After touring and recording together for 13 years, the New Orleans-based quartet CowboyMouth began to document their live shows with a single FireStation interface from PreSonus Audio.
In addition to the live recording, lead guitarist and vocalist John Thomas Griffith also needed an interface that would be conducive to his creative workflow as he composed new music for the band. “I want to spend my money on one unit that can handle some 10 different things and that’s what led me to the PreSonus FireStation,” he said. “I can’t even tell you how many different things it can do at home and on the road.”
For the live recording project, Griffith runs his FOH console directly into the FireStation interface and then into his Sony Vaio laptop (AMD Athlon 4 1.3GHz processor with 512 MB of RAM) via FireWire cable. The signal enters Cubase VST, running on Microsoft Windows XP, via 4-pin iLink port. His FOH engineer, Adam Kamm, sets up a 6-bus out of his console and runs that into channels 3 through 8 on the PreSonus unit. Mixing the instruments live and running just the six channels into Cubase VST preserves hard drive space over the course of the tour.
In addition to the six channels coming off of the board directly, Griffith wanted to be absolutely sure that he captured the feverish pitch of the crowd. He has two stereo mics (positioned in the rafters for indoor settings and pointing off the stage into the house for outdoor festival gigs), a KSM 32 and an Audio-Technica 4033, which he runs directly into the FireStation’s mic pre’s on the first and second channels.
For more on the FireStation, visit www.presonus.com. For more touring news, visit mixonline.com/live_sound_tour_profiles/index.htm.
