Gear Review : TuxGuitar

As readers of Troll Cave Music will probably have picked up by now, I love guitars. I play guitar, but admittedly not very well. Part of it is that guitar is one of the absolute hardest instruments to replicate with computers. However, computers can help in some ways.

I have recently come across such a guitarist-assistance tool, TuxGuitar. TuxGuitar is a music transcription program, but it goes way beyond that. Best of all, it's open source and free.
Basic Overview
TuxGuitar is an open source application that boasts the following features:
* Tablature editor
* Score Viewer
* Multitrack display
* Autoscroll while playing
* Note duration management
* Various effects (bend, slide, vibrato, hammer-on/pull-off)
* Support for triplets (5,6,7,9,10,11,12)
* Repeat open and close
* Time signature management
* Tempo management
* Imports and exports gp3,gp4 and gp5 files

Translate for me, please!
I see TuxGuitar as a guitarist's electronic notebook, of sorts. You can write out your music as guitar tab and traditional score at the same time. It also boasts a wide variety of guitar effects that are missing from most non-guitar-oriented programs, like hammer-ons, pull-offs, slides, bends, etc. All of these are easily accessible in the toolbar. To make transciption even easier, you can even add a fretboard image to the UI, and pick off the notes by their fretboard position. So there's 3 separate ways to enter the notation, and the program figures out the other two for you. You can also add chords, and it will include the Chord image above the transcription of the notes.

TuxGuitar also gives you the option of other instruments, including bass, drums, and other items like organs. Differences in the notation (Bass clef, for example) make native support for other instruments essential, especially if you want to make notation for the whole band. There's also the ability to add lyrics to the sheet, so you can generate pretty complete sheet music.

Drums do suffer, though, since they do not (yet) support traditional drum notation. Instead, percussion mode uses General MIDI note numbers to represent the drum "tab". This is OK if you're planning on using those directly into a MIDI-enabled drum module, but pretty useless when you print out the drum tab.

So I can see it, so what?
Transcription is a good foundation, but TuxGuitar goes one step further. It also has enabled a music player, so you can hear what the transcription sounds like. This is OK, except for the thin, horrible samples that are embedded in the program. The web site does give instructions on how you can reconfigure to use other programs for the playback. You could, for example, reroute the MIDI out into REAPER, Ableton Live, etc., if you really wanted to.

Windows? Mac? Linux?
Yes, yes, and yes. TuxGuitar is available for pretty much any OS you're running. And if not, there is also an online Java app so you really can use it just about anywhere.

Why Use TuxGuitar? Can't we do this in [random DAW]?
I've been asking myself the same question - if this is just a MIDI player, can't I do that in REAPER? Yes and no. I don't see myself ever using TuxGuitar to record a masterpiece. This is not a DAW, and doesn't pretend to be. It's a MIDI authoring and playback tool on steroids. The real strength, as I mentioned earlier, is a guitarist's notebook. You can transcribe your fragments and keep them safer than notepaper scribbles (which I always lose). Recording guitar audio is nice, but you don't always remember where/how you played a specific passage. With TuxGuitar, you can tab it out based on the fretboard without even knowing the notes themselves. (I think I just felt a collective shudder at the thought of people playing without knowing the notes. Relax. It does happen.) The other side of this coin is that you can use it to help translate traditional notation into guitar tab, so you can use it as musical middleware, if you will.

When you look at the TuxGuitar site, many users are posting their own full-blown compositions in TuxGuitar. Ambitious, and weak, since using the normal TuxGuitar playback reminds me of everything bad and wrong about the old days of .MID files back in the day.

Final Thoughts
TuxGuitar is a nice little tool that doesn't really presume to be more. Although it has some DAW-like features, the ability to create sheet music (and tab) of your work is a great win. I have countless random scraps of hand-written tab of a good riff here or there, and I lose them with great frequency. Being able to properly document what I'm working on (with all the bends, hammer-ons, etc) is a wonderful thing.

The best part? It's open source, zero cost gear, so no need to cost-justify it.

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Guitar Rig 3 GO - free for a limited time!

Anyone who has looked into Guitar amp and effect modelers knows that Native Instruments' Guitar Rig is one of the top players in the field. The biggest problem I have with the modeling software is that it is expensive enough that most home studios can't necessarily justify buying more than one. True, the modelers are a lot cheaper than buying the physical gear that they model, but as my regular readers know, I'm focused on the best gear for the lowest cost.

