Kelseyville Pear Festival 2009

Saturday, September 26th, Kathy and myself met my good friends of 30 years, at the Kelseyville Pear Festival. A small town of less than 5,000 friendly, fun, people.

The weather was sunny and hot. The people and the live music was wonderful. And the ice cold pear-margaritas were absolutely delicious! We experienced the last few hours of the festival and then we mosied about four miles down the road to an excellent fine italian/french restaurant with live music. The seafood was out of this world and we truly enjoyed ourselves up until the the "check" arrived. LOL

Charlie and Carole are fun friends to have. Kathy and I majorly enjoyed their visiting us and our home. We are looking forward to socializing at their home after my next appointment at the SF VA hospital which is reasonably near their home.

HHNET

NASAV_studios - New Additions

Welcome home AW4416 - I've been waiting for you!



Well! It comes with no surprise to me, that I finally purchased a Yamaha AW4416. Along side my 01X this is a major plus, especially using its "automix" function. The basic design of the AW is a 24-input mixer, feeding a 16-track hard disk recorder, followed by a 16-channel monitoring mixer, all feeding a stereo bus. But, there's more. Besides it's on board studio-class DSP and FX processors, the 4416 has 2 I/O slots which can be fitted with 4-XLR, 8-TRS, 8-channel ADAT and Waves_Y56K.



The Waves Y56K shown above is one of the aforementioned I/O upgrades that I purchased for my 4416. This is serious FX processing power both for world-class effects and studio mastering.

SERIOUS DSP HORSEPOWER!
The Y56K utilizes two 120 MHz 56300 DSPs providing up to 2 billion DSP operations per second! The card supports 20 L1 processes and up to 8 chains of effects. Y56K also supplies 8-channels of ADAT lightpipe I/O which can be utilized for transfering WAV files directly to any ADAT-equipped computer. The Waves Y56K world-famous effects include:

+ Renaissance Compressor and EQ

+ TrueVerb reverb

+ L1 Ultramaximizer

+ SuperTap delay and DeEsser

These processors are all available in addition to the AW4416's on board DSP which utilize 48-bit internal precision on a 24-bit I/O. What does this mean? It means the quality is astounding! This is the identical DSP hardware that has been used in recording studios worldwide. Waves has become so popular, it has integrated into ProTools TDM and also sold as standalone plugins for PC and Mac DAW's. But, wait there's more! The Y56K also has a 9-pin serial port. There are 3 additional plugin effects which can be downloaded and transferred into the Y56K using a USB-to-9-pin serial transfer cable. The Y56K also supports snapshot automation, meaning the DSP and FX settings are all "total recall" just like my 01X automated mixer. Meaning, after hours of making adjustments and getting things right, if I get a headache and lose a week, I can return to the studio and presto! everything instantly returns to exactly where I left off! This is wonderful!

Hot dang! This is VERY exciting!

HHNET

NASAV_studios - Great New Stuff

Hello! I always prefer to include a photo or graphics. It makes for a much more interesting blog, it looks better and I would like to believe the people who take the time to check out my blogs enjoy them more because of the photos.

Anyhow, I was using bing.com and searching for an 01X shot and low and behold, here is MY own photo that I posted to a blog quite some time ago. It's a great shot and I decided to kick off this blog with it. Five years ago I dreamed and drew on paper, the idea of having a recording studio in a motor home. And I also wanted to record with Yamaha 01X, Logic and on a Mac. It is absolutely delightful that those plans came to fruition. Using Logic 9 on Mac with the 01X is pure bliss. There is lots of learning, so I will be purchasing some additional video help to keep the recording pace moving.

As with any plans in life, there can be delays. In my case, the delay has been with some key items. It's Sepetember and I am just now ordering my vocal processor, an Ibanez AEL2012 acoustic electric 12-string guitar and case, a ART V3 tube mic pre-amp and a pair of KRK near-fields to survive on until I can decide what I really want to mix and master through.



Now that Logic Studio 9 is up and running on my Mac, music and recording has already become a ton of fun. As I complete my initial studio purchases I continue to iron out various niggles and kinks that arise in any project studio, especially in the beginning days. But, overall I am very pleased with the pro gear that I have bought and how these devices are performing for me.

Currently, I am having a blast with this free AU plug called DrumCore_3. It's an amazing tool to assemble high-quality drum tracks that don't sound like your typical loops. For one they sample everything at 48KHz, 24-bit so everything has lots of punch and dynamics. Then they stylize the drumkits to match legendary drummers! This is not only very fun to use, but the shear quality of this system is wonderful.

Using MOTIF_XS and its arppegios and built-in samples can render some very dynamic drum tracks, and I do use them. But for my songwriting purposes, I am already finding DrumCore_3 to surpass using my XS at all for drum tracks. Actually, I am grateful for returning to Reaper's forum to check up on the Mac version, when I stumbled upon a user writing about DrumCore3 and he posted an .mp3 he recorded. I was impressed and immediately headed to Submersible's website.

In closing, I am very jazzed to be buying a new 12-string guitar. I miss playing guitar very much and look forward to getting up to speed quickly so that I can begin recording my guitar tracks and getting some live video to my listeners.

HHNET