My rough-and-tumble workspace
Another essential piece of gear for guitarists: proper studio headphones to monitor your own output and go easy on your neighbors. Sure, you can make do with the latest pair of in-ears left from the deadest iPod, but you owe it to your ears to actually hear what you’re doing.
I chose Beyerdynamics DT 770 PRO, 80 Ohms Studio headphones for that purpose. The manufacturer says they’re “closed reference headphones for control and monitoring applications”. Couldn’t have said it any better …
Product photo © Beyerdynamic
In point of fact, they produce a very transparent body of sound without cutting off the bass too much. The ear pads are covered in velour and they are easy to wear for a long time, not too hot. They are available in two versions, with an impedance of 250 and of 80 ohms. The first one is for connecting to stereos, headphone amps and mixing consoles while the low-ohm variant works with mobile devices and the headphone jacks on computers.
Perhaps this is a good place to explain the mess of a setup demonstrated in the lead image.
The guitar cable goes into the iRig adapter that is connected in a two-way-fashion to the iPad running AmpliTube’s software. That’s my virtual amp and array of stompboxes there, very flexible and fun to play around with. Cinch out on the iRig adapter goes to sound in on the iMac. There’a little program by Rogue Amoeba running on there called LineIn that connects any sound input device to any output device. Neat, and free as in beer. I use it to either pipe sound to the system output or, if I want to record, to GarageBand. That in turn will give you an option to monitor your tracks on the headphone jack. Needless to say, the Beyerdynamics are on there.
So there you have it, a private audio space for practicing and a little recording studio.
December 27th, 2011 at 4:50 am
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