[Funky Blues Guitar]
Hi and welcome to the Audient booth at NAMM 2019, I'm joined by Guillaume here
from Two Notes, our partners in crime in developing Sono our brand new
guitar centric audio interface it's been an absolute pleasure working with you
Oh yeah
I thought we'd take a bit of time to just talk about
the origins of the project
why we thought this kind of product needed to exist.
You've been developing products that have really helped guitarists record
get a really good sound when they don't necessarily have the facilities of a big
commercial studio, they don't necessarily have the time to go through miking up
all their cabs and things like that
what do you find your biggest frustrations are with audio interfaces for recording guitar?
I mean that the guitar world and the recording world are colliding for some
years now like every guitarist nowadays wants to record at home even
professional guitarists more and more will record at home and we found that
well most of the recording gear is marketed for sound engineers and
I think can, I mean guitarists can find it a little bit intimidating to go into that
world where we talk about latency we took about tracks we talk about
many thing, well I mean they should focus on their guitar, they should
- focus on their tone. - Yep not what frequency number that they need to get in that EQ
- Yeah exactly I mean those specs are important when you record but I mean your first
contact with the audio world, the recording world should be about tone I think
yeah tone and feel that's what guitar is about, guitar and bass
and we've been working very hard at two notes to develop a whole range of
product that actually are about tone and feel and hopefully not too complicated
- not unnecessarily complicated - yeah accessible
yeah absolutely and
I believe that there was room for a kind of a crossover product in between the
guitar world and the audio recording world and it was it took us some time
- to figure out wait exactly - yep it did
- we would need to develop because you
you need it to sound good right out of the box, it needed to actually provide
a set of functions that will instantly put the guitarist in an environment that
he knows that that he's comfortable in
and for us taking care of the
speaker simulation part and all the process of the miking which is usually
- the hard part when you are in a tiny home studio - yeah absolutely
Myself, I mean when I play, I don't have a huge facility at home actually I do have
one at the office, but I don't really need one at home but I still play at home
I don't record so much, but I just want to you know plug the guitar I
probably have 20 minutes of free time, I can't make noise too much
and I do just want something that sounds good to plug a few pedals in
probably put on headphones and enjoy playing, and I'm I know amp modelling gets
better and better and we are a part of this evolution, but still, the concept I've
been pushing is, why remove your tube amp, why remove your tube products,
- your pedals, to replace them with a copy of that - Absolutely
it could be a very good copy
it's still a copy, but why not keep them, just plug that into well the Sono
interface in our case or to torpedo in some other cases or a real amp and just
- enjoy playing and record at the same time. - Yeah absolutely I mean our
our approach to Sono has definitely been about keeping allowing people to get
their tone, you know, get their sound with it rather than it being "the Sono Tone"
you know the flexibility that your software, the DSP processing
that you guys have developed is absolutely crucial to being able to
cover a wide range of genres and being able to
plug in, even if you bypass the tube preamp you can still go in to the
line inputs through your CAB processing so yeah if you've got that that favourite
- pedal that you've already got one of your LeLead - preamp pedals absolutely
- there's nothing stopping you from doing that - I think there is on an interesting
thing to say about the concept of the product because some people would
think they will get high gain or that is kind of an amp or something I think it's
important to explain how a guitarist builds a tone, to me it's important to
build a strong foundation, that's where actually that's where the things
happen and needs to be as good as possible otherwise you're just building
on sand, kind of, and to me this Sono product is about this
having a very good foundation
-so that's what we do with the tube to preamp inputs -yeah that's what we aimed for
that's a clean tube preamp input you can still have a bit of fun with it
but it's designed to actually be driven by pedals or other preamps maybe and
- it's also quite good for voice as well, we'll cover that - Yeah yeah absolutely
- but I mean just for the guitar that's really what you need to just plug the
awesome, I mean I do have a quite large pedal board, and I mean just be able to
plug that into a soundcard, I know that instantly I get to what I'm what I want
- what I need is to me the crucial point of this product. - Oh yeah and you know from our perspective
we come from being an audio interface company primarily and
we could see, we were keeping our eye on what was going on
in the guitar world and we've got lots of guitarists in the company and
everyone's kind of putting their systems together at home they're home recording
studios or going out and about recording on location and things and
finding that they needed too many boxes
or what they were
getting just wasn't quite delivering the feel
or quite their sound
but also that those coming more from your side of the market that guitar side
those manufacturers haven't necessarily put in all the features that you really
need and a good audio interface I mean lots of them will only have a DI input
and then go straight into amp modeling which means there's no way of
really making up an acoustic guitar for example or recording guitar and vocals
simultaneously or D.I-ing and miking up your cab at the same time
so those were key things that we really wanted to to bring to the guitarists.