So I'm happy to share the new that for a limited time, Native Instruments has made available a free version of Guitar Rig, Guitar Rig 3 GO.

Free? What's the Catch?
As you might imagine, it's not the full version. Instead, you get a single stack of Guitar Rig components: Skreamer (distortion), Lead 800 amp, Lead 800 4x12 cabinet, and Delay Man (chorus & vibrato). Also included are the tape deck (for playing an mp3, aif, aiff, or wav file into the rig), and a tuner. Also, there are a dozen presets already in the browser. You can also create your own rigs and save them. So you're getting a single rack of Guitar Rig gear - which is pretty good, since in the real world, most of us have only one rig to play through, too.

How do I get it?
Guitar Rig 3 GO is being offered in conjunction with ESP Guitars. To get to the download, you must go to ESP Guitar's site here, and enter their contest to win an ESP Kirk Hammett LTD KH-602 guitar (MSRP $1,599.00 , street price $1,200.00). Follow the instructions to download either the PC or Mac version. They will email you the registration code and download link.

How do I use it?
Guitar Rig 3 GO comes as both a standalone and a plug-in version. When you operate in standalone mode, you can switch to a 30 minute demo of the full version of Guitar Rig 3, so you can get a good taste, if you want to upgrade. The plug-in mode (32 bit VST), works great in REAPER. Drop it on your track and go. I've used it along side POD Farm (and even in the same fx chain with POD Farm) without any problems.

How Long Does This Last?
The bad news is this promotion is only good until September 30, 2009. Be sure you go to the site and get your copy before then. Check out all the details at: http://www.espguitars.com/news/news_guitarrig.html. Make a note of the code at the bottom of the first screen. You will need that in order to get Guitar Rig 3 GO.

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Tutorial: Fixing a Noisy Line, Part 2

In Part 1 of this tutorial, we looked at gear and line investigation techniques to try to identify and/or minimize the problem. Here, in Part 2, we will focus on software solutions to handling a noise-laden signal.

REAPER Tools
While using REAPER, I have found 2 viable options to cleaning up a noisy audio track bundled with the program itself. ReaGate, and ReaFir. We will look at both of these options in turn. But first, we need a good way to see the sound. REAPER comes with a good tool for just this purpose: "JS: Analysis/gfxspectrograph". Add this into the end of your FX Chain, and you can use it to visually monitor what is coming across on your line. Totally black means it is totally silent. You can use this to gauge the effectiveness of your cleanup methods.

ReaGate
ReaGate is the bundled VST gate that comes with REAPER. A gate is essentially an automatic on-off switch for the audio. When the overall level drops below a certain threshold, the line is silenced. Gates usually have a bunch of other features, but you probably don’t need them forthis situation. To use ReaGate, add it to your FX Chain. It should be in the top slot, before any other plug-ins are used. This will keep the other plug-ins from amplifying the noise problem.

On the left of the ReaGate interface, you have a vertical slider that measures dB (decibels). The higher you move the slider, the higher the threshold for the gate to turn off the sound. Move the slider up until the background noise disappears. For my situation, a setting of –37.8 db was the lowest point where the noise dropped off. The green bars beside the threshold reflect the incoming signal. You can watch the Output mix meter on the right hand side to see when the Gate turns the signal off.

To Gate or Not To Gate
Gates are a tricky thing. On one hand, they stop the low-level noise from coming through very well. But when you have a gate in your chain, ANY sound below that threshold will be cut off as well. So if you’re letting a guitar ring out, when it hits that threshold your sound is completely dropped out. Depending on your style of music, this clipping could sound really strange and unwanted.

ReaFir
Another option is ReaFir, with is identified as a FFT EQ+Dynamics Processor. This is a tool with quite a few modes, including a gate. The gate in this doesn’t work quite the same, and is not as effective as the standalone ReaGate, in my opinion. Change the “Mode” to “Subtract”. There will be a new check box beside it labeled “Automatically build noise profile (enable during noise)”. This feature can be your new best friend. Make sure your equipment is connected and that the track is armed, with monitoring on. If you are combating line noise, turn your instrument’s volume to zero. If your trouble is from the instrument itself, silence it as best you can with the volume at your normal recording levels. (For guitars, you can loosely tie a bandanna or other soft cloth around the neck so it mutes the strings.) You should see the noise profile pulsing in the window.

