Wow this week has been a lot more hectic than I imagined. The gear front of all things. Todd’s band uses a lot of absynth and maldire uses a lot of gladiator and sylenth 1. We have to have a PC. We could not just use the headphone jacks out off a laptop, to noisey. So looked into cheap converter usb boxes. First we tried the Presonus Audiobox USB and the sound quality was not even as good as the built in audio on my laptop LOL. Then I bought the Mackie Blackjack which is supposed to sound good but fuck the drivers suck and not good enough for windows 7 64bit with low latency. Ran into my old guitar center friends at Bain Center I mean Guitar center. Back in the day a lot of really cool people used to work at GC in arvada colorado. CJ, Erick Koznar and ortavio. Miss those guys. Eric reps Arturia and a bunch of other big companies and also is the brain child of “Darker Days Tomorrow” and his first band “Emergence”. Any how the arturia rep was in the keybaord room with a Minibrute hooked up to some shitty roland keyboard speaker live amp deal. It sounds pretty good. Really mean and mid rangey. The construction quality of the mini brute was impressive, knobs felt solid and so did the sliders, its made of metal as well, has a heft to it that makes it feel more posh. I think I might actually get one of these when they are available. Sick of waiting for the boom star. now I have an Sh09, and get a mini brute, and i will be really happy. But this is another story. I got talking with kosnar about my laptop live delema. He said he could hook me up with a RME baby face cause he reps RME out here and he could get me one cheaper than retail. Still would of cost around 700 bucks. So todd and I were dreading the cost so hard core, we want to buy lights and some stage shit, not some high end converter for the laptop. Gah.

So I returned the blackjack and the Presonus Audiobox and some hippy looking crazy guy there asked me what I needed, and I explained, he said “You only need 2 out, and not the pres and stuff, right?”, I said yes. Then he recommended the Native Instruments Traktor Audio 2. It was only 100 bucks and comes with tracktor. Whoa. now I can do one off DJ events. LOL. Then I looked on line and read some reviews on amazon and low and behold, its low latency big time vs the competition, plus it sounds almost as good as a duet, but not quite. I could live with that. So I bought it. Later that day my Sh09 came in the mail. WOW. This thing is so amazing, now i need a kenton pro solo for it, I cannot use volta cause I am PC only. Nothing snaps like the sh09, not even the sh02 snaps the same with the env on the filter. I brought this to practice, and the other day I was spending a lot of time going through presets on the pc to find the right bass sound for the song Fixation that we might be playing live. I had such a hard time with the VSTS, sorry, but not even trillian cuts it a lot of the time. I plugged in the sh09, and instantly made a sound that would work as the bass. This vintage roland stuff is amazing, its bright and bold, snappy and bonky or fat and ominous. Too bad I cannot bring vintage gear on tour, I have to baby all that in the studio cause I don’t have the money to do it. The new moog stuff is so dark and not cutting enough. Still big and fat on the low end, but we do not want to bring an expensive voyager on tour either. Shame. So I decided to bring the virus for bass duty cause it does better than the stupid software for bass as well.

In the end, The Traktor audio 2 from Native instruments sounded much better than the built in sound card and the presonus audiobox usb and it has way lower latency. I read that if you bumped it that the usb was flaky and i tested that on the tractor audio 2, and no drop outs or flakey connection. Solid. I cannot recommend this enough as a low latency decent sounding DAC. 100 bucks and you get pro VST sound live that you can actually play with low latency. Could not be happier.

Now back to learning songs. So far I have learned 5 of the twilight Garden live set. Have to learn like 4 more. Then I gotta rehearse them over and over and play and practice so I don’t suck and ruin todd’s show on the tour.

Click Here to read Hexfix93′s Review of “HOPE” by The Twilight Garden