Geek Gear-Day 2k9

Yea-haw... yesterday was geek-day 2k9, and this time I had a bit more dough and a bit more luck... My shopping list was simple:

1. Drum Sticks
2. Bow & Rosin

But I had a good time, and a bit of good luck... Found some decent deals (spent a little over $100 on alot of quality goods)

Drum sticks & Bow are going to be put to use for sound-design, I just need to wrap the sticks other ends to make them mallets (yarn & bouncy balls)... Need to figure out the methodology behind bowing, rosin & friction, expecially since I have absolutely no intent on using it on string-instruments.

Also I aquired a rig that hooks up 3 mics on one stand, which is going to let me use my DanElectro Free Speech Talk-box along with my mic, and the opportunity to connect my telephone-mic too!

But the pièce de résistance is the Korg nanoPad, It's so easy to set-up and use, although if I get other nano-series controllers I'll have to invest in a powered USB-hub, because my computers mobo doesn't play nice with my front-facing USB ports. Korg has included some other goodies, drum programs, a discount for Ableton Live, and a USB A to USB mini-A cable. This thing is beautifully responsive to velocity, feels as nice as an MPC, it's wafer-thin and the roll & flam are controlled by the X-Y pad in some pretty fun ways allowing for amazing controllerism effects with no software setup. The software for the controller allows an insane amount of tweaking what everything does in all 4 scenes, and you can even drag & drop the order of the scenes, very sexy for $60.

I recently downloaded CamStudio so I'll post some production tutorials fairly soon (I promise.) next big purchase will be a camera, so I can show some non-computer-related sound-fun too!

Geeks Day

About Once a year me & my dad (a professional musician) go out and look @ all the cool little local shops to check out the new & used equipment. As Usual, we spent about 4 hours out & about playing with stuff.

Also as usual, I found some stuff I wanted but want to spend that much money on (Usually New equipment, But a lot of used was over-priced too)

Golden Used finds included: Casio CZ-101 ($100), Turntables($65-200), midi controllers($50-200) and an Upright 3/4 Bass ($499) ...

Fortunately my dad has been searching for an upright for sometime, and this just happened to be about 1/4 of the price of buying a new one. So he now has a bass in his arsenal, which I am welcome to come play with.

I myself left with a handful of cables and adapters, cuz I am poor.