THE ELECTRIC ROOM WISHING YOU A ROCKIN CHRISTMAS.

Cakewalk Sonar X1 Producer Music Production software – - at The Electric Room.

Sonar X1 delivers all that you need to produce polished “radio-ready” productions, from
tracking, and mixing, right through to final mastering.
From the innovative Skylight interface to the legendary, “big-studio” sound of the ProChannel console strip, Sonar X1 is the ideal choice for anyone serious about music production.
Sonar X1 is Windows 7 and 64 bit ready, and continues its tradition as one of the most popular DAWs on the market today.Find out more here

Event 2020 Studio Monitors

The original 20/20 from Event revolutionised the recording industry in the 1990′s and secured
a place in the hearts of audio engineers the world over.

Using manufacturing processes and materials unheard of at the time, the 20/20 combined a
magnetically shielded 25mm natural silk dome with an 8″ mineral-impregnated polypropylene
cone. A laminated and internally dampened MDF cabinet with a front-mounted large diameter
bass port assisted in providing the 20/20′s impressive low end response.

A year later Event released a powered version, the 20/20bas, to critical acclaim from engineers,

musicians and the media alike. The very first pair of 20/20bas speakers were used by Francis Buckley

to mix Quincy Jones’ Q’s Jook Joint album for which he won the 1996 Grammy Award for Best Engineered Album.

Now fifteen years later Event is proud to announce a new generation of clarity, transparency, definition and
some Big Ass Sound.

This new speaker incorparates a number of fundamental improvements over the original model while remaining
true to its character and performance strengths.

Event’s engineering team used ideas and technologies from its flagship Opal speaker in order to achieve
performance in keeping with the company design philosophy of high output, low distortion and excellent dynamics.

Event 2020 Studio Monitors – Studio Monitors – at The Electric Room.

Hey there everyone…one thing I’m really enjoying at my solo gigs is control over my vocals,

thanks to the TC Helicon Voicetone Create…no more asking the sound guy “can I have some reverb

on my vocals, please?”, only to be ignored…again. Lush TC reverbs, delays, telephone-style effects, distortion…it’s all there

at my feet, and I can save 10 presets that suit my voice. The mix control allows me to blend as little, or as much

of the effect as I like. I can send my soundie a dry signal as well if I want to, which gives him some control at FOH too.

The mic pre in the unit is very nice, and there’s of course an XLR mic input, and XLR output in mono or stereo.

It’s perfect for those vocalists looking to take their live sound to the next level and to ensure consistency of sound

at all gigs. Highly recommended!

Have a look here

Hope we are all making music! I’ve been very busy and a bit quiet of late, but now that I’ve wrapped that album, it’s time for a little rave…

 I recently changed my speakers over to a pair of PMC TB2i passives, running from a Linn amp – and I just had to tell you all how exciting it is to have great speakers! But not just exciting, important – here’s why:

 These were a major, huge, improvement on stereo image, frequency balance, fatigue – all of the usual suspects. I won’t bag out the brand I was using – lets just say they are extremely popular, and often considered for smaller studios…..I thought I had good enough speakers. Notice the ‘enough’….We all think our speakers are good enough, don’t we?

 Also, we’re all reading about what great speakers are, I don’t need to go on about it. But what is worth saying is the difference they made to my life….yeah, I’m going that far. I make or record music for a variety of clients, and like many of you, I’m trying to build a business in audio production…Some of us are already making a living, some of us are working up to that….but we all need quality tools, right?

 And like most of us, I think I ‘know’ the value of good speakers. If you can’t hear what you are doing, you’re not making the most out of the money you’ve spent on everything else.

But actually getting really good speakers, even though they were extremely affordable, has turned this ‘knowledge’ into a reality: every time I take my mix out of the studio and play it around in the ‘real’ world, it translates better…..much better…..much much better. In a way, ouch. All the hours I spent tweaking, muttering, staying up late – some of that, perhaps a lot of it, might have been saved if my speakers were this good in the first place.

 As soon as I played mixes I had pulled up in the old monitors on the PMC’s, it hit me in the face what I needed to do, and more importantly, when I did it, those things translated the first time into the real world. To many of you I won’t need to explain how many hours that will save me, how much angst and self doubt – after all, a good workman (or woman) never blames their tools, right? Well, it turns out, a good workman (or woman) doesn’t use crap tools either!

 To put it crudely, poor speakers LIE. They lie to you….poorly treated rooms will help the lie too….and you will do your best, try harder, reference more, work longer hours, all to make up for it. ( I should note here: I understand that this is all shades of grey….there is no perfect speaker or environment, if there were, we would all know what it was. I’m talking about good as opposed to not bad…).

Moral of the story: if you want results with your music, for whatever reason, at whatever level – and you even think maybe your monitors are average, not the best you could afford now – or if you have ‘pretty good’ monitors and are planning on spending up on other gear in the near future…. Look again. Do you really need a bigger control surface more than you need to hear every nuance you are trying to create? Do you really need another swag of plugins more than you need the confidence of trusting your decisions minute by minute?

It isn’t always what we want to hear, that we need to revisit one of the staples of our rig. There are so many other tools/enhancements we still need, right? We’ve sorted (and paid for) that part, moving on please?

Not if your monitors aren’t the absolute best you can possibly afford. Put them first, unequivocally first. You will be a better engineer, right now. And don’t just ask the guy at the shop either… read lots of reviews from trusted sources, try to visit other decent studios with your reference material and check out speakers… the effort is worth it, a hundred times!! Here’s another way I have put it in the past, without necessarily taking my own advice…Take your budget, for everything, and spend half on the speakers. The full half. Spend the other half on everything else….. If you mix in vocals from a $6000 mic through $1500 speakers, it will be very hard to justify that mic cost in the final results…it’s the principle of the weakest link.

 Who’s with me?

Cat