Sell Your Childhood, Buy Your Future

As I have worked on building my home studio, the one question I have kept coming back to is the ultimate issue of cost. As long-time readers know by now, my desire is to get the best studio for as little money as possible. I think most (if not all) aspiring musicians start with the same basic idea: I will invest money now, and make my money back when my album is released and sells a million copies (or a hundred copies, for those who set their sights more realistically.) The main problem is that it doesn't always work that way. We spend a little. And then a little more. Eventually, we have a studio that cost as much as a car, and we still haven't made a dime on the album we are still working on. I'm there with you, brothers and sisters. Recently I've been on a budgeted buying binge. (I apologize for the excessive alliteration there. It couldn't be helped.)

Sell First...
So what is my advice? Sell Your Stuff. I don't mean sell your studio gear - that will be worth its weight in gold when you finally release your album on iTunes. But we all have various and sundry things we have been collecting (intentionally or otherwise) over the years, and we don't really need it all, do we?

In the modern age, when we talk about selling, we are inevitably talking about two places: eBay or craigslist. I'm personally not a fan of the whole free-for-all that is craigslist, so I avoid it. But eBay is a great place to sell your extra stuff. Look around your home. I'm sure you can find any number of things you wouldn't miss if they were to find a new home. Outdated video games you haven't touched in years. Old, out of print books. CDs, especially boxed sets. Old computer hardware. Seriously, there's a market for everything on eBay.

Since I began trying to tip the financial scales toward breaking even (in the last month), I have sold enough items to almost completely pay for my current studio gear. And there's not a single item I've sold that I will ever miss. The biggest question to ask yourself is which is more important: making the best music you can, or holding on to that Playstation 1 game that hasn't been played in 8 years? I can't answer for you, but for me the answer is a resounding MUSIC!

...Then Buy
Of course, it's not just about getting people to pay way too much for your old junk. It's also a great way to get the gear you want cheaply. You need to be a little smart about what you buy, but you can find some great deals. For example, I got a great deal on a new Canvas Bass Guitar for $71.00 (with free shipping) recently. Even buying a entry-level Bass from a traditional retailer will set you back twice that. (Side note: I'm loving the Canvas Bass, model CTFB10. I'm not really a bassist, but it plays exceptionally well and the pickups have a great tone. But I digress.)

Buyer Cautions
There's a few things to keep in mind if you're buying music gear on eBay, or from any second-hand establishment for that matter.

1) Beware Fakes - If you can buy a $1,000.00 guitar for $50.00, it's a fake. There is no way you're getting a real 70's Gibson Les Paul for under a grand. Period. If you're not sure, Google it and compare photos to see if anything looks wrong - especially detail like logos and designs on the headstock. That's where a lot of the fakes get the visible details wrong.

2) Buy economy - Buying lesser known brands is often better, since there is almost no profit margin in making fake versions of $200.00 guitars.

3) Beware Used Software - If you're buying gear than includes software, make sure it isn't something that requires a registered serial number with the maker, or you might be SOL. Used gear tends to be already registered to the prior owner. So if you buy a Line 6 UX1, for example, you must be the owner registered with Line 6, or you may be prevented from downloading Pod Farm (or GearBox) software. Personally, these are items I will only buy new in box because the headache isn't worth saving $20 on an already reasonably priced piece of gear.

4) Make Sure It's Compatible - If it's recording hardware, you can get screaming deals - just make sure it's compatible. A good example is the wonderful MOTU hardware. The older, non-Firewire hardware is still great gear. But it needs a PCI card interface. Many of the auctions I've seen on eBay include the MOTU PCI-324 card, which runs on a different voltage level than most modern PCI slots, so it won't work. You'll need the PCI-424 card, which if you are the registered owner, you can buy direct from MOTU for $295. Or buy one on eBay for slightly less than that. So a screaming deal on an original MOTU-2048 is dampened considerably if you have to shell out another $300. to make it work on your system. You MUST do your homework to avoid getting the shaft on these "good deals".

5) Buy From Established Sellers - If a seller has a lower feedback rating, I'm always a little nervous, even if it is all positive. You never know how serious they are. Now, if they have a 100+ feedback score, you know that is a much more serious seller, and more likely to be treating their transactions as a business.

