Category: Review

Gretsch g5420t Electromatic versus Ibanez AS53 TF Hollow Body Guitar

Ibanez AS53-TF Hollow Body Guitar

Gretsch g5420t Electromatic versus the Ibanez AS53 TF Hollow Body Guitar. I decided to sell my Gretsch g5420t Electromatic after owning it for six years. Not because I don’t like it but because I am not playing it much. It is a great guitar, has got a great tone but it was, most of the time, “collecting dust” in my studio.

Since I was looking for a smaller, thinner, more lightweight guitar I decided to sell the Gretsch g5420t Electromatic. But before it was  shipped out I wanted to do a final review video about it. Hopefully the new owner will use it as it’s intended to be used: “play it day and night!”. In this video I do some clean playing (chords, lead) and some distortion leads.

Below the video of the Gretsch g5420t Electromatic there’s a video of the new Ibanez AS53 TF Hollow Body Guitar. Of course two different beasts! And there are differences in sound. The Gretsch is fuller sounding but a heavy, big, beast. I was looking for something smaller and more lightweight. The Ibanez really fits the bill for me.

Gretsch g5420t Electromatic

Guitar Amp: Fame Vintage Line GX15R Combo

Ibanez AS53-TF Artcore hollowbody

Guitar Amp: Fame Vintage Line GX15R Combo

Lead and rhythm guitar, clean settings. Bass, Mid & Treble all center. Some parts with a little reverb, some parts with some additional gain for distortion.

The Ibanez AS53-TF Artcore hollowbody is a semi-hollow guitar made in Indonesia. Great tone, low action (out of the box). The nyatoh neck is fast and comfortable to play.

Standard strings included are substandard. In this video I use the guitar as it came, with the strings that were on it. This guitar is not, as many of it’s competitors, build in China! It has a very nice, rich, tone and the playability is, for me, great. The tuners keep the guitar in tune, but you might want to upgrade – I probably will later on and will probably choose black tuners, btw. Sine I think that looks a lot better on this guitar.

The guitar was bought online at BAX (https://www.bax-shop.nl/​). Good shopping experience, fast delivery. I normally buy at Thomann when I buy guitars online but they were out of stock so I opted for BAX. First time I bought a guitar there and the overall experience was good.

Specifications:
neck type: AS Artcore Nyatoh Set-in neck
top/back/side: Sapele top Sapele backSapele sides
fretboard: Bound Laurel fretboardWhite dot inlay
fret: Medium frets
number of frets: 22
bridge: ART-ST bridge
string space: 10.4mm
tailpiece: ART-ST
neck pickup: Infinity R (H) neck pickupPassive/Ceramic
bridge pickup: Infinity R (H) bridge pickupPassive/Ceramic
string gauge: .010/.013/.017/.030/.042/.052
nut: Plastic
hardware: Chrome

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Sounds Like Van Spirit – Street musicians

What a great project! A sound engineer traveled trough 25 countries with his Van packed with recording gear and recorded 50+ street musicians. Watch the video below to learn why he did this. An amazing story.

I listened to some of the recordings and decided to order the album straight away. This is music as pure and raw and honest as it can be. Love it. The recording quality is superb.

More details at the website: https://soundslikevanspirit.eu/

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Has SoundCloud just killed itself by blackmailing it’s users?

SoundCloud is an amazing platform for sharing and listening to music – especially a perfect place for musicians on a tight budget and independent musicians looking for a place to host their tracks or share them with the world. Many bands, solo-artists, talkradio, local radiostations and so on share their audio on SoundCloud. This has come to grinding halt.

UPDATE – SOUNDCLOUD HAS GOTTEN A LOT OF FEEDBACK ON THIS DECISION AND WILL NOT IMPLEMENT IT.

What happened? SoundCloud notified it’s users they would need to pay for the services SoundCloud is offering as soon as they post more than 15 tracks or 3 hours of audio. Of course there is a simple way around this: put your albums in one huge mp3 per album.. so you can post 15 albums. But that’s not very useful. Especially for all these artist websites, studios, bands and so on that embedded their songs in their websites. Or, even worse, other websites that embedded their tracks, .. you would need to remove the tracks and upload new ones. Or, .. do nothing. Since, if you don’t upload new tracks, the old ones will stay at their service. The effect of this will be your account will be ‘frozen’. If you want to stay with the free service and remove tracks to post new ones there will be many ‘dead links’ to your songs.

