Gear 4
Gibson’s Kalamazoo Gals
The “Kalamazoo Gals” in front of the Gibson factory in Kalamazoo, MI circa 1944. Photo Credit: Guitarkadia.com. Gibson’s 2016 line of acoustic guitars features plenty of updates — some are designed to suit the modern player, as in the Progressive series. Others are made for history buffs, like the thermally aged tops on the Vintage series. One “update” […]
Get the Tone: Post-Rock
Employing electric guitars to build minimalist, single-note movements into towering walls of sound, post-rock musicians are no strangers to using their instruments and effects as a focal point in a genre often devoid of vocals. Pioneered by bands such as Tortoise and Slint, post-rock has been thrust into the mainstream in recent years by acts […]
New Gear Report: PreSonus Studio 192 & Spectrasonics Omnisphere 2
PreSonus Studio 192 USB Audio Interface I see the Studio 192 as PreSonus’ answer to the other hot rackmount audio interfaces coming out this year (see Universal Audio Apollo series; Focusrite Clarett series). Unlike those Thunderbolt interfaces, the Studio 192 is USB 3.0. And man, this thing shoves a LOT of I/O through a USB […]
Body Shop: Grand Auditorium
In my last post I gave some love to the mighty Dreadnought style of acoustic guitar, but this time we’re going to be scaling the size down to talk about the Grand Auditorium. This style is an incredibly popular choice for many good reasons, most of which I’ll be covering here. After all, Taylor Guitars refers […]
Ask zZounds: Active and Passive Basses
Active vs. Passive Basses: What’s the Difference? Bass pickups fall into one of two categories: active and passive. This distinction in pickups is such a fundamental part of electric bass construction that most bass amps have separate inputs for active and passive basses. Of course, electric basses can be broken up by a number of criteria, like number […]
PRS 30th Anniversary Celebration
30 years is a long time for anything, but especially long in the musical gear industry — a realm where players (cough, guitarists, cough) tend to be quite wary of new brands or products. The fact that Paul Reed Smith Guitars has not only survived, but has actually become known as one of the top guitar manufacturers […]
Get the Tone: Doom Metal
A haze of gloom and fuzzy feedback emanates from stacks of amplifiers. The buzzing drone builds into a wall of slow, churning riffs that rise and swell, inspiring a feeling of ominous dread that wells up inside of you -— the sound of doom metal. Like so much of modern metal music, the doom sub-genre […]
Neat BumbleBee & BeeCaster: Gear for a “Podcast Revolution?”
It seems like for the past decade, news organizations have been saying we’re on the verge of a podcast revolution. And while news headlines are of course exaggerating things out of proportion, the truth is podcasts have been continuously gaining momentum and widespread acceptance over time. In just a few short years we’ve seen powerful […]
Tracking History: Bill Putnam
Obviously a lot has changed since the days when this photo was taken — heck, I can download a multitrack recording app for free onto my phone and use the phone’s on-board mic to record, layer, and mix sounds for a production that wouldn’t be the best, but would be easily more intelligible and of […]
