Author: Itygr

  • The Twin87: Two Eras of One Legendary Mic, One Switch

    The Twin87: Two Eras of One Legendary Mic, One Switch

    The UT Twin87’s pitch sounds like marketing: two legendary “87” circuits in one mic body, pick your era with a switch. Usually when a spec sheet sounds that cute, the product is hiding something. So let’s skip the vibes and look at what the switch actually does.

    The engineering, in one paragraph: in Vintage mode, the capsule runs directly off 48V phantom power — the same topology as the earliest 87-style mics, and the reason those records sound soft and warm on top. Flip to Modern and an FET boost circuit raises the capsule’s polarization voltage to 63V. Higher voltage, higher sensitivity — a brighter, more articulate top end. Real components doing it, not a DSP preset pretending to.

    UT Twin87 vintage vs modern voicing comparison (illustrative)
    Illustrative voicing comparison, redrawn from published characteristics. Both modes cover 20 Hz – 20 kHz — the difference lives in the top-end behavior.
    UT Twin87 large-diaphragm condenser microphone

    Why the switch matters more than the specs suggest: matching a vocal to a mic voicing normally means a second mic, a second stand, re-gaining, and losing ten minutes of whatever the singer had going. Here it’s one toggle. Bright voice, take the softer vintage side. Dark voice, open it up with modern. The chart difference looks subtle; on the right voice, the decision isn’t.

    The skeptic’s paragraph, because I live there: is it “a U87”? No clone is, and anyone declaring theirs indistinguishable is selling something — possibly a clone. What it verifiably is: two legitimate 87-style circuit topologies, dual-diaphragm capsule, three patterns, built to compete far above its price. Judge it in your own room, on your own singer. That’s the only test that’s ever mattered anyway.

    One mic, two eras, three seconds to switch. The spec sheet is cute. The engineering is real.

    Gear in this post

    UT Twin87 large-diaphragm condenser (with shockmount) — check the current price on Amazon

    Heads up: affiliate link. If you buy through it, Aina Studios earns a small commission at no extra cost to you — it helps keep this training free.

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  • “AI Mixing” Plugins: What They’re Actually Good For

    “AI Mixing” Plugins: What They’re Actually Good For

    Every AI-assisted mixing plugin gets marketed the same way: drop in your tracks, get a “mastered, radio-ready mix” in seconds, no engineer required. I’ve used a handful of these on real sessions, and here’s the actually useful, unhyped version of what they do.

    Field Notes — Citation Needed

    What they’re genuinely good at: fast, competent gain staging and a reasonable starting EQ curve based on genre and instrument tagging. If you hand one a rough mix that’s badly gain-staged and has an obviously harsh vocal or a muddy low end, it will get you to a “listenable” starting point faster than doing it manually from scratch. For a demo that needs to go out today, or a writer who needs a quick reference to send an artist, that’s a legitimately useful function. It’s not nothing.

    What they’re not good at, and this is the part the marketing skips: any decision that requires actually knowing what the song is trying to say. An AI tool doesn’t know that the bridge is supposed to feel like it’s opening up, so the vocal should breathe more there. It doesn’t know that the guitarist intentionally played that phrase a little behind the beat for feel, and “correcting” the timing is actually making the track worse, not better. It doesn’t know the difference between a rough edge that’s a mistake and a rough edge that’s the entire point of the take.

    Mixing well is not actually a technical problem being solved. It’s a taste and intent problem being executed with technical tools. These plugins solve the technical part reasonably well and have zero access to the intent part at all, because intent isn’t in the audio file — it’s in a conversation you had with the artist that never made it into the session.

    The honest way to use these tools: as a fast first pass, not a final answer. Let it get you from zero to a decent gain-staged starting point in thirty seconds. Then do the actual mixing — the part that requires knowing what the song is trying to do — yourself, on top of that foundation.

    Field Notes — Citation Needed
    Used that way, it’s a genuinely useful piece of your workflow. Used as a replacement for actually mixing, you’ll get a technically competent mix of a song that doesn’t sound like anything, because nothing in the chain ever knew what the song was for.

