Long before I had an iPod I read this article on Wired.com and found it not only cute but also convenient. So when I bought my iPod I decided to do the same and try to fit my iPod into a Moleskine. I went to my local OfficeMax shop and found all the required ingredients:

1. a steel ruler
2. an exacto knife (or box cutter)
3. glue (white glue, the one used in schools) and some UHU glue
4. a little brush
5. a Moleskine (preferably a sketchbook one)

Instead of the Moleskine all I could find was a clone from a brand called Danpex and unfortunaltely there wasn’t anything like the sketchbook, which would have made it easier since there are less pages.

I started by making the hole in all the pages with the box cutter and the ruler, usually making the cutting lines before with a pen, sometimes cutting more than one simultaneously since the cutter would go deep into the notebook. I left 5 pages in the beginning and 5 pages in the end without holes. This process took maybe a couple of hours. Then I removed the little pouch attached to the inside of the back cover. Finally, I started gluing the pages together with the white glue. You can use an empty tuna tin or similar to pour a generous amount of white glue into it so that we can dip the brush in it. Then spread the white glue with the brush in every single page and carefully glue each page into the rest of the pages. This process took a little longer than an hour. Finally the last 5 pages that didn’t have a hole were glued together to the rest and the backcover using UHU glue. When it was done I put a pile of books on top of it and left it to dry overnight. The next day the whole thing was hard as a brick.

I’d make a recommendation though. If possible use the sketchbook instead of a normal notebook since there are less pages and these are thicker making the whole process a lot easier and a better quality result.

You can see the final result in the picture, it looks good, it is very discreet and I can take it everywhere without people noticing that I’m actually reading on an iPod. It also protects the iPod very well, better than most commercial protective cases.

RealTraps are very professional and within a few days I had my PVB at home and ready for some testing. The packaging was excellent. The PVB came in a solid cardboard box with protective styrofoam in the corners to easily withstand the trip from the factory.

The PVB comes with a metallic piece that can be effortlessly attached to any standard mic stand, as shown in the picture. I recommend that you get yourself a solic mic stand cos the PVB is relatively heavy and my mic stand tilts slightly by the weight of the PVB when it is at full height for vocal recording, although it shouldn’t really be a problem in any case. The construction of the PVB is good, it looks solid and that will probably last many years of use.

Let’s go into the sound aspects. Even before mounting it I unfolded it and spoke into it and could already hear the damping. I’ve been trying it with my Rode NT1A microphone directly into the Focusrite Saffire and so far recorded vocals and spanish guitar and the results are excellent, the sound is instantly dryer and better than I imagined I could get in that room without any complicated and expensive treatment.

So that you can judge by yourself I have uploaded some examples below.

Guitar Sample Without Portable Vocal Booth
Download audio file (20091019 – Guitar Sample Without Portable Vocal Booth.mp3)

Guitar Sample With Portable Vocal Booth
Download audio file (20091019 – Guitar Sample With Portable Vocal Booth.mp3)

I’m writing this post from my new iPod touch using the wordpress application. Lately I’ve been reading a few reviews of cool apps to make music with and with all the other stuff it comes with it seems to me a bargain for the price now that it’s only around $200 for the 8GB version. I don’t really want it for the music since my creative zen still does a great job, especially now that spotify isn’t working anymore for being away from home and while I find some kind soul to setup a VPN for me it’s still gonna be much needed.

Starting with a quick review. The first thing I realized was how cool, light and well designed it is and once I started playing with it I couldn’t stop.

So far I’ve downloaded a bunch of free apps from the store and a few of them to make music. There’s a piano and a simple substractive synth and they sound great. Also a multitrack recorder and a guitar tuner. However, I’ll only be able to use these ones when I get myself a mic but i’m looking forward to it since it can be very handy as a quick draft tool for writing songs.

The screen is very sensitive and it’s very easy to play melodies and chords. There’s also a free version of Groovemaker, which although I’ve only been able to play with for a few minutes looks and sounds very promising. And this is only the start. I guess that the Ipod had the potential to become an extremely powerful tool for making music.

So I walked around downtown a bit and found three shops and finally bought an ok spanish guitar in a little shop downtown Puebla where they didn’t even tune the guitars. After playing anything that vaguely resembled a guitar I chose a Tres Pinos (never heard that brand before) that costed 3000 MXN (that is 226 USD at today’s exchange rate), the other guitars I tried don’t really deserve to be named so, a bit frustrating. The Tres Pinos doesn’t sound as nice as my Alhambra back at home but it actually plays quite nicely, although it detunes pretty quickly.

Later on I found another area of Puebla that actually has loads of nice guitar shops but I don’t regret having bought that one since for the price I won’t get much better quality.

A week later I spotted a red wine coloured Yamaha with two humbuckers sitting in a pawn shop near home. I went in, asked the price and the clerk let me test it… in a Hi-Fi stereo system. It sounded ok to me so I bought it for 1400 mexican pesos, about 105 USD. The guitar in question is made in Taiwan and has a few scratches but other than that seemed ok. Once back in the silence of my home I found that the guitar made quite a lot of noise that makes it quite unusable for recording. After some poking I found that the problem was a faulty tone pot. So yesterday I ordered some replacement pots from eBay and I’ll attempt to replace it, wish me good luck. In fact I feel a bit excited of trying the surgery to see if I can actually fix it since killing it wouldn’t be a huge loss. Although having to do so much work for fixing a 105 USD guitar seems like a lot it’ll still be good practice. I probably wouldn’t be so enthusiastic about doing it to a more expensive guitar.

