Category Archives for "New Music Gear Monday"

New Music Gear Monday: Two Notes Torpedo Live Digital Amplifier Load Box

two notes torpedo live

A guitar amp load box lowers the volume to, or even eliminates, the speaker cabinet so you can crank up your favorite amp without tearing the walls down with SPL. I go way back when it comes to guitar amp load boxes, even building my own before there was one on the market. I then […]

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New Music Gear Monday: Black Box Analog Design HG-2 Plugin

Black Box Analog HG-2 plugin

How many times has it happened where you have a great mix going, but it just needs something a little extra to bring it all together? Of course, there are now a lot of plugins available to add some “glue” to your mix, but they usually bring just one sound to the party. The Black Box […]

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New Music Gear Monday: Aston Starlight Laser Targeting Microphone

Aston Starlight

From the beginning of recording time we’ve been aiming microphones at the source by eye when first setting up. For the most part they’re pretty forgiving if we don’t point them exactly perfectly, and a quick listen will tell us if we need to adjust. But wouldn’t it be cool if there was a more […]

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New Music Gear Monday: Ultimate Ears Sound Tap Personal Monitor DI

Ultimate Ears Sound Tap

It looks like the days of the floor monitor are numbered as the live gig world quickly adapts to in-ear monitoring, something that the concert industry embraced many ears ago. Today IEMs are priced within reach of just about any gigging musician, but what really holds back many players from jumping in is the complicated […]

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New Music Gear Monday: Antelope Audio Orion32 HD Interface

Antelope Audio Orion32 HD

One of the problems with audio interfaces is they just don’t have enough I/O sometimes. Most interfaces are either 8 or 16 channels, which is plenty in some cases and not enough in others. While the price for a single 16 channel interface might seem reasonable, when you put two of them together to meet your […]

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New Music Gear Monday: Radial Studio Q Talkback Box

Radial Studio Q

One of the byproducts of just using a DAW and not having a console in your home studio is the fact that the monitoring and communication features that we were all so used to are suddenly absent. While monitor controllers are pretty much everywhere now, that still leaves communication with the artist’s cue mix a persistent […]

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New Music Gear Monday: PSP FETpressor Compressor Plugin

PSP FETpressor

PSP’s impressive plugins always make my Top 10 list and rightfully so. There’s a lot of expertise that goes into making these gems, and each one has a variety of real-world uses. The latest from the company is the FETpressor, based around the sound of the 1970s hardware blackface Universal Audio compressor/limiters that we all loved […]

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New Music Gear Monday: Mojave Audio MA-1000 Microphone

Mojave Audio MA-1000

There are lots of great microphones available today that either try to directly copy one of the vintage classic mics, or use it as a starting point for an updated version. So why does the world need another one? Well, when it comes from the mind of the super inventive David Royer, its something that […]

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New Music Gear Monday: FabFilter Pro-R Reverb Plugin

We’re starting to see more and more next generation DAW plugins where outside the box thinking results in an easier user interface which ultimates leads to new or more useful sounds. Nowhere is that more evident than with the new FabFilter Pro-R Reverb plugin which takes many of the more difficult reverb concepts and controls and presents them […]

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New Music Gear Monday: Slate Control Monitor Controller

Slate Control

One of the most important components of a home or desktop studio is the monitor controller, and while there are more and more such devices on the market these days, not all are a good fit for many studios. For instance, the needs of someone working with a laptop mixing on headphones are completely different from […]

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New Music Gear Monday: Audionamix Speech Volume Control

Audionamix Speech Volume Control

If you’ve ever had to deal with a noisy track, you know how time consuming clean-up can be. Yes, you can gate it, but that can sound unnatural. There are also many excellent noise-reduction plugins available, but they don’t always do the job without adding some unpleasant artifacts. You find yourself playing with different combinations […]

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New Music Gear Monday: A-Designs Mix Factory Summing Amp

A-Designs Mix Factory

Mixers either swear by outboard analog summing amps or don’t see the need for them at all, but the ones that do are very passionate about them. We’re now into the second generation of summing amps, and the latest ones are incorporating a lot of features that the the first gen didn’t have. That’s one […]

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New Music Gear Monday: MXL DX-2 Dual Capsule Microphone

MXL DX-2

Most directional condenser microphones have dual capsules, but they’re almost always identical, and it’s how they’re placed that makes the mic directional. That said, what if you created a mic that had 2 capsules, but one was a large diaphragm and the other was small so you could get a combination of the sound of the two […]

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