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Neumann Speakers! Really? Wow!

March 29, 2011 in Gear, Updates

Well, the title says it all and mostly – Wow!

The recent acquisition of Klein&Hummel (2009) speaker company by Sennheiser/Neumann made this possible.  K&H is a brand known world-wide for the highest quality audio monitors and speakers, and similar to Sennheiser and Neumann, they’ve been doing it since 1945.   Neumann is committed to maintaining the highest level of quality and continuing the K&H tradition of producing the ultimate in studio monitors.
The first Neumann offering – the KH120 – is a great example of how they are doing it.  We were lucky enough to be at Sweetwater when Neumann unveiled and demonstrated the new KH120 – amazing!  In a theater that seats 250, a pair of the KH120 literally rocked the house with musically accurate and beautifully precise imaging. (OK, full disclosure time – the Sweetwater Performance Theater is one of the most beautiful 250-seat acoustic spaces on the planet. Click here for a pictorial tour of the Sweetwater Theater.)
Besides musically accurate sound and the hugest sweet spot we’ve heard in a near-field studio monitor (is ‘hugest’ a word?) click here for more cool features embedded in web flash. If you are even considering new studio monitors - you’ll be glad you checked them out and feel free to click here to buy them at Sweetwater.

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Blackstar Amps Make a Big Bang at Sweetwater!

March 22, 2011 in Gear, Updates, Video

Loren Molinare and Dan Hansen came by Sweetwater last week to show and play the newest addition to the Sweetwater excellent guitar amp offerings – Blackstar!

OK, WOW!  First thing that was apparent is that these amps are For Real.  From the ‘Four Bald Guys’ that escaped from the Marshall camps to the really cool speaker emulation that makes a great recording on direct input, these amps are fast turning into THE amps to rock on.   OH yeah, the Four Bald Guys – click here to read about the founders of Blackstar,  they rock hard daily and wanted to build amps that earn respect in the hard rock world too!   Gus G, Paul Allender, The Church, and lots of really heavy guitarists are using Blackstar, including long-time friend of TheK2BShow Neil Zaza.  Click here to read all about the Blackstar Artists.

CHECK THIS OUT!!  These amps have a proprietary and patented control circuit called “ISF”, which stands for Infinite Shape Feature, and is way too cool to explain with mere words so watch this video that explains the flexibility and the power of the ISF, pretty amazing -

Also these amps are, of course, real tube (‘valve’ in UK-speak) amplifiers and Blackstar makes three lines – The Artisian Series, The Series One, and the HT Venue Series which all rock, Rawk and ROKK! OK, and NOW for the actual killer sound of these things! Check out this demo by Blackstar Artist Gus G from the band FIREWIND -

Check out all the Blackstar videos on their site here.
Blackstar Amps are widely distributed (through Korg in the US) so check them out, but be careful – you’ll want one immediately!   They rock so hard, you’ve been warned! :)

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COOL New AutoTune7 Features and Info!

February 3, 2011 in Gear, Updates

Here’s a great list of neat tricks and benefits whilst using AutoTune7  that comes directly from our good friends at Antares. Amazingly (but not surprisingly), AutoTune7 has just been named “one of the top ten most valuable trade secrets by Daily Finance” (with the Coca-Cola recipe and Google’s search algorithm), Wow and Congrats!!!!  Here’s some killer tips and features of AutoTune7 -

(Auto-Tune 7 is available for Mac and Windows in VST, AU, RTAS, and TDM formats)

Pitch Correction

• Auto-Tune has been the professional standard in pitch correction for over 12 years.

• Go from Vocal Effect (e.g., T-Pain-style) to true Pitch Correction transparency with ease.

• User controllable Humanize function for natural sounding pitch correction.

• Over 25 different scales available.

• Excellent in both live and production environments.

• Use MIDI notes in real-time to set your pitch scale on the fly.

• Correct, add, edit, or remove vibrato. Auto-Tune 7 can also ignore vibrato from incoming live or recorded vocals.

• Pitch Correct stereo tracks while preserving phase coherency.

• Sophisticated Formant Correction to preserve natural voice characteristics when using Auto-Tune 7’s pitch shifting feature.

• Non-Destructive editing – up to 20 levels of Undo.

• Switch from easy-to-use Auto Mode to detailed Graphical Mode with a single click.

