All Things Audio

Buy the Shure E4 at zZounds for $299.99 (Jan. 14, 2007)

I wrote a short mini-review on the Shure E4 headphones a while back, but I wanted to do a more thorough review and haven’t gotten around to it until now. To start, the Shure E4’s are a well-regarded set of in-ear monitors priced around the middle of the in-ear market ($200-$300). As good quality in-ears they are appropriate for stage monitor use, shutting out the noise when you’re in a plane, or just for regular use with your iPod. You could even just use them as your regular headphones, though I find in-ears in general are not ideal for that application.

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One of the tiny things that you might not think matter in playing guitar is pick selection. When I was just starting guitar (I started on acoustic steel-string) I played on whatever I had lying around, which generally meant the standard cellulose picks. They sound OK, but tend to break a lot, especially over time. After a while I got sick of my picks breaking and settled on Dunlop’s Nylon Standard picks. They proved to be much longer-lasting, but I really wasn’t satisfied with the sound I got out of them. They lacked the bite that better cellulose picks seemed to have. Plus in the end they wore down anyway.

I did find that I had one teardrop-shaped yellow Tortex pick (coincidentally also by Dunlop) that I did like and it lasted forever, but I lost it at some point and never thought much about it. In recent years, a few of my friends started using the red Tortex picks. I gave them a try, but hated them. They’re way too floppy for me, and I can’t get the kind of tone I want out of them, especially when doing more picking as opposed to strumming. By this time I had started playing electric guitar a reasonable amount too, so I needed something for picking single-note stuff. Still, the Tortex picks were definitely durable. They tended to get lost, disappear, or get “borrowed” (haha, you know it’s true) rather than wearing out or breaking. Soon after, I picked up some orange and yellow Tortex picks and they were much better. As I had remembered, but with the standard shape. The orange is slightly lighter which I like when doing more strumming on the acoustic. One annoying thing about Tortex picks though is that the printed black text smears almost immediately. Gets on your fingers. Small price to pay though.

At one point way back in high school, one of the guitarists I knew that I played with for a short stint introduced me to the Big Stubby line of picks. Guess who makes them. Hah, yeah, Dunlop. (I swear it’s coincidental!) Apparently I’m a Dunlop pick fanboy. Anyway, it was interesting (for electric, not acoustic). They are just as they sound–big fat picks that have virtually no give. Anyway, he gave me one or two, but I lost them after a while and didn’t use them much anyway since at that time I was just learning and really didn’t know how to do too much more than just strum chords. Just recently I decided to try them again, and I found that I really like them! Even for acoustic. Not for general strumming on the acoustic of course (though you can get away with it), but for single note picking stuff I really feel like it adds to the body of my tone. I haven’t used them that long yet, but I think I’ll be switching primarily to these for now. Hopefully they’re as durable as the Tortex picks.

Buy it at zZounds for $999.95/pair (Dec. 6, 2006)

It’s been a long wait getting these speakers setup. OK, actually it’s only been a week or two, but it sure feels like a long time. First of course I had to wait for all my new equipment to arrive. The speakers themselves really didn’t take all that long and arrived earlier this week, but the cables and audio interface (Echo Layla3G, I’ll write more about it in another post some other day) took a little longer to arrive. I then found that the TRS plugs on my cables were too thick to fit into Layla3G one above the other which is necessary seeing as the outputs are linked in left/right pairs. Sigh. Anyway, I got around that by using unbalanced cables with smaller connectors to my mixer, and then outputting a balanced signal to the speakers. I am actually starting to feel like it’d be nice to have one of those control centers like the Mackie Big Knob Control Center, but it just seems like a lot of money just for essentially a mixer with a big volume control, so I think I’ll live with my mixer for now. Anyway, onto the review…

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Buy the Shure E4 at zZounds for $299.99 (Dec. 3, 2006)

Although not cheap, the Shure E4’s are a great set of in-ears. I use mine on a regular basis on stage as in-ear monitors. It blocks out stage noise quite well, and sounds great! These are also an excellent replacement for whatever earbuds came with your iPod or other digital audio player…

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(Reposted from old site)

Buy it at zZounds for $99.99 (Dec. 4, 2006)

Introduction

The Behringer V-AMP 2 is a budget amp modeler, quite similar to Line 6’s POD 2.0, but aimed to undercut it. I purchased this modeler because while our band usually has only one electric guitar (me), we wanted to try something different on a song or two. Although we had a good experience with Line 6’s POD 2.0, the V-AMP 2 seemed to be reasonably well-regarded, so at half the price I decided to give it a shot.

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Buy it at zZounds for $44.95 (Dec. 3, 2006)

The Behringer UB802 is a great little mixer for a low cost. I’ve used mine regularly for about a year now for my in-ear monitor mix (with my trusty Shure E4 in-ears) on stage without any problems. I’m quite careful with my equipment though.(Update: 12/3/2006. I’ve run into a problem. My left out on the main outputs seems to be broken, sigh. Along with what seems to be broken DI at church and some other complaints from friends with UB-series mixers, I’m starting to have some misgivings about Behringer. I have a post in queue about them that I’ll finish sometime.)

I also use another UB802 (not mine) on a regular basis that has taken a bit more abuse and the XLR jacks or underlying connections seem to be slightly loose, which is problematic. I may open it up and try to repair it myself sometime. (Note: It seems that the problem may have been with the mic cable I was using and not the mixer, though the jacks are slightly loose…) The quality of these mixers don’t match up to the quality of higher end mixers, but then again the price doesn’t get anywhere close either!

The UB802 has two microphone preamps which are a nice touch for something this cheap. As with pretty much all mixers, it’s advertised as more channels than the way a normal non-marketing person would count it. There are two channels with preamps which can take XLR or 1/4″. Two stereo 1/4″ channels (2 x 2 makes four, right? heh), a tape channel, and an FX send/return.

It uses an inline power supply, so while there’s no wall wart, the proprietary power is still a slight annoyance. Why can’t we all just use IEC connectors? Sigh, but I can live with that. It’d probably be too expensive to fit a power supply into that small of a board anyway.

Bottom line, it’s a great cheap little mixer if you’re willing to deal with some possible quality issues…

I purchased two guitar stands a while ago, and I figured I’d write a brief little post on them, since they’ve treated me well so far. Of course, guitar stands aren’t anything special; it’s pretty hard to go wrong with anything that’s fairly popular. I’ve always used the big tripod stands (like this one) before, and have had a relatively good experience with them, but those have always been the church’s stands, not mine. I wanted my own that would be easy to carry back and forth. I ended up going with a pair of Fender folding guitar stands, one for electrics, one for acoustics.

If you look at some of the pictures, you’ll see they’re similar to the common foldup music stands, and I was a little worried about them being flimsy, but actually they turned out to be quite sturdy. One of the legs on the stand for electrics did get a tad loose, but it hasn’t been a problem, and it’d be easy enough to tighten it up if desired with a small wrench and a screwdriver. They’re quite compact when folded up–I keep the electric one in front pocket of the bag I use for my POD XT Live, and it fits quite nicely.

The only problem I have with them is that neither fits my bass terribly well. While sticking my bass on it works just fine by itself, if I have a cable plugged in, I have to carefully position it to make sure it doesn’t slip and fall off. I had no such problem with the old tripod stands where the padded legs of the stand came straight out (as opposed to angled as with these stands) and were closer together. Oh well. Maybe I’ll pick up a different stand for my bass sometime.