Portable recording for musicians on-the-go.

I don’t know if you’re like me, but every now and again I run into a product that makes me stop and ask, ‘Why didn’t someone think of this sooner?’ That’s the feeling you’ll get when you check out the Onyx Satellite FireWire Recording System, the new two-piece, highly portable recording solution from Mackie.

The home recording blues.

For many years, I’ve been writing songs at home and trying to communicate and work with my bandmates on various projects. I’ll start with a drum machine track, some basic guitar chords and a scratch vocal on tape. Then I’ll pass the tape around the band and wait for an opportunity to get everyone together for some real takes. I almost always end up schlepping my gear over to the bass player’s house. This involves not only moving the necessary equipment, but disconnecting and reconnecting every cable I own at the new location. What a pain!

Once the bass is recorded, I tear everything down and move it all to the keyboardist’s apartment. Record the keys; move again to track the rhythm and lead guitar, then the first harmony vocal, second harmony vocal, etc. Finally, I can go home, track my lead vocal and start mixing. Along the way, I’ll usually have to repair a cable here and there that has succumbed to the ravages of all this plugging and unplugging. Phew!

Well those days have finally come to an end. No, I’m not quitting the band or giving up music, although I’ve thought about it! I’ve just found a better way—the Mackie Onyx Satellite FireWire Recording System.

A better way to track – anywhere, anytime.

The Onyx Satellite is a two-piece FireWire audio interface with two of Mackie’s new studio-grade Onyx mic preamps, and it tracks directly to a FireWire equipped PC or Mac. It works with any ASIO/Core Audio compliant DAW software—and it sounds great! The two-piece system consists of a detachable, portable “Pod” and the Base Station, which stays at home connected to all my mics, line cables and drum machine.

The Satellite pod is small enough to fit into my laptop bag and, since it gets power from the PC bus, I don’t even carry the included power adapter. The new Onyx preamps are ultra-quiet and sound so much better than those in my mixer/recording workstation. The pod has two combo jacks on the back that accept either 1/4” line or XLR inputs and, with the press of a switch on the front of the pod, the 1/4” inputs become dedicated guitar inputs, so I no longer need my old DI boxes. I’ve even used Onyx Satellite to make recordings of our live gigs.

Free music production software.

Onyx Satellite ships with Tracktion, Mackie’s own music production software, which is really easy to learn. Tracktion’s signal path is laid out in logical order from left-to-right and you just drag and drop elements as you need them. Tracktion also works with MIDI, so now I can record MIDI, as well as an audio track of the keyboards and experiment with my sound modules for just the right patch. When I’m finished tracking and mixing, I burn a CD and I’m done.

Now when I want to record the band, I just grab the Satellite pod and my laptop and hit the road. No more bad cables, no more rewiring blues, I’m even starting to write better songs, thanks to my Mackie Onyx Satellite!

Now, why didn’t someone think of this sooner?