For podcasts or radiostations, 3 hours and 15 files will probably enough to have their 15 most recent shows online. But still, the archive of shows will need to go if they have any.

PAY OR DIE

So, is there no other way around it? Yes, of course there is.. as I’ve mentioned: if you’re willing to pay. If you pay some money you get unlimited upload. You can keep using the service as you were used to. Currently they offer a discounted version, for around €75 for the first year. That’s still a lot of money for many people. So people will abandon ship or remove songs to post new ones.

I mean, really, do they want this to happen at SoundCloud? 404-errors all over? Dead links? I think it hasn’t occurred to them this will not only kill their website traffic but also their Google SEO-ranking… 🙁

THE END OF SOUNDCLOUD AS WE KNOW IT

This would be the end of SoundCloud as we know it and as we loved it. A 15-song limit is way to small. Especially if you have been around long, you might have build up a nice catalogue of songs as a band or solo-artist. And as soon as you want to upload you have the choice: pay or loose a (large) part of your library, effectively killing all embeds and ‘deeplinks’ to your music. This is, imho, blackmailing people to pay. It’s no problem for us to put the money on the table, it is, however, against our will. We’re being forced to pay .. and we don’t like that at all..!

The tracks by Solid Rock Blues Band and others recorded at the LoftStudio (Zolderstudio) can be found here:
https://soundcloud.com/barkingaunts

 

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AVL Drumkits with Mixbus5 and Ardour

Recording Drums using Harrison Mixbus5 or Ardour with AVLDrums, a free LV2 plugin for Linux Audio Workstations (DAW) offering professional drumtracks.

Mixbus5 & AVL Drums (LV2 plugin). A video by the LoftStudio, Home Recording Studio Project and home of the Solid Rock Blues Band, the One Man Band Studio project. AVL Drumkits offer you professional sounding drums for Mixbus and Ardour. Manual editing, playing drums trough a midi-keyboard or even a midi-drumkit.

In this video I show you how you could use AVL Drums to record drums – live drums using a midi-keyboard or manual editing a drum track. The midi-keyboard was bought years ago at the ALDI supermarkets for less than 120 euro. It has pretty nice sounds available, as well as good midi out. Allowing you to use it to record professional sounding midi tracks, including drums!

AVL Drums offers two different drum kits with several velocities, mic placements (in Ardour) and a lot of instrument/kit pieces available. I record drums using a cheap midi-keyboard running trough my Behringer UMC404HD.

Video by the ZolderStudio (LoftStudio), https://www.zolderstudio.nl

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Advertising your music on YouTube

Is advertising your music on YouTube useful? Does it get you views, subscribers and new fans? Perhaps even helps you sell your music? I decided to put it to the test using Drooble’s YouTube package.

Some time ago Drooble announced YouTube advertising packages. They offer you around 500 views for $25. That’s only USD$ 0.05 per view so a fair price. Even though I was very skeptical, even before ordering it on Drooble I’ve voiced my doubts, I put it to the test with a recent video I uploaded. A video that was not getting a lot of views but, compared to my other music videos, was doing okay.

You might wonder why I did spent money on it. Well, it’s easy to be skeptical. But the proof of the pudding is in the eating, right?

THE GOOD NEWS (AND SOME BAD)

The service is useful in regard to the number of views. It went from 80 views to 606 views in a week (and it’s now up to well over 1,400). So the views kept coming even after the advertising campaign stopped.

However, no new subscribers and, what’s worse, the viewing time per user for the video went down a lot. Meaning, people would only watch for about a minute or so instead of the full video (as was the case with most viewers before that).

The advertising does work if you want to push the view-counter up. But it doesn’t get you engagement from viewers. No feedback as in comments or likes or even dislikes.Even the scam-advertising will get you at least likes or dislikes (and some trash feedback). Isn’t that weird?

For me, this was just a “put it to the test” and as far as I’m concerned, it didn’t pass. A waste of money. Even though I did expect this, I hoped it wouldn’t be true and would lead to more engaged viewers.