• Intuitive, user-friendly MIDI object-style editing while in Graphical Mode.

• Comprehensive editing features available while tracking or correcting pitch in real-time.

• Throat Modeling Control based on Antares AVOX Throat allows users to modify vocal characteristics by passing the effected signal through a precise physical model of the human vocal tract. (Users can also individually modify throat characteristics on a note-by-note basis or on an entire vocal track. Available in both Auto and Graphical Mode).

• Real-time displays of currently detected pitch and correction amount.

• Auto-Tune 7 syncs to your DAW’s internal clock (if supported by your DAW) so you can move around your track at will without breaking sync.

Time Shifting (not available in TDM, use RTAS instead. Auto-Tune 7 TDM includes the RTAS version)

• Time Expansion / Compression range up to ten times (expansion) or 1/10th (compression) of the original length.

• Completely non-destructive – simply turn off the Time Control to revert back to your original timing.

• Envelope Graph display provides visual feedback for intuitive time-shift editing.

• Easy to toggle back and forth between original audio and time-edited audio for comparison.

• Intuitive and user-friendly – simply drag amplitude waveforms to make them longer or shorter.

• Elegantly simple Data File Management for managing time-shifted audio data.

Of course, more great info is available at the Antares website, click here to go to the Antares website. And also, in keeping with their coolness, downloadable demos of most all of their products are available, click here to go to the Antares AutoTune7 and other products downloadable demos page. Thanks again Antares, and keep up the great work!  (P.S. – You can get AutoTune from KennyKenny at Sweetwater – 800 2222 4700 ext. 1270 or most any good audio retailer.)

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Annie and the Beekeepers vid “In the Water” from our friends at Benchmark and Masters From Their Day!

December 28, 2010 in Gear, Music, Updates, Video

Thanks to our friends at Benchmark for this cool video of Annie and the Beekeepers song “In the Water”. A trio of guitar/voice, cello and upright bass, these Berklee grads sound great, and even greater using Benchmark gear.

Music studios are catching on and in recent years Benchmark mic pres and converters are cropping up in studios across the country.  As an historically ‘engineering-driven’ company, Benchmark is realizing the power of the web so they’ve started a really cool video marketing series called “Masters From Their Day”.  You’ll see all of them here on TheK2BShow site or if you can’t stand the wait for each episode, check them all out at the Masters From Their Day website. Click here for the main home page for Benchmark.

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Alain Le Kim’s documentary on Dave Hill and Cranesong!

December 20, 2010 in Gear, Music, Updates, Video

As promised, here’s the first installment of the documentary called “Crane Song – Superior Gear, The story of Dave Hill”, that originally aired on TheK2BShow, Nov. 17th.  We’ll post another new installment of this film each month until it’s all been previewed and then we’ll move on to Alain’s documentary on EveAnna Manley called “Manley, Rule of Tubes”.  These are greatly informative docs that are well done and quite interesting.  See all of Alain’s films here and check back for new installments.  Dave Hill is a friend of TheK2BShow and a real audio genius.   See Cranesong gear and read about Dave here. Enjoy!!!

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The First Show! Wow! Sneak Peek Photos!

November 19, 2010 in Gear, Music, Photos, Updates, Video

Backstage at TheK2BShow

OK!  The pilot for TheK2BShow is finally in the can!  Thanks to EVERYbody that helped on the show and also to the great audience members that saw history being made!  After all, it’s REALLY about the audience and serving up some great entertainment, which is what happened.

Even KennyKenny didn’t look that bad on TV, who’da thunk it?  (And, his monologue was actually funny!  Kinda.)  Fantastic musical guest Carson McClain wowed the audience with some Detroit Electro using the real, vintage 808, etc.  Marcel James, of Antelope Audio came all the way from LA to give us a scoops on the soon-to-be-released awesome A/D and D/A converters called the Zodiac and newest Michael Jackson record and there was even a live, onstage guitar lesson that was very enlightening (thanks to guitar student Jim Burge for graciously being a guinea pig on that!).

The show is being edited now and of course will be posted here soon on the upcoming “Full Episodes” page, as well as segments from the show in various places.   For now, check out the great slideshow done by our very own DJTrend, a popular photographer and DJ in the area, by clicking here –  TheK2BShow SlideShow by DJTrend! Thanks again, and check back soon for the show video!

