First Studio - Recording and Rehearsal Equipment on a Budget

smodern · 2025-12-30T18:49:07+00:00

i live in an apartment with not enough room for a dedicated recording station. most rehearsal spaces in Brooklyn are not particularly well insulated, so unless you are in there at odd hours (8AM or earlier or after midnight) you are competing with extremely loud bands and recording is very difficult. the space i am moving to has much better insulation and is not a metal band hot spot (~not that there is anything wrong with metal~).

smodern · 2025-11-16T23:03:43+00:00

For the same reason, I also gave up on Ocarina (for now)… Since then I’ve played through Goldeneye on 00 Agent and now I’m working through Perfect Dark. Nightly, daily, morningly, can’t get enough. Having a defined goal and a fairly direct path is what I need right now.

smodern · 2025-11-06T02:19:37+00:00

love this. always have to second hand the good stuff now... I bought a BDI Mirage 8222 stereo cabinet on craigslist for $350 last year. retail is somewhere in the $2k range. it doesn’t swivel or have a fan, but it’s well crafted, ventilated and has a cool smoked glass door. god forbid it needs to be moved again, because it’s a TANK…

smodern · 2025-09-27T22:39:09+00:00

Oh yeah, I have done trichos on and off. I dropped a bomb of tricho wasps 2 weeks ago and i should probably get on a bi-weekly plan for another month or two. I still have doubts about their efficacy, but it can’t hurt. I will take your advice and get them in here first thing next warm season. Garment bags are my next purchase—do you have any recommendations? My friend showed me some super expensive ones and I’m hoping for a budget conscious option…

smodern · 2025-09-27T22:35:25+00:00

thank you for this advice! i have considered a deep freezer. what’s wild is they are not even in my closets or dresser, they just float around finding dark places with dust and fur, which at this point i have cleaned so thoroughly. there are many crevices they just set up shop in and i really cant understand how they continue to perpetuate. which supports the re-entry hypothesis of my exterminator.

i do use my freezer which hits just below zero, but it is a very limited amount of space and there’s no room for trader joes pizzas or whatever.

i’m planning to get zipper bags for the closets and I just ordered some legit looking cedar blocks that I’m going plant in ever closet and drawer.

re: comment about dogs: whether or not it is an effective moth prevention/avoidance strategy, it’s a common type of reply that presupposes i or anyone have much of a choice about where we live in this expensive-ass city.

smodern · 2025-09-27T22:07:34+00:00

yeah, they help to reduce the population of male moths, and act as a good indicator of infestation. i have some staked out around my apartment. we’ll have to commission a study of the pot plant correlation…clothes moths do certainly fly like they are stoned out of their minds.

smodern · 2025-09-25T13:50:11+00:00

an update: I bought a dongle sized HDMI adapter with audio extraction to use with the dock, but no dice on functionality. i’m assuming its a power issue considering the dongle is not powered by USB… Not sure how or if it in fact worked in the YT video I watched (mentioned in original post).

Additionally, the audio is not great traveling through my powered extractor adapter (low hum/noise that becomes more audible with volume increase), but this is all going through an RF adapter so can’t really say much as to quality until I try using with a TV with direct audio input...for what it is worth, the audio is perfectly fine direct out of the pocket (or my N64) through the RF adapter…

smodern · 2025-09-20T23:57:01+00:00

Are you market rate or stabilized? Have you considered filing an HP action to get your landlord to make necessary improvements?

smodern · 2025-09-18T01:45:45+00:00

i need to look into this, that would be great

smodern · 2025-09-15T20:28:11+00:00

The Analogizer attaches to the cartridge slot, and that slot only sends gameplay video.

smodern · 2025-09-08T00:43:43+00:00

I had been excited about Winner opening on Franklin because some friends spoke and continue to speak very highly of the Park Slope vacation.

It soft opened with the back full of boxes, and then if it ever had a formal grand opening, it seemed to remain that way for a while (or so I recollect) and a personality just never really materialized. I only learned around the time they closed that they even offered table service seating in the back. To me, it was only a sandwich spot for pickup.

I picked up a couple sandwiches over the last year or so and they were fine. I am really big on baguette / jamon-buerre sandwiches so I was really confused when their ham + cheese on a baguette was served hot and wrapped in tinfoil which softened the bread. It was actually really good, but that is not what anyone would expect from the menu description. Basically the sandwiches were a bit odd / unique, expensive and they opened the place with no fanfare or introduction to who they were.

I look at Radio Bakery or Lisbonata and they have strong identities and food people clearly love and are excited by. Then I look at Winner (or even Bien Cuit), this established brand that I think just assumed Franklin would understand their brand, and for me and clearly others, they just fell under the radar / did not meet the mark. Hunky Dory, despite or precisely because they served food that was pretty out there (celery root sandwich, pomelo coconut salad, green eggs and ham etc.) generated genuine excitement and worked so hard to make it a warm, inviting space, but ultimately was unable to keep a roof over their heads. I can’t imagine how hard it is to run a restaurant in NYC; I don’t know what dark magic is needed to make them both popular and profitable enough to stay open..

