PreSonus Blog

Notes for Notes is a non-profit organization which builds, equips, and staffs after-school recording studios (inside Boys & Girls Clubs) packed with guitars, drums, keys/synths, DJ gear, digital music stations and full recording studios offering youth completely FREE access to explore, create, and record music. They currently manage studios at Boys & Girls Clubs in Santa Barbara, Nashville, and Los Angeles—with more coming soon to Brooklyn, San Francisco, Detroit, Austin, and Atlanta thanks to the CMA Foundation. Notes for Notes has a policy of letting young artist own their art—they don’t censor lyrics or promote themselves as an anti-gang/drug program… it’s all about music and the positive bonds that form as a result. Notes for Notes’ curriculum extends beyond music creation and into education on the multitude of careers around the industry.

Here’s a quick video on what Notes for Notes is all about.

Click here to register for this event!

FREE Live Webcast | $5,000 in prizes!

ASCAP invited 18 top songwriters and producers to write the hits of tomorrow at its fourth annual songwriters retreat in France.

Held September 17-25 at the 14th-century Château Marouatte in the Dordogne region of France, the retreat was designed to produce hits and get cuts in a variety of genres. Each session placed a producer, a topliner and a recording artist together to write and record in a different room of the castle. By the end of the retreat, nearly all the participants had worked together. They left France with hard drives full of professional-grade demos, ready to pitch to artists and record labels.

Château Marouatte is owned by famed music industry executive Miles Copeland, founder of IRS Records. Copeland once brought music legends like Jeff Beck, Jon Bon Jovi, Belinda Carlisle and Desmond Child to high-level songwriting summits at the Château. In 2011, ASCAP convinced Copeland to revive the tradition, and has brought a new group of songwriters and producers to France every year since.

The 2014 participants hailed from around the world and across the genre spectrum. They were: Anjulie, Martin Brammer, Ashley Campbell, Mike Daly, Chris DeStefano, John Fortis, Elyar Fox, Dia Frampton, JT Harding, Brett James, Giovanni James, Brian Kennedy, Emmy Palmer, Autumn Rowe, Amir “Azeem” Salem, Sharon Vaughn, Peter Wade and Oren Yoel.

PreSonus provided the following for the event:

• 4 pair of Eris E8 monitors
• 2 pair of Sceptre S6s monitors
• 1 pair of Sceptre S8s monitors
• 1 ADL 600 mic pre / channel strip
• 1 ADL 700 mic pre / channel strip
• 1 RC 500 mic pre / channel strip

Recordings from the event can be heard on SoundCloud by clicking here.

Santa Barbara, California’s Glen Phillips is probably best known for his work with 90s alt-rockers Toad The Wet Sprocket, whom he formed when he was a mere 15 years old. After a six-album career with TTWS—peppered with mainstream radio hits—the band called it a day in 1998. Since then, Glen has been a prolific solo artist, with no fewer than five records and two Eps to his name available on his Nimbit profile. He’s also collaborated on three other projects: the Mutual Admiration Society, Works Progress Administration, and RemoteTreeChildren.

Toad has enjoyed sporadic reunions and tours since 2006, and Glen has concurrently managed to maintain creative output for both the band and his solo material—atop the aforementioned collaborations. The man stays busy!

Sonically, Phillips’ solo work is quite diverse, including the folky/spacy terraforming concept album Secrets of the New Explorers, the spooky stomp and rootsy snarl of Unlucky 7. Toad fans will find a lot to like here while exploring some new sonic territory—but will have Glen’s familiar voice to guide them along. Dig in, and get a t-shirt while you’re at it. There’s six to choose from.

• Click here to keep up with Glen Phillips on Nimbit.
• Interested in Nimbit? Sign up for free here.

PreSonus Product Manager and Queen of All Things Technical Wesley Smith was recently featured in AVNetwork’s Chicks Rule; Honoring Women in AV article. Congrats to Wesley for being selected! Wesley has been kicking butt at PreSonus for eight years; recognition well-earned. Obligatory pull-quote follows:

“Men tend to question how women in audio learned their skills or became interested in the industry, as if it must be a very different experience from their own. This is still one of the biggest differences I find in my experience versus those of my friends in other industries.” 

Click here to read the article in its entirety, replete with more Wesley-wisdom and additional interviews with other righteous gals. On a related note, click here to check out our Women in Pro Audio blog series from a while ago.

[This just in from the Press Office of MIDIMusic ProAudio, our distributor in Italy!]

Today, Midi Music has hosted an important event for the Italian key dealers featuring the two main new products recently introduced by PreSonus: The new generation of StudioLive RM Series Rackmount mixers, and the new range of StudioLive AI PA Loudspeakers. About 50 retailers and operators, as well as journalists from Italian commercial audio magazines attended the event.

Francesco Galarà, Midi Music’s new product advisor for the Pro Audio division, described the philosophy and technical characteristics of the RM series, focusing on the unique features and intuitive ease-of-use offered by UC Surface. He also addressed the versatility that makes StudioLive RM16AI and RM32AI suitable for applications in different fields: live sound, studio recording, radio and TV Broadcast, and system integration.

After going deep into the specific details of CoActual and Temporal Equalization technologies, it then has been the turn of the set of StudioLive AI PA speakers.

