Category: Reviews & Impressions

The NUX-PG2 is sold as a “Portable Guitar Effects”. This is not a pedal: it does not have stompers, and it has a little clip on the back to fix it to your belt, probably. Still, it was designed to be used with an electric guitar, as a basic amp simulator with a couple of sound effects, an EQ, a metronome and a tuner. A demo of this pedal using the Volca Bass can be seen in the video bellow.

A quick inspection of the device shows a simple interface with four pentagonal knobs, three switches and seven buttons on the front panel, as well as a large display on the centre. On the left side there is a Noise Reduction switch and a stereo Aux In mini-jack socket. Incidentally, the audio coming in from this socket is not processed. On the top there are 1/4″ TS (mono) jack sockets for input and output and also a stereo headphones mini-jack socket. On the right-side panel we can see a 9 Volt power supply socket (centre negative, like most guitar pedals), and a three position power switch with off, on and on with backlight options. Around the back, we have a metal clip (possibly to attach it to your clothes, and also the battery compartment (it takes only two 1.5V AA batteries, and they will last for quite some time). Continue reading “NUX PG-2: The guitar “pedal” that almost put me off from using guitar pedals”

I started my YouTube channel about 6 months ago. Like everything in life, this was an improvisation: my first 20 videos or so were shoot using my cell phone which was always changing focus (something that hurt the quality of my initial Volca Sample Tutorial Series). Since November I’ve been experimenting with my old Olympus camera (a VG-160) and also a Toshiba Camileo SX900 I brought in second hand. All three machines are capable of shooting 720p HD video (which is also the highest resolution I can manage on my laptop). The cell phone shoots at 25 fps, with very decent low light performance, while the other cameras go up to 30 fps, but the indoors video always looks grainy. Moreover, the focus on the Camileo is apparently broken, and the lower right corner of the image is always blurry . On top of that, neither machine is capable of accepting external audio, which makes sync’ing the audio from the synthesizers a messy job, to say the least. Now, I am just a hobbyist and  I’m not interested in spending a lot of money on a DSL with external audio capture. So, I brought the Logitech c920 to try and record video directly to my laptop, while also recording the audio from my focusrite. These are my first impressions after recording and editing a test video with it (focusing on the Volca Keys).

As far as consumer webcams go, the Logitech c920 is a bit on the expensive side. I brought mine for a little over 100 €, making it the most expensive webcam on the catalogue on the shops. So what are you paying for? Well, the first thing I found is that the camera is heavier and bigger than other webcams with similar design, like HP’s HD 2300. The second thing I noticed is that the camera has a socket for screwing to a standard camera tripod, which is very useful. Continue reading “Logitech c920 HD Pro Webcam in Linux”