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  • Always Print a Rough Mix Before the Artist Walks Out the Door

    Always Print a Rough Mix Before the Artist Walks Out the Door

    Early on, I’d wrap a tracking session, tell the artist “I’ll get you a mix soon,” and let them head out the door with nothing in hand. Felt efficient at the time — why hand over something rough when a better version was coming? Turns out that instinct cost me more than it ever saved.

    Field Notes — The Hard Way

    Here’s what actually happens without a rough mix in hand: the artist leaves, and their memory of what they just recorded starts drifting the second they walk out the door. By the time I sent a real mix days later, what they remembered hearing in the room and what they were actually hearing back had quietly diverged. Notes would come back that didn’t match anything that happened in the session — “the vocal felt more forward” when it hadn’t moved, “I don’t remember that guitar part being that loud” on a part that had been sitting at the same level the whole time. I wasn’t getting feedback on my mix. I was getting feedback on a memory that had already started to fade and reshape itself.

    The fix costs almost nothing: before anyone leaves the building, print a rough bounce. Doesn’t need to be polished. Rough fader balance, maybe a touch of compression on the bus, nothing precious. Send it to their phone before they’re out the door. Now they have an actual reference instead of a fading memory, and every note that comes back afterward is anchored to something real instead of something remembered.

    It changed the entire feedback loop. Notes got sharper and more specific because people were reacting to an actual mix instead of an impression of a session. Revisions got faster because I wasn’t chasing a moving target shaped by memory drift. And artists trusted the process more, because they walked out with something in hand instead of a promise.

    Field Notes — The Hard Way
    It takes maybe five extra minutes at the end of a session that’s already run long, and every one of those minutes is doing real work. Don’t skip it because you’re tired and the session ran over. That’s exactly the session where the artist’s memory needs the most help holding onto what actually happened.

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  • The Stream Deck Is Secretly an Everyone Tool — Drummers Included

    The Stream Deck Is Secretly an Everyone Tool — Drummers Included

    The Stream Deck got filed under “streamer toy” the day it launched, and that filing error has kept it out of a lot of studios and off a lot of stages where it belongs. Programmable buttons with little screens on them, plus dials on the newer Stream Deck + — that’s not a Twitch accessory, that’s a control surface at an impulse-buy price.

    For producers: map your DAW. Transport, markers, punch-in, your five most-used plugins, that macro that bounces stems the way your mastering guy likes them. The dials on the + model handle monitor level and plugin parameters. It’s the “I do this forty times a session” stuff, moved from three keystrokes to one thumb.

    Elgato Stream Deck + audio mixer and studio controller

    For drummers — yes, drummers: park one next to the hi-hat and it becomes a set brain. Click on/off, backing track fire, patch changes, the talkback to front of house. If you’ve ever watched a drummer try to run tracks from a laptop trackpad mid-set with a stick in one hand, you already understand the pitch.

    For the live/church world: lyrics advance, scene changes on the console, streaming scenes, lighting cues — one volunteer, one grid of labeled buttons, near-zero training. The buttons show pictures of what they do. That’s the whole onboarding.

    The honest caveats: the software ecosystem is where the power is, and it’s also where the fiddling is — budget a real evening to set it up well, or it’ll be a fancy clock. And the moment you use one, you will start wanting a second one. Nobody warns you about that part.

    It’s not a streamer toy. It’s the cheapest control surface in pro audio, wearing a costume.

    Gear in this post

    Elgato Stream Deck + (LCD keys, dials, touch strip) — check the current price on Amazon

    Heads up: affiliate links. If you buy through them, Aina Studios earns a small commission at no extra cost to you — it helps keep this training free.

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  • Build the Mix From the Drums Up, Not the Vocal Down

    Build the Mix From the Drums Up, Not the Vocal Down

    Most people build a mix the same way: pull the vocal up first because it’s the thing everyone’s listening to, get it sounding good and present, then start layering everything else in around it. It feels logical. It’s also backwards, and it’s why so many mixes feel thin or crowded in ways that are hard to name.