We conducted a listening test, covering various genres of music from pop to rock, from the classics to jazz and then—the icing on the cake—Tchaikovsky’s famous “Waltz of the Flowers,” which was very suitable for highlighting the magnitude of the StudioLive AI Loudspeakers’ dynamic response, linearity and definition playback—all without compromise at any listening level. The clarity and definition immediately captured the attention and curiosity of the audience, who remained long after the demo with many questions and insights about the features and capabilities of both products.

The event was followed by a nice dinner party, with typical Italian seafood and a fine Piedmont Hills wine selection, offering the participants another opportunity to continue to deepen the discussion about technical and commercial aspects of PreSonus products.

Midi Music ProAudio
Press Office

Don’t stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Dana Fuchs left her native Orange State for the Big Apple at a spry 19 years of age.

• Songbook? Check.
• Dream? Check.
• Voice? Check.

That was twenty years ago, and Dana’s still belting it out. For other artists this could be where the story ends, or at least gets boring. She could be just another songbird with a dream who flew the coop for the Big City, only to be lost in the shuffle.

No. Not this one. Dana’s the rare sort of artist with absolute mastery of her gift. Not only does her voice simply do whatever she wants—but if you’re fortunate enough to be within earshot, you’re going to feel whatever she wants you to.

And it can turn on a dime, too. Dana will be cooking up a batch of heartache one second, and then serve up unbridled joy the next. The sonic equivalent of a Leatherman. I didn’t know a voice could look right through me until I heard hers.

The producer of an off-Broadway production of Janis heard it, too. You can probably guess what that show is about, and what happened next. Janis was a hit, Dana was a hit-within-the-hit, and segued from her off-Broadway show to more shows even farther off-Broadway, and she brought a hell of a rock band with her.

Fast forward hundreds of shows and five albums. The latest from said eponymous band, Songs from the Road, is a live affair recorded (and shot, DVDs available now!) The Highland Ballroom that is an ideal snapshot of not just Dana—but also the band at their collective peak. Featuring Dana’s longtime collaborator Jon Diamond, the band is incredibly tight, providing exactly the sort of anchor that a wild voice needs.

Dana and company’s Nimbit store offers a wide array of great stuff: CDs, downloads, and DVDs of Songs from the Road, t-shirts, autographed 8x10s, and four full-length recordings from Dana’s back-catalog—available autographed or vanilla. Buy how you want: most recordings here are available both as digital download and compact discs, and there’s even a CD/DVD/T-shirt combo pack, appropriately discounted for the completest on a budget.

• Click here to keep up with Dana Fuchs on Nimbit.
• Interested in Nimbit? Sign up for free here.

[This just in from Andrew Hulshult, game audio wunderkind and Studio One devotee. He was recently tasked with recording new, “Re-Rockestrated” versions of classic game soundtracks for the companion soundtrack to the new 3D Realms Anthology, a collection of 32 their classic titles. It was a monster task with a tight deadline, but both Andrew and Studio One were up to the task.]

Hey, PreSonus!

Studio One was a huge help on my work recently with 3D Realms’ new 3D Realms Anthology Soundtrack. The soundtrack includes nine songs from eight games, and it needed to be finished with a tight deadline—tracking, mixing, and mastering all in two months! To make matters more stressful, they were all extremely fast-paced old school MIDI tunes from the 3D Realms back-catalog from legendary old-school composers like Bobby Prince, Lee Jackson, and Mark Klem, just to name a few.

Studio One quickly proved to me that it is still an absolute force to be reckoned with. At one point I had close to 25 fully-loaded instances of Kontakt open, with mastering tools active, while mixing and tracking. I never had a crash or heard a CPU clip—not even once. I don’t know who your programmers are, but I owe them a beer for sure. [Editor’s note: it’s these guys.] After many late nights of tracking and mixing, I was able to deliver a product I was proud of, and help bring a legendary gaming company I grew up with back to life. Studio One is quite literally helping my dreams come true.

Studio One came to kick ass and chew bubble gum… and it’s all out of gum.

The 3D Realms Anthology is a download-only 32-game collection – that’s the entire 3D Realms library (excluding Max Payne and Prey) brought together by a brand-new, custom-made Anthology launcher built to run on Windows.

You can buy the game compilation (download-only) here.

You can buy the soundtrack here.

Here’s a trailer for the soundtrack:

and here’s a trailer for 3D Realms Anthology itself:

3D Realms Anthology includes the following games:

• Arctic Adventure
• Bio Menace
• Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold
• Commander Keen: Goodbye Galaxy
• Commander Keen: Invasion of the Vorticons
• Math Rescue
• Monster Bash
• Mystic Towers
• Paganitzu
• Monuments of Mars
• Cosmo’s Cosmic Adventure
• Crystal Caves
• Death Rally
• Alien Carnage
• Hocus Pocus
• Major Stryker
• Blake Stone: Planet Strike
• Realms of Chaos
• Pharaoh’s Tomb
• Word Rescue
• Secret Agent
• Raptor: Call of the Shadows
• Terminal Velocity
• Wacky Wheels
• Stargunner
• Shadow Warrior
• Wolfenstein 3D
• Rise of the Triad: Dark War
• Duke Nukem
• Duke Nukem 2
• Duke Nukem 3D
• Duke Nukem: Manhattan Project

Start recording today with this complete, all-PreSonus mobile-recording package for Mac, Windows, and iPad! It’s a great choice for multitrack song production, demos and musical inspirations, live performances, podcasts, field recording for video or sound design, and much more!

Record in the field (at 96k, if you like) with the included Capture for iPad software, then wirelessly transfer your tracks to your Studio One workstation for mixing!

For more on the iTwo Studio, click here.