PreSonus Blog

The Winner of the Dream Rig for Your Dream Gig Sweepstakes Sounds Off!

[This just in from Steve E., winner of the 2012 Dream Rig for your Dream Gig Sweepstakes!]

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Looks like home to me.

I wanted to send you a picture of me and the gear and I wanted to thank all of the companies involved in hooking me up with all of this awesome equipment!

This is truly a “Dream Rig” and I have only began to scratch the surface of what the combination of the ADL 700 preamp, Blue Microphones Kiwi mic, and KRK monitors have to offer.

So far, I have tracked my dad and I on mandolin and acoustic guitar respectively just using the Kiwi into the ADL 700 with excellent results. Hopefully soon, I will have an heirloom double album of my dad and I playing traditional old time music on one disc and a re-mastered version of my dad and grandfather paying the same exact tunes back in 1967 from a reel to reel tape. This equipment couldn’t have come at a better time! I I also have recorded my daughter Isabella singing into the same combo and I am totally blown away with the details you can bring out with the onboard compressor and EQ settings. By the way, all of the awesome artwork behind me on the walls is hers, too.

The possibilities are endless! When I combine the ADL 700 with the Kiwi and its 9 polar patterns it is just mind boggling! In addition to this, the ability to switch the EQ in before the compressor is a really awesome feature, along with being able to bypass either one or both at the flick of a switch. This truly is a match made in heaven…

I have also ran the new Monoprice guitar into the ADL 700 instrument input and achieved an excellent funky single-coil blues sound along with pumping the gain up a bit and getting some smooth crunch and creamy sustain. I can’t wait to track some bass through it!

My next major project is to record a full-length album with my friend Keith for our band Letchwurth (this is the dream band I selected when I entered the contest.) This equipment will take our recordings to an entirely new level—just as long as I can bring my recording and mixing skills up to the same level, ha! We cannot wait to start tracking with the new equipment. This setup blows away everything we had before! Also with the new Pro SoundCloud account we will be able to post everything up for everyone to hear. Look out for Letchwurth “Ringworm Eraser” in the future…

Before I won the contest, I had a few cheaper dynamic mics and one condenser along with the Focusrite liquid Saffire 56 preamp/firewire interface you see on the bottom of the ADL. In addition to this, I only had headphones to mix and monitor with, so with the KRK VXT4’s and 12S sub have been able to mix and monitor the right way. This speaker combo is absolutely perfect for my small home-office and I am totally amazed at the detailed sound-field that these speakers deliver. I am now able to hear details that I never even knew were there, even with headphones! Of course, I couldn’t have hooked it all up without all of the cables and accessories from Monoprice. My setup is now complete! What else could I need?

Thanks again to everyone involved with putting this equipment into my lap and allowing me to step beyond the next level with my recording capabilities!

I am truly thankful and view it as a sign to capture high quality recordings with my friends and family for many years to come.

Some Post-NAMM Greets from Bad Seed Guitars

[This just in from Sheldon Currington, titanium luthier extraordinaire. Cave and I got to interview these guys at NAMM 2013 and we just got this kind follow-up from them. We’re thankful to to have these guys on our buddy list.]

Hi PreSonus!
This is just a quick email to reconnect after our NAMM 2013 show experience.
We have just landed back here in New Zealand after what can only be described as a whirlwind tour of the USA and so this is the first chance I have had to make contact with you regarding our time talking at NAMM 2013.

They look like Good Seeds to me.

They look like good seeds to me.

I want to thank you for taking some time to show us around while we visited Baton Rouge and PreSonus after NAMM. We had a truly amazing time at NAMM for a first year, and learned an awful lot about what we can do for the years to come. And it was a great thing that you did for us to show us around the PreSonus facility on our way across the country. We had a total blast and were really well treated by everyone that we visited, it makes these trips so much more worth it when you can shake hands with the people that you connect with on a regular basis. I am sure my father would agree! Thank you so much for sharing your time with us! Also, please thank the others that spent time with us playing at PreSonus HQ. The amp sounded awesome and I think he is onto a great thing there, with the personalized features he combines into such great sounding units! Very cool!
Please also pass on my thanks to both Cave and Ryan for coming down to see us at the booth and shooting the interview. Those guys were great, funny and easy to get along with… which made my nervous interview just a little easier! Please let them know I am very grateful to them both!
Now that I’m back in New Zealand I will be running Bad Seed full steam ahead to build new and innovative custom guitars, I cant wait to get into it! We had such an amazing response to the guitars that we bought over to NAMM and it’s inspired me to put the creative hat back on and set off on some new projects.
Keep in touch and let me know if you have any thoughts or ideas, or if there is ever anything that I can do for you.
Best Regards

Sheldon Currington
Bad Seed Limited
www.badseed.co.nz

 

PreSonus LIVE airs Thursday, chat LIVE with Craig Anderton!

