So we were super excited about it at winter NAM and now it's finally here in the studio.
We have the Alesis IO Dock. Now this is an audio interface that connects to your iPad
so you can record music on the go or in your home studio, let's check it ou. So the alesis
IO dock is made of a sturdy plastic construction which makes it both lightweight and durable.
Now one of the important things to note about the IO Dock is its ability to sync with the
iPad, any app that you purchase in the app store is going to work with the IO Dock, the
most important of course being garageband which allows you to record your sessions into
this software. Now the way that this works with garageband is because of all the ins
and outs that you see on this interface. On the back you have a monitor out for your speakers,
you also have a direct monitoring switch so you can hear your audio through those speakers.
Or not, your choice. We also have two line inputs back here, now they're combination
XLR and ¼ inch for either guitar or microphone. You have a gain knob for each of those inputs
and you also have a switch for if you want to use either guitar or microphone. Now you
also have phantom power, 48 volts which is switchable, footswitch which is really great
so you can punch in a certain point in your recording if you do that in your session and
one of the things that I really like is the video out, so you can hook this thing up to
an external monitor to see what's going on with the iPad with a much bigger screen. Also
you have your DC power and on the left side you have your MIDI in and out. And what's
really cool is this USB MIDI which allows you to hook the whole IO dock up to your computer
so you can use all of your apps, like the keyboard apps and the drum machine apps connected
to your other software on your main computer. And on the right side you have a headphone
jack in, ¼ inch and you have a main level and headphone level knob for that. But we're
going to get this thing hooked up, get some MIDI controllers and a guitar up to it, show
you how easy it is to get started recording with a Alesis IO Dock. Alright so what we
did is we hooked up the Alesis Q25 ,which is a MIDI controller, up to the IO dock. It
got us a basic drum track and I hooked a guitar up just to play a real simple guitar part
and I'm going to end up laying over more things like bass and a lead part and here is how
that sounds. Very cool, so what we're going to do is jump to that amplifier section in
garage band, and we've got all of our different presets in here. Now there's tons of stuff
to play around with in garageband, I'm not really going to get into that, it's more about
how this IO dock works to record. So I'll just go ahead and record for you, show how
everything works. Very cool, so once you're done with that you go back to your main menu
screen and you can hear how it all sounds together. Pretty rough, not too tight, but
it's a cool way to get your recording started very easily. So what I can do for you guys
now is pull up the keyboard section. So we've got our keyboard here, and our alesis 25 is
recording all that. So what we're going to do is lay down a synth part on top of this
recording. I went ahead and put a synth in here, and that is really easy to do when you
have an external controller like this. Just plug it to the in on the IO dock and you're
ready to record. Now I'm going to go ahead and get this started, hit record here. It's
that easy to get started with a guitar and a controller and if you want to plug a microphone
into this thing you can do that. You can record a song with just your iPad and the Alesis
IO dock. The only limitation with this is that you have to have the DC power supply
connected whenever you want to record. It would have been nice to have an external battery
source with this, but you can always go online, buy a battery pack, hook it up to this thing
and you can get mobile with it. Now if you want to find out more information about the
Alesis IO Dock check us out on Uniquesquared.com, you can also find us on twitter, and on facebook
where we're posting all sorts of giveaway and contests. You can go to our blog too and
find a huge write up on the Alesis IO Dock and find out more information about this product
right here. My name is Taylor, be you, be unique, at uniquesquared.com.