The Wish List

Having taken a look around yesterday at the various bits of music software / hardware available, I've made my wish list for the upgrade of my stuff. In order of upcoming purchase.

Presonus Firewire Tube Audio Interface
My old audio interface board fits in a desktop machine, and never worked so well really - one of the two stereo inputs was attenuated, so I was always panning to get a balanced signal when recording stereo feeds. As well, my old midi interface was separate, and increasingly unreliable. This unit has sixteen audio feeds (as opposed to just stereo, so I can do small ensemble live recordings (I've got the headphone monitoring panel already) to different tracks, and I have enough inputs to manage a complex drum or keyboard mic setup) and it has the MIDI on board. The firewire let's me take it mobile with my laptop, for recording my speaking gigs and/or location recording of performers.

Once I've got the interface gear, I can start recording the outlines of the tunes. I tend to play with a tune in Cubase in the early phases much like a word processor - will throw in a bunch of ideas and start to move them around until I like the basic flow and feel of the whole thing. Once that's done, I re-record everything for production, so it doesn't matter at this point if it sounds a bit campy.

Alesis ControlPad and BFD2
My drums need an upgrade. I've traditionally played the drums by hand using an old Yamaha pad trigger, but I've always wanted more pads and programming than it offers. As well, the velocity sensitivity and acoustic fidelity of BFD2 make it pretty much droolable.

Steinberg Cubase Studio 4
The Presonus comes with Cubase Essentials, but I'll smack against the 48 track limit fast. I can get started there, but the Cubase upgrade will be needed. The outline phase doesn't need many tracks, but once I start doing multiple takes on multiple ideas in the arrangements... ;-)

Music Lab RealStrat
I really want to emphasize a more acoustic guitar and stratocaster lead sound in my next round of work, and as I mentioned earlier, I need to prioritize either keyboard chops or guitar chops. My intention is to use the guitar tracks with the piano, bass and drums as the rhythm section of my "group's" sound, so when I'm putting down the backbone of the tunes, I'll need the guitars.

Vir2 Acoustic Legends HD
I'll use this instrument for the acoustic guitars. It's incredible, really.

Quantum Leap Goliath and Gypsy
This is a basic "across the board" upgrade of my sounds, including a killer Bosendorfer 290 Piano, a great Hammond B3 sound, some great basses and world sounds, orchestra (including the first passable flute I've ever heard) and I'm hoping some good drum kits. The classical guitars and violin in Gypsy are to melt over.

Chris Hein Horns
I can rough in the horns with what I have, but these are simply the most outstanding artificial brass I've ever heard - it's entirely targeted at the jazz and pop brass section sound, and completely kicks butt. I'll be tempted to redo the brass arrangements on No Limits with it. It's so sad that the brass comes at the end of the process - I really want to play with this now. ;-)

... ok, I'm back to doing real work now - I'm going to finish the menu system today. I get to do it while listening to the Goliath demo songs though. :D