MusicLive: Digidesign Goes to Eleven

It's One Louder... but it doesn't come in black   10-Nov-09

Six-thirty in the morning and my alarm goes off...

Now that's unusual for me... see, I'm a bit of a night-owl, and rarely get to bed before 2 or 3am, so seeing this unearthly time on my alarm gives me a bit of fear & loathing.

But at 7:30 Nick's gonna come round in his car and we're off to the 2009 Music Live Show in Birmingham UK, at one of the country's largest indoor venues, the NEC, so get up I reluctantly must.

An even more chilling prospect... it's 'Educational Day' at the show, which means hordes of Yoof, bussed in an Armada of School coaches, will be thronging, pillaging, and generally running amok through the aisles, I suspect with the sole purpose of annoying the f*&k outta me...[yeah, I'm a real grinch in the mornings ;-]

So anyways, I arrive at the show carrying a large camera rig and a sense of impending doom... suspecting I wouldn't see much exciting new kit, and wishing I had a light sabre on the front of the camera to deal with those who think if they wave at me real close up they're gonna be on TV...

But what I didn't expect was to find something really pretty cool, which would stir a bit of gear-lust in the loins and make me think about dusting off my instruments and start playing again (and believe me, it's been a while ;-)

The - and I'll say it unashamedly - 'sexy' shiny orange box in the shape of Avid/Digidesign's new 'Eleven' sure did float my boat.

See I'm an old-school guitarist at heart, and if truth be known, carry a luddite gene which makes me a bit uncomfortable with a wholly computer-based music world, and hanker for a bit of good-ole string-bashing.
Sure, there have been many fine attempts to woo guitarists into the techo-world, and I'm sure they'd all do a fine job, but the Eleven rack is the first one I've seen that has inspired me enough on a show floor to make me want to buy it... and more importantly, to make music with it.

The thing that struck me is that it's a neat way to enter the whole recording world (from a ProTools standpoint, of course) - as well as a bunch of killer sounds and functionality, it comes with a version of ProTools too - and suddently the price (it's around 700 quid) doesn't look too bad at all.

Anyway, I'll stop blathering on and let the video we shot of demonstrator Anders Glantz do the talking.

And I'm sure you'll find a whole bunch of tech-speccery and info right about here...

More Information

• http://www2.digidesign.com/eleven/media/index.cfm
• http://www.digidesign.com/index.cfm?navid=209&itemid=5422

Andy Mac

$899.99 at Music123.com

$899.99 at MusiciansFriend.com