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OH Wow, ProTools 9!

November 9, 2010 in Gear, Music, Updates

Well, if you haven’t heard yet, ProTools is officially at Version 9 now!  AND it works on ANY audio interface hardware – ASIO, Audio Units, ANYthing!  Does it mean that we’re old because we still have an unopened box of Sound Designer 1.0 from 1984?  :) (For you youngsters, Sound Designer was the great-grandaddy of ProTools and the first product ever to come from what was known then as Digidesign.)   Old is good sometimes, but mostly new is better in the case of software.

There’s a ton on new features in ProTools 9, see an overview here and then click here for detailed info on the new features.  One of the MOST requested and exciting features of the new PT9, other than working with non-Avid hardware, is ADC, which stands for Automatic Delay Compensation.   Basically, that is when one adds a plugin into the session, the DAW software now polls the plugin for its inherent latency and then compensates the timing of the playback accordingly, giving a much more phase-coherent and solid-sounding track.

Not sure which ProTools is right for you?  Click here for a comparison chart of all the new PT9s and the previous PT8s. There is no more ‘LE’, only ProTools9 and ProTools9HD, with the addition of the Complete Production Toolkit 2 option for PT9 only (PT9HD already contains the features of the Complete Production Toolkit 2).

OK, what a deal!  How much for it and can one get an upgrade from older versions of ProTools?  Click here to find out (and don’t get sidetracked – they are ‘upgrades’ meaning one must own previous ProTools to qualify, Avid calls them ‘crossgrades’.)  Even though they are called crossgrades, they are not ‘crossgradeable’ from competitive products, only from previous versions of ProTools.  Just sayin’…

Have fun!

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New ‘Music to Listen to’ Page added!

November 5, 2010 in Gear, Music, Updates

OK, well now we’re in big trouble because we have a page that is for LISTENING TO MUSIC!  There’s a cool concept.  After all the talk and demos and products and specs, there’s the actual music!   We’ve added this page for anybody that wants to send us music to post on this page.  Soon you will be able to upload it yourself to this page, which will really be rad.   Check out the offerings and that page by clicking here.  Have fun and thanks for any comments you can post about the music.

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Novation Unveils New ULTRANOVA Keyboard

October 28, 2010 in Gear, Music, Photos, Video

The cool new ULTRANOVA synth has its roots in Chris Huggett's SuperNova II

Novation debuted a cool new keyboard today at Sweetwater called the UltraNova.  Created by Chris Huggett, famed OSCar inventor, it features a built-in mic for the very hip Vocoder function as well as true conductive-rubber pots for accurate and instant programming.  Three intense oscillators that can multiply themselves and stack them on top of each other for thickness and, of course, a K2BShow favorite, wackiness!  Matt Darbyshire, Product Specialist for Novation, showed it off in the Sweetwater Morning Meeting and trained the Sweetwater sales engineers on the vast and powerful features of this new 37-note wonder.  The factory sounds are thick and rich and of course, tons of knobs to tweak away, including a “Tweak Mode” button that lets one control any parameter from an extra bank of 8 soft-knobs. See a video about that here.  Also, the patch selector is an iTunes-style  browser that makes it easy to pick any of the over 300 factory sounds AND it comes with a free patch editor/librarian software too!
Check out more about it here, but please don’t hurt yourself, this baby packs a punch!  :)

Here’s a video of Matt doing a short performance on the new ULTRANOVA!


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Shawn Phillips Reveals the Future of Musicians

October 26, 2010 in Updates

OK, Wow! 70s icon Shawn Phillips recently came to Fort Wayne and blew us away with his current music and his familiar chestnuts too!   (Thanks, C2G Ministries, for a great show with great sound!)  He had a ton to say about the future of music and musicians, check out the full interview here very soon. Suffice it to say that his talk included how right now, not in the future, musicians are controlling virtual instruments and physical instruments with nothing but brainwaves, via encephalograph-style sensors hardwired directly to the brain. Oh Wow! Check back for the full video interview, will be posted soon (Did you know Shawn gave Joni Mitchell guitar lessons in the 60s?  Betcha didn’t know Shawn gave sitar lessons to George Harrison way before The Beatles met Ravi Shankar!)  What a great musical gem, check out Shawn’s site too!

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