?Well, like an idiot I volunteered to run live sound for my buddies band, Promise To Burn. They have been working their tails off making sure their first show is a great one. Seriously, the asked an electrician to come in and analyze the wiring of the place they are playing to ensure that it has the necessary power for the show. The whole band took a week off a work to finish preparing. They've spent 2 months getting ready for this. Somehow, it made logical sense to help them out with running live sound. DAMN IT!

Okay, so they were going to use an Allen and Heath board (nothing wrong with that), but I refused to do to run live sound for them. Why? Because I'm so used to having compression, fully parametric eq, gates, etc on every channel that it's very hard for me to work well in the live sound arena. I just never have enough tools.

Then they came across a digital board that took care just every need I could think of off the top of my head. They ordered it immediately and conned me into learning how to use the damn thing. It came in today so I fired it up in the studio.

The checked all over the internet and eventually found it for less than $2,000. The Yamaha 01V96 may seam a little expensive, but not when you look at the features. You get 12 channels of preamps, 2 stereo ins and the ability to have 40 channels somehow. You can expect the Yamaha up to 24 channels using optional cards. I know the band bought a Behringer 8 channel preamp / converter that will connect via some digital input. (You can tell I really know what I'm doing!!)

The selling point for this console is the fact that you get 4 bands of fully parametric EQ, compression, and gating on every channel. To get that kind of power with a conventional mixer is going to cost you thousands of dollars. Don't forget that it has 8 aux sends. That's a lot of effects!!! The Yamaha comes with reverb and delay that you can actually tweak quite a bit. I hate preset only boxes!

I was very excited to be trying the Yamaha 01V96 after I saw that it can be used as a controller for Cubase SX3. I thought there may be a future with me and the Yamaha since Cubase SX3 is my new audio recording software of choice.

So, I brought the Yamaha digital console to my studio and fed it some outputs from my Delta 1010 soundcard so that I could practice mixing on it without having to deal with human beings. (aaaahhhh!!)

After 2 long, hours of pushing buttons, I think I've got a decent hang of the Yamaha 01V96. I must say that some things are very intuitive. A two minute video would probably explain 90% of the features pretty well (and would have saved me 2 hours of hard work). So far, it appears that applying the effects is a little weird. For example, when setting EQ you get a dedicated knob for everything (I like this!!) but when you using compression, reverb, delay, or gating you have to cycle through menus. That makes it time consuming and a little unnatural to me. Of course, all of this for under $2,000 is a total steal in my opinion. Maybe when the band gets rich we can upgrade to the next console and I'll get 5 more knobs.

I've got the feeling that this is going to be one great console in the end.