DW Airlift Stands

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dwFunction: Heavy duty drum hardware stands
Price: $189-$209
What’s New: While 200 bucks might be a little steep to throw out for a snare stand, the DW airlift is worth every penny.  Identical to the world-renowned DW 9000 Series drum hardware, the Airlift snare and tom stands feature a revolutionary new pneumatic shock system that allows effortless, exact adjustments to the snare and toms.  The drums sit on a cushion of air that allows the drummer to adjust the drum to the exact height with incredible ease.  Additional memory locks ensure that the drum will be in the exact same place at each setup, saving time (and your back) for drummers everywhere. 

-Andy Toy

Sahe Audio Rekawl App

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rekawl picFunction: Gear setting recall App for iPhone
Price: $4.99
What’s New: Ever have a tone dialed in that was perfect…only to have your pedal settings bumped the next day and now you can’t remember how you got that perfect tone?  ReKawl is here to help!  ReKawl is an App for iPhone (and soon Android) that allows you to take pictures of your gear and label each one, sort by sound or song, and recall them to remember exactly what settings you used for each sound.  Studio engineers can even generate custom track sheets to quickly recall their favorite settings for each piece of gear! 

-Andy Toy

Fender Blacktop Tele Baritone

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Function: Baritone Electric Guitar
Price: $499
What’s New: How low can you go?  With the new Fender Blacktop Tele Baritone, quite low indeed.  27” scale B-to-B tuning allows you to play a full 4th below standard tuning and thicken the low end of your sound.  A maple neck with Rosewood fingerboard bolts onto an Alder Telecaster body.  The two tele-style single coil pickups paired with the single humbucker at the bridge makes the Tele Baritone an unconventional, yet vastly versatile baritone electric.  The pickup configuration differs from most classic baritone guitars (usually equipped with 2-3 single coil pickups) but offers a more modern sound.  The Blacktop Tele Baritone covers everything from low country twang to rich, full-sounding chords.  For the price, the Blacktop Tele Baritone offers a wide spectrum of tonal possibilities and is a nice addition to a stage with multiple guitarists.  

Cubasis for iPad Review

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Function: Audio production software for iPad
Price: $49.99
What’s New: Have you ever wished you had “proper” music production for your Apple iPad?  Now you can with the new Steinberg Cubasis for iPad and iPad mini.  Based on the popular Cubase music production software, Cubasis is designed to be a streamlined, yet full-fledged audio production app for recording, editing, mixing, and sequencing.  Cubasis offers an unprecedented unlimited amount of audio and MIDI tracks (although the capabilities of the iPad hardware will indeed have its limits), over 70 virtual instruments, a mix console with effects processors, a sample editor, over 300 audio and MIDI loops, and basic interface and MIDI recording with other CoreMIDI apps while Cubasis runs in the background.  To top it off, Cubasis projects can be exported and opened in the PC/Mac versions of Cubasis for later editing and full audio mixdown and MIDI export is supported as well.  Sounding familiar so far?  It kind of sounds like a souped-up version of the “LE” versions of apple’s Logic or Avid’s Protools…for Windows or OS X….except the features offered in Cubasis rival most “LE” versions of popular audio production software at half the price, plus it’s on an iPad, making it the most flexible mobile platform of its kind.  While the high cost might make this app unappealing for some, the unprecedented power and traditional music production appearance makes this app a very useful tool in the hands of an expert or beginner alike. 
 
-Andy Toy

 

 

 

Keith McMillen QuNeo Review

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Function: USB MIDI control pad
Price: $199
What’s New: Get your 3D glasses ready: the QuNeo is a brand new 3-dimensional MIDI control pad from Keith McMillen Instruments.  16 pads, 2 rotary sensors, and 9 sliders make the QuNeo incredibly versatile for beat making and loop triggering.  16 pads are set up in a 4×4 grid, similar to the classic MPC setup, but instead of hardware knobs and sliders, all of QuNeo’s controls are touch sensitive recessed pads/rotaries.  Multi-color LED lights mark the position on the sliders/rotaries and when used with Ableton Live, the pads control notes, trigger loops, or simply make the lights dance on the beat depending how you program them…but that’s not even the best part: every pad on the controller is touch and pressure sensitive.  Depending on how hard you press the pad, you can trigger different layers of effects, notes, loops, filters, or anything you can think of.  The pads are divided into different sections each so pressing different places on the pad can trigger different MIDI events if desired.  For example, press a pad once to play the loop, press it harder to raise the volume, and drag your finger around the surface to control a delay/filter once the loop is going.  Crossfade this loop with another loop with a slider and mix the entire thing with the side sliders and rotary knobs.  As strong as the QuNeo is in Ableton Live, it’s not just for loops, if you are a keyboard player, you use the pad to change patches and control virtual effects: use each pad to turn on a new layer of sound, turn on/off effects, control feedback/delay time, or reverb time and amount or even tap the tempo of time-based effects.  The controller can also be used to control lighting and video effects via MIDI.  The QuNeo is a truly groundbreaking MIDI device that offers control of every parameter imaginable with a touch of your finger, and allows the user to not only utilize the device as a transport for loop triggering, but also treat the pad as a performance instrument itself.  Whether you’re triggering loops and stems or looping live on the fly, or just need a comprehensive MIDI controller, I can’t emphasize enough how much power is in this device.  QuNeo brings a whole new level of control to MIDI performance.

 

For more information about the QuNeo and other Keith McMillen products visit keithmcmillen.com. 

 

-Andy Toy