I agree with what cold fashioned said above but I think not so much cohesion is good as it accentuates the simultaneous multiplicity of the sonic experience haha… good stuff, sounds like it would be good at half time and half again as well…
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Hey, yes, in fact the track on debate right now is made with those two only. I built the beats, loops and song in the Blackbox and used its multiple outs to record directly into the Bluebox. I turned off the Blackbox compressor, panned everything to the center in the BBox except for the drums and no reverb or delay, saving all that for the Bluebox, and only filter for character.
The two together is more or less a complete micro studio, as long as you’re comfortable staying within the sampling realm.
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Thanks, yep, I actually made like a one minute version, thinking “This is enough actually, where do I go from here?” Notable without most of the drums, mainly the ambience and just subtle beats to drive the sense of velocity to some extent.
It tends to get that way. You got a complete something. It turns out all right. But then there’s a section that’s slightly better than the rest, and you realise that’s where your next song is, and this one maybe never sees the light of day.
But also, to just finish something, no matter if it’s any good or not, is also a way to move forward.
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Hearing the two versions for comparator purpose was really useful for me. For the record, I don’t think one sounds fundamentally better or worse - there are parts of the Bluebox mix that I prefer, and parts of the SSL mix I prefer. So, I’d put that down to workflow and mixing choice differences. My own mixes are barely passable so the Bluebox will definitely meet my needs. Regaridng the EQ and anything channel based (obviously send effects would be different) but are you able to ‘flatten’ the channels so that when you copy each individual track off the SD card with eq applied?
Another interesting comparison would be if you took the Bluebox version and zero’d all the EQs and compression. Perhaps even taking the reverb etc off too. So you could compare a raw recording from the Bluebox with a processed recording from the Bluebox. Don’t feel obliged to do that, I’m just thinking out loud.
Thanks for your continued updates on this!
Hey, no I don’t think you can render out the results with the actual eq and similar applied. The actual wav files remain raw. I haven’t tried to mix down a batch of tracks into say the master, and that might potentially yield the result you’re after. But my guess so far is, this can’t be done.
I can easily post a version where all the fx, eq, compression, gain and panning applied in the Bluebox are removed, for reference. I’ll do that tomorrow and we’ll see what comes out of it.
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Between the blackbox and bluebox, though, you could, right? Or sacrifice two channels on the bluebox and send the main out to them (and make sure those channels aren’t going to main), to print your current mix. You’d run into quality/generation problems with this, of course, but no more so than with tape.
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Yes, that’d work. You could potentially record all Bluebox tracks one by one into the Blackbox, and either just export them from there or perhaps even cooler, give them the sampler treatment. Beat count, slicing, granular and bi-directional looping, each track applied to its own start point from the sequencer, would generate very interesting results.
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Will have that pair in a few weeks… I think it’s going to be the core of a travel rig, once travel is a thing again, probably with a poly beebo, typhon, and micromonsta. Should be a lovely little ecosystem.
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Happy to give a listen a little later!
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You’re gonna kill it with that combo. With a synth as well, you’re basically set for everything.
Like others have said, the highs seem a little too pronounced and there seems room for lots of low end. But the bones are so damn good. There’s so much good here, could benefit from some tweaking but also if it were released exactly like this it’d be ok too. You got skills talent and taste! I’d like to hear this with some more low end and bass, but even on my phone speaker, it was solid and in the upper echelon of all music I hear on the forums (not that it’s in any way a competition!)
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Whoa. Dude.
Does anyone know for what the midi in/out can be used on the bluebox?
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It also seems, the Bluebox takes cc from a controller, allowing you to map say something from Novation through the Learn function, which works similar to Blackbox and Ableton. Haven’t tried this yet but 1010 Music confirms this can be done.
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It seems the Bluebox actually records to master as well, not just through the six outputs. I haven’t tried this myself, but essentially if this works, it means you can render a master directly in the Bluebox, if you’re happy with the end results.
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Thank you.
I own the blackbox and the “learn” feature is very good to map functions for direct access to an external control.
If e.g. it would be possible to map the volume controls of the tracks to a controller with midi-faders, one would have the volume function directly accessbile in which ever screen you are.
Right, yeah, I though this was the case — I had forgotten it when I was thinking about loopback above. I could still see it happening sense to take your master recording on a blackbox instead, since the bluebox doesn’t have much in the way of manipulation tools yet. Are the directory structures compatible between the two devices? Like, can you just move a card back and forth and have it find stuff?
Would still love to know what the implementation looks like, if you have time to test this.
Yes, that seems to be the purpose, though I’ve yet to try this. I won’t be using the Bluebox like this myself, but I can totally see this is a valid scenario, in live contexts especially.
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