FFT Size
This setting is essentially the size of the “chunk” of data it will evaluate at a time. A smaller number means it pushes your computer harder, because it is evaluating a lot of data. A larger setting is more economical on your system resources, but it also causes a lot of latency while monitoring. Personally, I usually set mine to 512, and it is a good balance between the two.

Build A Noise Profile
Mark the check box beside the “Build a noise profile” option, and let it run for a few seconds. A red line will begin to raise from the bottom where it is detecting noise. After it stops adding to its height, click on the check box again. That’s it. You have now build a noise profile that will be applied to the audio signal passing through this VST. This is basically a frequency-reactive gate, where a traditional gate is volume-reactive.

ReaFir or ReaGate?
Both ReaFir and ReaGate suffer from the same problem with sustained audio levels. Neither one is actually removing the individual components of the noise. They are both removing the audio when there is little or no instrument audio. If you have sustained sound coming through, like you would with a rhythm guitar passage, then the noise might be evident within the sound of the guitar itself. This is because gates are trimming the quiet levels noise, but they do nothing to actually stop the individual elements of the noise. I personally prefer ReaFir's "subtract" mode to a traditional gate, because the sound doesn't just stop when it reaches a certain point. Individual frequencies do, but not the entire sound. It sounds like a more natural fade than what you get from a gate crashing down on your sound.

Other Options
Depending on your noise source, you can also investigate notch filters to try to remove individual offensive frequencies, but these will impact your overall tone significantly. In my situation, I have such a wash of noise across a lot of frequencies that it is impossible for me to take this approach.

Do you have other software tricks that you’d like to recommend? Post a comment!

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Tutorial: Fixing a Noisy Line, Part 1

Something I’ve been combating lately in my recording is line and interface noise. As I mentioned recently, the Lightsnake USB interface I’ve been using worked OK with my acoustic, but once I started recording with an electric guitar, the noise is much more prominent. There are 2 ways to correct a noisy interface: 1) Buy Better Gear, or 2) Use the tools you have to try to minimize the audible noise coming through.

Since we are about frugality, we will assume that you don’t have the scratch right now to pick up a better interface. (I’m crossing my fingers and hoping a better interface box is under the Christmas tree, or at least some cash to buy it guilt-free.) That leaves us with the duct tape and chewing gum solution (i.e. a non-ideal solution) to cleaning up your audio.

Check Your Wires
The first thing to check when you’ve got excess noise coming on your input is to check the connections. Do you get pops and crackles when you touch the cables while connected? You might have a broken wire that is adding noise when it is flexed. It might be cracked shielding in the cable that might be picking up interference. Try to eliminate as many sources of noise. And remember, an incoming audio source MUST be plugged in to something when you’re testing. A cable end dangling on the floor usually will pick up a little charge from the air, perhaps a little extra hum from finger grime on the plug ends. Also, make sure the volume on the instrument is turned all the way down. This will help you isolate whether it is the instrument’s electronics causing the noise or something with the line/interface itself. If you identify a possible broken wire, try to swap it out and see if that helps.

Check Your Gear
If you have a clean line when the instrument’s volume is turned off, then you might have a problem in your gear itself, or interference causing problems with the gear. I have found that CRT monitors will cause a little extra hum on some lines. If you can, turn off the CRT and see if the sound goes away. If this is the case, then see if you can re-route things to keep the lines further from the monitor.

Another source can be some fluorescent light fixtures. I have used a couple that will generate a lightsaber-style hum on lines nearby. Turn off the lights and see if that helps.

If you can determine that the instrument is somehow at fault, but you can’t identify anything else reacting with it, then you may want to consider borrowing someone else’s similar instrument to see if it exhibits the same problem, or take the instrument to a qualified tech and see if there are modifications you can make to reduce the noise. (For guitars, these usually either means replacing pickups, switches, or at least having the wiring re-soldered to make better connections.)

Extra Hardware
Sometimes you can isolate that it is the instrument, but there’s nothing you can do to directly fix it. There are some line filters and power filters that might be able to help fix your signal. Frankly, most of those are out of my price range, especially for a “it MIGHT fix the problem” potential solution. If you have friends with this type of extra gear, by all means borrow their equipment and see if it cures your ills. If it does, start saving your loose change to buy one for yourself. Again, this falls under the “Buy Better Gear” option, which isn’t always a viable course to take.

