Friday, 28 May 2004

The nylon-stringed Guitar... ...is acknowledged to be one of the hardest instruments to record, seriously! The top end of a nylon-stringed guitar is sort of velvety or silky and no pick-up I know does that justice. Compared to a steel-stringed guitar the nylon-strings are so subtle!!! A much more delicate in the mid-range and with a very tricky treble! And I feel that gets lost with a pick-up. I have tried the Baggs pick up systems, I have tried the RMC, and I have used the B-Band (in fact I am still listed as their endorser)...well, of those pick-ups mentioned, I truthfully do prefer the B-Band.....but in the end I have returned to just using a microphone, because I feel that the nylon strings need to breath and can only be reproduced with a microphone at this time. Of course a Digital microphone would be great, but I am very happy with my Neumann M149 in the studio and my Shure KSM 44 for live performances. Last year I used only the microphone for our performances and no pick-up whatsoever, and I am planning to do that again this year. The nylon-stringed guitar is very intimate and small and probably the most unlikely instrument for a large venue! I remember how hard it was to be loud enough when we played with Santana in 1996...loud enough for 15,000 people to hear...well, of course all subtlety is lost in that context anyway.... One of my favorite performances is a private show I do at a California winery every couple of years. I play un-amplified in a wine-cellar in front of about 30 or 40 people - by invitation only. You could hear a needle drop, it is so quiet when I start playing...no microphone, no amplification, no speakers...and nothing to hide behind...this is the way a nylon-stringed guitar is meant to be heard.... Well, we are going to try to create that intimacy for you this year...it's that much harder for our engineer when I take away the pick-up, but Alan always rises to the challenge....   10:16:58 PM  comment []   Buffalo spammer gets 3.5 to 7 years A New York man convicted of using the network of Internet service provider EarthLink Inc. to send out hundreds of millions of unsolicited commercial (spam) e-mail was sentenced to between three-and-a-half and seven years in prison Thursday, according to Brad Maione, a spokesman for New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer. [MacCentral] One down, a whole bunch to go....   6:01:07 PM  comment []   Arctic Getting Warmer Faster Melting icecaps trigger a vicious cycle, making the Arctic heat up quicker than the rest of the planet. Also: Fresh water supplies shrink ... male fertility drops ... and formaldehyde is unleashed. By Stephen Leahy. [Wired News] More Feel-Good-Friday news for the end of the week. Well, actually the male fertility drop seems like a good idea..... OK, we'll do better next week. I promise to find only positive things for this Diary next week.....Ah, how 'bout this: we might receive all of the CDs as early as Tuesday. Now, the question is this: do we put the Digi-Pak edition on sale right away, or should we wait and release both editions at the same time? Lemme hear you...   11:56:28 AM  comment []   Google faces Gmail advert limits Californian politicians are close to putting shackles on what Google can do with Gmail messages. [BBC | TECH] OK, help me understand this one. It is OK for Clear Channel to own radio stations, TV stations, billboards, concert venues, along with being the biggest promoter in the world, on top of that apparently owning the patent on Live Concert CD burning - and I am not even mentioning Eric's claim that they are buying Avid/DigiDesign, because I haven't been able to verify that - and Google can't put as many ads in Gmail as the users will put up with? At least you have a choice in web-based mail and could choose a different option...with Clear Channel you really don't have a choice, do you. Or do CA politicos have no other pressing laws to enact? Are they, gasp, that bored? PS: I have been using Gmail for several weeks now and love it! Compared to their competition, Google has made the ads very unobtrusive - which means easy to ignore.   11:35:19 AM  comment []

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