Big thumbs up, pats on backs and grateful handshakes to Howard Jones, Tony Musgrove and Caroline Cook at Source Distribution for supplying us with a Presonus Firestudio. As I have said at the beginning of this blog, we are undertaking all the recordings on our own extremely minimal budget, so their help was greatly appreciated.
Selling the old and very cumbersome ProTools system has proven to be the right thing to do. All the recordings are now being done in Logic 8, and the Presonus system (a Firestudio and a pair of 8 channel Digimax mic preamps) gives as the facilities to do up to 24 tracks of simultaneous recording, and the gear compliment is now merely a MacBook Pro laptop and a little 3u rack! Much better than the 12U rack with a full computer we lugged before. It seems the dream has almost been reached - you really can carry a 24 track recording studio in a bag and little rack ... Never thought I'd see the day ...
The Presonus stuff is really really good. The preamps are all excellent, which is the main thing when you're tracking a drumkit, but importantly it also gives us 3 headphone amps with separate mixes available on each. Drivers seem fine although at the moment there are no Leopard (OSX 10.5) drivers which is rather frustrating because I had to create another boot drive for the macbook, but its all good.
Peace, and have a safe journey home.