It’s the Interface!
In my situation, I was able to isolate it to the Lightsnake itself. As I explained in my post “Eating My Own Words”, it became more evident with the electric guitar than with the acoustic, but it is definitely the interface itself, since I don’t get the same problem with other line or microphone inputs on the same computer.

Software Solutions
If your final verdict is like mine, then the garbage on the input can’t be directly avoided without buying new hardware, so you have to try to clean up the signal after it has been received. In Part 2 of this tutorial, we will look at software solutions to this problem.

Read the full post here!

Eating My Own Words - Lightsnake Review Updated

Well, I'll be the first to admit that having to eat your own words is not too tasty, but sometimes it is exactly what you need to do.

Recently I posted a review of the Lightsnake USB Instrument Cable. In that review, I gave it decent marks in my experience - no errant line noises like some people claimed to have heard (I even parroted the corporate "must be a bad cable" approach to people's problems.) I have once again proven to myself that you will get different results with different gear. At the time I wrote that review, I had only one guitar to try with it, a Daisy Rock Wildwood Electric/Acoustic Guitar. So my review reflect my experience with it at that time. The extra environmental noise normal with an acoustic guitar in a non-soundproofed environment caused me to always put a gate in the effects chain to clean it up. The natural fullness of sound from the acoustic guitar came across nicely and I was satisfied that the (gated) recorded material was fairly accurate to the original sound.

I recently picked up an Epiphone SG Special, which is an admittedly low-end electric guitar. Of course, I plugged it into the Lightsnake. My first reaction was "what in the heck is that racket?" The racket was, unfortunately, an electric pulsing noise over the monitors I never noticed previously (thanks to the gate). Okay, fine. I put a gate in the chain, and did some trial recording with the SG. The gate worked to take off the noise in the silent sections. But as soon as you hit anything loud and sustained (like a chord progression), the noise was embedded in the louder sections. I also tried using the ReaFIR VST in Subtraction mode to build a noise profile. Again, it works fine for trimming the noise off in silent or very light, quick notes, but if you have any continuous playing, you can hear the noise interlaced with your guitar sound.

I took a shot of a spectrograph of the line noise with the Lightsnake plugged into the SG with the volume knob set to zero. What you see is a wash of noise, with a lot of other structured pulses embedded in it. I checked old recordings from the Acoustic - I see the same "pulse signature" in the signal. I think the reason I never noticed it with the Daisy Rock on recording is that the acoustic is naturally a very full sound, so the noise was actually getting lost in the sound of the acoustic. Since the electric doesn't have the same wide-spectrum wash as the acoustic, the noisy cable is laid bare for all to see and hear.

So here I sit, eating my own words about my value shopping, and have to say I spent my money poorly. (However, I have been using it for 6 months or so before I came to that conclusion, so maybe it wasn't a total waste.) I heartily recommend saving your pennies (as I am) and save up for a more "pro" box. I'm currently looking at the Line 6 TonePort series, since it is more of a name brand with a lot more positive reviews.

Since this is the net, we can rewrite history, so I plan to. I have added the core of this post into my original Lightsnake review, so folks stumbling across it will be wiser that I was when I first wrote it.

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Site Review: HowToTuneAGuitar.org

If you've ever looked for instructional guitar videos online, you'll find an ugly pile of subscription sites and "pay us and you'll play like Clapton in thirty days" claims that you know are extremely bloated. I've looked at a few sites that have appeared to be good, but I'm not going to spend the money to get into the subscription areas. It seems like it is a misguided use of my money. Recently I have come across a site that is playing by a (slightly) different set of rules: http://www.howtotuneaguitar.org.

Why On-line Tuning?
The name of the site makes it seem like a one-trick pony, but it actually has more goodness buried inside. First, let's talk about the main focus: Tuning a guitar. Yes, I know most guitarists have a digital tuner of their own, but when you're working at your desktop studio, sometimes it is easier to use online tools than to 1) find your tuner, 2) find fresh battery for the tuner, 3) unplug your rig to connect the tuner, 4) tune it, before 5) putting everything back the way it was, and you've forgotten what you were going to play.

