Tag Archives: spectrum analyzer

Modifying An X-Touch Mini For Rack Mounting

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I use an X-Touch Mini in my music studio rack. I decided to do this by using metal rack spacers cut with the X-Touch Mini sitting in the center. By using screws screwed into the sides of the X-Touch Mini’s plastic housing (in front of the rack spacers), it will make it so that pressing the buttons or moving the fader will prevent the device from falling backwards.

Here’s how I modified the X-Touch Mini to mount into the rack.

Process

I started by taking two “1U” rack spacers and used a dremmel to cut the metal into a size that matches the X-Touch Mini. Cutting the rack spacers is the hardest part.

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Reason: Why RE’s And VST’s Waste Your Time

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Something not a lot of people realize is that most additional instruments and effects you can add to Reason via rack extensions (RE’s) and now VST’s (bleh) not only aren’t needed, nearly all of them are features found in Reason masquerading as new concepts.

Don’t be fooled by fancy audio demos

The hard, unspoken truth about music production is that there isn’t many instruments and effects devices that are doing anything new. How many effects are doing anything actually new? That’s the thing; people aren’t inventing new effect categories… after 40 years of audio design, the music community isn’t going to be coming out with new concepts anytime soon. You’ve got categories like distortion, delay, reverb, repeaters, chorus, unison, phasers, pitch shifting, gaters, amps, filters, EQs… and of which all of these are already built into Reason (with the exception of a repeating device, but that’s why combinator patches exist I guess).

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Studio Hardware Walkthrough

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In this post, I detail the physical hardware I use for my desktop studio setup. Rack, mixer, music devices, audio interfaces, audio analyzers, monitors, speakers, power supplies and desktop configuration.

Rack

The rack is custom-built from two red IKEA tables. I stacked them and keep them in place with two “L” brackets. I then installed rack rails, cutting the metal rack rails with a dremel tool.

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Don’t Use EQ Spectrum Analyzers, Use Your Ears

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There’s an issue that people who’ve started making music the past 10 years or so think an audio spectrum / waveform = what you hear. The sad fact is that it doesn’t.

One thing I’ve found that seemed to be a key to “professional” audio mixing / mastering people is that they had some kind of experience with real, studio mixers. They didn’t have access to spectrum windows, they mastered by tweaking dynamics knobs and using their ears. They didn’t have techy BS of calling out kHz or Hz numbers like “4,200”, “31.5” or other crap relating to decibel ranges like people using computer software so frequently do. This is because…

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