Time Marches On
It’s been a relatively busy few months, but nothing of singular significance has warranted an update. I made some changes and upgrades to the home studio to include trading in the Apollo Quad 1st generation unit to Vintage King and replaced it with the newest iteration Apollo X 8P unit. This design is somewhat more oriented to patchbay use and so I also got a Switchcraft patchbay and a whole bunch of cabling for the studio. The rearrangement and running of cables took the better part of a few weeks. It’s mostly done now, although I’ve got the odd cable to run here and there.
All of these processes can be sort of slow and iterative based on other demands - work, exercise, etc. I’m still dialed back from full time musician mode because of the elbow, although it’s slowly getting better it still limits the amount of time I can spend playing every day. In the meantime I also traded in my Nikon D5300 to B&H Photo for the newest generation Fuji XT-3 mirrorless camera. I’m still figuring out how to use it, but I can already see the benefits. It’s an amazing camera. Along with this upgrade and the studio changes, I tried to straighten up and organize my various closets and so now I have a camera closet so to speak. I’ve decided to use the extra room with the WinPC as the video room and I’ve got a desk and green screen permanently set up. The closet now houses all my camera gear, and that stash is slowly growing. Every hobby (at least mine) tends have some gear fetishism and acquisition inherent to the process.
I cleaned up the amp closet as well and coiled all the newly extra cables after having changed to mostly snake cables for the patchbay setup. Because of the patchbay I’m now able to split one eight cable snake with four leads going to the vocal closet and four to the amp closet. So, now I have the Royer 122, SM57, and I was able to dust off my Sennheiser e906 dynamic mic and all three are in place for the 65 Amps 112 cab in the closet. I’m still using the default vocal booth setup with the Slate VMS One and SM7. This leaves me two left over leads in the vocal booth and one leftover lead in the amp closet. I also added a 16 channel passthrough to my main desk so I can plug in instrument mics and whatnot as needed. I’ve got one channel dedicated to the DI output from my H&K Grandmeister and I still need to run two outputs to the Matrix GT1000 for output to the Port City OS 212 I have in the main room.
The remainder of the ports are mostly redundant, but it will be nice when I need to mic up instruments or just plug in a vocal mic in the room. The switchbay is essentially ready for use at all times but a couple of the fairly common uses require a patch to be run, for instance the Avantone monitors need a patch cable to be heard. As these are only used to check the occasional mix, that need is fairly uncommon. Tweaks are sure to be necessary as I slowly transition back to a more music heavy mode again. These needs reveal themselves with the use of the gear.
Continuing on with switchbays, I had been holding off for several months as there is a new player in the game with Flock Audio, who are soon to release the first software controlled patchbay. I had wanted to wait until they were released but the release schedule hasn’t been confirmed and they have some fairly draconian return policies. As far as I can tell, you can only return/get a refund if the box is unopened. There doesn’t appear to be an option to return the unit if you decide it’s not what you wanted. For a unit that I think is going to run upwards of $2K, that’s a pretty big leap of faith. I’m going to wait until it’s been out in the wild for several months if not longer and see how the reviews look. It’s a great idea if it stacks up to the hype of Flock Audio. The ability to change routings through software with a few mouse clicks and to have presets saved for various arrangements is quite appealing.
In the meantime I’m glad I decided to go with the typical patchbay setup as it’s really streamlined operations as well as opening up some routing options that weren’t readily available in the past.