Writing and recording in my hotel room. Not. And why you should skip Digidesign's MBox 2 Micro.

Meant to post this earlier.

I confess, I’ve always thought that being holed up alone in a hotel room in a strange town would be the ultimate songwriting/recording scenario. Au contraire. Perhaps if the weather were a blizzard, rain or nuclear winter, such a scenario would be great. But here in Madison, Wisconsin, the weather is balmy, breezy and bodaciously nice -- from sunup to long past sundown. So even though I packed my laptop, external drive, Steinberger guitar, book on songwriting and Digidesign MBox 2 Micro*, I wrote not a note and recorded nada. Lyric writing was another matter. As you can see from the photo at left, I found a nice coffee shop (okay, a Starbucks) and once I figured out how to use my Blackberry Curve as a broadband modem connected via BlueTooth, I was in business. I blogged, surfed, worked on verses and choruses and emailed from this upper terrace -- as I am now -- while back at my empty hotel room my recording gear sat and gathered moss.

* If you, like me, fancy the idea of getting some serious song work done on the road, you might be tempted to get a Digidesign MBox 2 Micro. SAVE YOUR MONEY. The Micro has no record capabilities at all -- which I knew when I bought it, but didn’t fully appreciate the full suckage of this fact -- and is basically nothing more than a dongle that allows Pro Tools to work. Yet it costs $249! Sure it comes with Pro Tools, but who cares? If you’re buying this detuned piece of junk, YOU ALREADY HAVE PRO TOOLS. Damn, I’m pissed. Anyway, for less than fifty bucks more, I could have got the MBox 2 Mini, which would have been a FAR better choice, as it has audio inputs yet is only slightly larger. If Digi were cool, they would sell you this device for about $100 sans Pro Tools, but they’re not, so you pay through the nose for software you most likely already have. Bad, Digi, bad.