    Field Notes — Try This At Home

    Here’s the actual problem with vocal-first: you’re building your entire tonal and dynamic decision-making around one element in isolation, then asking every other instrument to fit into the space that’s left over. But the vocal doesn’t define the space of a mix. The rhythm section does. Kick, snare, bass — that’s the actual foundation everything else lives on top of, and if you build the vocal first, you’re building the roof before you’ve poured the foundation.

    Try this instead: build the low end and rhythm section first, in isolation, until it feels solid and locked on its own — kick and bass playing well together, snare sitting where it should relative to the kick, drum overheads glued into the picture. Get that feeling right before a single other channel is up. This is the floor everything else stands on.

    Then bring up the vocal against that foundation, not against silence. You’ll find the vocal needs different EQ moves than it would in isolation, because now it’s actually fighting for space against real information instead of nothing. That fight is what a real mix is — every instrument negotiating for its own frequency space against everything else that’s actually there.

    Then, and only then, layer in guitars, keys, pads — the elements that are meant to support, not compete. They’ll find their place faster and with less EQ carving, because the two things that actually define the mix’s shape — rhythm section and vocal — are already locked in relationship to each other.

    Field Notes — Try This At Home
    This isn’t about ignoring the vocal. It’s the most important element in the mix, no argument there. It’s about not making every other decision in reference to a vocal that hasn’t yet been tested against the actual foundation it needs to sit on. Build the floor. Then build the walls. Then hang the art.

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  • The $40 Tool That’s Been in My Rack for Two Years

    The $40 Tool That’s Been in My Rack for Two Years

    Everybody wants to talk about the gear that costs real money. Nobody wants to talk about the $40 thing that’s been quietly solving a problem for two straight years without ever asking for attention. So let’s talk about mine: the Xvive AT-1, a cheap in-line cable tester, the kind that costs about what you’d spend on lunch for two. (bought used via Reverb.com)

    Xvive AT-1 portable audio tester — Field Notes review

    Here’s why it earns a permanent spot in the bag over gear that costs ten times more: the single most common point of failure on any stage is a bad cable, and almost nobody actually tests for it until something’s already gone wrong live. You troubleshoot a dead channel by swapping the DI, then the preamp, then the input on the board, and forty-five minutes later you find out it was the XLR the whole time. A cable tester turns that forty-five-minute troubleshoot into a fifteen-second check, every time, before it ever becomes a problem in front of people.

    I run every cable through it during setup, not just the ones that are acting up. That’s the actual habit that makes it worth having — testing the cables you think are fine, not just the ones already causing trouble. I’ve caught intermittent shorts this way that hadn’t failed yet but were clearly on their way out, the kind of cable that works fine during line check and then dies halfway through set two.

    It’s not exciting. It doesn’t make anything sound better. It will never show up in a “gear I’m using this year” post next to a nice preamp or a new set of monitors. But it has saved more shows from a mystery dead channel than any piece of gear I own that cost more than a car payment.

    Update — the sequels exist now: Xvive went and built them. There’s an AT-2 Pro — USB-C rechargeable with a built-in monitor speaker — and an AT-3 Ultra that splits into two pieces so you can test long installed runs (even DMX) end to end. I haven’t run either through a full season yet, but the AT-1 has earned enough trust that both are on the bench list.

    Xvive AT-1 — featured gear spotlight
    If you don’t have one, get one this week. Not the fanciest one, just any one. Run every cable through it before the next load-in. You’ll find at least one bad cable in the first month you didn’t know you had, and that one catch alone pays for the tool a hundred times over in stress you didn’t have to have on a show day.

    Gear in this post

    Xvive AT-1 portable audio/cable tester — check the current price on Amazon

    Xvive AT-2 Pro (USB-C rechargeable, built-in speaker) — Amazon

    Xvive AT-3 Ultra split-design line tester — Amazon

    Heads up: those are affiliate links. If you buy through them, Aina Studios earns a small commission at no extra cost to you — it helps keep this training free.

