During a visit to Narragansett in preparation for the Newport Jazz Festival a week or so ago, the opportunity finally arose to put my new M-Audio M-Track II to use.
My three year old son was looking forward to seeing Robert Searight of Snarky Puppy. He’s already declared that he wants to be as good of a drummer as him, and I applaud his (extreme) ambition. The Puppies tightly funk-jazzed their way through a handful of instrumentals in front of Fort Adams as the sun threatened to set. We capitalized on the energy the bands brought by playing some music of our own.
What better way to celebrate modern jazz than to learn a Led Zeppelin cover and adapt it for two acoustics and a mandolin?
I plugged the M-Track II into my Surface Pro (1st gen) and ran everything off of battery power. We gave Jim one mic and positioned it so that it picked up more of his vocals than his guitar. The second condenser sat between Steve and I, slightly favoring Steve’s mandolin.
So far, I have two concerns with the M-Track II. First, it doesn’t have any MIDI inputs, which the competing PreSonus Audiobox USB includes. Second, the Zeppelin recording came out nicely, but the other two jams we recorded had a hiss on the mic pointed and me and Steve. This could be due to a number of factors not directly attributable to the interface (too hot with direct sunlight? bad cable? bad microphone?), but either way I’m leery.
Hopefully I’ll know more when I get to record something else. Until then, though, Steve has a few originals he’s been working on that might get some drum tracks later this week. In addition, I’m still telling myself I’ll rerecord some Rama Ram Jat. We’ll see!
-Mike