JOE WALLACE: I'm Joe Wallace for Gearwire.Com, and I'm the guy who writes Gearwire gossip, and we thought it would be fun to further torment and annoy you with a video version, giving you the latest in industry news and gear gossip, things like that. This is our great experiment. We don't know if this is just another hairy guy at Gearwire babbling about nothing or if this will actually be of some value to you, so please post in the forums. Tell us what you think. The Gearwire forum icon is right there at Gearwire.Com on the left. You can't miss it.

So, here we go with our first bit of gossip. Presonus, back in December of last year, announced that they would support Sonar with their FaderPort remote recording transport control. Well, now they upped the ante again and Presonus has announced Digital Performer is now supported with FaderPort. That means you can plug this lovely little remote box into your USB port and control volume and remotely enable your record settings and things like that. It controls panning, muting, solo, record enable, etc., etc., and you don't have to sit at your keyboard anymore and mess about with those things.

Now, the bad news is you Logic Express users, GarageBand users, Cubase LE and Cubase SE, well FaderPort doesn't support those platforms so you're screwed. You can always write to Presonus and ask them if they're going to help a brother out and offer support to these programs that come bundled with all kinds of different things, I think Final Cut Pro, things like that for Cubase LE and things like that.

Martin Atkins, the head of Invisible Records and also now a teacher in Columbia College in Chicago, has put out a book. Well, he hasn't actually put it out yet. He's written it, it seems to be finished according to the press release, but he's teasing us with news of a book called "Tour Smart". "Tour Smart" is about touring, and since Atkins has been doing this now for about 30 years with groups like Nine Inch Nails, Pigface, Ministry, Brian Brain, etc., etc., he's got a nugget or two of wisdom to share. "Tour Smart" is supposed to demystify the entire process and explain why some bands specify in their writers for tours a bowl of M&M's with no brown M&M's. According to Atkins, if you walk into your dressing room and find that bowl of M&M's chocked full of brown ones, you know the guy organizing that leg of your tour hasn't paid attention, and that's just one of the things he dishes on in his book. We hope this is coming out soon. Check the Invisible Records web site for more information on that.

Steinberg has announced a series of tutorial DVDs about recording, and it seems as if they are going to be selling these DVDs. By the same token, Cakewalk is kind of, not really on purpose but is sort getting into a format war with their free tutorials on YouTube. Steinberg goes DVD, Cakewalk goes YouTube, who's going to win? My vote is for the free stuff.

Gearwire has plenty of free stuff on YouTube. All you have to do is do a search for Gearwire or you can search for anything, the stompboxes, whatever stompbox you're wanting to hear, search and see if we've got some stuff up there, and if we don't drop us a line in the Gearwire forums and ask how come we're falling behind the power curve.

That's all the gossip for now. This is our great experiment. Please drop by Gearwire forums and let us know what you think. Is this just another hairy, smelly guy pestering you on a video clip or is this actually going to be worthwhile. We're going to be sort of parceling these out over the next few weeks, one and two at a time until we get an idea whether or not people are actually watching the bloody thing, so keep checking back for more. I'm Joe Wallace for Gearwire.Com. This has been the video version of Gearwire Gossip.