Ever try a practice journal?
I’ve been lazy at practice for awhile. I’ve got tons of things I want to work on in my technique and tons of things that I’ve purchased that I have yet to even look at. I’ve decided to take a page from the playbook of a few other guitar players I know and try a practice journal.
There is no correct way to do this, but I’ll go ahead and outline my strategy.
- Only plan a week of practice at a time. This should help accommodate the changing needs of what I should practice.
- Always start your last practice session of the week by planning the next week so you don’t end up with a day with no plan.
- Write down what you want to work on, and that day write down what you actually worked on.
- Be descriptive, draw shapes, keep good notes.
- Keep something handy to record if you stumble upon something awesome.
- Mix it up, don’t spend multiple days on the same topic if you can help it.
- Put in some of the things you would otherwise avoid (transcription, reading music, etc.)
I think the beauty of this is that it’s a forcing function to make you practice. So often we’ll just jam and call it practice, or go days without practicing. Since I have a plan, I find a way to commit 30 minutes to an hour on some specific thing I want to work on.
Have you tried this? Did it work for you? Sound off!
A cheap DIY clean boost pedal
I was looking for a quick and dirty clean boost pedal a few weeks ago when I found this kit from AmplifiedParts.com. The kit comes with everything you need to build the complete pedal for $24.95 plus shipping. I think the cheapest boost pedal I’ve seen is the $40 Electro-Harmonix LPB-1 (I have one, and this kit is better I think) so this makes for a real bargain.
Of course it’s DIY, so you need to be handy with a soldering iron and have some time to spare. It comes very well documented and took me about an hour to completely assemble and wire up. It’s not a very difficult project at all, perfect beginner project if you haven’t build pedals before.
I did take a slight detour from the printed instructions to add a BOSS style DC jack on the back so it wasn’t a battery only affair. You can get the jacks for less than a couple bucks and it only adds two small wires to the project.
If you are in the market for a boost pedal or just want to get started building your own pedals, I highly recommend this little kit. It’s called The Piledriver Power Power Boost Effects Pedal Kit and is available from AmplifiedParts.com. They shipped pretty fast too!
The sample below is just a quick thing I recorded so you could hear how well this little pedal drives a tube amp into clipping. I was playing an Ibanez Jem77BFP guitar through just this pedal into an Egnater Tweaker 15w half stack.
Keeping cables organized and handy in the studio
If you have even a modest project studio, you know the nightmare that is cables. I would be surprised if I counted and found that I had less than a few hundred cables in my studio. The problem is obvious, not even considering organizing the ones you are using, what do you do with the ones you’re keeping around for when you need them?
I’ve found two products that I’d like to recommend to help solve this problem. I’m still looking for the ultimate storage rack solution, so throw me your suggestions if you use something great, but these two products will help you keep loose cables tidy and keep spare cables handy.
Velcro Ties
At first I was a big user of zip ties. The problem was that you didn’t want to use them for cables that aren’t being permanently installed. Besides that, when you did use them in a more fixed purpose, you still ended up adding or removing gear and needing to cut them anyway. I found these ties on Amazon and I keep one on every cable I own now. Even laptop power supplies, headphones, etc.
The ties themselves are only about 4″ long and you have a hole in one end. You simply push the tip through the hole and cinch it snug to the cable.
Once it’s there, any time you need to wrap up the cable, you just look the Velcro around it when you’re done. It’s fast and easy. I buy them on Amazon for $8.69 for 100 and I literally went through and not only tidied up all of the cables in my desk, but also put them on all of my spare cables. No longer are there random cables laying loose for me to trip over or bins of spagetti for me to try and find a cable in.
Command Cord Bundlers
There are also a bunch of types of cables that I need to keep within reach in the studio. I have dozens of balanced patch cables that I’d like to be able to grab instantly for patch bays. The same goes for small stompbox patch cables. Finally, you always want to have a few instrument cables right at the ready.