I have a note about that because well I was saying that
amp modellers get better and better and that's true I mean you can find plugins
that really do the job.
What sometimes guitarists forget is that well
you can have the best modeling you want, if the first stage of the sound
the input of the sound card, if you don't put any energy in this and I mean
a little bit of money to make sure this is properly designed you can have the
best amp modeller in the world, it won't work!
You need to feed that that plug-in or whatever you're using you need to
feed it with a proper input tone and so that's what the tube gives us
- Oh absolutely. - high voltage through the tube
that's what it gives us so you can go
and actually send the best signal to whatever at modelling you're using I mean
I don't preach necessary for what we do, there are plenty of awesome product right now
- but at least send the right signal to that place - yeah yeah so yeah hopefully
we have covered the basics, also the re-amp output was
something you know it's used so much in the studio's not just for a re-amping a cab
also you can do re-amping of your pedals like for example your recorded
your guitar tone and you just want to add some FX, there you go
out of the sound card, back into it going through all the effects you want
- that's something I do often in the studio - yeah and of course
you've got all those the features that you'd expect on an
Audient audio interface as well, so the zero latency monitoring
is really key, you know obviously zero... the absolute key thing was to get
that feel right as we've talked about a lot and latency is absolutely key there
and that was our, that was one of the big driving factors for making sure that the
Torpedo processing was in the box, not being done on the host.
I mean to make great tone you
need CPU power, I wouldn't design a product inferior to my standards
and they are pretty high, I want people to enjoy playing
that feeling, that tone you get, but especially the feeling, it comes from enough power
so there is not too much latency, I want the sound to be snappy
something that really works like a cabinet as much as possible
Yeah brilliant.
- Did we talk about the standalone function? - Ahh no no
- Because I think that's a nice addition - Yeah we felt that it was really important
to be able to
as you talked about earlier, you might just want to sit down in your lounge with your
guitar next to you, and Sono sitting there and just you've set up the
presets using the Torpedo Remote software, download them into the unit and
very quickly be able to flip between the three tones that you've chosen, your three rigs
It really helps with getting up and running quickly as well
because one thing that we are always very conscious of when we're designing
our interfaces is minimizing how much effort it takes to get recording or
just get creative, you know with this, the fact that you don't have to be
connected to the computer means that you don't have to spend all the time
fiddling around with the setting, you've got your presets you can get
there really quickly and just get that idea
get developing that idea that you've got going through your head
Absolutely I mean obviously the users will get three presets
that we design right out of the box and many other option if they want from the
software to edit that but at least they've must be able to get the unit
out of the box have that pair of headphones or monitors and just play
I mean I wouldn't mind bringing one of those on one of my pedal boards and just
send that to the PA for example I mean we have line outs, balanced, you just
send that to the PA good, that's it.
Yeah yeah it covers those bases as well Im mean
even with a mic input as well you could have guitar, vocals
- I need to try I didn't try that - Yeah that's a really nice
little portable, I mean it's not designed to be a PA mixer, but for that
situation it actually will do a really good job.
- Well Guillaume it's been an absolute pleasure working with you over this
- Wow two years - Two year project, you know it's
something that we really had to take our time to make sure that we got right and
we hope we have and you guys have done a great job and thank you so much for
- for your time and amazing technology - we love doing it we'll do it again