Long time, no blog…

The last couple weeks have been pretty productive here at Firebrand.  We had a little down time to do some long overdue maintenance: patch bay stragglers were wired in, things were rearranged a bit, a few normals were added, and a couple intermittent patch points were chased down and summarily dealt with.  I finally opened up a non-working FMR Really Nice Compressor and, a few electrolytic capacitors later, magically transformed it into a working FMR Really Nice Compressor.  I also spoke to Peter Reardon of Shadow Hills Industries who was nice enough to call me on the phone five minutes after emailing him to walk me through a problem I was having with one of our Mono GAMAs.  The darn thing had shipped with the nickel transformer out of polarity relative to the steel setting.  All of this, I know, is riveting reading.  We also did some cooler things, like work on some music.  Jonathan McCammon was back in recording some vocals for his upcoming release, Ellen the Felon & the Mattronome were doing the same (and guests added violin, sax, and backing vocals), Death of Yeti came back in to finish mixing, and I worked on a first pass of mixes for Mike Boggeman‘s record.  We were also pleased to show a couple of potential freelance engineers around the studio and talk shop.  Oh, and we had a very special guest amp in that I wish I could tell you more about.  Let’s just say that St. Louis will soon have a brand new (old) amp company and a certain guitar player in a certain band with some very famous beards will have serial number one.  That’s all I can say.  Lastly, we built a few more channels of Classic API VP26s.  Not only have we been using these things ourselves and loving them, but we’ve been building some on the side for people who don’t have the soldering skills to built the kits themselves.  Why DIY, when you can HTDAFDIFY*?

*have the dudes at Firebrand do it for you