World Ambassador of Ukulele, Kimo Hussey and some special guests will be giving a six week ukulele seminar at Kailua Music School starting on April 29th, 2014.
If you would like more information or to register for the workshop, please call us at 808-261-6142 or email us
Recently I wrote a post about mounting a pair of PZMs in the big room at KMS. They worked well, but the bass response just want quite would it could be. Opening them up I saw a capsule of questionable origin run thru a transformer of very dubious quality.
A google search revealed this schematic which allowed me to ditch the transformer and change some things around.
After a trip to Radio Shack I came back with a handful of capacitors, some zeener diodes and this capsule
RadioShack 270-090
I got out a breadboard, my soldering iron, glue gun, wire strippers, basically the regular gang of friends and went to work
So here’s the workspace ready to go
Soldering iron is on and heating up and I’ve placed the first capacitor in the breadboard
Here goes, inserting the rest of the caps, resistors, zeener diode and the leads for the mic element. I tried to lay this out in the most compact space I could
Now I’ve inserted the mic element and attached the mic cable for testing
Yay! It works, and no smoke when I hit the phantom power switch!
Time to gut the old PZM’s innards.
I chopped up the breadboard with some side cutters and made the circuit board as small as I could.
I got out the hot glue gun and cut the old foam to fit the new, larger capsule
Stick everything in the case, screw it together to look for shorts, flip the phantom power back on, test again and its ready to go!
And now its back where it belongs
“But, what was the point of all this?” You ask, in extreme aggravation waiting for all the photos to load
Well, see (or hear) for yourself:
First the unmodded PZM
And now the modded PZM
Listen for yourself. The modded PZM has WAY more bass response, more gain and less noise. Win win win all around!
Wan’t to record your lesson or practice with ease? No problem. We just added a pair of PZM’s right to the front wall to capture whatever happens in the room. Its as simple as plugging the (nicely labelled) XLR’s into whatever you are using to record.
Done
Finally got a rackmount computer case for the mobile rack
even got to try running a Roland TD-3’s MIDI outs into it, controlling Steven Slate SSD4 Platinum in REAPER
Kailua Music School’s Big Room just got a new 16 channel recording setup for the students and teachers to use!
Behold! A Focusrite Liquid Saffire 56, a Focusrite Octopre MKII, a Presonus Central Station with remote, a full 1080P monitor. A pair of Numark monitor speakers, and a Polk Audio subwoofer. All powered by an i7 920 with 12 gigs of RAM, and of course, running REAPER
Found a suitable rack to use for the gear and shoved the subwoofer under the table
Bolted down the rack and decided what sort of fasteners to use to make a clean job of it
Deciding on the gear order
Split the recording snake to make it more convenient for both setups
Oh no! The dreaded foil jacket. These can be delicate
Good thing there's a NAPA next door. Some split loom corrugated tubing is just the thing!
Both looms done and ready to go! 16 for the control room and 8 for the big room
Beginning the wiring for the rack
Adding the word clock and the DAW output to the Central Station
Rack is all done, wired to the speakers, Central Station Remote is connected
Everything is up and time to test some sounds!
