Tag Archive for: usb

And now for something completely different digital vs VHS for music

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Yes you read it correctly

As you might or might not know I love playing guitar and recording music.
Every minute I can get I’m playing around in our Home Studio we build during Corona.

I don’t have any illusions of making it as a songwriter or musician but I love experimenting with sounds, modes and recording techniques. It’s probably no surprise for people knowing me that my gear is mostly vintage tube amps, older guitars and of course vintage studio gear. Still love the Alesis, Digitech and Lexicon gear. Somehow due to the imperfections it just sounds beter.

To make the connection to photography, when I shoot with older M42 lenses there are a lot of downsides but somehow it just inspires more and the images have “Character” it’s hard to explain but you just see and feel it under certain lighting conditions. The flares of an old lens are just so much different, same as the bokeh. But ok, todays topic is something else.

Digital all the way

Today it’s not strange to go all digital.
Well ok the guitar is still analogue (I hope) but most guitarists will probably play over a modeller.
For me it’s a mixed bag. I love modellers but I still feel that a real tube amp is still king.
I’m in the lucky position to own a few older models and they are… well just awesome.

When I grew up my first one company was a recording studio which I ran together with a friend.
There we wish we would have the options you now have in a laptop.
I had to work with 2 consoles, one for drums and one for the rest.
Recording was done on a 8 track (which was very nice for that time and the size of our studio) reel 2 reel deck which had to be aligned every single recording. We were saving for an ADAT system but before that happened my fried decided to use the building for something else.

Many years later I picked up playing myself again and was literally shocked by the options you have now.
When I was starting I owned a 4 track Tascam which immediately made me one of the most sought after bandmembers, a bit like the PA from David Lee Roth 😀
I still own the recorder (but it’s doesn’t work anymore) and the main problem was that you had to bounce almost everything because 4tracks was very limiting especially when you wanted to work in stereo.

Now a days we have almost no limit to the amount of stereo/surround tracks and how many effects you want to use. We had to work with one Reverb unit 😀

At the moment I’m recording in Logic and using an X32 console.
Somehow mixing or recording in the box feels very unnatural and having loads of sliders feels like home.
The X32 has this really handy feature of recording your song on a USB stick via an internal recorder. Just pop the drive in your PC/Mac and you’re ready to master.
The results are great.

But…. there is always a but

Don’t get me wrong the sound quality is amazing from the X32 (well more than enough for me).
But I always have to grab some tape emulation plugins to tame the sterile highs I often hear from the drum samples and keys.
In the past I tried a few older reel2reel tapes and dump the stereo mix there before mastering and always came back disappointed, yes the sound was there that I loved but it was messy, lost definition and it wasn’t in sync. And spending 400,00 on a reel2reel that is 100% correct (for how long) is not something I’m willing to spend.

So…
The idea came to test out a device you probably would not expect in a recording setup.
An Hi-Fi stereo VHS recorder.
Now it may seem weird, but it’s not.
When I grew up, most music was spread on tapes and even with Dolby noise reduction and great players the sound quality was nothing near the very expensive CDs.
Until we started to experiment with BetaMax and VHS recorders. Especially the Hi-Fi VHS recordings sounded great. Beta was still beter but compared to even the best cassettes this was a huge step forward, and you could get loads of music on one tape.

So that got me thinking.
The recording technique on VHS is different from tape, so you know you’re not going to get that real tape magic, but let’s be honest anything that doesn’t run at very high speeds and has the proper width will not, and those decks are horrendously expensive. So I dug up our VHS recorder, blew of the dust and ordered a new tape.

The test

Now this is of course just for fun.
I recorded the same mix simultaneously on both the VHS and USB stick.
After that the VHS was routed back into logic via the interface.
In logic I selected both tracks and did the exact same mastering workflow, this time I did not fine tune anything to make sure I didn’t change anything by accident and uploaded the two files here for you to compare.

The outcome might surprise you.
I advise headphones or a really good set to listen to the details.

Click here to download the files
VHS mastering
USB mastering

The song

The song is called under the balcony.
It’s recorded during the holiday on an Ibanez Tod10N.
This is a nylon string acoustic electric guitar.
I hope you enjoy the song and the test.

If you also record music or a podcast and you want to be available on all streaming services and want to keep your revenue, but also get nice art for releases and landing pages.. check out distrokid. I’ve been with them for 2 years now and it’s a great service. Songs are released for free on all streaming platforms (even more than I knew existed) and you get a nice overview of your revenues. And if you use our link we also get a nice bonus.

Want to hear more of my music?
Check out your favourite streaming service or
https://soundcloud.com/frank-doorhof

https://www.bandlab.com/frankdoorhof

 

 

Adding more storage to your MacBook Pro (or other laptops) and what to look out for

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Apple is great but some things are insanely expensive

I’ve never been a huge Apple fan, but I do love their products.
Let me explain.
They just work, and they work great together. For me this is vital because I work mostly on my phone but want a fast and seamless integration with my laptop when needed, I also love to edit my images in Photoshop with the iPad Pro in extended screen mode. In other words especially the last few years, Apple found their way back to the creatives after releasing some horrible horrible laptops.

The M series changed it all for me.
My first M product was my iPad Pro, and in all honesty I still use the M1 12.9 iPad Pro.
It’s great for editing, reading comics and magazines, watching movies, browsing and of course connecting a controller and have some fun with Call of dutch mobile 😀

The M series in the iPad Pro actually made it possible for me to edit video better and faster than on my Dell XPS i9 windows laptop, which in essence blew me away, I never expected a tablet to hands down beat my super expensive laptop that was fully specked out.

