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Thursday, February 9, 2012

Logic, Reason And Live DAW Comparison

I'm always interested in the progression of DAWs, especially ones that I don't use regularly myself. Here's a great video on the differences between Apple Logic Pro, Propeller Head Reason, and Abelton Live. I learned a lot from this movie and unless you're currently a user of all of them, you will too.




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Wednesday, February 8, 2012

The Secret To Eating On The Road

Eat Well Boy image from Bobby Owsinski's Big Picture production blog
Anyone who's ever been on road even for a few dates knows how screwed up your diet can get. The inconsistent schedule can turn your eating habits upside down, which eventually will take a toll on your energy. In this excerpt from The Touring Musician's Handbook, a number of road veterans provide some tips on the best way to eat in order to stay healthy.
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"After a few weeks on the road, you start to get weary. After a couple of months, you’re constantly tired in a low level sort of way. Sure, you may be getting enough sleep, but it’s a restless, uncomfortable sleep that silently wears on every fiber of your being. When that happens, it’s easy to give up on any health routines that you might have and just want to survive. That’s when you have to be more vigilant than ever before you slip into some nasty health-related habits that can stay with you for the rest of your life.

What To Stay Away From
One of the first things to get out of whack is your diet. Junk foods are never good for you, but they can be especially hazardous on the road. Fast food not only can add some unwanted pounds but the added dairy products like cheese and mayonnaise can play havoc with your voice (more on that in a bit). Mayo alone can easily add 200 calories to a dish and anything with a cream sauce even more. You’re better off to ask them to hold it or put it on the side. 
The most important thing is to eat healthy, and it’s so easy not to in our situation. There are snacks and sodas around all day and you have a number of choices for meals because most (of the bigger) tours are very well catered. So you need to watch your diet and keep your weight down. A lot of guys put on weight when they go out on tour because they eat a lot at meals and eat a lot after the show.   Terry Lawless: keyboard tech with U2
Watch your diet. That’s a big deal. I’ve seen so many guys that would go out on their first tour and come back a year later and they’d gained forty pounds. You get to the venue at about four o’clock and backstage there’s going to be catering, it’s going to be good, and you’re going to pig out. As you know, musicians are not known for their self-control.   Mike Holmes: keyboard player for Lee Greenwood, Leroy Parnell, and Delbert McClinton
You have to stay away from eating pizza every single night, unless your twenty-five and still have the metabolism of a hummingbird (laughs). The older you get, the better shape you can keep your body and mind, the better you’re going to perform and play.
One of the things that’s great about being on the road is that you travel to great cities and you can eat a lot of great food and you can go out and party with your friends every now and then and have a really great time. But you can’t do that every night because you’re going to end up fat and lazy and not in very good shape. Eventually it will take it’s toll no matter who you are.   Paul Mirkovich: musical director for Cher, Pink, Janet Jackson and Anastasia
Some Good Things To Eat
On the bus, apples and peanut butter on whole wheat bread is a good source of protein, carbohydrates, vitamins and roughage, and will help you save your pre diem. It’s easy to get dehydrated so drink lots and lots of water, and substitute fruit juice instead of soda whenever you can. Healthy alternatives like protein bars, dried fruit, trail mix and nuts are easy to take with you to snack on, and the more fresh fruit you can eat, the better.
I also take Power Bars or some kind of nutritional bar on the road with me because you can’t depend upon other people for your sustenance on the road. I’ve been stuck before when we’ve missed our flight and nobody had any money for food, so I learned never to go out on the road broke. Don’t let anyone stick you on an eight hour bus ride on a sit-up bus with no food and no water where they’re telling you, “We can’t stop because we don’t have the time. We’re going to miss sound check as it is.” While that may be true, you have to take care of yourself, so when you get on the bus, take a bottle of water and a couple of Power Bars. If they stop for lunch, great. If they don’t, you’re still covered.   Ed Wynne: sax player for Al McKay's All Stars and formerly of The Doobie Brothers
When To Eat
The best time of the day for your biggest meal is lunch, since a light dinner works best to prepare your metabolism for the show. At lunch you usually have a great variety of dishes to choose from with a lot of healthy alternatives. Be on the lookout for ethnic restaurants because they usually have many healthy alternatives rich in vegetables and protein alternatives like tofu. If possible, remember to substitute brown rice for white; it’s healthier for you.
Try not to eat after the gig. The only kitchens that seem to be open late are the ones that feature deep-fried food. When you eat a grease-laden meal before you go to bed, there’s no chance for your body to work it off. The calories can really add up after a few nights a week of post-gig fried food gorging. If you must eat after a gig, keep it light and healthy.

Finally, take a shower whenever the opportunity presents itself, since it doesn’t come often enough."



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Tuesday, February 7, 2012

Introducing The Delay Genie App

Delay Genie IOS app icon image from Bobby Owsinski's Big Picture production blog
About a year ago one of my publishers, Hal Leonard, asked me if I'd be interested in doing a phone app. If I was going to do one, I wanted it to be something that I would use myself, all the time, so I came up with the Delay Genie.

The Delay Genie basically replaces those time delay charts that most studios used to have so you could easily set the reverb predelay and delay times when you're mixing. While most delay plugins allow you to do some form of automatic timing, the Delay Genie is different because it will allow you to easily calculate dotted notes and triplets, time denominations that are essential to a good mix and one of the tricks of most top mixers.