Tune Me
The online tuner is a six note widget that allows you to turn on each note, and it will repeat a clean guitar tone of that note until you turn that one off. Then you can tune by ear to the tone it plays. (If you're really interested in wasting time, you can play a rudimentary tune on it, as long as you are only playing the open strings - but that's goofing off, isn't it?) What makes this so helpful beyond a pocket tuner is all of the alternate tunings. There are a ton of alternates both familiar (Drop D, Half Step Down, etc) and a lot that are completely alien to me (I have no idea WHAT a Buzzard tuning is, but I now know it tunes to C, F, C, G, A#, F). One weakness to the tuner is that when it is playing tuning notes for alternate forms of instrument, it uses the same tones. For example, the Dobro setting still sounds like a regular guitar. But this can be overlooked for two main reasons: It is a free tool, and I don't actually own any of the unusual instruments like a Dobro.

Another bonus is the tuner widget. It is a mini-version of the tuner on the site, but limited to standard tuning only. I have embedded it in my sidebar (Called "Tune-O-Matic"), if you want to play with it.

Tutorials
In addition to the tuner, the site also features a decent library of guitar lessons. These do not appear to be custom videos for the site, but rather the results of extensive YouTube digging. As a result, they are at various levels of helpfulness, and the "teachers" are at various skill levels themselves. But they are pretty good. (I particularly like the way the teaching video for "Keep On Rockin' In The Free World" includes on-screen diagrams and read-along fingering and pattern charts overlaid over the video). Even though these are all YouTube embedded videos, the site provides a good filter for pre-screened content, so you don't have to waste time getting lost in the vacuum of YouTube, where people have been known to get lost for days.

Chords and Scales
They also another widget called "Chordbot", which gives you 4 fingerings for just about every possible chord you've ever heard of, in a nice visual of the fretboard in a very readable format. If learning the various scales is more your interest, there are also multiple fingerings presented for every major and minor scale, again in a nicely presented format (though as individual pages for each scale, unlike the integrated "Chordbot").

Reviews
There are a few "reviews" on the site as well, primarily of teaching tools and lesson software. I'm not too interested in buying lessons, as I mentioned earlier, but I took a closer look anyway. It didn't take long to realize that the "reviews" section is really just an affiliate link farm, with all the ones I checked linking to pages that were built in exactly the same endless one-page-infomercial format common with "get rick quick" e-book sites. So there isn't anything that I would consider a "review", and I'd recommend pretending that section doesn't exist.

Other Stuff
Yes, there is actually a section called "Other Stuff", which is a infrequent blog of guitar related topics. There seems to be some level of ranting against Guitar Hero, but that's to be expected from "normal" guitarists. Not a lot of action on the blog, so probably not something to be on the top of your feed reader (if at all).

The Good, The Bad, The Ugly
HowToTuneAGuitar.org is good at their core proposition: tuning your guitar. They are also good with their collection of YouTube-scavenged Guitar lessons. And yes, the Chordbot and the scales are worth your while, too. The rest? Blatant ads that take up more space than their original content. Go for the tuner, stay for the Chordbot and the lessons. Skip the rest.

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Gear Review: REAPER

The most essential tool in your home studio is the Digital Audio Workstation (DAW). Sure, there are other dedicated hardware solutions, but those can be pricey. There has been an explosion of DAWs on the market in the past few years, which is good thing. The bad thing is that most of them are out of the range of a sensible budget. ProTools and Ableton Live are two of the good old boys of the DAW market, but the are pretty pricey. (The "discount" versions of both programs are so crippled that they are virtually useless.)

A fairly new DAW on the market for Windows is REAPER. REAPER plays in the same category as ProTools and Ableton, but it doesn't require specific audio hardware (like ProTools), and you can download a non-crippled, non-time limited version. The only difference you see as an unregistered user is a 5 second nag screen when you load it. To register, it's $50 for a non-commercial license, and $225 for a commercial license. There's no "spyware" aspect; it's all based on the honor system. Price definitely played into my first experimentation with REAPER, and after I started ripping into their sample project, I was hooked.

What is it, exactly? To quote their site: "REAPER is a fully featured multitrack audio and MIDI recording, editing, processing, mixing, and mastering environment."