PreSonus LIVE Airs Thursday! 2p.m. CST / 3 p.m. EST / Noon PST / GMT -6
Learn all about digital effects in Studio One. Craig Anderton will be in the chat room to field your questions!

http://www.presonus.com/videos/presonuslive

Craig Anderton

Source Distribution TV’s PreSonus Coverage from NAMM 2013

[This just in from Source Distribution! Thanks for the coverage, guys, and Rodney: good work!]

Victor Wooten, Steve Bailey, and David “Fingers” Haynes from the PreSonus Booth at NAMM 2013!

Leading by Example in the Dog-Eat-Dog World of XLR Cable Management

[This just in from Jan-Arend, StudioLive Wizard at Large and Executive Cable Manager.]

IMG_3330Hey guys,

Want to show you something. I saw Big Joe Daddy’s Big Multi-Pin Panel-Box Thingy post on the PreSonus blog. It looked very professional! I too use the StudioLive 24.4.2 on various occasions and locations.
We all want to get the best mixing position for our bands and the easiest place for the console. But having said this, we all know that having at least 30 cables to the mixer on the other end of the stage isn’t easy. It gets messy. So I wanted a flexible solution for my band(s).
One band is very different from the other. One is almost completely acoustic, with 3 vocals, acoustic/electric bass and guitar, accordion, and drums. We use two auxes for wedge mixes. The other band is completely electric, with 3 vocals, drums, electric piano, guitars, and basses. No amps on stage, and four stereo in-ear mixes for monitoring. My StudioLive is also used in churches and other events.

I wanted to make a flexible and very compact snake-system that I could use in both situations. I wanted to have the possibility to get all 24 channels from the stage to the Studiolive, and to get the main and subgroup-outputs plus all the aux outputs back to the stage. Ordinarily, this would require a single 40-channel snake. Everybody knows that these cables are heavy, and not easy to use at all. And every time, I would have to plug in 40 cables into my mixer.
Now my solution:IMG_3334
I had a 30-meter 16.4 snake for a couple of years, and I thought, ”Why not have two of these 16.4 cables, with multi-pins in the mixer case?” So, I bought another 16.4.2 multi-core cable to make a total of 40 channels.
I keep my StudioLive 24.4.2 in a Thon mixer case, from Germany. This case was made for the SL and it fits perfectly. Nice thing about this case is the “semi” doghouse configuration. This gave me room to mount the multi-pin connectors in the case. It took me a week or two to make all the connections and to change connectors of the second stage box. Stage box one has 16 inputs and four outputs (A, B, C, and D). Stagebox two has eight more inputs, all 10 aux outputs from the mixer (with Neutrik combo sockets) and two more outs, E and F. This all gives us 24 inputs on the StudioLive and 16 outputs from the mixer on stage.
With our acoustic band, I only need one snake, and with the other band I use both snakes. Now we can put the mixer anywhere we like, setup time is much quicker than before and we don’t have to carry very heavy cables.
See the attached photos for the result. Maybe this helps other StudioLive users to get ideas about their set-up.

Greeting from a very happy StudioLive user!

Jan-Arend Blok

Jan’s bands:

“De Duifies” are singing Dutch songs from a very popular tv series “ja zuster nee zuster” back in the sixties in the Netherlands.
“Spoetnik” started in 1980 and plays mostly covers nowdays.
thanks and best to you too!!

Olesya Star’s Unusual Duet

olesya_star_christmas2012[This just in from PreSonus Artist Olesya Star, who recently completed an unusual duet.]

As an independent artist, people always tell me that to survive you have to take 2 steps left whilst walking forward or you’ll go in circles, so I always keep an open mind to new ventures, avenues and pathways through this minefield called the music biz. One such diversion presented itself to me recently in the form of a country duet, originally meant for Dolly Parton, but sung by Tim Rose. Tim was an original American troubadour who was a founding Greenwich Village folk musician in the 1960s, and former band member with the likes of Mama Cass (Mamas and Papas), and later in life Andy Summers (The Police) and Mick Jones (Foreigner). Sadly, I never met Tim Rose before he died in 2002, but by pure chance I was asked by an old friend of Tim’s  if I would supply “Dolly Parton-like vocals” and work the track, originally recorded in 1988.

The tracks were originally recorded on 2″ tape, so the tape needed to be baked and digitized prior to landing on my studio desk. I had 24 tracks to play with that had been encoded at 24bit/96khz, which I brought immediately into PreSonus Studio One Professional v2.  The job of identifying the microphones that were used in the original recording was completely irrelevant with Studio One, as it was far simpler just to make the recording sound how it should by using the simplest included Studio One features: Channel Strip, CompressorPro EQOpenAIR reverb and, my favorite by far, the Mulitiband Dynamics effect on the Master channel which glues the track together—sometimes much better than using summing mixers that cost in the thousands.