The loyalty of the viewers makes me wonder if the views are machine-generated. Even though the line of the viewer loyalty goes down slowly. It might be “too human” to be bot views (as the ones you get when ordering 5,000 for $10 at some of the scam services around). But, .. Only 22,5% of the viewers watched the full video. As I said, no likes, not even dislikes. Now that does make me suspicious. If people don’t even “hate” or “like”? With over 500 views there should be at least a few likes and one or two ‘dislikes’.

As I noted before, the YouTube statistics also show that the people watching the video as a result of the advertising are also less interested in viewing the full video as the ones that find it because of organic search. That’s probably to be expected however it does show the importance of organic traffic to your videos. You know, people that click on the video they read about 😉

CONCLUSION: IS THIS A SCAM?

I’m a little disappointed to see that the advertising Drooble offers seems to drive people to the video that aren’t interested in it after all. It’s well spend money for me however, since it was an experiment. But, if you’re looking for a promotional tool for your band or video clip I’d say: don’t buy views/advertising. Not on Drooble. But especially not on other sites that offer you “tons” of views. They are scams for sure. In Drooble’s case, I’m convinced they’re doing the best they can and might even believe they offer a useful service. And I’m sorry to say: they don’t. The statistics proof it.

 

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Unboxing & Review – Devine PRO2000 Studio Headphones

Today we’ve received a new set of headphones from BAX Shop, the Netherlands. The Devine PRO2000 Studio Headphones. We’ve bought them as an additional set of headphones for monitoring, recording and listening to music. 

Of course these headphones cannot be compared to high-end headphones. I did a comparison with the Audio Technica ATH-m20x. The ATH’s are twice as expensive as these Devine headphones. And yes, you can hear the difference. No doubt about that.

In short
Pro’s: the headphones are very well build, have a good sound and are very comfortable.
Con’s: they are not suitable for mixing.

The reason why they are not suitable for mixing is because the bass is too loud, there’s simply a little too much low end. The mid’s are fine, high end is slightly recessed. Still, it’s a good buy if you want to use them for listening to music or for monitoring. They’re dirt cheap! Only 27 euro’s.

Youtube video (unboxing and review)

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Review Harley Benton TE-52 NA Vintage Series Telecaster

The Harley Benton TE-52 NA Vintage Series Telecaster is a Fender Telecaster “look-a-like” Telecaster guitar and not only a lookalike but also a ‘sound-a-like’. It comes with all the sparse features the original Telecasters had: 3-way switch, tone and volume, 2 single coil pickups (Roswell TEA alnico-5 TE-style). A solid wood (Ash) body. C-profile neck, decent tuners, 21 frets and deluxe chrome hardware.

The guitar comes with with d’Addario .009-.042 strings according to the Thomann website. I do have some doubts about this. I’ll get back to that later on.

Anyway, how’s that for a guitar that will only set you back EUR 139.00??
What can you expect, build and sound wise?

BIRTHDAY PRESENT

As I wrote in the post about the MXL770 mic, I turned 50 the other day and my wife gave me a few very nice presents! Apart from the MXL770 she also gave me (amongst other non-music related gifts) this Harley Benton Telecaster. It had been on my wish-list for some time. But I already have a very decent collection of guitars so I didn’t dare to buy another one 😉 She knew, however, that I wanted a Telecaster. So, .. I got it as a birthday present! This now more-or-less completes my wish-lists as far as guitars is concerned!

 

 

Worship-Guitar

I started to play in a worship band (in Church) last year and I’m using my electro-acoustic Samick guitar for that. However, on stage I noticed I was having feedback issues sometimes – so I have to turn it down too much. I want to use this telecaster instead. An electro-acoustic is, in the setting I’m playing in (Drums, electric bass, electric piano, vocal-group) just not a good choice. Hope the other band members agree.

d’Addario Strings?

