Dylan's New Toy

I've been realizing lately that I haven't come up with many blog posts that discuss interesting aspects of Japanese culture. This, I think, is because I don't really interact with Japanese culture all that much. Today I left my house, biked to work alone, listening to my audiobook of "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", coded all morning, went to lunch with my Greek, Dutch, French, Ukrainian, and Canadian friends (and that's only three people!), went back to work, coded by myself and did some data entry, ate dinner with basically the same foreigners, did some shopping, went back to work, debugged a bit, and came home. I wish I could bring up interesting points like the fact that Japanese kids perceive the sun to be red, but the fact is, I don't have that level of interaction with Japanese culture anymore.

So instead, I will present my new toy for show and tell today. It's a Korg D888 Digital Multitrack Recorder!



"But Dylan," you all say, "don't you already have a digital multitrack recorder?" That is true. BUT... (a) it can only handle one or two inputs at a time, and (b) it uses SmartMedia cards, which seem to be about as easy to find as single-density floppy disks these days.

This thing is pretty sw33t. It can handle eight simultaneous inputs and outputs, which is almost enough for Osakapella, and more than enough for Urara 6. It has an internal 40GB hard drive and USB out, so I don't need to carry around piles of obsolete flash memory cards. It also can be used as a mixing board (albeit an expensive one) in a pinch. Oh, and Lito and I bought it as part of a deal together with a set of speakers for him, and thus I got a free T-shirt and carrying case with it, so now I can be a Korg posterboy. :)

The downsides - it's kinda heavy for carrying long distances, it doesn't have any effects besides reverb, and, well... the manual is all in Japanese so I haven't really tried it out yet. They have the English manual on their website though, so no worries there.

Now the question is, where are we going to record? My apartment would work, except that I don't have separate booths for voice percussion and soloists, and I'm worried that the sound will bleed. A studio might work, except that in most of the studios we've used, you can hear the thundering rumble of the bass and crash of the cymbals from the inevitable thrash metal band in the next studio over. Maybe we can find a nice studio with separate booths somewhere... I'll have to look into that.

Anyway, I plan to learn how to use my new toy over the next week. If anyone has any advice on amateur recording that may be helpful, let me know! I'm really excited about recording Osakapella's third CD and Utaurara 6's first! :)