Recording - February 2010 - 30

Avid’s Digidesign Eleven Rack that if you turn off (bypass) an effect such as reverb or delay within a patch, the tail continues to decay as it should; it is only interrupted when changing patches. Conclusion The DSP horsepower under the hood of Eleven Rack is fast enough so that the player’s feel is uncompromised. Flexibility of connectivity is unprecedented and navigation is fairly easy and even intuitive to master. I actually began using it without browsing through the included manual and was able to understand how everything is laid out on my own. And once you understand it, tweaking and adjusting parameters—both in Pro Tools and via the hardware interface—is fast and easy. It’s capable of amazing simulated sounds. Though each of the many “real things” is still undoubtedly better, the great sonic variety offered by the Eleven Rack, the multi-tasking excellence and the flexible convenience, all at a really great street price of $899, convince me to highly recommend this unit for all recording musicians who will be working with electric guitars and who seek to use Pro Tools. Price: $1259 ($899 street) More from: Avid / Digidesign, www.avid.com; www.digidesign.com The included mic preamp is very similar in sound to that of the Digi 003 Rack+, but is not identical. Though they are so close sonically that it seems that it would require highly trained ears to discern the difference, you might say that the ones in the 003 Rack+ are slightly better. If you keep playing while you scroll through some features (such as effect or amp type within one patch) you can cause transition noises. When I asked a representative at Avid, he replied: “I think the severity of this depends on the amp and effect and settings. In most cases, I notice some delay as when I change the effect type but very little noise. Considering that this is a function most users will be doing while editing a Rig vs. performing, we hope that this is an acceptable tradeoff.” While I consider that reasonable, I suspect that some users might want to control any and all parameters with external MIDI controllers to take full advantage of the flexible real-time features. This could present an inconvenience in the flow of a performance; you could find the transition a bit bumpy if you change an amp type (from an AC30 to a Plexi, for example) or effects type (i.e. from a digital delay to a tape delay) within the same patch; doing this falls into the “I’m making a new rig” category—it takes a few milliseconds and might create a slight noise. The best way around this is to create separate patches, that way you only focus on transitioning between patches, which sounds very smooth and transitions quite fast. There are patches such as “I2: Shuttle Home”, with very long exquisite reverb tails (using Eleven SR) that create a great ambiance, the type that makes you want to play one note and let it ring on and on while you contemplate striking the next… But when switching patches, reverb tails (as well as any other elongated effects such as delay feedback) are interrupted and cut off. It would be nice to have a smooth transition/crossfade of effects between patches, but I was told that this would require a second set of processing chips, seriously increasing the price of the product. Note Fernando Curiel (fernando@musicopro.com) is an inspired guitarist, recording engineer, and the Editor of Recording’s Spanish-language sister publication Músico Pro (www.musicopro.com). Fernando would like to thank his contacts at Avid/Digidesign for assistance during this review especially Hiro Shimozato, for his attentiveness and coolness. Digging Deeper: Q&A with Hiro Shimozato (Guitar Products Manager at Avid) This is such an in-depth product, with so much potential, that I was very motivated to dig deep and get creative with it. Not only did the right sounds inspire playing and writing riffs and solos, it also made me want to experiment with combining an assortment of different virtual and hardware guitar pedals, with varying signal paths and rigs, as well as different ways of implementing the Eleven Rack in real world scenarios relevant to all guitar players. The following is a Q&A with Hiro Shimozato, who is the Guitar Products Manager at Avid and is credited with Industrial Design, User Interface and Product Management for the Eleven Rack. The Q&A took place during the review process, and reveals just how capable the Eleven Rack is. It seems like everything I threw at him, no matter how much of a curve ball it was, he was able to confidently reply with a “Yes, that can be done” (whether it’s a workaround or not), or a “Yes, we noticed that and” either “we’re working on that” or “this is why”. All the answers were verified and proved true. If you are reading this it’s probably because you have considerable interest in this product, therefore I have no doubt that the following will be as interesting to you as it was for me.—FCRECORDING FEBRUARY 2010 I noticed that the Speaker Breakup function, a feature that sets the Eleven plug-in apart, is not included in Eleven Rack; I’m curious as to why? Hiro Shimozato: Speaker cone breakup is currently only available with the Eleven plug-in (RTAS or TDM). I’m not sure how much experience you have had with the plug-in but this feature is extremely CPU intensive. With Eleven Rack, we couldn’t get all 7 FX and the Amp running simultaneously without a lot of instability so we had to remove it. We are looking into optimizing this part of the DSP algorithm to be more efficient and hope to one day be able to include it in Eleven Rack. Since the Eleven Rack is so versatile as a standalone unit, I was surprised that there were no included features for practicing, such as built-in metronome or a metronome input, or a dedicated input for a CD or MP3 player to play along or practice without the need of a computer. I know there are no stereo inputs for that purpose, but is there a workaround to plug in and be able to monitor and control the level of an external audio source like those mentioned?

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Recording - February 2010

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