Rick Veneer’s View

My all time favourite vocalist is the wonderful Al Green. Still killing ‘em on “Later with Jools Holland ” http://www.abc.net.au/iview/#

Al doesn’t come on until 55 minutes into the show.

He’s the king, which is really saying something, because there are a lot of great singers I admire. But someone has to top the list and it’s still Al after all these years!

Two great and very useful little toys – both Firewire audio interfaces and both terrific value for money.

Presonus FireStudio Project

I use the Presonus on location when I need up to eight mic preamps and it performs beautifly. Just this baby and a laptop and you have a recording studio to go. Just add mics and a pair of monitors.

Great sounding mic preamps, easy to set up. It comes with a free copy of Cubase LE and other software to complete the studio. Nothing else is needed.

Presonus FireStudio Project

MOTU Ultralite Mk 3

I use the Ultralite in my home rig. It has only two mic / instrument preamps, but there are six more line inputs and I have more mic pres available around the studio. The outstanding feature of this little box, apart from the audio quality, is the Cue Mix software. This is a great software mixer, plus really useful DSP effects for use on each channel, like 5 band parametric e.q. with 2 filters, modelled after the best classic consoles, reverb, compression and an emulation of the classic LA2A optical compressor of vintage fame. If your computer is struggling to run a lot of plugins, this outboard DSP power can be extremely useful. Even if your computer does have the grunt, it’s still great to have the option of using these very nice tools.

Motu Ultralite Mk 3

Both boxes have plenty of ins and outs, and they do their jobs extremely well. There are many other products out there, but I really only have practical experience with these two.

Well done, the gearheads at Presonus and Motu!

First Post (not to be played on the bugle like the “Last Post”)

Big Rock

BIG ROCK records have a great new website big-rock.com.au and deserve every success as champions of Aussie rock, blues, country rock, blues rock, rock rock and all real non – pop type actual rock. Get my drift?

Congrats to Cletis Carr for building a cracker of a site.

Myself and Little Goose are on the roster as Rick and The Goose with our acoustic jazz blooz type album Valley Of The Blues (also see rickandthegoose.com) as well as me and the Vigilantes and a couple of compilation cds – the all instrumental all original Bakers’ Dozen and 25 Years Of Big Rock.

Bakers’ Dozen features many great guitarists – Chris Turner , Tim Gaze, Cletis Carr, the late Pete Wells, Kevin Borich, Mal Eastick, Phil Emmanuel, Bruce Mathiske (red hot!) Adam Carl Stephens, Kim Humphries, Johnny Gretsch and Peter Pik and somehow I got on there too. There’s some hot performances and KB plays bass on my track with Goose on the drums and I play bass on his track with Goose on the drums. At $25AUD it’s a bargain and available on the Big Rock website.

Rick