Recording - August 2012 - 33

How about now? Now? Now? Now?...”— it can eat network bandwidth and CPU power on your laptop. Fortunately you can dial down how often it does this, which makes mouse movements and graphical updates more jerky but gives back a lot of CPU juice. The framework When the MuseBox starts up, the LCD displays the current loaded preset and Tag (we’ll talk about Tags in a second). You can use the front-panel knobs to call up presets as needed, and with a MIDI controller attached, you can easily go through a performance or studio session without ever having to mess with a monitor or mouse. When it’s time to create and tweak sounds, that’s when you hook up the computer hardware or use Muse Remote Control to get into the MuseBox and program it. The MuseBox Graphical User Interface is where all the action happens. As you can see in the screenshot at right, it presents you with a single window that encompasses everything the MuseBox can do at any given time; as we walk through this layout we’ll come to understand how the MuseBox works. The center of the panel has four slots, two Synths (virtual instruments) and two Audio Inputs (effects plug-ins that process input signals). The Synths have virtual keyboard displays where you can set up active ranges (for splits and layering), while the Audio slots have selector dropdowns for the various inputs and LED input level meters. Each slot lets you assign a particular plug-in to the slot by dragging it from the list at left and dropping it into the slot; clicking on its icon causes its main programming interface to open, so you can tweak to your heart’s content. Each slot has four Assignable Parameter knobs and two Mix Effect knobs. The first four are assigned to whatever you wish using MIDI Learn; you can have many more than four parameters under control at any given time, but the first four are mapped to the knobs. The Mix Effect knobs, when active, are send controls for the two Mix Effects (see below). Each slot has its own level and pan controls, and a CPU meter to show load. Over on the right is the Mix pane, where you can have a series of two more plug-ins that are applied to the mix of four slots. Each of the two mix effects can be either a send/return effect controlled by the Mix Effect knobs on each slot, or an insert effect across the mains with its own wet/dry mix. Normally only the front or rear pairs of inputs are active at any given time. However, you can enable Passive Mix mode, in which the front inputs are routed to the Audio Input slots and any signals at the rear inputs are simply blended into the audio outputs as is, with no level or pan control. This lets you run, say, a submixer or audio player through the

MuseBox and gang its output on top of what the MuseBox is doing. Presets can be sorted by conventional patch bank, or by Tags. A Tag is a grouping of presets according to any particular need the user might have. The MuseBox comes with a variety of Tags organizing its thousands of presets into instrument types, e.g. Acoustic Pianos, Synth Pads, Electric Guitars, or Acoustic Basses, or into specific signal routing applications, e.g. Vocal+Guitar with Keys. But you can create your own Tags for things like “Tuesday Nights at Open Mic” or “Mr. Smith’s Demo Tracking”, and organize presets for quick recall depending on what you need. Any preset can have many different Tags and appear wherever and whenever you need it—a very handy organizational trick. The content The MuseBox comes with six virtual instruments: Applied Acoustics Systems AAS Player, Camel Audio Alchemy Player, LinPlug Alpha 3 Free, TruePianos Amber Lite, U-He Triple Cheese, and a special instrument called MusePlayer, designed by Univers-Sons, that we’ll discuss in detail below.

There are 13 audio effects plug-ins to choose from. Camel Audio contributes the CamelCrusher, CamelPhat, and CamelSpace multi-effects; Kjaerhus has its Classic Chorus, Classic EQ, Classic Flanger, and Classic Phaser; and Wave Arts offers version 4 of its MasterVerb reverb and TrackPlug eq/dynamics channel strip. The collection is rounded out with Mu Technologies Mu-Voice harmonizer, GVST GLoop looper, Steinberg Karlette multitap tape-emulation delay, and finally Peavey includes its own ReValver HP guitar effects plug-in. These plug-ins cover pretty much all the bases for composing, playing, and recording music, if not full mixdown or mastering; they’re from well-respected names and virtually all of them have been around a while and established great reputations. Everyone has his or her own favorites, but based on my experiences before and during my MuseBox tests I find it hard to fault these offerings. MusePlayer The creators of the MuseBox understood that for the majority of players who just want to play, the winning strategy would be to provide a central sample-playing

RECORDING August 2012

Recording - August 2012

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