As you may already know, I am not a fan of stompboxes, I rather use digital processors, multi effects, “all in one” boxes, like the BOSS I currently own…

That is why I try to keep an eye on the “toy store”, and I mean BOSS here…But not only as I started to get interested more and more in solutions from Line6, to match my guitar.

So, this time I said to introduce you Micro BR , the smallest PRO studio!.

Well, what can I say? It is just a bit larger than an iPod, has 4 playback tracks and plus 32 V-Tracks, an SD Card slot, onboard multi-effects, built-in rhythm patterns, a tuner, MP3 compatibility, USB, and more.

I guess it’s the perfect guitar accessory to take with you on the road, next to your guitar, if you have that magic idea that you don’t want to miss. I know I have been there a lot of times, and I just use my mobile to record it, which is not always the best thing…

Trying to learn more about it, I landed on this site here, BR for guitarists, and what do you know? Micro BR has siblings (see for example BR1200CD), bigger and better.

As for the price, as listed by Amazon, BOSS MICRO-BR comes at $186(aff).

And a simple search on YouTube brings you an interesting set of videos about how to record, mix and master your recordings. Cool!

Any of you owns such a toy? Any personal, hands-on review?

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You know, I was telling you about Line 6 and Ableton Live and my home recording experiences.

I enjoy doing this, I realized it is the best way to bring a new song to present it to the band. I record it at home (the guitar part, I mean) then I put a vocal guide on it and send it over to Costin, the lead singer, to put some words on it, to see how it sound, so when we get together at rehearsals, we already speak the same language.

However, if the guitar sounds better than a lot of guitars I have heard, I can’t get the voice right and I realized I don’t know how to record the vocals right, because I have never been in such a position to record it myself. Usually, you know, you go to the studio, you have the sound engineer there who already fixed things and maybe just tweak a little the sound and you just record the voice. Right?

Well, now I find myself in such a position so I need to…ih…study! Well, yeah, like I wouldn’t already have too much on my head, I started to look for how to record the voice.

See, the internet is such a great tool for learning, I can’t imagine what I would do without it these days! I have found this article here that says a few things about it. And of course, I said to share it with you.

So, what’s your experience with recording vocal parts? I mean…from the other end of the mic. Any good tips to share?

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Following the recording I did a couple of weeks ago, last night I started to fool around with Clapton’s song, Layla, in front of my computer. It didn’t take me much to want to record it to see how it sounds. Once that the first notes were recorded, of course, I wanted more. However, it was late, the acoustic guitar sounds kind of loud so I didn’t go too far.

However, something came out of it, a refreshing take, unplugged, a bit faster than the original recording (this is how I hear this song, by the way) based on the unplugged version. Maybe I could give it a bit more air in some parts, but if I will have the time, maybe I will clean it later.

Those of you familiar with the unplugged album will recognize probably parts of the unplugged solos, the tempo and the general feeling, I guess. It’s not a one on one take, since I haven’t listened that song in a while, so it’s just what I remembered, without trying to follow the exact structure of the song.

At the end I wanted to make a video out of it, to upload it on YouTube, but each time I compiled the movie, I don’t know why, some notes ended up scrambled, out of tempo, because of the compression, I guess. So, I stopped and I decided to put the song here as audio only.

So, here it is! Enjoy my personal version of Layla!

[Audio clip: view full post to listen]

Later edit: I managed to have a good quality video, so here it is on YouTube. Enjoy!

Buy Eric Clapton’s Unplugged concert from Amazon!
Record your own songs at home with Line 6 GearBox Silver Bundle with Toneport D.I. USB Recording Interface!

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So far I have tested my recording toy only with the Variax. This is because I really didn’t need anything else, my Variax guitar provides me all the tones I need, including acoustic tones which are pretty realistic.

However, suddenly I started to ask myself how my acoustic guitar would sound recorded through TonePort UX1. So far I didn’t try it because, to my shame, I didn’t have a battery for the EQ, it ran out and because I didn’t have the need of using it on stage lately, I forgot to buy one. So yesterday while buying some groceries I remembered about it and bought a battery also.

I started to record my acoustic and because I didn’t have anything planed, I started to play Tears in heaven, just to see how it sounds. When listening it, I started to improvise over the backing track and…I kept the record and decided to upload it here.

I must admit it has a few bumps and off-tempo notes, because it was recorded in one take, I could have removed them, actually I even recorded 2 other better versions of the solo part but none had the same feeling like this one, so I decided to keep it. Despite the fact that it is not perfect, this version is the most soulful.

So because it made me think of autumn and love, I called it…Autumn love. Not very original, I know, but hey, I didn’t think too much of it, it was an impulse name. I also put up a small video, following Dr J‘s example.

