Check Out the New Mobile Tracking Rig

[karbomusic]

Short story, back in the day I lived in band house for 11 years with all instruments mic'd and ready to go 24/7. I can't say enough about how great of an engineering/recording/learning experience it was to have that convenience. It also spoiled the heck out of me even if I was poor the whole time.

Well I don't live in a band house anymore and I'm somewhat tied to my DAW. IE: Very much not worth pulling my FF800 out of the big stationary rack and basically tearing everything down just to go record at my drummer's house only to have to reverse the entire process when I return home. So, I have slowly been dreaming up a solution which I just finished over the weekend, Yay.

FF800, Universal Audio 4-710D, 48pt ProCo Patch bay + Rack:



Added an old laptop I had lying around (and my fader port) and I can now unplug a couple cables and go:




With the FF800 and the 4-710D there are 18 analog inputs with 8 of those being good mic pres; four of those have 4 1176 styled compressors plus a combination of tube and/or ss pres. All the I/0 for the FF is hooked to the patch bay. The 4-710D is word clock sync'd to the FF800 while doing its own A/D conversion which arrives at the FF800 as 8 channels of ADAT. I'm pretty stoked so far from carrying it around the house and testing it.

The only bummer is that I have a much better laptop but it has no firewire. This old 2001 model Compaq has firewire with a TI chipset. Its drawback is not having much memory and a slow disk. However, its only for tracking and usually 4-8 tracks only and zero VST or extras are going to be needed. So far it has been able to do 4 while testing with no problem so I should be able to easily throw it in the car, mic and record drum tracks then drive back home with the goods.

[Bulls Hit]

What a great rig.

Now here I am 6 years later trying to do the same thing. The 4-710d is on its way. I'm pretty excited..

[karbomusic]

Originally Posted by Bulls Hit

What a great rig.

Now here I am 6 years later trying to do the same thing. The 4-710d is on its way. I'm pretty excited..

Excellent. My rig has grown but I still use and love the 4-710d.

[martifingers]

The Firewire issue is the little acknowledged scandal of portable audio. I ended up buying a Macbook simply because of the TI chipset incompatabilities.
But very cool you put this together.

[karbomusic]

Originally Posted by martifingers

The Firewire issue is the little acknowledged scandal of portable audio. I ended up buying a Macbook simply because of the TI chipset incompatabilities.
But very cool you put this together.

Yea, no doubt. I switched to FFUFX a few years ago which is USB and FW. USB 2.0 had no issues transferring 20+ tracks at 48k/24 bit. The only issue I had was that I did the first 2/3s of the tunes to micro SD card plugged into the Surface, when it got over 1/2 full (15GB), it would occasionally stall. In the new rig I use both the UFX and the FF800 - I just manually routed all the FF800 inputs to ADAT2 which fed into the UFX giving me darn close to 26-28 inputs.

I then just switched the recording directories to the main system SSD which fixed the issue entirely. I'll start a post sometime on the project, once I get some time to get set back up after all the work and moving stuff.

[jerome_oneil]

Originally Posted by martifingers

The Firewire issue is the little acknowledged scandal of portable audio. I ended up buying a Macbook simply because of the TI chipset incompatabilities.
But very cool you put this together.

I sent back a MOTU Firewire interface in favor of a USB because I couldn't get the thing to link up to any Firewire interface on any computer I had access to. I'd just assumed it was broken. Now I wonder if this wasn't the problem.

Anyway, Karbo, as usual, makes me green with rig envy.

[karbomusic]

Originally Posted by jerome_oneil

Anyway, Karbo, as usual, makes me green with rig envy.

We don't have kids, so that's my retirement funds you see there to an extent. I don't feel too bad though since most of my bandmates have no nest egg and twice the gear I do, just in the form of basses, guitars and keyboards. I at least have enough saved that gear purchases don't make a huge visible dent but I'm getting old and when I woke up today, the bank account balance said "drive in to work".

This record is certainly not going to have any ROI but it's sure fun going down the river.

[jerome_oneil]

I have four kids. I'll rent you a couple if you think it would help slow you down.