Outboard Gear

[yellaman]

my theory would be to stay within the digital environment until mixdown.. then take your stems to a propa studio and mix thru a bad ass desk and group certain tracks and pass them thru some valves and verbs and then put the whole lot thru a bad ass limiter! DONE! ive personally found that this is my favourite way.. I like to add a layer of colour and depth during the actual mixdown using certain valve equipment like manley or uad even tubetechs.. also mix very loud and then very quite to attack the depth and dynamics from both angles..

I dont really consider things like the access virus hardware because yes even though its not exactly a cpu and it has a sound its still a digital machine just like a cpu.. its not voltage driven.

I sumtimes find that software has an endless pallete but limiting myself to certain applications puts things into perspective and allows me to work on MY sound rather than an endless variety of sounds and styles which i can easily lose my way.... Creating 2/3 template projects with my favourite vst's etc and assigning the synths'/eq's that i regularly use to a midi controller (Bitsream 3X) is my way of working.. this way i will have a couple of different templates as a launchpad for my usual styles... easy!

But i might buy a tubtech compressor or eq this year so i can experiment with different textures......

[paulcortex]

i use an acer laptop based system running synapse orion plat 7 (and more than likely ableton live 7 soon)...with a focusrite saffire sound doohicky and occasionally playing live i use my roland TB 303 and TR 707 synced up with a BOSS se 700 multi effects (best kept secret in acid techno...well....it was till i just said it ;) )
never had many problems with timing...although a regular power source that wont trip my focusrite is always a major mission....nothing worse than the massive sound of....SILENCE! lol...it depends how lazy i am really...and i dont like humping the equivalent of a jean michel jarre gig around on the london public transport system LOL