6) Does it pass the Sniff Test? This goes back to #1 above. If the deal is too good to be true, it might be. If something feels wrong about the seller, move on. (I made that mistake once - and 3 weeks later I'm still in limbo as to whether I'm ever going to get the item.)

Bottom Line
Yes, I know this post is probably coming across as an eBay advocacy lesson. Probably so, since I'm spending a lot of free time working with eBay, and I'm getting sucked into its vortex more each day. But at the end of the day, I know that auctions are short-term commitments. If you lose your motivation to sell, and want to get focused back on music, you can be free and clear within a week, with no lingering after-effects like other "make money now" schemes.

As all of us struggling to get our music made properly in our home studios know, there is almost always someone who is keeping tally of how much we're spending on our gear. Wife, mother, husband, child, landlord, collection agency, etc. The only way we can dig ourselves out of the bottomless pit that is our home studio is to offset the expenses with an income. And I, for one, am willing to sell my childhood for a new pair of reference monitors. I'll keep selling until I get what I need. Of course, if you have a spare set of KRK Rokits that you'd care to donate to the Troll Cave, drop me a line. I'm always open to donations.

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POD Farm supports REAPER...finally

The music-makers have finally been heard! As of the Pod Farm 1.03 update, the POD Farm plugin now works in hosts that use a 64-bit VST engine. This includes REAPER. So now we not only can skip the whole "VST wrapper" annoyance, it also means we can now access the Automation parameters in Pod Farm. Yes, we can finally "knob twiddle" POD Farm from within REAPER.

There is a big learning curve on the automation, however. I say this because every possible parameter appears in REAPER, whether it is in the current effects chain or not. Since POD Farm allows you to have 2 effects paths at the same time, this means there is also 2 of everything. Users with lower screen resolutions might have some difficulty in REAPER, since they all appear in a single window.

Even so, this update means that POD Farm users can finally get the full power while using REAPER. You can get the update by using the Line 6 Monkey to update your software.

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Gear Review: Line 6 Pod Studio UX1

If you've been reading here for a while, you know that my previous guitar recording interface, the Lightsnake, had some serious limitations and generally left me pretty unhappy with the results. I can say now that the Lightsnake has been retired, and has been replaced with a Line 6 POD Studio UX1. After playing with it for about a week, I think I've seen enough to give it a proper review.

The Hardware
To kick things off, let's look at the box itself. The UX1 connects via USB, and all power is handled through the USB cable - no additional power supply needed. On the front of the box, there are 3 ports; one XLR jack, one 1/4" unbalanced instrument input, and a 1/4" headphone jack. On top of the box are a power light and 2 knobs: Mic Gain and Output. No big surprises in the function of each of those items. The back of the unit has jacks for two 1/4" analog outputs, two 1/4" Line Inputs, one 1/4" Stereo Monitor line in, as well as the USB socket.

As you might imagine, you can record from any of the inputs, except the Stereo Monitor line in - that acts as a pass-through for anything you want to show up in the mix but not be part of the "recordable" input.

Sound Card
Oh, did I mention it functions as a complete sound interface, including output? That's right. It comes with its own ASIO driver which you can easily tap into with most any audio software that supports ASIO. When I connected REAPER to the "ASIO UX1", then ALL of my audio output from REAPER was directed at the UX1. I have read where this can be confusing if you don't think about what you're doing, but it's a good thing. In my case, I have a moderately cheap sound card in my PC. With this, I don't really have to worry about upgrading that card, since I'm bypassing it for my audio work.

Latency? We Don't Need No Steenking Latency...
One admirable trait of the UX1 is that it is able to pass through the input audio to the output WITHOUT waiting for the PC to handle it directly. This gives you effectively zero latency in the monitors, even if you have a relatively high latency setting in the ASIO driver itself.
From my testing on an existing project, I have reduced the slips and stutters in my system from being a frequent occurrence to flawless audio by incorporating the UX1 into my setup.

