You’ll be happy to know I did get my new mBox 3 Pro. I ordered it from Sam Ash because they claimed they had it in stock but I had a bad vibe about the order. They screwed up the shipping and sent it fedex home instead of fedex ground so I had to cancel the order after they failed to deliver it three times. At least the Sam Ash people told me where to get one at a local music store.
While I was there I had a chance to audition a bunch of electric guitars. I liked four of them well enough to write down the model numbers. Two were Epiphones and two were Ibanezes. The first Epiphone was a Gibson SG knockoff. Dual humbuckers, mahogany body, maroon finish. It played nice and sounded nice. But one of the knobs was missing so I wouldn’t buy it. The next was an Epiphone hollow body modeled after another classic Gibson. Dual humbuckers, four knobs, also maroon finish. It didn’t play right cuz the string for the sales tag was wrapped around the two top strings. But the hollow body felt and sounded good, and reminded me of the main guitar John Lennon played in the late 60’s, a cream colored Gretsch. They had what looked to be a reissue of that guitar for about $2500, way out of my range. So I moved on and saw a nice Ibanez. One was a les-paul style but lighter and with a more agile feeling neck. Played really nice, nice cream color. The last was another hollow also in a cream color and looked alot like that John Lennon guitar, and is my current favorite.
I was surprised to find I really like the sound of those hollowbodies. Playing one feels closer to an acoustic. But I’m not sure if that’s the guitar I want because it seems alot less versatile than a regular electric guitar. For one thing the necks tend to be a bit flatter and wider, which can be both good and bad. For another it seems like some styles would be sort of off-limits with an axe like that. OTOH I don’t really see myself playing metal anyway. I’d rather have a guitar that gently weeps than loudly screams. Anyway people like John Lennon (Revolution, e.g.) and Neil Young have been able to get really hard rocking sounds from hollowbodies. Still, I also like bands like Rush and other that have a more modern guitar sound. (My friend John pointed out that Alex Lifeson played a hollowbody on a number of songs.)
Anyway, I got home from the music store and began to set up the mBox. I did the OS upgrade to 10.5.8, installed ProTools8 and hooked up the hardware on xmas eve. It works great! Michelle helped me get things going. Now she wants to be my apprentice engineer, which is awesome, cuz she has a good head for computers already. So I had her just make some noise into the mic and she decided to sing Away in a Manger. The sound is so good. When I went to play it back, I told her to stop singing now so I could hear the playback. I looked up and she wasn’t singing and I *was* hearing the playback! Later Lizzy came down and did aO Come All Ye Faithful. The new MBox has 2 headphone jacks, which makes this sort of thing alot easier.
Starting to learn PT8. There’s alot of new (to me) stuff in there. Project templates with built in click, nice and handy to get started quick. The built in FX have been upgraded. The basic compressor now has a nice little realtime input/output graph. Lots to explore.
I did a little side project for my mother-in-law she had an old 45 r.p.m. EP of girl scout songs from the 1950’s or 60’s that she asked me to make into a CD. (I’m the only one in the family with a working turntable.) The record was in pretty bad shape with lots of scratches and a few skips. I was able to eliminate a lot of the noise thru a combination of EQ (cut out everything over 4k) and compression (hard limiter to reduce the transients because the the pops were louder than the music) and it sound a good deal better. Still todo is edit out the skips, break the sides into tracks and burn the disc.
Studiowise, next step was to re-attach my midi rig. The new mBox has a single midi in and out, so I could get input from a single controller if all else failed. I have an 8×8 MOTU box that’s been an integral part of my. Last time I tried hooking it up to ProTools on the mac was about two years ago when 10.5 was new, and I totally struck out after lots of hassles. This time it plugged right in and totally worked. Woo-hoo! The other thing was to get SampleTank going again. I downloaded and installed sampleTank for mac 10.5 a month or two ago when I was trying to get up and running with Reaper but no dice. This time it opened in ProTools but my trail had expired. I had a bit of headache with the authorization but I finally got there.
So now I’m up and humming. Began work on Rocket to the Moon tonight. Got a click track and scratch MIDI bass part. I thought I’d lay down a scratch guitar part too using direct inject, but I ran into latency problems. There’s a good 8th or more note delay between the time you play a note and when you hear it in the headphones. Completely unworkable for live tracking. I messed around with the various input buffer dialogs, but to no avail. I’m pretty confident this can be solved if I just find the right control, because for years my old mBox was rock solid with no perceptible latency. I’m wndering if I should deactivate some plugins. Anyway, once I figure it out I’ll let you know.
The plan going forward is to upgrade to 10.6 and PT9 although I’ll probably wait until I’ve completed a song or two in the new setup. I’m also considering getting the digidesign expansion bundle that includes an AI drummer and detailed drum synth/sampler, a virtual analog synth, a fender Rhodes simulator, and some other stuff. Lots of fun ahead.