Alo Phogg's Music Blogg

Here's the third instalment in my occasional series about my so-called home studio. This time we're talking about my gear. The previous instalments were: Part 1 - The Room Part 2 - The Desk If you'd rather watch than read then take a look at the following video: If you prefer to read, keep going. I can't promise I'll cover everything that's in the video, but I'll try to give a good overview of what I've got. There may even be some extra info here that didn't make it into the video. Background As mentioned in the first instalment, for years I had nowhere permanent to house my gear, so I had to keep everything light so it could be set up and taken down after every session. That gear was simply a recording bundle from Focusrite comprising of their 1st edition Scarlett 2i2 interface with Focusrite branded condenser mic and headphones: They were joined later on by a 1st generation Novation Launchkey 25 MIDI controller: Unfortunately the constant plugging

In my blog post " My Home "Studio" Build: Part 1 - The Room " I promised to follow that up with other posts. I suppose the "Part 1" bit was a bit of a give away. Well, b ack in March I did publish the second video in the series - I just forgot to do the accompanying blog post! Sorry. So here it is. And just in time before I publish part 3 in a week or so's time. Once again, if you'd rather watch the video, fill your boots. Here it is: The desk in question is my  Thomann Millennium SD-120 Studio Desk . The desk arrived as a flat pack and the video is an in depth review of how it all went together and what I think of the finished product.  In this post I'm going to limit myself to pointing out a few things to watch out for when building the desk and giving my overall impressions. If you want all the gory detail of the build please watch the video. One more thing before we start. I bought this desk with my own money. This is not a sponsored revi

 A what and a-why? I'm just getting into a new hobby, electronics. It's subject about which I know absolutely zero, so obviously I think I can build an electronic instrument! I've liked tongue / tank / hank drums for a while now, but can't justify buying one for the little use I'll make of it. So why not make an emulation of one? The idea is to make a pad with keys laid out similarly to the tongue drum, where each key is touch sensitive so that touching a key triggers a sound in some way. I've made a start but am still at the experimentation phase. If you want to follow my progress I'll be documenting it over on my " Cahamo's Electronic Adventures " blog so I won't go into details here.  Start with this post to follow along. It's not yet decided whether this will be simply a MIDI controller that I can use to control a virtual instrument or whether I will trigger on board samples through a built in speaker (along with a line / headphone

I've just wasted half an hour of my life trying to work out how to make an unwanted Kontakt library disappear from the library tab of Kontakt's browser pane and from Native Access. Why? Well a few weeks ago I upgraded from Kontakt Player to the full version of Kontakt. Player comes with the Factory Library Selection library which contains a subset of the instruments of the full Kontakt Factory Library that I now have. So I no longer need the Factory Selection library and wanted to remove it. I loaded up Native Access and searched for the uninstall button. Guess what? No such button. OK, could I delete the library from Kontakt? Nope. I can hide it, but not delete it. Great. Anyway after a bit of Googling I found how to do it on Windows ... manually delete the library and hack the registry! Yeah, really! Mac users have to search out and delete something called a plist , apparently. And where on the Native Instruments website did I find this gem of information? I didn

This is the first in an occasional series about my efforts to create myself a little home studio for composing recording and mixing in a not particularly suitable room. This first part is about that troublesome room. You can either read about it here, or if you prefer, watch the video below. Series Overview This series is aimed at people like me, seeking to carve out a little studio space in a family home where both space and cash are limited and extraneous noise is potentially a problem. You should note I'm a strictly amateur musician / composer and this is certainly not claiming to be a professional quality build. If that's what you're looking for, you're in the wrong place! I'm trying to document my progress and the problems I'm facing. There's nothing theoretical about this series - it's a real world example of how an unknowledgeable amateur goes about building a technically complicated project. What could possibly go wrong! About The

It seems to be traditional at new year to produce some kind of “top ten” list or other. Well, I’m not a fan of ordered lists, but I have produced a list of the YouTube music channels I watched the most last year. And there’s nine in my “top ten”! Before we start, a quick disclaimer. I’m not connected to these channels in any way and I’m not getting any kickbacks for plugging them. I just like them and I’ve got a lot out of them. Time to pay it forward. And this is purely my personal choice. I’m not saying these channels are the best or that there aren’t any others out there. These are genuinely just the channels I actually watch! Having said that, I’d love to hear of any other channels anyone thinks I might be interested in following - please use the comments. Glad that’s clear. Here we go: My first love, muscically, is the acoustic guitar – primarily fingerstyle acoustic blues. So I’ll start with a couple of acoustic players I follow. Rainer Brunn First up is Rainer