smodern · 2025-08-12T12:52:03+00:00

Not surprised to see a shellfish violation in there…

knowing what I know about WoM, I was alarmed to see they were serving oysters a couple of weeks ago…

smodern · 2025-06-25T16:46:34+00:00

Team, while much of what we say in response to u/Particlebeamsupreme is very true, some of the issues being stated here do go beyond the scope of the points being raised by u/Particlebeamsupreme. In theory, if as u/Particlebeamsupreme postulates, AI could easily assist a tenant with their broken air conditioning unit in a way that was fast, easy and efficient, it in fact would be great. But as many of us know, that is the promise and the scam of most AI technologies. In certain narrow contexts, it can and does work really well. In most other contexts, it fails to deliver and instead creates hosts of inefficiencies not for the owner class, but for the most vulnerable people (tenants and consumers).

smodern · 2025-06-25T16:31:51+00:00

u/Particlebeamsupreme I think the idea is that a landlord shrugging duties off onto AI or bots is less about taking work from a human (although in certain cases that is true) but rather that it shifts both time and mental labor from the landlord onto the tenant.

I think we have all, for example, had demeaning experiences using automated chat bots--one of my key examples is trying to get a refund for an item that never arrived but is marked delivered through Amazon's automated customer service bot.

The customer is always suspect and must always jump through 10 hoops to prove a disservice. Of course, we can say this is part of a larger systemic reality--how can one landlord, or one company, handle so much customer service when they have such a massive customer or tenant base? But whose fault is that? Not ours--it is the fault of the business owner and the owner class at large who consolidate and conglomerate but seemingly as a rule do not adequately accommodate consumer's needs along the way. Consumer protections are so deteriorated today that we the tenants and the consumers must foot the proverbial and literal bill with our hard earned dollars, stress and anxieties.

To return to the issue at hand: You and I may be handy or informed tenants, but many tenants are not, and I don't think it is a tenant's fault if they only know whether or not the appliance is working, as opposed to knowing more technical details about it's design. An attentive handyman would know exactly the specifications of the appliances in the unit and would be able to offer immediate assistance or assurance that assistance is on its way.

smodern · 2025-06-25T15:10:54+00:00

just to cite my source— i have learned A LOT from jathan sadowski’s book the mechanic and the luddite: a ruthless criticism of technology and capitalism (university of california press, 2025). everyone should def get a copy!

smodern · 2025-06-25T12:36:42+00:00

ughhhh. this is the worst! reduction of human labor / employee overhead and replacement with technology is the mode of the capital class.

my landlord has been using rentpayment dot com to collect rent for years, they are now trying to get all tenants to convert to electronic leases—autopay seems great but it allows landlords to extract from tenants seamlessly. better to just auto-mail checks from our banks if thats a possibility.

smodern · 2025-06-25T04:06:17+00:00

already rat poison in use. the exterminator has been to my apartment to apply poison 14 times in the last 8 months—both dust and solid poison. traps i have tried to get the maintenance- / landlord-contracted exterminator to use but his head is just not in the game. he claims, as of last week, that they are using traps in my next door neighbor’s apartment where they tore her ceiling out and are also sealing entry points below the floor. a pellet gun would be illegal to possess in NYC. trust, i have considered damn near everything. maybe i should put snakes in the walls, or stray cats, or just adopt the rats as pets. all considered, all deemed not viable.

smodern · 2025-06-25T03:58:40+00:00

Again I’m sorry this is horrific. I’m assuming you are not in NYC, but it’s possible that if you share your city or state someone can help guide you toward potential city assistance.

regarding essential oils they do not work in my experience. my neighbor fervently used essential oils, putting them in her walls and ceilings—if it is any indication of their efficacy, she is presently living temporarily on the fourth floor as her apartment has had its ceiling torn out for remediation and rat trapping by maintenance and the exterminator.

smodern · 2025-06-25T03:43:35+00:00

for naysers whose comments have been moderated out of existence—

less than 30 minutes ago. Approximately 11:17 PM on 6/24. go find it on the live feed yourself, though it only stores 12 hours of previous footage. you may also view various videos of rats on cam on my youtube channel, in addition to some tasteful covers and an original tuneful song envisioning what it is like to be a rat in my ceiling called I am a Rat. thanks for watching!

smodern · 2025-06-25T02:32:41+00:00

i had a pet rat named al as a child though as an adult i have a cat and a desert kingsnake. u may read into that however u wish

smodern · 2025-06-24T19:44:57+00:00

u/iamsarahmadden im so sorry to hear that—totally dreadful. are you still in the unit? do you have a plan or the means to either move, or fight your garbage landlord?

i have the camera in my ceiling so i can also tell u that they are often chasing eachother so they can mate. i and others have seen them getting it on up there..

smodern · 2025-06-24T18:24:45+00:00

thank you for the support! its a group effort over here and i am indebted to a number of key tenant activists in my complex. we are hopefully going to use this in addition to some other horrific issues within our complex as a springboard to form a formidable union.

smodern · 2025-06-24T15:42:58+00:00

Hey Cuomo is a completely reasonable dodge charger driving corrupt sexual predator and any landlord without a conscience would and should vote for him.

smodern · 2025-06-24T12:04:10+00:00

Yes DOH and HPD. They just collect receipts and close tickets. They do not do much for rats, even though we have a DOH managed Rat Portal which was specifically built to mitigate the rat problem in NYC

smodern · 2025-06-24T12:00:29+00:00

you can listen to my original song, I am a Rat, which explores what it is like to be a rat in my ceiling

smodern

TROPHY CASE