Musical Instruments

Shure's SM58 and SM57 are industry standard for live vocals and many different studio applications.

IK Multimedia has always been able to come out with products for the mobile musician and audio engineer. The iLoud Micro Monitor joins a line of loudspeakers that further support that market. The speakers are incredibly small, but boast a feature set that is usually found in larger, more expensive studio monitors.

The Turbo Mesh Kit by Alesis is ideal for silent home practice thanks to its great features as well as its quality pads.

I’m a gear geek. I’ll admit it.   When I was asked to cover NAMM for Best Buy Canada, I was on cloud nine. The show was busy and we had a lot of appointments with vendors with a focus to get a first look at the exciting gear that Best Buy will be offering you.   Along the way, I HAD to take a look at the gear that I’d love to take home to my studio. Here are some of the products I saw that had me checking my bank account.

 If you are in the market for a stereo mixer that won’t colonize a lot of space then the Yamaha MG06X may be what you are looking for. Compact but with incredible power and features, small-scale live performers, DJs, or home studio producers can all benefit from this compact, portable, and well built mixer.

IK Multimedia makes a number of well-respected products for the pro-audio market, but has struck a chord, in a big way, by creating simple devices and apps for the iOS platform.    Their “i” line of hardware products allow musicians and music lovers to create, record and produce music on their iOS device in a way that is not intimidating, but also gives access to deep features.   They’ve come out with two new iOS products this year: the iRig Mic HD and the iRing.

The RØDE Wireless ME mic system is a quick and easy, yet immensely powerful and practical setup for audio recording for any content creator.

  Home recording technology seems to get better and cheaper with every passing moment. What you can achieve in your spare room or home studio today was only in the realm of high-priced professional installations a dozen years ago. The problem you’ve probably already encountered is that there is a LOT of information out there. I’m going to try and break things down into manageable chunks. I’ll walk you through some concepts you should be familiar with and touch on some gear that you may or may not want to consider.

The M-Audio Vocal Studio Pro kit is everything you need to get started with music production! Read on for a full review of its capabilities.

The FG800 acoustic guitar is a new offering from Yamaha that features a traditional western body style and in perhaps its greatest feature, has a solid spruce top. Best Buy just sent one to me for this review, so read on to find out why I liked this guitar.