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  • The Live MD’s Secret Weapon Is an Infrared Mic Mute

    The Live MD’s Secret Weapon Is an Infrared Mic Mute

    Every live music director knows the math: open mics equal noise, bleed, and feedback risk, and human beings — even professional ones — do not reliably mute their own channels. You can chase faders all service, or you can automate the problem away. This is a post about the little box that does the automating.

    What it is: the D’Addario Mic Mute is an infrared proximity sensor that sits on the mic stand. Somebody steps up to the mic, it unmutes. They walk away, it mutes. No software, no console scenes, no discipline required from the person holding the tambourine.

    D’Addario Mic Mute infrared microphone sensor

    Why it’s a secret weapon: think about the mics that hurt you most. It’s never the lead vocal — you’re watching that one. It’s the backup singer who stepped away to clap, the speaking mic nobody’s at, the acoustic guitarist’s vocal mic during the instrumental. Those open channels are pure downside: bleed in the mix, gain eaten out of the PA, feedback waiting for the mix to get loud. This box closes them without you spending attention on it.

    The honest limitations: it’s a sensor, so it can be fooled — a music stand parked in front of it will hold a channel open, and a singer who leans way back mid-phrase can clip a word if you set the range wrong. Spend the five minutes aiming it properly. And it isn’t a substitute for gain structure that actually works; it’s a multiplier on top of it.

    Where it belongs: volunteer-run stages and churches, honestly, before anywhere else. Rooms where the person mixing is also running lyrics, lights, and a livestream. Every mic that mutes itself is attention handed back to the person at the board — and attention is the scarcest resource in live sound.

    The best mute button is the one nobody has to remember to press.

    Gear in this post

    D’Addario Mic Mute infrared mic sensor — check the current price on Amazon

    Heads up: affiliate links. If you buy through them, Aina Studios earns a small commission at no extra cost to you — it helps keep this training free.

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  • Why Your “Good Enough” DI Box Is Quietly Ruining Your Bass Tone

    Why Your “Good Enough” DI Box Is Quietly Ruining Your Bass Tone

    Nobody thinks about the DI box. It’s a $30 gray metal brick that sits on the floor and does one job. You plug bass in one side, XLR out the other, and you move on with your life. That’s exactly the problem — it’s the piece of gear everyone stops thinking about the moment it’s out of the shopping cart.

    Field Notes — Don't Be That Guy

    A cheap, passive DI with a low-grade transformer does two things quietly, and both of them make your bass player sound worse without anyone knowing why.

    First, it loses low end. Not all of it — just enough. Cheap transformers roll off frequency response earlier than they should, and bass is the one instrument on your stage that lives entirely in the range that gets clipped first. Your bass player will swear their tone changed between rehearsal and the show. It didn’t. The DI they’re plugged into on show day is different from the one they use at home, and nobody flagged it.

    Second, and this one’s sneakier, it introduces impedance mismatch that eats transient detail. That attack you hear when someone digs into a string, that little percussive snap before the sustained note — a bad DI smooths that out. The note’s still there. The character isn’t. You end up with a bass that sounds “fine” but somehow doesn’t cut through the mix the way it should, and everyone starts reaching for EQ to compensate for a problem that a $150 active DI would have solved by just not creating it in the first place.

    Here’s the actual test, and it takes two minutes: same bass, same amp, same everything, run through your current DI, then run through a known-good active DI (Radial and Countryman both make solid ones that won’t break the budget). A-B it on the same channel with everything else held constant. If you can’t hear a difference, keep your DI, you’re fine. If you can, and you will, that’s your answer.

    Field Notes — Don't Be That Guy
    This isn’t a “buy expensive gear” lecture. It’s a “know what your cheap gear is quietly costing you” lecture. Sometimes the answer really is the $30 box and it’s genuinely fine. But you should know that from a real comparison, not from assuming the box in the drawer is neutral just because nobody complained about it yet.

