Pedalboards are always changing. At least they always change for me.

I was not enjoying the tones I was getting from the Strymon Iridium. I was thinking about going back to amps as I missed the feel of playing through an amp. The Iridium was fine but not great.

The thought of hauling heads and cabs out to gigs is not very appealing. Especially at my age. What should I do? And then along came IK Multimedia’s big announcement, the Tonex Pedal.

Admittedly, I doubt that the Tonex Pedal will change the world. I ordered one of the first ones to arrive at Sweetwater. And I love the tones coming out of that box.

I am travelling right now so I can’t update my pedalboard as it is back home. I have been playing through a virtual rig on the laptop using Neural DSP’s plugins. Those plugins sound great. As do the Tonex models. I’m now running Amplitube with Tonex as my virtual rig until I get home.

To add Tonex to the pedalboard means making a few changes. I used one of the online pedalboard designers to craft the new board.

A few changes. I had added the Eventide H90 to the board which kicked the BigSky off but I miss the BigSky. As the H90 can easily cover pitch and chorus, I will kick off the Pog and the Julia and bring back the BigSky.

The Tonex will displace the Strymon Iridium. And, sadly, I have to kick off the Timmy and I need to replace the Deep Six compressor with a smaller form factor pedal. I have a few compressors in the studio and I might just throw the Keeley compressor on the board.

With the RJM Mastermind, I don’t have to worry too much about pedal order and cabling as I can readily rearrange pedal order in the Mastermind. I will have a fair amount of re-wiring to do on the board which might involve a day or two of effort.

After which I will likely spend a fair amount of time dialing in the new tones.

Until I decide to change the board again.

Shoreline. That one is in Toronto. I, on the other hand, am referring to a church in Austin, Texas. A megachurch. Somewhere around 8,000 or so people attend each week.

My friends at Avid invited me to a webinar with a couple of the production staff and Brown Note Productions to learn about their complete production workflow.

Not really all that complete mind you. The webinar focused primarily on how Shoreline was using Avid products for their audio production.

The session was posted to YouTube and if you are interested you can give it a look.

What stood out from the discussion for me was how much money that church had invested in their audio production. For example, this was a shot of their broadcast room:

Acoustically treated room. Beautiful desk. And what else do I see there? Might those be a pair of Barefoot MicroMain 27s? A fully decked out S4? An Avid Matrix?

Equipment and buildout costs were not mentioned however a room like that would easily exceed $500,000 in Canada.

The topology of the audio environment that was shared on the webinar looks like this:

They have an S6L-32D for FOH and an S6L-24D for monitors along with the S4. A couple of E6L engines, a 24×24 IO for the broadcast space and a Stage 64. The FOH and Monitor consoles, along with the engines, would run about $400,000 up here in Canada. Without installation costs and all of the related cable plant. Not hard to envision a couple of million for that installation not including the rest of the FOH, lighting, and video components.

Don’t get me wrong. I would love to mix behind an S6L or an S4. But that is some serious money for a church to spend on audio.

Definitely state of the art.

Canada Day weekend is here. And it is a very warm weekend indeed. Temperatures are in the 30 Celsius range with the humid reaching 40 Celsius or so. In December, we were experiencing colder temperatures than the North Pole. Six months later our weather is warmer than Miami, Florida.

I’ve been working on a new camera body for our upcoming travel to Norway later this month. As much as I love my Nikon gear, it is too big and too heavy for the type of traveling that we will be doing in Europe. The Leica is my favourite camera but I only have one lens and it is challenging, at least for me, to shoot a location without the benefit of being able to cover a wider focal range.

I had an Olympus OM-D E-M1 system that I really enjoyed. A micro four thirds system that was really light and offered good image quality.

I upgraded that camera body to the Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II. The Mark II is an incredibly feature-packed camera. I already had all of the lenses that I needed for the trip: 17mm F1.8, 25mm F1.8 and 12-40 F2.8. For the micro four thirds system, doubling the focal length yields the effective equivalence of 34mm, 50mm and 24-80mm coverage. Perfect range for my style of photography.

I took the camera out for some test shooting. The downtown landscapes are now showing beautiful flowers.