I recorded my vocals through the PreSonus AudioBox 1818VSL, dropped the majority of unnecessary channels/recordings, and sculpted a rough mix before handing the final session over to my producer/mastering guru, Adam Mills. Adam  added some heart-poundingly heavy kick drum and a sprinkle of the missing magic by adding just 2-3% OpenAir in the Mastering/Project section of Studio One, as an insert, with a tight room preset— and no more pre-delay than 15-20ms. There you go, now I’m even handing out secrets!

The result is “You Can Hurry Darling (And I’ll Walk Slow)” which now sounds like I was in the room with Tim Rose at the same time, All thanks to Studio One and PreSonus. Here’s a sample, the full single drops Feb. 14!

PreSonus Pays Tribute to Recording Royalty at 2013 Grammys

PreSonus Pays Tribute to Recording Royalty at 2013 Grammys

by Carl Jacobson, Director of Strategic Marketing & Business Development

None other than Quincy Jones himself!

None other than Quincy Jones himself!

The Grammys are the Grammys… pomp, circumstance, bravado and flash. If you’re a fan of music celebrities or one of the stars that make it, there’s no other night like it.
But if you’re like us at PreSonus, you get more excited about the unsung heroes who actually record and produce the music.  We find the contributions to pop culture by Quincy Jones to be as significant as those he worked with like Michael Jackson, Aretha Franklin, or Frank Sinatra. And the listening enjoyment you get when you hear Steely Dan or Ray Charles is as much due to Al Schmitt’s engineering genius as it was to the performances by the artists themselves. They go hand in hand.
So that’s why, when the Producers and Engineers Wing of NARAS, (the people who bring you the Grammys) asked us to join them during Grammy Week for a Night of Jazz honoring our friends Quincy and Al, we felt honored too. These are our people and we want to celebrate what they do.
The unofficial tagline of the P&E Wing is “All Geek, All the Time.” Imagine being invited to a party full of people who can get as excited about the speakers playing the music, as the music coming out of them!  Imagine if the party you’re invited to is being held in the same recording studio where Fleetwood Mac, the Eagles, and Nine Inch Nails recorded their best work.
The night was held at The Village in West LA, and when we learned that the State of Louisiana was a sponsor, and gumbo & beignets were on the menu… we felt right at home. And, for once, we didn’t have to cook. That’s our kind of party!
It was suggested to us that we could bring some toys, so for us that meant our new Sceptre monitors and the ADL 700 channel strip, we even invited our brothers at Nimbit for good measure. A nice thing about the Grammy Week P&E Wing party, is that it’s cool to talk tech. Most of the producers and engineers who fly in for the Grammys are too busy working to attend NAMM, so they appreciate the chance to talk about the latest and greatest gear in a casual and intimate environment with the people who make it.
I can’t tell you how many times we heard love expressed for a Central Station or PreSonus preamp. Or the respect people had for what we’ve done with Studio One in such a short amount of time. Honestly, the jokes about letting people leave with the Sceptre monitors got a little old by the end of the night, but hey, it’s hard not to get gear lust when you hear them.  There was genuine excitement that we collaborated with Dave Gunness on the designs, and relief that someone had finally perfected a coaxial speaker design that was not only loud (loud is easy,) but that it sounded good, too… I overheard one engineer say “It’s a good loud.”
Aside from getting some quality time with the honorees we also got a chance to see some dear friends. Brad Zell, our Director of Marketing Communications reconnected with Rob Chiarelli, mix engineer for Madonna and Christina Aguilera, among many others who he worked with at Avalon. Brad also spent some quality time with Dave Hampton, engineer and system tech for Prince and Herbie Hancock. And I’m always happy to run into my guitar instructor from high school, Shawn Clement, who later went on to score countless films, video games and TV shows.
Some other notable people we saw with that night included will.i.am, George Benson, Ed Cherney, Carmen Rizzo, and Jimmy Jam.
All in all an amazing evening and we can’t wait till next year.

 

Joe Solo’s Music Success Weekend Workshop

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New PreSonus HQ is Coming Along…

So, we’re growing. Like, bursting-at-the-seams-growing, and have become a little too big for our britches. Sure, all the jambalaya and Mountain Dew consumption around the Baton Rouge office is clearly a factor, but the real issue is that we’ve simply hired a lot of people to do a lot of work, and now there’s too many people to fit into our current facility. It’s like a pro-audio clown car up in here. We’re gonna need a bigger boat.

In my role as the Social Media Manager for PreSonus, I work from my home in the passive-aggressive capitol of the world, Seattle. Fact is, the only reason I haven’t moved to Baton Rouge yet is because Ron says “We’d love to have you here, but there simply isn’t anywhere for you to sit.” So, I’m glad to see they’re workin’ on it, because I’m overdue for some Crawdad and Three-Cheese Baked Macaroni and kindness from strangers.

While this might appear to look like some concrete in a muddy field, this is a big step toward arriving in our new home. Look at it as the architectural equivalent of having gotten our drums tracks committed to tape, and we just called our first-call bassist to come do his job.

We’re hiring for more positions to come, by the way.