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Following yesterday’s post, today I was thinking about layering the guitar tracks on a record and this started a whole new thread on my complicated mind…

I will start with this concrete situation I faced these last weeks, a song that I play with my band since I guess, 4 years. I think I can say I know that song. I wanted to test my new recording toy and the recording application, Ableton Live. Everything worked fine until recording the chorus, on power chords.

My habit, when recording the chorus, not because I plan, but because I observed it over time, is to record one guitar as the base track and then a second one with that special something that make the chorus interesting, from the point of view of the guitar.

To my despair, what I used to play since a couple of years in live shows, didn’t sound right when recorded, especially when another guitar was added on top of it. I tried various things, deleting and recording over and over again, until, to my surprise, the best track, the one that I actually kept in the end, was the simplest one, a track where the “base guitar” played only a G and a C on power chords, straight, no muted strings, just plain power chords. On top of that, the second guitar worked like a charm…

I must admit that in live situations, I would have never agreed on playing JUST PLAIN POWER CHORDS. Man, I can not just sit and watch you playing while I play one chord every 4 measures, I CAN DO MORE THAN THIS!!

I can, but the question is…should I?

I think that we could think of a compensation law, as in everything in life, if you wear a striped shirt, you’d better wear a tie with an unique color, if one of the two life partners is a “hard rock(my mother’s saying)” the other one should be less stubborn, isn’t it? The married guys should know what I mean, guitar players or not…

It is the same with the music: if the lead vocal line is complex, you’d better think of something simpler for the instrumental part, while if the vocal part is straight, you should compensate it by having an interesting instrumental part. If both are complex will sound crowded, while if both are simple, will sound…simple and dull.

Joe Satriani said that 90% of what you play as a guitarist is rhythm guitar(I think I’ve seen this on Jack Pribek‘s site a couple of days ago) and he is damn right just that we, as guitar player, always want to play more, louder, more complicated, when we actually play for the song, not for us.

I think that the less is more law works here better than anywhere else, isn’t it?

To make my point, here’s the chorus of the song I was telling you about. Unfortunately, it is the first version, that is all I could find on this computer, drums are way too loud so almost everything stops when the kick drum comes in, but you’ll get my point. At one moment I will upload the whole song. Until then, enjoy!

By the way, that’s a Gibson Les Paul emulation there over a Strat clean tone on my Variax using tones only from Line 6 TonePort UX1.

[Audio clip: view full post to listen]

So, let me hear you, guys!

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Well, my dear friends, yesterday I have received my little toy, TonePort UX1, the USB recording interface from Line 6. I ordered it on Wendsday and I received it yesterday…That caused a lot of frustration, to be honest,but OK, it is here…

So, when I’ve got home with it, I was already impatient and I couldn’t wait to install it. I could tell you right from the start the same thing I have observed when I purchased the guitar, the guys from Line 6 give a very big importance to marketing. Everything is packed up nicely, beautiful packages, it gives you that special thrill, like you are a kid waiting for the toy that Santa is going to bring you this Christmas! Well, this is how I’ve felt, anyway…

The package brings one USB recording interface (Line 6 TonePort UX1), 1 USB cable, 2 CDs and a lot of papers for registering, if you want. Speaking about marketing and support, I don’t think they left something out, I felt that when installing the software and the hardware. On the 2 CDs it was written very large, to not miss it, which CD to install first, which the second, they were very careful to inform you to not connect the hardware before the installer reaches a particular point, etc. I was impressed by the fact that they put a lot of weight on explaning to the customer how to do things right. I liked that a lot, because, even if I am a computer professional, I realize not everybody spends his days around computers.

I installed the Ableton Live software also, plugged my guitar and wheee…or not!?!!! WTF? Play, damn it! 

If there is anything that I hate in this software world, is to read the documentation of a product. I am impatient and I expect everything to work from the start and I have the conviction I can usually learn any software without too much reading…Well, in this case the damn thing didn’t wanna start!

Back to school, then. Of course, the device is not connected in anyway to the sound card of the computer, so in order to make it work, to hear it using your sound card you need to take the line out from the recording device and plug it to the line in of the sound card. Pretty obvious, but I expected it to know about the sound card, one way or the other.

After overcoming the fact that everything on the recording device uses large jacks(1/4) while on the computer everything works on small ones, I still haven’t been able to play it using my computer. My mic line has a problem and i can not record a mic, seems my line in also has the same problem!

Head phones maybe? Yes! It work, finally! Let’s roll!

