Saturday, March 11, 2017

Updates and Upgrades

Couple of weeks back, got my first Tele. Had gone into the store hoping to buy a fairly standard one, but wasn't enthralled by them, weren't doing much different from what the Strat does. Just as I was done and deciding I'd just wait, the salesman put this Limited Edition into my hands, one of the "Magnificent Seven" that they did last year, and that did the trick!

I think it's the vintage pickups on it, gave me the sound I had expected and wanted from a Tele. Have been playing a lot since, as haven't done a lot of that - I find that there's writing, there's recording / mixing, and there's playing, and if you do one, it's at the expense of the others, and that meant my playing had slipped.

So it was time to put on other people's music and play along for practice. The other thing about that is, then I find my brain is full of other people's music and has no space left for its own ideas!

Despite that, when I have a day or two where I don't fire up some tunes to play to, ideas have been trickling in, mostly little fragments so far, but they will turn into something eventually!

Drivers again

So, remember some time back I was struggling with latency, dropouts in monitoring, and occasional CPU dropouts that made Cubase stop recording? Still going on - this dual Xeon machine just is not cut out for audio. With no happy resolution in sight, I decided to replace my Presonus. It had a few other things happening with it too:

- A high-pitched whine all the time, only for me listening, fortunately it never recorded. Not the Presonus's fault, same as the latency issue isn't, it's the shitty motherboard in this workstation, and drawing power from the USB bus was not working well.

- The volume knob for the headphones lost the left channel now and then and needed a "wiggle" to get it back. Old age comes to us all.

- Never did like the layout of the knobs, it saved space, but meant I never instinctively knew which knob was for which input.

- It couldn't run phantom power for my Audio Technica mic without introducing a whole crap-ton of noise (again, crappy motherboard.)

Thus, enter:


A Focusrite Scarlett 6i6 gen 2. Now, I don't need 6 inputs, nor two headphone outs and all that - what I did need was external power, and it did the trick, no more annoying whine, and it can phantom power the mic without noise. Love the layout of the knobs, though it has a larger footprint as a result.

The dropout issues are better due to the latest hardware and drivers - not perfect, because shitty motherboard remember, but I can find settings that don't give a problem in the sample rate, buffer size and Cubase settings.

The key thing here is to get it up and running smoothly so that technical malarkey doesn't get in the way of writing or recording. The less bumps in that process, the less there is to knock me out of the creative flow!



No comments:

Post a Comment