Control With It, Baby

The M-Audio ProjectMix I/O is here and it is working flawlessly. I ran the driver CD, pushed a couple of buttons, and I'm up and running. The MOTU interface has found a nice home with a local sax player, and I still have the expansion unit for any format conversions. The ProjectMix has 8 built in mic pres, an 8-channel ADAT in/out, a pair of S/PDIF i/o and a software mixer/router to allow for two discrete headphone mixes. My mic pre count has gone from two to ten - which means I can track a drum kit and bass and maybe a scratch guitar. Very useful.

It's great to have faders again, and once I get deeper into it, I expect that using the mouse to navigate around Cubase will be rare instead of the norm.

I decided to try to sequence some drums and bass for a demo of a song (City of Devils) that may go on the album. It actually worked! I built up a kick and tom tom groove on the virtual drum kit, added a gurgling bass synth (ala Lanois), and used Amplitube to get a Vox AC30 sound, with a wah wah pedal and fuzz box. Pretty convincing results. Maybe a bit OTT for this record, but I am toying with the idea of keeping the rhythm track approach and using acoutic guitars instead of the raunchy electrics. We don't want to be too stylistically diverse. Stay tuned.