Eleven out of Eleven!
The Digidesign Eleven Rack is something that people who know me would be very surprised to find on my wish list of equipment. I am definitely a stick in the mud when it comes to recording good quality guitar sounds and to me there is no alternative to a real guitar amp with tubes and a good speaker, which these days I insist is a Tone Tubby hempcone, no matter what the amp – all mic’d up through a nice mic preamp.
The Eleven Rack stands for everything about guitar tone and recording that I hate… Or does it? Well actually, after looking into it the last week I’d say that is not the case and here’s why.
I’ll likely never change my mind about the best way to capture electric guitar, as I said I’m a stick in the mud about that and I’m a guitarist that likes to think he has some idea about getting good tone out of a plank of wood, some pickups and an amplifier, but Eleven Rack might just be exactly what I need for the studio.
It fulfills so many roles that it’s like finding the world’s best secretary, organiser, delegate and ambassador for your business when you were just looking for someone to type your memos. It should come with a badge on the front that says "BONUS!"
So lets look at it in detail. Please note I haven’t actually used one of these units or heard it in real life. I’ve only seen the youtube videos out there and the promo media published by Avid/Digidesign.
So Here Goes
Recording:
For recording my own songs it would save me hours and hours. I usually record my songs in some sort of demo form because that’s part of how I write, so when I come to record the "real thing" I usually have to go back and re-record the guitar parts because, to save time demoing them I normally quickly record the guitars with my Palmer PDI-09 DI box coming out of the amp. It’s good, but not good enough to use for serious recordings in my opinion apart from the odd track that is well blended with other guitar tracks. What happens then is that I often have a demo with a guitar track that I love the feel of, but can’t live with the sound and any attempts to re-record with a decent tone set up seldom capture the same feel and soul of the original demo guitar track.
If I had the Eleven rack I wouldn’t really care if the sounds were good enough or not to be honest because I’d be using it’s functionality to get me through the demo with some useable sounds and capture an untreated DI’d guitar signal in the process that I can re-amp later in any way I like. Bingo! That’s enough to make me want this unit to be honest, but there’s so much more.
This thing is an audio interface, so I can plug my Apogee Mini Me (I love that little preamp converter) into the S/Pdif input and have 2 quality inputs to record my vocals and acoustic guitar etc. In time I can add to this rig something(s) that I mucho desire: An API A2D dual mic-pre and A/D converter and an Empirical Labs FATSO jr – I used to have a FATSO and I sold it for financial reasons in 2004 – I am still scarred by that 
Anyway, what this means is that this makes an amazing front end to a Native DAW. Think of the features for tracking? Yes more inputs would be nice, but apparently you can get up to 8 inputs simultaneously, which I haven’t figured out how yet. So I can plug the Eleven Rack into the USB 2.0 port on an iMac Quad core, which only has one firewire port, so that’s perfect for catering for an external hard drive without daisy-chaining using FW800 to FW400 adapter cables (very messy) and something which is now unavoidable if you have a DIGI003 or MBox 2 Pro with anything less than a 17" Macbook pro (waste of money) or a Mac Pro (Not a waste of money, but a huge sum of money).
I’ve already said. If you hate the guitar sounds, you still have an excellent re-amping device and you can use it to quickly lay down your guitar tracks, focus on the performance being tight and full of magic, then go out to your amp afterwards to capture your prefered sound.
Live Performance
I have to admit that whilst this thing may be excellent live, if I had a choice of an Eleven rack or a bassman LTD with a couple of pedals in front of it then the Bassman would get the gig every time. I use a power attenuator, so I can send some heat through the power tubes without pissing off anybody else and it works so well for me that I haven’t been disappointed with my guitar tone at a gig for years, since I started using an atenuator. I’m sorted for live sound. I keep it simple and i don’t need FX loops.
However, remember that I mentioned the Eleven Rack is a Protools LE audio interface? Just imagine this and tell me it’s not cool:
The guitarist (of all people, the guitarist) walks in and (maybe unwittingly) has the most sophisticated bit of kit in the whole venue. He brings in his flightcase with his Eleven Rack inside and sets it up on stage. Now here is where it gets sophisticated, so maybe the guitarist will let the rest of the band set it all up, but the options are amazing.
The Eleven Rack can be simultaneously feeding an amp or power amp to keep the guitarist happy, a DI to the PA to keep the soundman happy and the remaining inputs available on the unit can be used to feed the vocal mic, some drum mics and a bass DI, probably more into Protools. You can record the bloody gig yourself and it’s the guitarist who has the solution! That’s just crazy, but also really cool.
Not only can the band record their set, but afterwards, back in the studio the guitar sounds can be changed if necessary or reamped and fed through an amp and a mic becuase the raw DI’d guitar signal was recorded. And the winner is…
I know it is limited in the number of inputs for such a task, but I have been making records with 8 audio tracks and only 2 simultaneous inputs for 6 years, so to me this is good, but apart from the inputs, something that the DIGI003 will give you more of, I can’t think of a more feature-rich, problem-solving, game-changing, audio interface available for the recording musician right now. I just wish it had an ADAT port for 8 more inputs.
Via Bandcamp
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