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  • The 30-Second Soundcheck Trick That Saves Your Whole Set

    The 30-Second Soundcheck Trick That Saves Your Whole Set

    Soundcheck always runs long. Always. Doesn’t matter if you’ve got 20 minutes or 2 hours, someone’s monitor mix isn’t right, someone’s guitar isn’t in tune, and the drummer wants “just a little more kick, just a touch” for the fourth time.

    Here’s a trick that’s saved more of my sets than any piece of gear I own: before anyone plays a single note, I go around the stage and ask every single person one question, in this exact order.

    Field Notes — Cheat Codes

    “What do you need to hear, and what do you need to hear it over?”

    Not “how’s your monitor.” Not “you good?” Those get you a shrug and a thumbs up that means nothing. This question forces a real answer, because it’s actually two questions stacked on top of each other, and most musicians have never had to articulate the second half out loud.

    A vocalist doesn’t just need “more vocal.” They need their vocal loud enough to sit over the kick and snare specifically, because that’s the thing eating their pitch reference. A guitarist doesn’t need “more guitar,” they need enough guitar to hear their own timing against the click, because that’s what’s actually throwing them off.

    Once you know the “over what,” you stop guessing. You stop doing the slow, awkward dance of pushing a fader up, getting a vague “a little more,” pushing it again, getting another vague “a little more,” until you’ve fed back three times and everyone’s annoyed.

    Do this in order, stage left to stage right, before you run a single song. It takes maybe 30 seconds per person. On a five-person stage that’s two and a half minutes, and it will save you fifteen minutes of trial and error later, plus a much better first impression on anyone new sitting in with the team that day.

    Field Notes — Cheat Codes

    The bonus move: write the answers down. Not in your head — actually write them. “Drummer: needs vocal over kick.” “Bass: needs click over everything, doesn’t care about anything else.” Next time that same lineup plays, you already have your starting point before anyone steps on stage. Soundcheck goes from twenty minutes of guessing to five minutes of confirming.

    It’s a small thing. It is not a small result.

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  • Mixing a Whole Church on a Screen: Life With the Waves LV1

    Mixing a Whole Church on a Screen: Life With the Waves LV1

    Our front-of-house console is a computer screen, and I’ve stopped apologizing for it. The rig is a Waves eMotion LV1 Classic with an IONIC 24 feeding it, and after enough services and shows to trust it with the important Sundays, it’s earned a proper write-up.

    The honest starting point: mixing on glass scared me, the same way it scares every engineer who grew up on faders. The fear is tactile — where do your hands go when everything is a touchscreen? The answer turned out to be: the same place your eyes were already going. You watch the mix anyway. Now the thing you’re looking at is also the thing you’re touching.

    Waves LV1 Classic and IONIC 24 — the Aina Studios live rig

    What the IONIC 24 changed: one box on stage handles the preamps and the processing brain, one cable run back to the mix position, and the whole “where does the server live, where does the I/O live” diagram collapses into something a volunteer can help pack down. Setup time is the quiet superpower here — the rig goes from cases to passing signal faster than our old analog snake ever did.

    The actual reason to do this: the plugins ARE the console. Every channel gets the same Waves processing we’d reach for in the studio — real compressors and EQs we already know, not “console-brand approximations” of them. The mix that leaves the room on Sunday and the mix that comes out of the studio during the week are built from the same vocabulary. For a place that trains engineers, that consistency is worth more than faders.

    What I’d tell you before you switch: your redundancy plan matters more than your plugin list — know exactly what happens when a computer hiccups before it happens during a bridge. Budget real time for gain-staging the system properly (SoundGrid land rewards discipline). And let your team touch it on a Tuesday before anyone touches it on a Sunday; the interface is fast once it’s familiar, and terrifying exactly once.

    Mixing on a screen isn’t the compromise. Pretending a console from 2009 is the only legitimate way to mix — that’s the compromise.

    Gear in this post

    Waves eMotion LV1 Classic + IONIC 24 — available through Waves and pro audio dealers (links coming once we set them up).

    Some posts on this site use affiliate links; when they appear, they’re marked, and purchases support Aina Studios at no extra cost to you.

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