Shows and acquired gear goodies

First and foremost, I have to say I had a great time playing with Man Man Tuesday night. All of those guys are really cool to talk to and hang out with. They smashed out a killer set. We seemed to hold together a pretty tight set ourselves, so no complaints here. Plenty of nice folks around after the show to talk to and the crowd response was fantastic. Tonight is the 60s tribute show at Billy's Lounge which will be a riot. A whole night of 60s jams? Come on, that's a no brainer for a good time. We dropped "Waiting For My Man" by the Velvet Underground and went with "Twist & Shout." Can't go wrong there.

On a gear oriented note, I am picking up a Lexicon Lambda USB audio interface for my computer as well as a CAD Trion 6000 condenser microphone with switchable polar patterns and a 10db pad. I'm excited as this will be my first microphone that offers a figure 8 polar pattern so I can experiment with mid side recording techniques. You know, figure 8 mic pointing 90 degrees to the left with a cardiod condenser immediately above it pointing straight at the source? Of course. Just to get a bit technical, the figure 8 polar pattern refers to the microphones ability to pick up an omnidirectional sound source from both the front as well as the back of the capsule. The cool thing about it is if you place it like I stated above, you get the ability to affect the stereo spread in post production in your DAW(Digital Audio Workstation). Say, for instance, I were to assign each of the two microphones to a channel to record. After I record into or transport wav files into my computers recording software, I can copy the mid micrpohone(the figure 8) and paste it as a new track and flip the phase on that track. After doing so, the two tracks cancel each other out due to being out of phase. You then pan each track far left and right. After you do that, you link the two tracks together for consistent volume adjustment and fade in/out to your preference. What you'll find is that with only the mid microphone level up, the sound is very narrow because it was the one pointing directly at the sound source. As you turn up the level on the side microphone(copied into two channels and linked), you notice that the stereo image really starts to reveal itself as you are essentially adding in the indirect room sound reflection coming from the sound source. Sounds nice on a variety of things and I'm looking forward to experimenting with it. Life is good.