At the moment I’m running a M1 Pro 14″ MacBookPro which will be replaced as soon as the M4 pro is released, not because I really need it, but I do find that when screen recording heavily AI driven software I do start to experience the limits of my laptop 😀
For normal use I would not know why to upgrade to be honest.

Although I feel that the MacBookPro’s at the moment give the best bang for the buck, there is one thing that is incredibly expensive when upgrading, and that’s internal storage. My photos and videos are all stored on 2 synology NAS systems but when working on several video projects, music recording etc. the internal drive is even with 1TB a “bit” on the small side. But upgrading is in my opinion way to expensive, so I was looking for a great solution.

Most solutions are based on the SD card slot which doesn’t make sense for me due to the speed hit and also the lack of really large storage. I need at least 4TB extra and also an option to work from that drive, or use it as a scratch drive.

On Amazon or your favourite supplier you can get pouches you can put on the back of your laptop.
I found that they are large enough to hold a small harddrive.
So I bought a 4TB small SSD and that’s where the troubles started.

Watch out and beware

Of course we all know (I hope) that there are different kinds of cables.
There are cables that are just for charging and cables that support USB3/C or ThunderBolt connections.
The USBC connector has many faces so to say.
And the problem is that often we don’t really notice it unless you start testing.

First of all
Don’t ever buy cheap cables.
Most of the cheaper cables will downgrade the speed of your external SSD to a very slow USB2 speed. Which means you think it works but copying files is incredibly slow. These cables are often only meant for charging your phone or tablet. But they do recognise the drive, which will often confuse the user.

Another thing is the shielding.
My first cable I tried was of a good shielded quality, but still my wifi was very unstable, losing connecting all the time and the speed was horrendous, all was great when I disconnected the cable.

At that point I almost gave up, but decided to order an even better shielded cable and finally, no more unstable wifi, no more slow transfer speeds, it just works like a charm 😀

When you order a cable make sure you order a very high quality USBc or TB cable.
Especially make sure the shielding is top notch.
I also highly recommend angled connectors. It’s always better to transport the laptop with the cable disconnected but it happens regularly that we don’t and with the angled connectors it never gave any problems, but to be sure, just take it out of the port.

Now because images say more than words, I made a small video for you.

 

Behind the scenes during the workshop “smoke” plus how I shoot tethered to the iPad pro

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In today’s episode of behind the closed DOORs we talk about tethering to the iPad pro
And I take you BTS during the workshop smoke with our model Linda.

During the video you see all the results but in the blog post one of the sets 😉

Enjoy the video and dont forget to subscribe. We have a lot of different videos ranging from behind the scenes to reviews and tips and tricks. Plus of course our regular live streams in the digital classroom series

Z30 SP xDrive for the traveling photographer

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Some things look great on paper but are terrible in real life.
Some things can be solved.

According to some the iPad/iPhone etc. are closed of systems where you always need iTunes to sync or put stuff on your device, and although indeed this was always true in the past there are many solutions now a days that work like a charm, for example I use mostly “preview” to get images and videos off my iOS device, or (if there aren’t many) I use airdrop, and when I need them in the catalogue of Lightroom I will just connect my phone to Lightroom.

In fact I only use iTunes to get video material on my iPad before traveling and music on my iPhone. And even then I don’t convert the video via iTunes, I just drag and drop the files into the folder for my CBR reader or video for VLC. The times where you had to convert everything is long gone.

But still there sometimes is the need for more, especially when traveling.
We love to edit video on the big screen of the iPad pro, but I also love to watch some episodes of my favorite show while flying and preferably I want to carry everything with me so I have a lot to choose from, and although you can fit a lot of shows on the 128GB iPad pro…. well I still want more sometimes, and when you combine it with video editing even the 128GB can be filled up rather quickly.

But don’t worry… there are solutions for that too.
Enter the Z30 drive.

SP128GBLU3Z30V1W

I’ve tested the iShowfast a while ago and although I liked the idea of the drive, and in all honesty it did do its work almost flawless, the connection was very weak and within a few weeks of normal use I already wasn’t able to lock both the lighting and USB part of the stick, in the end they exchanged the stick but I’m now so used to the Z30 that I’ll keep it in it’s box and probably sell it. The main thing I like about the Z30 is that there is a 100% hidden position as you can see in the middle of the image above. With the iShowfast there wasn’t, so you always had the USB or lighting part exposed, and that means…. well change of damage or dirt getting in the contacts.

Now writing a review on a device like this is pretty… well let’s put it this way, it’s like writing a review on a USB stick, it works or it doesn’t  😀

Safari

In essence the Z30 drive makes it possible to very quickly sync files like photos, videos and documents between your mac/pc and iOS device. To make it work the only thing you need is the free iOS app that you can download from the app store. Via this app you can do some pretty cool stuff like creating a backup from your camera roll, backing up your contacts (and restoring them), synchronize between devices, work with dropbox (upload and download) and of course it also supports encryption so your files are safe.

I’ve been working the Z30 for some time now and I must say that I’m really happy with it, it copies pretty snappy from my MacBook Pro and the “feeling” of always being able to copy material from my MBP to my iPad pro on the road is pretty handy, we film a lot of material on the road and it saves us a lot of time to being able to already do some editing on the plane and the iPad pro simply shines on video editing capabilities.

If you’re traveling a lot, OR if you just need some extra memory on your iOS device and you don’t want to always connect to a MBP/Pc or whatever the Z30 is something I HIGHLY recommend. Check them out on their site. it’s available in 32/64/128GB versions (I tested the 64GB version)