I found these little guys and I’ve stuck them everywhere! I have two on my desk, two on my guitar rack, one on each side of my guitar stands. When I am not playing my guitar, I just wrap up my guitar cable and hang it on my rack. All my patch cables are right there and there’s no more mess or figuring out where to stick them.
Each pack comes with two and three pieces of adhesive in case you have to move one. The adhesive is pretty permanent so I’d avoid placing them on any surface you are worried you won’t be able to completely remove it from.
I’ve got one on my desk holding 20 balanced patch cables so they can hold quite a bit. You simply lift the little tab and you can get to the cables, then let the tab slide back in the slot to close it and hold the cables.
These little guys go for $4.06 for two on Amazon.
Suggestions?
As I said before, I am still trying to figure out some kind of great wall storage solution for cables. I have considered pegboard but haven’t bitten the bullet on it yet. I’ve heard about people using coatrack types of things. What do you use?
You can purchase the two items I mentioned above with the following links:
YouTube Amp Demo Truths Revealed
I put together this quick video to demonstrate why you have to be very cautious when listening to an amp demo on YouTube and using it to make any kind of purchasing decision. Watch the video for an A/B demo of what a Mesa Boogie Nomad 45 sounds like on a camera microphone vs. a high quality Microphone capturing what you hear in person.
Keep Waves from nagging when your iLok is elsewhere
Make Final Cut, Logic, etc. ignore Waves plugins when your iLok is not plugged in
If you are one of the many Waves users to have your plugins installed on both a desktop and a laptop computer, you probably know the pain I am about to describe.
It happened to me the other day at work. I hadn’t used Final Cut since I before I had bought the Waves Gold bundle. I had played with all the plugins on my laptop, but since moved the iLok and thus the authorization to the Mac Pro in my studio.
I carry the Macbook Pro all the time, but I don’t usually need the plugins so I won’t hassle with moving the iLok USB Dongle back and forth all the time.
I launch Final Cut and immediately start getting authorization failures one at a time, for each plugin in the suite, with a long, annoying companion delay to make sure I know I am not doing what I am supposed to do.
Well my friends and fellow music creation nerds, I have a solution for you. There is a single component that makes all of the Waves plugins visible.
If you look at the hard disk all of your applications are installed on, you be able to navigate to “/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/Components” and see a file that is named something similar to “WaveShell-AU 8.0 component” like you see pictured above.
This single component determines if all of your Waves plugins will be available to your applications or not. I found a tip saying just copy the file out of this folder to another before you run your applications when your iLok is not present. When you have it available the next time, simply copy it back.
That works for sure, but we can make it much easier for ourselves.
Automator
If you have not used the Automator for OS X before, this will be your introduction and let me tell you that it’s a very weak one at that. Automator is incredibly powerful and this use of it is almost like using a semi truck to haul a case of toilet paper.
Automator let’s you either record what you are doing, like a macro, or create chains of components to accomplish specific tasks. I decided to create two Automator Applications. The first, pictured below, simply selects the file I mentioned above, and copies it to a folder I created in my Documents folder.
Since this application removes the plugin component, I called it “Disable Waves” and saved the application in the same document folder I am copying the component to. If you look at the screenshot above, there are only two modules. The first explicitly selects the Waves Component file, the second moves whatever file the first module selected to a specific location. In this case I specified a folder I created called “Waves” in my “/Users/jason/Documents” folder.
By simply saving this Automator setup as an application, I have created an actual application I can run like any other program in OS X.
I also created the exact inverse of this application. I called the second one “Enable Waves” and stored it in the same location as the other.
As you can see, it’s the exact opposite of the other. Any time I run this application, it will move the file back.
Quick Keys
If you are a keyboard shortcut nut like I am, you probably know about command-space. Command-space launches OSX’s Spotlight search feature.
With the combination of Spotlight and Automator, before I run Final Cut I use command-space to bring up the Spotlight search box, type “Disable” and it automatically selects the application, press return and the file is moved quietly.
I can now launch Final Cut and not be nagged by Waves. When you want it back, do the same but type “Enable” instead.
Awesome, right?