REAPER is built on a solid end-to-end 64 bit audio engine, so you don't have to worry about quality degradation. It allows unlimited Audio tracks (recorded audio) and unlimited MIDI tracks. REAPER allows you to use DX, DXi, VST, VSTi, and JS plugins, so you can use (nearly) all virtual instruments and virtual effects you come across. Here's the nice part: once a piece has been laid down in whatever fashion (recorded audio, external MIDI, soft-synth MIDI, etc), then all pieces are treated equally. You can dump additional effects or effects sends on any track and they still function the same.

REAPER supports a wide range of control surfaces and external interfaces, so you can integrate whatever hard gear you have directly into REAPER. At this point, I regularly use an M-Audio KeyStudio 25, guitar via Lightsnake interface, and a microphone all jacked in simultaneously to REAPER, and I haven't had any problems. REAPER does support "MIDI LEARN", so within your project you can individually map pretty much any controls to your external control surfaces. I map the knobs on my KeyStudio to whatever VSTs I'm working with, so I can "knob twiddle" without having to control them with the mouse. Yes, it's a common feature on a pro-grade DAW, but it is nice to know you can get the same level of interaction when you're using cheap hardware.

This is such a big program, it's impossible to go into all the features that make it "pop" for the user. It has piano rolls, extensive routing controller - you can have unlimited parallel sends and up to 64 UNIQUE send paths, normalizing and quantizing individual elements, recording automation to capture pretty much any "knob twiddling" and parameter changes you need (recordable realtime or simply by moving lines to represent the values), a great pack of 64-bit VSTs and JS plugins to start your collection, and a lot more. Can you tell I'm loving this program? One of the other significant targets of the development of REAPER is to make sure the commonly used features are not buried too deeply in the UI. Most of the features you will commonly use are either available from the UI itself or from a simple right-click popup menu.

I only have one real gripe about using REAPER, but it is a common problem across pretty much all DAWs: some plugins are highly unstable and can crash the entire project. (I use mostly VSTs, so I can only speak to that) Most of what I use are freeware plugins, so they haven't gone through as rigorous testing as "professional" plugins, but even there you occasionally find one that doesn't work with a specific DAW. The unfortunate side of this is that I usually only discover a VST to be bombing out on me when I go to save the project. Then you're left with a trial-and-error to see what plugin crashed it out. So long as you do some testing with any new plugins before you commit trying to build seriously, you'll be fine.

The team at Cockos who is developing this DAW definitely stands behind their product, with new updates sometimes weeks apart as they respond to the user community and roll out new features and enhancements. There's also a great user community who does a good job of helping you keep on your feet.

I'm sure I'll have more to say about REAPER in the future, but you should consider checking it out.

The homepage is at: http://www.reaper.fm/

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Gear Review: Daily Rock Wildwood Artist Acoustic/Electric Guitar

My first experience with Daisy Rock gear was with this guitar, when I managed to win it in a contest held on a Metal web site. How exactly an acoustic guitar got paired up with a site devoted to a genre not known for acoustics, I'll never know. But I digress.

Okay, I am a guy, so having a guitar from a company whose promotional materials boast "Daisy Rock Girl Guitars", it does take a certain sense of self to play it. (At least I got the Rainbow Sparkle finish, which really looks mostly black. The other one in production when I got this was Pink Burst. Impossible to retain any machismo while playing that!)

Let's go over some of the vitals: The Body is a single cutaway design built from maple with a spruce top, mahogany neck and rosewood fretboard. It comes strung with D'Addario EXP 11 strings, which have a really warm tone on this guitar. Since this is an acoustic/electric, there is an additional panel on the upper side of the guitar with the controls. The built-in electronics include an electronic tuner, 2 band active EQ, and a master volume control. The controls are clean and free of any noise/popping/clicking when changing them. The 1/4" line out jack is on the bottom curve of the body, which keeps it nicely out of the way.

As an acoustic guitar, this is a fine piece of workmanship. The neck is a little smaller than most acoustics, which makes getting around the neck a lot easier. The tone, I must say, is wonderful. It has wonderful resonance and it has a lot of character to the tone.

I'm not going to say it is the ideal guitar for cheap recording, since it is out of my normal "budget gear" range. It is less ideal for a home studio (unless you live alone) mainly because it is acoustic (i.e. no way to turn it down), but it is still a sweet piece of gear.

Suggested Retail price is $569.00, but the average street price I've seen is around $400.

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