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| My primary instrument is the electric guitar of which I have about 15 years of experience. I've owned the Charvel
for all but the first couple years. It's a frankenstien instrument with many modifications including a very unusual, and rather obtuse, Kahler
Spider floating bridge. The neck and body feel very similar to the newer Jackson Dinky line. It's a finicky beast that doesn't stay
in tune well with extended play but sports ridiculously low action; lower than I can tweak the Ibanez without exessive buzz.
The Japanese designed Ibanez RG 1570 Prestige is a well reputed instrument and for valid reasons. The neck is a 5 piece wood composite that allows it to be very thin while remaining structurally sound. The vibrato system, the Ibanez Edge-Pro, is simply the best I've ever used. It will respond to various forces in ways that my Charvel is simply incapable. There is amazingly little friction between the floating vibrato and the supporting pegs as they minimized the connecting surface areas. The Kahler design is barbaric by comparison. It took me a while to fork out the cash for an upper end instrument but I'm very pleased with this one. For in-line signal processing I use a dated but effective Digitech GSP 2101. I've had this thing for years and still only use tweaked presets although it's capable of much more. Amazingly, it's decade old hardware that still fetches around $300 for a used unit. Below it, in the same photo, is an Edirol PCR-M1 midi controller. It works alright as a software mixer controller but you wouldn't want to use the keyboard to actually play anything as the action is terrible. Let me really drive this one home, it's downright unusable for anything other than simple triggering. I'm likely to buy a good midi keyboard and a separate midi control surface in the future. When the two are mashed together the resulting product always seems sub-par. |
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I managed to get a decent pair of monitors, the M-Audio BX5a. In general, I'm a fan of M-Audio products. They tend to target prosumer markets and don't jack prices up with silly bundled crap or weird features nobody wants. Albiet, they are slow to get Vista drivers released. At any rate, the speakers have great near field sound reproduction. The drivers aren't large enough to reproduce very low frequencies but for my purposes this is not a great limitation. Another thing I appriciate about M-Audio is they publish the frequency response curves of their speakers. |
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| At the center of it all is my workstation; an AMD x64, 2GB memory, M-Audio Dela-410 audio interface, 32-bit edition of Windows Vista, Sonar 6 Studio, dual head display. Unfortunately, there are no M-Audio drivers for Vista yet so I'm stuck using the mobo audio chip in the mean time. I toyed with the idea of building an open source studio on Linux for ages. However, I spent all my time 'gluing' various components together rather than recording music so I eventually opted for a muture commercial solution. |  |
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