Preamp

Eek it's been far too long since I last posted anything. Despite seeming to achieve nothing in the past few weeks it has been very busy. I generally prefer it the other way around - like this morning where I bought a ton of stuff to make cheesecake, got my hair cut and ordered a keyboard stand (from a real shop not the internet!), and I still have most of the day left to chillax.

For your entertainment here is a picture of a fully functional preamp ready to go into my Crunchie Boost pedal.

Folky folky

I seem to be overdosing a bit on folk at the moment. Went to see Pierre Bensusan last week at The Half Moon in Putney and was pretty impressed. He does some crazily skilled stuff in DADGAD tuning and somehow manages to be quite free flowing and loose in his playing style without being sloppy. Anyway I could have listened to him for hours, and he's amusing in between songs which is always a bonus! *Strong French accent* "All your politicians are leaving, I wish ours would do the same".

As if that wasn't enough I was at a barn dance on Saturday with a good local band called The Green Band, unfortunately it may have been the last time they play together. I get the impression folk bands may die out a little bit unless there are more young people into the music than I realise. I mean how many people start a folk band at uni? Rock/pop bands yes, jazz bands yes and a fair few string quartets etc. but no ukelele band. Well I need to get some rock gigs sorted before I become too obsessed with folk. In the meantime here's a picture of the man himself with his new Irish made guitar (courtesy of Markus due to the fact I was still learning how to use my new camera phone and consequently taking crap photos)...

After a long break of not using my old Minolta SLR camera I decided to get some photos of the Thames along by Chiswick and Putney. This was one freezing cold evening a few months back. However, due to my usual bad luck the batteries died half way through the film and idiot that I am I had no spares. Months later armed with batteries coming out of my ears I finished the film, got it processed, scanned, 'shopped and here are some of my favourites.





The walk I took was part of the Thames path - well worth a stroll.

Timing is everything in binary solos

Here's a quick post about syncing digital signals and digital clock sources. As I mentioned before I have my two audio interfaces linked by a coaxial s/pdif cable. This means that I can keep a digital signal path for all my recording without the loss of quality that repeated analogue-to-digital conversion might introduce. Hence the only analogue signals are from instrument to input and from output to monitors. However, digital audio is not as straightforward as it might at first seem.

Point to note 1 - digital audio is made by breaking down an analogue signal into discrete samples. The sample rate is the frequency at which this is done and the bit rate is essentially the number of binary digits that are used to encode the amplitude of the signal. Hence if your device is outputting a signal with a 44.1 kHz sample rate but your input is expecting a 48 kHz signal there's gonna be trouble!

Point to note 2 - when sending digital audio from one device to another their clocks must be in sync so that they both know where the music starts. This can be a bit of a problem but is usually solved by one device being the master and its clock being used to control all the other devices. In an s/pdif (and in fact the more "professional" AES/EBU) connection, clock signals are sent along with the audio which can make it a bit temperamental for recording. However when doing things on a budget there is not a lot of choice. One often used (and expensive) solution is an external clock source that can be linked to all your other devices and transmits the so called word clock signal separately. Even then though it is still not usually as good as the internal clock for a particular device. And so in conclusion I think it's best not to think too much about it and hope that as the need for external hardware decreases so will the need for crazy digital audio connections! In the meantime this is quite an interesting forum thread.

And if you're not sure what a binary solo is then check this out... "The Humans Are Dead" ;)