In this short series ‘Old and New’ some of the team are going to share an old, reliable piece of gear that we use all the time and something that has come into our lives in the past year. Next up is Julian Rodgers:
New - Pro Tools Carbon
I’m going to use ‘new’ advisedly here as the turnover of gear in and out of my studio isn’t high. I get a certain amount of review gear through each year but that’s not staying so the relationship, while sincere, is temporary. Stuff which is staying is a different matter. Those relationships often start more slowly but by their nature the develop over time. Here’s an example of how something new(ish) can bring focus on to old gear too.
When it launched at the end of 2020 I recognised the Pro Tools Carbon as a really significant product. As illustrated by its place in our recent article 5 Audio Interfaces For Tracking Worth Checking Out And Why. For Pro Tools users the Carbon fills a gap between HDX and Native routes. There are lots of people for whom Carbon looks like an expensive way to get what they probably already have - an interface with 8 mic preamps and ADAT expansion. This is true but only if you are prepared to compromise on how (or if) you use Pro Tools, and to what extent you are prepared to deal with latency. If tracking entirely within Pro Tools, managing headphone mixes from Pro Tools and tracking through plugins, then Carbon is uniquely attractive.
I’ve had a Carbon for a couple of years. I don’t use it every day, because much or what I do for the blog involves use of loopback. Podcasts, making videos and the like. This has changed recently because of the flexibility introduced to Pro Tools with Aux IO but until recently it was easier just to use my Focusrite Red 4Pre, which was right there in the rack anyway.
The early days of the Carbon were weird because, as Francois Quereueil pointed out in our recent podcast, Carbon, a tool designed for tracking groups of people playing together, was launched in the middle of the pandemic! So Carbon was a slow starter but happily I have been using it more and more and it’s every bit as capable as a tracking solution as I expected. It now lives in a 3U flight case with an old 8 channel headphone amp, meaning that I can split the 4 discrete headphone mixes out to a maximum of 12 people, and an extra 8 preamps are racked up with it via ADAT. You can expand to a 24 pre system but 16 covers what I need. The new Carbon Pre looks very tempting but at the moment ADAT expansion (clocked via Word Clock - ADAT clocking is a drag) is doing what I need.
Old: 2012 13” MacBook Pro
So that’s the new, What about the old? That is my ancient 2012 13” MacBook Pro which has gained a new lease of life as a tracking machine. For band practices in particular it’s incredibly easy to bring this this underpowered little computer along and record what we used to call ‘Working Tapes’, though tapes are obviously no longer involved. These recordings of practices are fun, very motivating when the performance is good, unsettlingly honest when its not but the point is that they sit somewhere between a live recording and a studio demo. Minimal miking and monitoring at modest levels over the PA (yes there’s lots of bleed, but it matters less than you’d imagine) mean that from the musician’s point of view they are at a practice, not a recording session (no red light fever!) and because of the near zero latency performance of the Carbon, Instead of having to figure out how to get audio splits from the mixer, I just substitute the Carbon for the mixer, pulling the Pro Tools faders down on the drums, guitar and bass but routing the vocals and keys to the PA, all with zero latency, with EQ, reverb and a little compression. And of course, because all of this is happening with the help of Carbon’s HDX style DSP my underpowered little MacBook Pro is still doing useful audio work 10 years on.
While I haven’t yet taken this rig to a gig, I think I would. The flightcased Carbon isn’t especially vulnerable but as someone who used to carry his own Kensington lock I’m rather cautious about taking laptops to gigs. I’d feel less nervous about taking a 10 year old computer than a super-desirable Apple Silicon machine. So in that way at least my 10 year old MacBook Pro is better than a current machine!