Oh and if you record at a high sample rate, don't expect to be able to play the project back through your PC's speakers if you just fancy a bit of experimenting, you'll be tied to the focusrite if you want it to play back at the right speed Seriously it took me 15 minutes to find the pan control in the mixer! After a weekend of pretty intensive experimenting I can just about record in full 24-bit 88KHz stereo, apply some trivial effects on a track-by-track basis, and get some sort of mix. Fortunately the suite comes with Cubase 7 LE bundled in, unfortunately it takes ages to download and activate, there's also a pretty steep learning curve for us newbies. My old standby Audacity won't do that unless you build yourself a custom version. In a sense the focusrite is only as good as the software used: windows doesn't allow a 24-bit input signal, so you need something that will hook up to the supplied ASIO driver. For the clip above I recorded both instruments in stereo using the pickup for one channel - that worked a lot better for the waldzither than the mandolin - in fact probably I need to take more of the mandolin pickup signal out of the mix as it lacks some high frequency 'sweetness'. Longer term I hope to add a second mic (thinking about the AT2020 Audio Technica) so I can experiment with stereo recording.

Here's my first impressions, and my one and only recording so far so you can listen while you read:īasically there's very little to say, you plug it in and it 'just works', listening through the supplied monitor headphones the sound is very sweet and detailed, and the supplied mic supplies more detail than the Samson USB mic I was using before. So I finally pulled the trigger on one, and got to give it a workout this weekend. The focusrite scarlett studio and in particular the 2i2 audio interface is often recommended around here (and elsewhere for that matter).

Line 6 pod farm for focusrite scarlett