:seguinsound.com/blog

For a long time I have known about the Mackie Control Universal. I have seen it in the Sweetwater catalog for years, as well as in various pictures of “pro studios”. As I’ve been getting busier and busier with more music and sound design jobs, I have been looking into it more and more to see if it could really speed up my workflow.

With a little extra cash in the bank, I made the leap. As fortune would have it, the folks at Sweetwater actually even had a b-stock available to save me some cost. Setup was quick and easy with simply a power plug and two MIDI cables running into my trusty little MOTU audio interface. Of course, being all excited about it and everything I somehow forgot to plug BOTH cables into the interface (though both were plugged into the Mackie). After some cursing at myself, followed by laughter at my stupidity, all was working very well with Logic Pro. Apple even provided a handy reference guide for what the myriad of buttons on the Mackie Control do in Logic which was very handy since I didn’t quite understand the meaning of ALL of the buttons right away!

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Recently, SeguinSound acquired a Zoom H4 Recorder. I had been looking at various portable recorders for quite some time that were capable of performing the following functions:

1. Be battery powered so that I might take the recorder into the field to record sound effects without lugging a laptop and audio interface with me.
2. Include built-in microphones to be used (even if they weren’t of incredibly good quality) for making things like recording my student’s lessons very easy (I teach guitar, piano and voice) so that I could post the recording on my website for them to review later.
3. Provide sampling rates of 24-bit/96khz for high-definition recording.
4. Provide XLR, phantom powered inputs for powering my shotgun microphone in doing said field work back at point #1.
5. Standard stuff like not look impossible to use and get decent reviews by others, etc.
6. Not be incredibly costly.

There were a few contendors on the table that ALMOST met these specifications, including the M-Audio, Edirol and Marantz. Fortunately, before I was able to pick up one of these, Zoom introduced the H4 at the low-ball price of $299. Amazing!

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