New Toys, New Music

I finally got round to doing something I’ve been meaning to for ages, but never managed to line up being motivated and having the money for it – I replaced my live mixer and preamp with a MOTU Ultralite Mk III Soundcard.

There are a number of reasons for this –

• Firstly, it’s need and tidy, and when I get the right cables (need to place an order with Evidence Audio!) it’ll be able to stay in place
• Secondly, it’s incredibly clean/quiet
• Thirdly, it has onboard DSP so I can EQ every in and out separately, and route anything I want to any of the outs (makes turning the vocal mic send to the looperlative on and off a synch.)
• Fourthly, it means we can take a firewire/USB cable out of the back of it into my laptop and record a perfect hi-res multitrack of every gig. Which means all those fun spontaneous moments that happen at Steve ‘n’ Lo gigs can now be captured. It means more live recordings, maybe even a live album from every tour… Proper magique.

Of course, I’m already thinking about just how many more inputs I could make use of, and what else I want it to do (I REALLY wish MOTU would make it so that you can use a MIDI CC controller with it without the laptop hooked up, so I could attach a fader-box), but it’s so much smaller, lighter, neater and cooler than any set up I’ve had before. Really looking forward to taking it to the US.

Anyway, to test I, I did a recording the other night, just using the free AudioDesk software that came with it. It came out rather well – here it is:

First New Experiment April 2010 by solobasssteve