Since I’m spending the week between Christmas and New Year away from the main studio, I decided to put together a road-worthy kit to take with me for sonic sketching on the road. Of course there’s the obligatory laptop, along with Cubase, 32-key USB MIDI keyboard, and Korg nanoPAD, and an external hard drive for audio. I decided to use the built-in audio chip set on the laptop, mainly because of space considerations – but also, with the ASIO4ALL driver, I’m getting some really respectable latencies – certainly good enough for idea generation. I’m sticking with set of quality cans – Sony’s venerable MDR-V600 headphones – again to make packing easier, but also to keep from annoying other people in the house while I’m riffing and tracking. I also brought along an external keyboard with the Cubase commands overlaid on the keys. I’ve become so accustomed to the SmartAV Tango that I’ve practically forgotten the Cubase QWERTY command layout.
TLA's portable sketchpad
I’ve had the Arturia Analog Factory Experience keyboard for a while, but only brought it out occasionally. This kind of situation is precisely what it’s made for, and I definitely appreciate being able to plug in a USB cable right into the laptop and wail away, albeit on a 32-note keyboard. The nanoPAD is the latest addition, and I enjoy the touch pads for tapping out percussion parts, and the gray touch pad to the left is a great X-Y controller (with after touch). It will be fun using that for imparting some wild expression passages on all kinds of parts. I just downloaded the editor to remap the keys, so that will be something to try out.
This will also be a chance to gain some familiarity with the built-in instruments in the latest version of Cubase. I just didn’t have time to install more than the Native Instruments Kore Player libraries before I left, so this will be a chance to explore some new sonic territory. I find the Spector and Mystic synths to be very interesting, but I haven’t had a chance to dig into them all that much – this week may be my chance to do that. And then there’s all of the garden variety stuff from HALionOne, which I’ll use for the basic tracks before migrating the project back into the main studio and re-mixing with the larger/more detailed libraries on the main DAWs there.
The last and most important piece of this puzzle was the latest addition – the M-Audio Studio Pack backpack – which fits *all* of this gear into it – and is small enough to be used as carry-on baggage for flights. It’s really great to have everything compartmentalized, so it makes for easy unpacking/re-packing when going through security. I think there are a few TSA security people that are running out to the local music store to pick up a nanoPAD today…
