Beta 52a

Today I'll be reviewing the Shure Beta 52a

The Shure Beta 52a is large diaphragm dynamic microphone designed specially for kick drums, bass cabs, and other low-frequency intensive sources. The frequency range on this microphone is awesome! It picks up the really lows, but can also pick up highs for overtones in your sound. Whenever I use this on my kick drums it gives it a nice punch, but my bass drum is also naturally punchy being a smaller size.

This microphone can also make a killer vocal microphone since it's responding frequencies are broad, and it's a dynamic microphone so it won't pick up TOO much and can be used for live sound

The only drawback that I've noticed is that sometimes the frequencies are too broad, and you have to rolloff the ending frequencies to make it sound cleaner and usuable

 The Shure Beta 52a can be picked up for a little over $150 USD, and can also come in a sweet mic package that comes with this and 3 SM57s, which I'll get to another day

NT1-A

Today I think I'll start off my reviews of microphones, starting with one of my personal favorites, the Rode NT1-A.

The NT1-A is a large diaphragm condenser microphone, slightly tweaked from the original NT1 and released in an anniversary package which includes...

A few reviews

I recently came into a number of  pretty neat pieces of electronic equipment. Since I do a lot of work with music I guess it seems natural that I come across a lot of equipment

Firsts off I want to talk about my new headphones. 

Dr. Beats solo hd. These things are pretty sick. I strolled on over with a best buy gift card and picked these bad boys up. The quality of these is amazing, and they can get really loud. The world is pretty much dead to you if you have it above half volume, and they articulate bass frequencies better than any other headphone I've tried to date

There are a few drawbacks though. The on-ear style makes them mildly uncomfortable after a few hours of wear. And the cable that plugs into the headphone gets pulled and stripped easily, the first cable on mine already has internal wires exposed. The cables are produced by monster though, so maybe they'll replace them for free like they do their other cables?

Moving on to my new mixer/audio interface, the Tascam US-800. This thing is pretty sweet, small and portable, but still has functionality. It has "8" inputs, 6 of which are XLR so you can plug in mics or some quarter-inch junk. The other 2 are MIDI inputs so... yeah i guess they could be good for a live setting but in a recording situation a lot of computers already have MIDI interfaces available. It connects through USB so it's compatible with most computers. It says it can sample at rates up to 196 kHz but that's pretty much a lie, I think I could only get mine to go up to 88.2 or 96 kHz. It's really not cut out for live sound since it only has volume settings channels, no efftects, panning, reverb or the like built in

I think I'll leave microphones out for another time, and i could do a review of my phone, but we've all heard enough of the iPhone 4 and junk. too bad I'm still stuck with at and t