Is It Clean?
If you read my review of the Lightsnake, you'll know it was a dirty, dirty interface, with odd pulses of interference and general noise. The UX1 suffers from NONE of those problems. Line 6 boasts a greater than 100 dB signal to noise ratio, and I believe it. Running the same spectrographs on the signal from the UX1 yielded a much cleaner signal, with a slight noise level in the lowest extremes of the graph, but nothing audible and it was a steady baseline, so it essentially vanishes when you record.

Bundled Software
The POD Studio UX1 comes bundled with 3 programs: Riffworks T4, Ableton Live Lite 7 Line 6 Edition, and POD Farm. I haven't played with Riffworks yet, and I already know that Ableton is a very cut-down version of that program, supposedly tailored to the hardware bundled with it. Considering this is stripped even further than the LE version, I'm not too interested in it. POD Farm is where the real second stage fun comes in.

POD Farm
POD Farm replaces the former Gearbox software that used to be bundled with Line 6 interfaces. The idea and many of the features are the same, but POD Farm has a much slicker interface. POD Farm includes a stunning array of software models of amps, effects, and cabinets that you plug together in a very obvious signal chain on screen. These are mostly based on real gear, including Marshall's JCM-800, Fender's Deluxe Reverb, and even the Orange AD30TC. They give cute names in the program, but they are very forthcoming on what the sounds are modeled after on their web site. Anyway, you have pretty much the gauntlet of gear to work with - certainly more than the home studio could ever hold much less afford - and there are additional model packs available to buy from Line 6 in case you are craving more gear. While more options are always better, I'm sure what I have will more than meet my tonal needs for quite some time to come. POD Farm also allows you to break your signal into dual signal chains, so you can get some really powerful and wild sounds going.

Playing Standalone
POD Farm works great as a standalone program. It gives you some nice options - like sending not only the fully processed signal out (to your DAW), but also sending the unprocessed/raw signal out (to your DAW) at the same time. So you can record the completely dry signal at the same time you record it fully effected, and also be pushing the signal out to your studio monitors via the 1/4" outputs in back. I'm loving it!

Playing As A Plug-in
Pod Farm as a plug-in needs a little work at this point. As of this writing, POD Farm 1.02 is the current version, and it has a problem in about half of the major DAWs on the market. Apparently, if your DAW has a 64-bit plug-in host (and no 32-bit host as a fall-back), then POD Farm will crash. Yes, REAPER is one of those affected. The workaround to this is to use a VST Wrapper to act as a middle-man between REAPER and POD Farm. I've been using ACON's EffectChainer, and it works OK, but you are left with the inability to use any Automation ("knob twiddling") on anything inside POD Farm, since the DAW can only see the EffectChainer, not POD Farm itself. Line 6 has posted in their forums that this issue has been logged and is on the "to do" list. Hopefully this problem is resolved soon, since "knob twiddling" is often needed.

Standalone and Plug-in Together
I like to use both versions together. I record through the standalone version into REAPER (monitoring the processed signal and recording the dry signal) and having a plugin on the recorded track with the plug-in version of POD Farm replicating what I was doing with the standalone version. This gives me the flexibility to change the sound after recording, but not having to rely on just hearing the dry tone while playing. In this fashion I can also record the wet signal at the same time, so it gives you a lot of configuration possibilities.

Tone Port vs. POD Studio
If you've looked around, there is a TonePort UX1 as well as a POD Studio UX1. The hardware is exactly the same, except the TonePort has a red faceplace and the POD Studio has a black faceplate. The only real difference is in the bundled software. If you have a TonePort, it comes bundled with the standalone version of GearBox, you can upgrade for free to the standalone version of POD Farm, but you'll have to buy the plug-in version of POD Farm. Both versions (standalone and plug-in) of POD Farm come bundled with the POD Studio. To save yourself time, I'd suggest the POD Studio UX1 over the TonePort UX1, not only because it will save you some time, but also because the black faceplate looks much cooler than the red.