I’m having a hard time believing these strings are really d’Addario. Or perhaps a certain type that just don’t feel comfortable to me. On my Gretsch I have a set of d’Addario Nickel Wound (.010-.046’s). They have a different ‘feel’. The ones one this guitar don’t feel slick, they really hurt your fingers when bending or sliding in to a note. So they will be replaced one day soon. I will probably opt for the d’Addario Super Light Plus (.095-.044) because Telecasters aren’t build to have super heavy strings on it but I’m not completely satisfied with these. Anyway – that’s the only “con” as far as I’m concerned. Other than that, it’s a superb guitar for the money!

 

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MXL770 Studio Condenser – Unboxing, Review and Testrecording

The MXL770 Studio Condenser is a very budget friendly yet high quality studio condenser microphone made by Marshall. It is a perfect microphone for those recording at home – it’s suitable for recording acoustic instruments like an acoustic guitar, as well as electric instruments and vocals.

So – I turned 50 the other day and my wife gave me a few very nice presents! One of them is this MXL770 studio condenser microphone. My favorite studio condenser, a McCrypt condenser microphone, is having issues after having been in use for over 20 years. So – time to replace it. This is a great replacement. In fact, I think it’s a very good upgrade. While the McCrypt was most certainly a great mic, this one is even better.

 

 

 

In the video there’s a test recording using my acoustic Washburn guitar and some vocal. Both are ‘dry sound’, no processing done. In the end of the video there’s a mixdown of the track I recorded.

The microphone was ordered online at Thomann (Germany).

 

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Harley Benton MM88A SB DeLuxe Bass Guitar (Demo)

 

On may 2017 I did my first review of the Harley Benton MM88A SB DeLuxe and I’ve had it for almost two years now. I still am not a great bass player but I’d like to give a little update on it. I was rehearsing some parts for a new song and thought “why not record this and put it online”. So here it is!

I never posted the first review on this website since it was on the previous “Barking Aunts” website. Click on this link to watch it. As you can see I did improve my bass playing a little 🙂

The Bass-guitar has been used on several studio recordings so far and I’m still very pleased with it! It’s a great, budget friendly, bass guitar and has, apart from the great looks, a nice tone.

It is played here over a ‘party amp’ in this video and I used a backing track for drums created with FXxpansion ECO Drums – a Windows program that also works well on Wine, under Linux, too. I’m really happy it does, since it’s a great drums-program and it was one of the programs I really missed when switching to Linux.

 

 

The audio was recorded using my Sony Cybershot camera – so this setup lacks a lot of low end, but you’ll get the picture I guess.

 

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Album Review “Down for the Count” on Drooble

Drooble, the social music website, reviewed the album “Down for the Count” today on their blog. Here’s the full text. Almost needless to say we’re very happy with this review (we, yes. Since even though it’s a solo project there are co-writers involved).

A guitar player and singer from the Netherlands, Rudy Brinkman has all the chops and lyrical talent to tell a compelling story. Down For The Count, his full-length record, has no less than eight of these — and most of them have something to do with a woman. He Stopped Loving Her Today is the broken-hearted man’s musical manifesto, and the bluesy/country goods don’t stop here.

The record is solid through and through, with Rudy’s voice taking just a little bit of time to settle in before you are up singing along to his soulful tunes. If the music gets your voice singing and your feet stomping, there must be something to it, right?

Otherwise, there’s not a whole lot going on in this album. Rudy likes to keep things simple and barebones, which really works for the moods and feelings he wants to express. Down For The Count is as far from overproduced as it can possibly get without sounding trashy.

We are always grateful for artists like Rudy who don’t mind sharing themselves unabashedly while showcasing some perfectly good songwriting along the way. We hope you have gotten over her for good, Mr. Brinkman!

The album is available for streaming on Drooble as well as on iTunes, BandCamp, SoundCloud and many other places. It includes original songs and some covers. Most of the songs are blues or country inspired. Covers included songs by Larry Norman, Rex Griffin, Bobby Braddock & Curly Putman and Bob Dylan. Also included is the well known song “House of the Rising Sun”, a traditional song made famous by The Animals (and many others).

All instruments and vocals on the album are by Rudy. The album was recorded at the Loft Studio (Zolderstudio). It features a Gretsch Electromatic guitar on many tracks, as well as a vintage Hondo guitar. All recordings were recorded and mixed using Ardour running on a Linux based system (KXStudio).

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