Recently I was a bit naughty a shelled out around £210 for some kit that would help me with my music project. I had just installed Logic 8 onto my Mac Pro and found that my PS Eye, which I had used for recording purposes before hand was no longer usable so I decided to invest in an audio interface and a proper microphone.

Denmark Street in London is pretty much a haven for a guitarist so yesterday I jumped on the Northern Line and made my way to the newly reopened Tottenham Court Road station and went go get a cheap but decent set up.

I’ve been eternally pestering the staff at London Pro Audio Centre about cables and boxes that would allow me to program MIDI into my Gameboy so I headed there first and saw that they had a Alesis IO|2 on sale for £85 so decided to take advantage of the deal and while I was there I added a mic stand, XLR cable and Sennheiser e606 to complete my set up.

The Alesis IO|2 works like a charm, it has two ‘channels’ each offering XLR, line in and insert inputs. This means that when I get the money I could essentially have two mics running at once, reducing the need to keep playing my guitar over and over again.

The only downside I’m finding at the moment doesn’t lie with the hardware but with Logic 8. For some reason it allows a plethora of options when it comes to inputs and outputs inside the computer but only allows me to select either my IO|2 or my Griffin FireWave, this means that basically unless I use the phones socket on the IO|2 (I don’t have 3.5″ headphones yet, so I’m running my Gameboy cable into my iPod dock) I can’t playback the music I’m trying to play along to!

Some pics

Alesis IO|2

Sennheiser e606 hooked up to my amp