A couple of weeks later in the same shop I saw a black Yamaha bass guitar and repeated the same procedure. This time I paid 1800 pesos, around 135 USD and this time I made sure that the guitar had no noise by cranking up the volume at the shop and thoroughly trying every possible pot setting.

The good thing about buying them second hand is that I won’t get too attached to them and I can just resell them at a minimal loss when I leave without even worrying thinkint twice about it.

Of course I miss my nice guitars back home which sound better on their own and feel very nice to play but since I’m not going to record classical music and at the end of the day both the electric and bass guitars are going to the DI’d through the soundcard into the sequencer to be processed by a bunch of digital VST plugins and sit in the middle of a mix I don’t think being cheap will make such a big difference to the end result.

1. Laptop, my Dell Vostro 1500 is more than enough to make as much music as we need with an Intel Core 2 Duo processor and 2 Gbytes of RAM. To many this may seem completely insufficient but when I started making music with computers I had excellent results using a Pentium IV at 500MHz and 256Mbytes of RAM. Oh! and it comes with a little firewire port to use with my Focusrite Saffire, happy days. So the laptop should be fine.
2. Soundcard, you know I love my Focusrite Saffire, so why change it? The only annoying problem (which was very annoying indeed) is that I lost my original power supply so I bought a new one from Focusrite itself. However, only a few hours before leaving when I checked it I realised that the power supply only accepts european voltage, not north american one, very well done Focusrite! So since the power supply this unit needs is an AC to AC adaptor and most electronic shops (physical and on the internet) only sell AC to DC it was a bit difficult to find one. The alternative would have been to buy a voltage step converter, but it would be very annoying having to use two units to power a simple soundcard.
3. Keyboard, my old M-Audio O2. I know now there are loads more USB keyboards to choose from but back in 2005 when I bought it it was super slim and still is very usable for creating bass lines, electric piano chords and, with a little patience, simple solos.
4. Microphone, Rode NT-1A, cheap and clean sounding quality condenser microphone. Cardioid pattern. It even comes with it’s own shock mount. Just make sure your soundcard can provide the power supply before buying it.
5. External Hard Drive, Iomega UltraMax 1TByte. I use this for all my media, movies and music but since it has multiple ports it can handle USB, Firewire, eSata. Good for music production too. Cool.
6. Belkin Sata II expresscard, I’m not very happy with the speed of USB for music making. Firewire is a bit better, I’ve done mixing up to 90 tracks with external hard drives. However, the firewire 400 ports from my iMac never were able to handle the quick triggering of drum samples from external hard drives so I always had to store the drum samples in the local drive. Very annoying. The theoretical much higher speed of SATA II should be more than capable of handling this. I’ll write about that when it’s due time.
7. Headphones, my old Audio Technica ATH-M40fs headphones, flat response, a little lacking in bass so I’ll try the mixes in cars or with a cheap set of multimedia speakers, etc. Unfortunately I won’t be able to do any proper monitoring since I will not be able to have an acoustic treated room or a decent set of monitors. But that should not stop us from getting good results.

This is the situation. I am in Puebla, México for work reasons for half a year away from my nice guitars and a lot of my other studio gear but I still want to make music. All I brought with me was the stuff that I could reasonably fit in my suitcases, so not a lot. I’ve decided to turn this into an experiment.

My target is to build a quality home studio for 3000$ (USD). The total price of all the gear must come within that budget and the final result should have excellent quality.

In the next post I’ll talk about the gear I took on the plane with me.

Last week I used my new Focusrite Saffire to record guitar and vocals on the microphone and all I can say is that I love it. Until now I was using my good old Edirol UA-20, which was fine at the time I bought it and has provided me endless hours useful service, but the clarity and richness of the sound recorded by the Saffire is outstanding. Just as if there was no soundcard. This is a leap in quality from what I was used to.

Before buying the Saffire I also considered the RME Fireface 400 and MOTU Traveler because I was looking for a truly ”pro” firewire soundcard although they were on a completely different price range, I was stretching my budget to aim for the best quality. Finally I realised that both the RME and MOTU were too much for my actual needs. I never record more than one or two instruments at the same time, have a standard two monitor setup although might need mobility occasionally therefore I needed a firewire powered soundcard with just a couple of inputs and outputs but excellent sound quality on those, no need for spending extra cash on 6 more inputs/outputs.

Having heard the quality I can achieve with the Saffire I believe that to notice any improvement in sound quality in my setup I’d probably need an acoustically treated studio rather than spending twice as much on my soundcard. Spending more is not always the smartest decision.

Do you really need all those inputs and outputs? Is your studio acoustically treated to make use of the quality improvement of that expensive soundcard?

Make yourself those questions before buying your new soundcard and you might save some money.