Delay Genie Screen image from Bobby Owsinski's Big Picture production blog
You can calculate the time delay either by first entering the BPM of the song, or tapping it in where the app will calculate it for you. After the BPM is directly entered or tapped in, the Delay Genie will instantly display:
  • delays in 1/4, 1/8, 1/6, 1/32, 1/64 note time increments
  • delays in triplet time increments for 1/4, 1/8, 1/6, 1/32, 1/64 notes
  • delays in dotted note time increments for 1/4, 1/8, 1/6, 1/32, 1/64 notes
As a bonus, in the Live mode, the app also calculates the delay time from the stage to a delay speaker stack in a live sound reinforcement situation.
The Delay Genie app can be used for:
  • setting the delay time to make a track larger than life
  • setting the delay time so it fits better in the track
  • setting the delay time so it sticks out of the track
  • setting reverb pre-delay time
  • setting reverb decay time
What's more, the price is right. It's FREE, although it will cost $.99 if you want to remove the advert.

Give it a shot and let me know what you think. It's now available in the Apple iTunes App Store.

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Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.


You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.


Don't forget to check out my Music 3.0 blog for tips and tricks on navigating social media and the new music business.


Monday, February 6, 2012

10 Most Expensive Speaker Systems

Sometimes people who love audio have more money than sense, and that's why the audiophile business thrives. When you have people paying 700 bucks for a wooden knob and multiple thousands for a speaker cable, you have to admit that there's some psychological voodoo involved.

But that's nothing. How would you like to spend a cool $2,000,000 on home playback system? Here's a great article that lists the top 10 most expensive speaker systems. I've only listed 5 here, but you can see the entire article at the whatuwantnow blog.


"When its music, debate, rock party, wedding or even a religious occasion, speakers are the most important concern to look, and to make one occasion perfect, people love to have good quality speakers,
1. ULTIMATE by Transmission Audio
Can you imagine a speaker can cost $2,000,000? Yes, this is the one, the most expensive speaker of the world, which wants 31,000 Watt to be listened. It has four aloof dipole subwoofers, and every subwoofer carries 10 fifteen inches subwoofers. This is not enough; every dipole plate has 24 eight inches unit channels, and 2 dipole MF on each channel along with one HF Channel plate of 68 meters ribbon.
ULTIMATE by Transmission Audio from Bobby Owsinski's Big Picture production blog
2. Grand Enigma by Kharma
Second most expensive speakers of the world costing you around $1,000,000, you can’t imagine the beauty of these speakers which are found in a Building in Belgium. They are totally enigmatic and loud with advance stereo system launched after complete test.
Grand Enigma by Kharma from Bobby Owsinski's Big Picture production blog
3. Infinite Wisdom Grande Loudspeaker by Wisdom Audio
Third most expensive speakers of the world costing around $7, 00,000, are really astonishing speakers built like a tower of 23 length with 2 tons of the weight, perhaps suitable for big ground parties.
Infinite Wisdom Grande Loudspeaker by Wisdom Audio from Bobby Owsinski's Big Picture production blog
4. MBX 10.9s46 by California Audio Technology
Another most expensive speaker of the world costs $560,000, are two guitar shaped attractive speakers in red color, each weighing 1 ton and height of 12 feet.
MBX 10.9s46 by California Audio Technology from Bobby Owsinski's Big Picture production blog
5. Sphäron Excalibur by Acapella Audio Arts
Another most expensive speaker of the world costs $380,700 and is uniquely has identical columns created of eight, thirty inch of subwoofers, and this speaker has buzzes of twelve square meters.
Sphäron Excalibur by Acapella Audio Arts from Bobby Owsinski's Big Picture production blog

How do these stack up? Can't say as I've never heard any of them, but I'd venture to say that they'd all be improved by Carl Tatz's Phatom Focus System.


Read the entire article here.

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Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.


You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.


Don't forget to check out my Music 3.0 blog for tips and tricks on navigating social media and the new music business.

Sunday, February 5, 2012

Facebook's Massive Media Storage

Perhaps you recently bought a few terabyte hard drives and are feeling that you're pretty well covered for storage. A terabyte, of couse, is a 1,000 gigabytes. The next increment is a petabyte, which is 1,000 terabytes.

So consider for a moment just how big a petabyte is.
  • Just 1 petabyte equals 20 million 4-drawer filling cabinets filled with text.
  • 1 petabyte equals 13.3 years of HD video.
  • 20 petabytes was the total hard drive space manufactured in 1995
  • 50 petabytes is the equivalent of the entire written works of mankind, from the beginning of recorded history, in all languages.
That's why the recent IPO filing from Facebook is so amazing. In it they state that they already store over 100 petabytes of photos and videos from their 850 million users.

Having trouble wrapping your head around that number? Maybe the following infographic will help.


Facebook Storage Chart image from Bobby Owsinski's Big Picture production blog

Obviously technology has moved into the realm of super-storage, and what once seemed quite large is now small. Welcome to the world we now live in.

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Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.


You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.


Don't forget to check out my Music 3.0 blog for tips and tricks on navigating social media and the new music business.


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