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echokiloromeo wrote: Fri Jan 26, 2024 12:11 pm **I just spent two weeks teaching a digital recording technology class for high school juniors and seniors. The amount of change that has happened since I was their age is extraordinary, but when I do the math it kind of makes sense while simultaneously making me feel very, very old.

Yeah it's crazy. I was a senior in 1987. We've come a ways since then! Another engineer and I were just talking about how much has changed just in the last 20 years...how much better are plugins now than they were in 2004? A billion times better. (Shout out to the digitalfishphones plugins, Spitfish still gets used daily here. 20+ year old freeware. Respect!)

Also: they may actually have too many options now....maybe the mind had more room to think about songs.

I really like that, it's interesting to think about. There is definitely something to the simplicity of a 4 track. I'm nostalgic for my old Fostex, I loved that thing, and I tried to make my current setup as close to that as possible so I can basically hit record and go.

But I think back to ~1996, I had an Otari 8 track (nostalgic for that too) and a 24 channel Mackie (not). I had a "song" I was trying to mix. It was a drum loop on track 1, bass line on 2, tracks 3-8 were all improvised guitars, and they were all over the place, ideas-wise. So I'm trying to figure out where the good bits are and ok, it's cool with the guitars on tracks 3 and 4 for the first 10 seconds, but then 3 gets shitty so mute that and switch to 5, oh but then 4 gets shitty a few bars later so.....you get the idea.

It was too much to keep straight and I remember sitting there thinking "if I could just SEE what was on the tracks and just cut out all the shitty parts so only the good bits played, this would be so much easier."

Maybe a year later I had a computer and was getting started with Cool Edit Pro and here we are.

MoreSpaceEcho wrote: Sat Jan 27, 2024 12:17 pm (Shout out to the digitalfishphones plugins, Spitfish still gets used daily here. 20+ year old freeware. Respect!)

can you imagine if someone updated the digital fish, i miss blockfish ;_;

Also, I think the EV ND 468 is a very nice and underrated microphone. Sounds fantastic on toms, I keep meaning to try it on other things, I imagine it'll sound great anywhere.

ALSO also, Reason 12 is a really wonderful DAW for mixing normal-ass rock music.

mdc wrote: Sat Jan 27, 2024 5:05 pm can you imagine if someone updated the digital fish, i miss blockfish ;_;

I've done more than imagine, I tried to make it happen! The dev (Sascha Eversmeier) sold the fishphones code to Magix when he went to work for them years ago. I wrote to them and told them people would line up and give them money if they updated those plugs but alas it's never going to happen. They still work on PCs though. Blockfish is and always has been my favorite compressor for drum room mics, I like it better than a distressor.

The stuff Sascha did when he worked at u-he is killer too, that dude really knew how to make music out of code. Presswerk is a great compressor, that's a sneakily underrated piece of gear right there. And Satin is a great tape sim, I dunno how much it really sounds like tape but it sounds awesome just going through it and the soft clipper on the output is very agreeable, as musical as a clipper can sound.

MoreSpaceEcho wrote: Sat Jan 27, 2024 5:23 pm Satin

The noise reduction models in Satin are fun for crushing a mono drum overhead.

I really love those Valley People Maxi-Q equalizers. I use the band solo function all the time to make a resonant filter for bass drum, and the same feature works well for "phone filter" effects on the mid band, but for anything where you want a clean, brute-force EQ, they're super useful. In band solo mode they're polarity reversing, keep that in mind when you're blending the filtered signal with regular.

Audix i5

Mickey242 wrote: Fri Feb 09, 2024 10:35 pmAudix i5

I’ve read that Sanford Parker likes these in place of a traditional 57

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Mickey242 wrote: Fri Feb 09, 2024 10:35 pmAudix i5

I’ve read that Sanford Parker likes these in place of a traditional 57

I've used the i5 on stage a few years now and definitely prefer it over most other mics for snare. They're not too badly priced either IDK why I never got one for recording or even my own live rig.