Bottom Line
The bottom line is that you owe it to yourself to buy a POD Studio UX1 (or the big brothers UX2 and UX8). The Line 6 POD Studio UX1 is a simple box with a simple purpose - which is does amazingly well. It sells new for around $149.99 at most shops, and it is fabulous. The hardware is solid and very clean, and the software so thoroughly exceeds my expectations that I am becoming inspired by the wide variety of tonal possibilities. The only difficulty I've found at this point is that POD Farm offers so many options, I'm spending more time fiddling with new sounds and not enough actual work on recording. If you need to record audio, you need one of these. Trust me.

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Welcome to 2009, it's nicer here.

The Troll Cave fell into a lull in December, in case you missed me. Between a lingering illness and the general insanity of the Thanksgiving through New Year's holiday season, there hasn't been much time for music. That should change in the coming weeks, as I have some new gear on its way, including a Line 6 POD Studio UX1 interface. I'll be posting a thorough review of it soon.

Also in the works for the months ahead are VST reviews/recommendations, a ReaMote tutorial (slaving other computers to take some of the load off REAPER), and how to wrap a cranky plugin to work where it doesn't want to.

Thanks for keeping up with me - drop me a line (send an e-mail, post a comment, etc) if there are other topics you want me to cover. I'll give it my best shot!

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Gear/Site Review: Hobnox AudioTool

I'm not really sure if this is technically gear to be reviewed or a web site with a cool app. I think it's a little of both. What I'm talking about is an online app that gives you the look, feel, and control of old school electronic music making. What I'm talking about is the Hobnox AudioTool.

Who are they?
Hobnox is a site that focuses on collaboration between artists and is very much centered on the collaborative spirit of the whole "Web 2.0" thing. There's a lot of content on their site, and it ranges from simple to inspiring to a plain waste of bandwidth.

What is it?
The Hobnox AudioTool is a simple point and click interface that simulates a number of major electronic instruments - the TB-303 bass synth, the TR-808 drum machine, and the TR-909 drum machine. You also have a host of other effects pedals to use - everything from compressors, flangers, delays, gates, EQs, Reverb - all standard stomp box effects are here. You also have a 16 channel mixer, a master output control, and signal splitters and mergers. That's a lot of gear to play with.

How do you use it?
The Hobnox AudioTool is extremely simple to use to get started. You connect up wires in the signal paths you want, and let the machines run. Sound simple? It is...if you know the machines. For those of us spoiled by the current style of DAWs to put our music together, this is going to be a completely alien experience. There is no central handler for the patterns in any of these machines. (Yes, you can make the 303 trigger from an external source, but it's still not "true" control, is it?) You build each pattern in each machine, and control them by turning the correct knob. The machines seem to be fairly accurate simulations of the originals, though the 808 doesn't have that unholy deep subsonic bass that the original was notoriously famous for.

No, Really, How Do I Use It?
If you really want to be serious about how to make something "real" with it, you will probably want to Google for programming guides for the TR-808, TR-303, and TR-909. These machines are so popular that there are a wealth of resources on how to use them. I'm not that old school, so I prefer the "what happens when I do this" school of thought. Nothing comes out planned, but it always comes out fresh.

What Can I Do Besides Play Around?
The Hobnox AudioTool includes a recorder function that allows you to record your "performance". It is saved under your Hobnox account (a clever way to encourage you to register on their site). So if you want to get all "old school" with your music, you can build your fantasy machine here, record it, and merge it into another project later on. The files are compressed with a Vorbis encoder, so you may need to convert the output file to another format, depending on your project needs.

Final Thoughts
According to the news on the site, this latest version (which is still listed as a BETA) has a lot of under the hood enhancements that will allow them to (in the future) give users the ability to create new synthesizers and effects. This sounds promising, but it also sounds like they are trying to get people sucked into the vortex of building add-ons for this toy/tool/thing. While I'm all in favor if user-developed content, it seems a little silly to have everything built from scratch for this system. Now what would be really great is if they would develop a VST host into the site, so users could plug in their freeware VSTs. That would give the Hobnox AudioTool a lot more flexibility and value.

As it is, Hobnox AudioTool is a cool toy. It is definitely one of the most advanced audio toys built on a Flash platform to date. It is definitely worth playing with at least once.

Check it out at:
http://www.hobnox.com/audiotool.1046.en.html

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