And the adventure begins

Man, I knew from the start that this toy is loaded with a lot of amps, but come on! After playing like 10-15 tones there I’ve got really dizzy! The software comes with 3 predefined tone sets: clean tone, cruch and heavy, each of these folders containing around 25(?) tones. Now think of the fact that you can adapt any of these tones and save them as your own, in another set, user defined. Man…

I can tell you that I played them all until the end of the evening, but I couldn’t find “my tone” among all those tones there. The same as with my Variax modeling guitar, which has it’s models based on famous electric and acoustic guitar models, tones there are based on famous tones that somebody once used. Like for example I could find a tone named Achtung, based on The Edge tone, or another one called “Aint talkin bout love” or something similar, based on Eddie Van Halen’s tone. What really made my day from this point of view was the tone named Hell’s Bells. Now you do the math and tell me the original band! I had a lot of fun with this tone since I couldn’t make a tone on my BOSS processor for You shook me all night, because I am not very good at cutting gain on my distortion. I can not feel it, seems something is missing, so I need to turn the gain on, losing ACDC’s spirit. But when the tone was already created, played using the Gibson Les Paul model, sounds nice! Yeah!

I was able to find a couple of tones there to get somehow closer to what I want, it was a tone called “80′s rhythm guitar”, pretty self describing, I guess, pure distortion, a bit too open in my opinion, but OK, it’s a preset. Also, the tone that I found to be the closest to what I want is called Blizzard and is based on Randy Rhoads’s tone. I will probably start working on it from there. I will see…

The next thing I tried was to create a tone from scratch. Damn, system overload!!! Let’s look at it this way. Suppose you are a very experienced, professional guitar players, with a lot of money. How many amplifiers would you be able to gather in order to really find the tone? More than 18 in one single room? And if you manage to put them together in one single room, how many cabinet sets do you think you would be able to gather? More than 18-20?! Well, and if you managed to do this: NOW COMBINE THEM, EACH AND EVERYONE OF THEM! Damn it!

Now add the line of stompboxes, a few on every position, like 2-3 types of delays, 2-3 types of wah, etc. And when you think it can not get any worse than this, think of how the sound is taken from those cabinets. With a mic. Aaaa…which kind of mic? There are 4 types, changing them changes the sound that much that you can not even compare. Ah, yes, now that you have chosen a mic, start moving it closer to the cabinet or very far away, on the other side of the room…get it?

…now multiply this by the number of available guitar models on my Variax guitar!

I reached a conlusion that I could virtually create any tone I want, combining the guitars with the amps I have there. This thing is a great learning tool, gives you the feeling of different types of amps. Very interesting to observe, when you play a particular tone, sounds lousy, then you look at the tone description and you see it is built for a humbucker and you play it using a Tele. Change the guitar to a Les Paul, and everything rocks! Really! I had the impression that my Stratocaster model on my Variax guitar does not have personality! Man, I played it using SRV tone!!!Yes!

At about 1.30 AM I went to bed. System overload!! Too many guitar tones available!!

By the way, all these tones are updatable, I mean you can buy upgrades from the internet, the software is integrated with the web site. 

Another interesting thing, even if does not add any value to the device itself, but makes your life easier, you have a player where you can play an mp3 from the harddisk or from the internet in order to jam along.

Want more? There is a digital, chromatic guitar tuner, there is a metronome, that can be adapted to play clicks or drums.

Nothing about Ableton Live for the moment cause I couldn’t make it to record anything, but I will try again this evening. By the way, today I spent at least 1 hour in the morning playing the damn thing before leaving to the office! The cool thing is that the TonePort is always connected to the computer, it does not need power, it takes everything it needs from USB, so I let the cables connected also, all I need to do is to plug my guitar and start the software! Now we’re talking!

Also nothing about the preamp models, about voice and bass models. Not yet.

Still want more? I know I don’t!

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Reading Jon post about Riffworks software inspired me to have this small post here about a new toy: Propellerhead Reason 4.0.

I start to fall in love with all Line6 related products, at least so far with Variax guitars, Tone Port interfaces and now with this virtual studio software that kicks ass!

I love the drums they deliver, nice tones and nice loops also. I have no MIDI controller for the moment and I have not recorded anything with my guitar, but drum loops are sooo much fun for the moment!!! I think I will get one of their Tone Port interfaces to be able to record easily whenever and whatever I want, but after I pay for the guitar.

For the moment I am conducting a small market research, to see what is the best value for the money regarding these Tone Port interfaces. For the moment I think that Line 6 Tone Port KB37 is the best choice since all the others give you enough to record your guitar, bass and voice but you still need a MIDI controller of some sort to play with everything else. This little toy, KB 37 delivers this too. Seems that for what you need at home it is a great tool, at least this is what I know so far. I haven’t tested it, I have only seen reviews on the internet but seems like the best value for the money. As all the rest of Tone Port interfaces comes with a big part of the power that POD delivers, amplifiers, effects, plus a software to manage them all.

But if you already have a keyboard that you can use as a MIDI controller, then I guess UX2 does the job.

Anybody else having one of these at home?

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