Podcast: Episode 3

Introduction

Hey there light audio recordists!

I hope you’re doing well today and it’s not too cold where you are. This is Ronan Fitzgerald from light audio recording dot com and it’s Thursday November twenty ninth twenty eighteen.

You’re listening to episode 3 of the light audio recording podcast. A five-minute round-up of news from the past month of relevant stuff, in the world of light audio recording.

This month, Black Friday was a big deal, so we’ll talk about that, as well as other news about gear and tech.

Item one

The last blog post here on light audio recording dot com highlighted some of the most relevant Black Friday deals for light recording.

If you availed of them, congratulations – you contributed to the six point two billion dollars that was spent online as part of the event.

According to fortune dot com, two of those billion are believed to have come from smartphone sales, and online sales are up more than twenty three percent from just last year.

Estimates for cyber Monday have the number at seven point eight billion, which is up ten percent on last year.

In terms of light audio interests, Black Friday falls just a couple of months before the NAMM show, which is where musical instruments and tech gets unveiled, therefore, Black Friday is an ideal opportunity for brands and retailers to push discounts on stock ahead of their new releases.

We’ll talk more about NAMM in next month’s podcast.

Item two

With the widespread nature of the fires in California, there are more than a few relevant items related to it.

Wayne Charvel, founder of the Charvel guitar brand, lost his home and workshop. Although Charvel sold the brand bearing his name in nineteen seventy eight, according to Reverb, he continued to make custom models under the Wayne name.

All current orders, as well as some prototypes and custom acoustic models were lost. A GoFundMe has been launched to help the family re-establish their livelihood.

Separately, Guitar Center have launched a fundraising appeal with the Red Cross to aid those affected by the California fires.

On their website, Guitar Center have announced that they will match every dollar donated to the campaign.

Meanwhile, Pro Sound News notes the list of music industry figures who lost homes in the fires, including megastars like Miley Cyrus, and film composer, producer, and former Oingo Boingo keyboardist, Richard Gibbs.

Item three

Gear news dot com had information about a magnificent little pedal coming all the way from Chile. This will be especially intriguing for light audio recording fans.

The company name is DSM Noisemaker, and the pedal is called the OmniCabSim Mini.

The pedal is the tidiest power amp and speaker unit you’ll come across right now. It’s the size of a standard mini pedal – like the Mooer and Donner ones you see.

This little pedal crams in too much to detail here, but it has a little switch to select speaker type, and four knobs to select a range of tones within them. It’s designed for guitar or bass, and comes with both quarter inch and XLR outputs.

Light audio recording is about saving space, and maximizing what you do with the space you use, so this tiny pedal should bring a lot of ideas and creativity.

This is a very cool little pedal to have in your rig.

Item four

And finally, at the end of last month, light audio recording staple DAW, BandLab, announced a bunch of new stuff for their platform.

In a blog post published on October twentieth, BandLab introduced better social sharing for its users. This feature is focused on sharing on Instagram and YouTube.

You can choose how much of the song you want to share, and some pretty standard tappity taps to get your latest revision shared.

Keeping with the engagement theme, in an addition that looks inspired by one of SoundCloud’s earliest features, you can now comment on tracks at a particular moment.

So, if a thing happens thirty seconds into a track, you can comment right there at thirty seconds in, where it happens. It’s kind of cool.

In terms of actual music production, updates include new effects you can add to tracks, four new loop packs, and four new midi instruments.

It’s worth remembering, that for all this, BandLab is free to use.

Wrap up

And that’s all for this month. I’ll be back in December with a round up of the latest news for light audio recordists, where we’ll definitely be talking about January’s NAMM show. Have a great weekend recording your music.

If you haven’t already, subscribe to the light audio recording blog at light audio recording dot com, where you can follow my exploration of recording music in a cheap, compact way.

You can also find light audio recording on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.

I’m Ronan Fitzgerald, and that’s it for episode 3. I’ll catch you next time.