completely fine. Not trying to buy a Pyramix setup for a spare bedroom. But I bought the Studio-Capture only thinking of its 16 inputs, and it was only now that I was positioned to feel limited by the eight analog outs. As I was getting ready to patch the Teac and everything together finally it was hitting me A. how annoying this would be, and B. how I would have to do it again once I got sick of mixing on eight channels, which would probably be immediately. I did not feel like spending any more money at this point, but I remembered a friend and bandmate who was talking about upgrading, in terms of inputs, from his Quad-Capture. So he bought my Studio-Capture and I used that to buy my MOTU 16A that just arrived yesterday.

Now I have a nearly professional recording studio in my house, no money, and a lot of work to do. Literally exactly how I like things.
active things: Belonging, These Estates, Spruce Island

Re: What are you buying, What's on its way?

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twelvepoint wrote: Tue May 04, 2021 8:08 am A couple months ago, my old Mac mini hit a point where it wouldn't take Big Sur, so I got a new Mini with the fancy Apple silicon M1 chip. This, plus the lack of Firewire port, made my old MOTU 828mkii interface obsolete. It had a nearly 20 year run, so I'm not upset. Anyway I replaced it with a Focusrite Scarlett 18i8, which can do 8 analog ins, which is enough for home drum tracking.

Big Sur and the M1 chip was also a little fussy with Reaper, not so much Reaper per-se, but IIRC there was an "allow reaper to access microphone" setting that wasn't available as a native M1 app, so I had to run it separately in Rosetta (Apple's translator for non compliant software), THEN say ok to the microphone thing and finally I could run Reaper as a native M1 app. I don't have a lot of plugins, but the Waves ones I use seem to relicense ok to the new Mac.

Sorry for all the details here, but I know there are a lot of Reaper fans here and I wanted to give a little brain dump of my travails. I feel like I'm out on the bleeding edge right now with the Apple M1 stuff, and my advice to folks would be not leap into it with mission critical stuff unless you have a backup machine.

-Chris
Hey thanks for this - definitely waiting a little while before M1 adventures over hear
"lol, listen to op 'music' and you'll understand"....

https://sebastiansequoiah-grayson.bandcamp.com/
https://oblier.bandcamp.com/releases
https://youtube.com/user/sebbityseb

Re: What are you buying, What's on its way?

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picked up a new imac to replace my late 2012 workhorse. figured it would be safest to go with the final intel chip for current plug-in compatibility, then upgrade to an m1 imac in a few years once everybody's worked the kinks out.

i'm setting up a separate listening area from my studio, and these guys are scheduled to arrive in today's mail:

amp: nad d3020v2
speakers: psb alpha t20
turntable: pro-ject debut carbon evo

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