post by Mitchell Sigman

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I recently installed a UAD-1 card in my Mac G5. It's certainly one of those "I don't know how the heck I lived without this thing" purchases. I use a lot of the 1176 compressors and the Neve 1073 EQ's.And I love the Precision Buss Compressor and Precision Limiter- my buddy and I did a shootout between these and the Waves RenComp and L1/L2/L3, and we preferred the UA plugs every time. Unfortunately, one UAD-1 card runs out of horsepower real quick, and thus begins the dreaded "no more plugins" message. I just picked up another UAD-1 card and I'm sure I'll STILL run out of juice. It's easy to see why guys were buying PCI expansion chassis and ganging up multiple cards...

Now the next-generation UAD-2 cards are here, and they seriously up the ante in terms of processing power (2, 4 or 10x the processing power of the original UAD-1 card). Get a new UAD-2 card and live happily ever after, right? Wrong. If you have pre-2006 G5 Mac you're outta luck, because older Macs use PCI-X format cards, whereas the newer models use PCI-express (aka PCI-e). What's the difference? Though both cards are physically the same size, the newer PCI-e cards have a smaller edge connector, and more importantly, have higher data throughput. The UAD-2 cards are only available in PCI-e format- the increased throughput is necessary to transfer all them extra 0's and 1's, pal. Getting back to me and my sorry predicament, this means if I want to jump into a new UAD-2 card, then I have to replace my Mac. But it gets worse... my audio system is centered around an RME HDSP-9652 card, and it's a PCI-X card as well. So now I'm looking at a new computer and a new audio card (incidentally, this is a good excuse for me to switch to a Firewire-based audio system, but that's a different blog). I think anyone who's serious about digital audio hits this wall every couple of years- the dreaded time when you realize that you need to seriously upgrade everything, and in turn, upgrade everything else to remain mutually compatible. A dreaded and pricey conundrum indeed. "Hey Russ... how 'bout that employee discount?!?!" Comments anyone?

Sometimes I think Apple outta put me on the payroll for telling everyone about MainStage, their virtual instrument hosting app for Mac. In a nutshell, MainStage is a standalone application included with Logic Studio that lets you use Logic's virtual instruments and effects plugs in a live environment... imagine having a whole bunch of Logic mixer windows, each quickly switchable as a preset "performance", with its own layers, splits and effects and you're in the ballpark. Additionally, MainStage lets you add as many physical keyboards and controllers as you like, so it's easy to spread sounds over a lot of "real estate". For me, the best thing about MainStage is how it simplifies setting up patches and chains. My live rig used to consist of Korg Triton Extreme (I like saying the "EXTREEEEMMEEEE!!!!" part like one of those cheesy extreme sports announcer guys) and an Alesis Ion analog-modeling synth. The Triton was quite a capable beast, but setting up samples, splits and effects was always a very time consuming task. The Ion wasn't too bad as synths go, but just naming all the patches and layers on both keyboards took forever compared to typing on a QWERTY keyboard. MainStage also makes light work of creating sets and rearranging the order of patches; simply grab them and move them into the desired order. Doing this kind of thing on a hardware synth can be a time-consuming nightmare of repeatedly saving patches to new locations in an effort to shuffle things around. And as soon as Mr./Mrs. singer-type-human shows and up and decides the set order needs to change for the thirty-seventh time because they're "just not connecting with the audience", you're back to square one (for the record, I eventually gave up on keeping patches in the same order as the set and just attempted to locate the correct patches as fast as I could between songs. I can't tell you how many times I nearly missed the two-count intro of "Take My Breath Away". Not to mention that the drummer actually took some sort of sick pleasure in intentionally TRYING to make me miss it). There's also the advantage of a computer full of plug-ins offering a great deal more flexibility than two hardware synths with regard to effects and processing. Presently, MainStage does have some horsepower limitations with third-party audio units instruments. You probably aren't going to fare too well if you attempt to load a 40GB piano and play it live, and I'm not sure how well it does with heavy horsepower plugs... I'm about to load the very awesome Arturia Jupiter-8V and see how it fares. Thus far, I've stuck mostly with Logic's internal instruments, and it does pretty well. Certain ES2 synth patches seem to trip it up on program changes... sometimes they don't play right away, but I've found that if I select the patch and whack a couple notes at the start of the set, it's ok when I go back to that patch later on (hello, Apple?). And it doesn't seem to like when you play a sampled piano and hold down the sustain pedal forever whilst banging away, but again, that's easily remedied (lift foot!). My only other gripe is that MainStage seems to perform best using an external audio interface (as opposed to the Macbook's internal 1/8" audio out), which means bringing my M-Audio Firewire 410 to gigs- that's one more thing to haul around and hook up. Ick. But I believe I've found a neat solution... Novation makes a sweet all-in-one analog modeling synth/MIDI controller/2-in/2-out USB audio interface called the XioSynth, available in 25- and 49-key flavors. This way I can take my big, ancient Roland MKB-300 76-key MIDI controller to gigs, and plop my MacBook and the XioSynth on top (the MKB-300 has a neato flat top- looks like THIS, but they haven't made them since around 1986.) So that's two keyboards, one laptop,  a stand and an amp (depending if the gig has a real PA/monitors). And since the XioSynth is a standalone synth in its own right, I can always use it as a back up in case someone spills a Long Island Iced Tea into my Macbook! (btw, Behringer, CME, Line 6 and M-Audio all make MIDI keyboard controller with built-in USB audio interfaces) As usual, you can call the happy audiomidi.com sales staff if you have any questions at (866) 283-4601.