So we got our bed track recordings done at Eddie’s Saturday. Seven songs done live with me, Jackson, and Eddie. And then Eddie played drums over an acoustic ballad demo the following Sunday. Tyson helped us with the engineering on Saturday because even though I’d like to, I can’t do it all myself. We ended up renting an Apogee Ensemble to be our main I/O going to a Mac Mini (2007 model with 2GB RAM). We also rented a Mackie Onyx 8 channel preamp that we hooked up to the Apogee utilizing it’s 8 ADAT outputs. To make use of the analog inputs on the Apogee, we rented an API two channel preamp with instrument ins and we ran the bass and guitar directly into the computer that way.
I have to say that I’m really happy with the way everything turned out. The mini was definitely powerful enough to record the 14 tracks simultaneously to the external USB drive. The Apogee was a great tool and the mixing software that it comes with is quite easy to use. One problem I had was getting the routings of the ADAT channels into Logic once it was coming in to the computer and into the Apogee software. This was solved once I realized I had to set up my input and outputs to accept the ADAT signal in the rest of the computer within the software. One thing though to ALWAYS REMEMBER is that if you are using external optical devices (like in this case the Mackie ADAT) you MUST sync the word clock with a BNC cable. This will solve the jitter issue.

Reaktor Patch – Timely Sweeper
A Reaktor patch I created where you don’t have to tweak knobs anymore so that you know how long your sweep will last. Also discuss mapping and configuring into Ableton and other DAWs.
Right click and save the ensemble here