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scrofani

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  1. Neumann TLM103B = my personal favorite for vocals, but costs close to 1000 US dollars AKG414 XLS = my favorite for a stereo pair for all around instruments (say for piano, or even drum overheads, or used on a guitar cab) and for switchable polar patterns. And the Rode NT1-A is probably the best in its price range as several have already said. But for what it's worth, I've never found my NT1-A to be as EQ-able as my Neumann. The NT1-A does sound good. But it just seems that I can carve the #%$* out of a signal recorded with the TLM103 (particularly vocals) and get whatever final sound I want. Whereas with the NT1-A I just can't seem to do that. It's a lot of personal taste but I was never happy with a mic until getting some of those more expensive condensers. I had friends who swore by the C1 (supposedly sounded as good as a U87) and similar. And I bought some of those mics, including the Rode NT1 and NT1A. But in the end they didn't compare to a U87 (when I actually borrowed one and recorded with it). So my advice will always be to skimp on cost somewhere else in a studio (I don't know - maybe buy fewer plugins) and save/stretch for the better mic.
  2. I've honestly felt for years that Waves plugs are more limited than logic's plugs. And what I mean by that is this: the presets and allowable range of the parameters as well as the mapping/scaling virtual knob adjustments are all better with Waves. I can ruin my sound more easily with Logic's plugs by being allowed "out of bounds" more easily. Granted, I can get as good a sound as I can with the Waves stuff too. It's not a matter of which plugs sound better but rather which plugs offer a faster and more focused workflow for, in my case, mostly acoustic music. But yeah, if you spend your time really learning to use Logic's compressor and eq you will get just terrific results. And get those great SSL presets as suggested. Years ago I learned a lot about Logic's compressor by running through the Waves C1 presets and trying to match the sound of each one using logic's comp.
  3. I haven't used my Duet in a while but isn't there a +48volt button to click in the Maestro GUI to turn the phantom power on and off? Definitely the TLM102 needs the 48 volts. If you had the phantom power on with the TLM engaged and then pulled the mic off the cable (never a good idea by the way to disconnect and connect condensers with phantom engaged) and then connected a dynamic mic that didn't require the 48 volts, I don't know what the Duet would do. But if it automatically turned off the 48 volts (not sure how it would detect that situation) then, yeah, you would need to turn it on again. In theory it's possible to ruin your dynamic mic this way although I've never seen it happen - by the way.
  4. Perceived loudness is more dependent on the rms level of the audio, not on the peaks. That's how our ears work. Set your level meter to view both peak and rms for those two tracks and I bet the rms level will be higher for the louder one. That's what final output limiters or loudness maximizers do, or any compressor for that matter. They raise the rms level while still holding the peaks to 0. But the only way to do that is to reshape the audio waveform.
  5. A preamp that I like very much is the Golden Age Pre 73. You can get one for just under $300 (if you can find one). You can read this and that about how the design is essentially a clone of the all time great Neve 1073s. The bottom line is that it can sound clean but can also be pushed very hard to colour the sound heavily with harmonic distortion. It's solid state, not a tube pre. I've been using one for about a month now paired with a U87, cardioid response, for the male lead vocals on an acoustic-guitar driven folk project. They got the thing because the singer was unhappy with the two thousand dollar Millenium "something" pre that the studio used to track most vocals.
  6. No major problems. It's just that snapz always starts as a background process that runs from startup time. I'm always quitting it via terminal just because I have some dumb issue with extra processes running when I dont need them.
  7. What's your favorite? I'm looking for a replacement for SnapzPro.
  8. OK, I went the AC-7 route on my iphone and thought that I might share my findings. . . . It's freakin awesome! It took a minute to DL and install the DSMidiWifi server app on my DAW desktop. Similar time for the iphone app. There were no fancy settings to make. I simply added a mackie control to Logic and set its midi in and out ports to the DSmidiWifi server, as demonstrated in the (slient) videos on the developers website. Presto, the iphone and my macPro saw each other. Controlling Logic is seemless, fluid and with no detectable latency. I think it's worth mentioning that my DAW machine does NOT have an airport card. It's connected to my local Wifi network via ethernet cable. I had read online that this was not a recommended setup but that instead you should set sharing preferences on the Mac to allow your iphone/ipad to see your mac's airport card directly, thus bypassing communication through the router in favor of a direct connection between the computer and the phone. Well that wasn't an option for me. But I sense no problems at all after two full days of use. My Wifi router by the way is an airport extreme and my DAW machine sits behind another gigabit ethernet switch. Still, Ac-7 is fast and smooth. Just today I took the extra step of installing the midipipe app on my Daw machine so that actual track names would appear in AC-7 on my phone. This was a little fiddly and the .mipi config file that the developer says to download to make this thing work with Logic wasn't enough to configure midipipe to work with Logic. You still have to watch the developer's "advanced Logic" setup video because there are two settings in midipipe that need to be changed, as well as one setting within Logic for your Mackie control. Still, all this was a 5 minute endeavor and now track names show properly. What's been really interesting is the ability to sit outside my studio, listening through a slightly open door and mix a tune from this position. I like to listen to mixes this way to see what things sound like when not in front of my reference monitors. Now it's possible to make changes to the mix from this location.
  9. I was about to push the install button on my iphone for iteleport to use it for this very thing. May I ask . . . . Is it reasonably usable on an iphone as opposed to an ipad? I mean, can ya get it to zoom in a reasonable manner to actually hit transport controls in Logic? Does the client software which I assume must exist on the DAW computer give you any trouble? Are there router port-forwarding issues with this VNC which I think is SSH encrypted? I don't really want to change my port forwarding which currently sends SSH (port 22) to my server computer which is NOT my DAW machine. Or is this a moot point if my iphone and DAW machine are behind the same firewall/router and I don't care to ever access my DAW machine from outside my studio?
  10. Did you ever find a solution to this? I've been using the drag and drop method and just keeping a little finder window open on the screen to quickly drop a new IR on the SD interface. It's much quicker than loading an IR from the drop-down menu in SD. It's not ideal.
  11. Man, it's a fantastic mic. I have one and use it all the time for male vocals, sometimes directly into a Duet. I will agree that it produces a fuller or darker sound than some other mics. But I've found that it has no annoying frequency bumps and so I can freely EQ the sh*@ out of the recorded vocal and make the end result sound like anything I want. I love it for that reason. A friend of mine swears by pairing this mic with an inexpensive ART TPS tube preamp. He says it's just one of those magical combinations he's stumbled upon.
  12. Right. Sorry, I wasn't clear: I wonder if it only works with the damper pedal; or will higher notes ring if their keys are simply held down while a lower note (which contains those notes in its harmonic series) is played. I believe that Kontakt scripting can handle such possibilities.
  13. I'm so tempted to order this. Synthogy is supposed to release Ivory 2 in April with an $80 upgrade cost for users. And I was all decided that that was probably going to do it for me, given the stated features. But now this. Seriously, I've got some Sampletekk pianos, Ivory and Pianoteq and while they are all good, there's something not quite right about each of them - that's different in each case. So I'm really interested to hear from you guys how Alicia's Keys will compare to these.
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