We are often told not to leave electronic equipment switched on, mainly to keep those electricity bills down. But what if turning it on and off all the time causes damage?. One of these pieces of equipment where this question is often raised is tube amps. There are pros and cons to leaving your tube…
On your audio interface or mixer, you may have noticed a button labeled ‘phantom power’ (or perhaps ‘48v’). This might seem quite mysterious if you don’t know what it is. After realizing phantom power is needed in order for some microphones to work, many people ask the question, do dynamic mics need phantom power? Well,…
Studio monitors are expensive pieces of kit and so it’s not surprising that people want to use them as much as possible. I had some friends around recently to watch a movie and I wondered if it would be possible to connect my Yamaha HS7 monitor speakers to my TV. Usually, I have them running…
So your bass guitar has a battery slot on the back, but you didn’t think that’s how basses work… What’s going on? Well first of all, don’t panic! It’s fairly common to find bass guitars that use batteries, and it doesn’t mean the instrument is in any way deficient. It just means that you…
When a piece of musical equipment stops working it starts a puzzling quest to find out what is causing the issue. Sometimes it can be something very simple, sometimes it might require some technical knowledge, and sometimes you might just have to accept it can’t be fixed. This is true for an electric bass…
After about a year of playing my bass guitar when I was younger, it started to sound weird. The sound was crackly, fading in and out. I went to the store where I bought my amp to complain about the sound. But the store manager said it wasn’t the amp that was causing…
When I bought my first bass guitar I had no idea it was an ‘active’ bass until one day it started to sound a bit weird. I thought the amp might be broken so I started looking online for a solution. After a few hours of searching, I found the cause of the problem….
The thought of being able to connect a keyboard to your phone and make it mimic sounds of a real piano would have sounded like science fiction a few years ago. But technology has advanced such a long way in recent times that it is now entirely possible and you don’t need…
I received an email from a blog reader who had recently bought a MIDI keyboard so they could start practicing a bit of piano at home. My previous blog posts on MIDI keyboards had all said something along the lines of “plug in your MIDI device and open up you DAW software to play”….
The ‘classic’ rock band template features three instruments: electric guitar, drums, and bass guitar – in addition to the human voice. Many bands will include two or more guitarists, and plenty will include additional instruments – keyboards, trumpets or saxophones, for instance. But a guitar-drums-bass trinity has formed the foundation of most bands since…