Express features

[derFunkenstein]

OK before we get started I did find this:

http://www.avid.com/US/products/pro-...atures#Compare

Here's the scenario:

The son of a family friend has been making music on his Macbook in Garage Band using nothing but a small keyboard controller and an external 1/8" mic plugged into the onboard sound. He's graduating high school this year and wants to pursue songwriting as a "serious hobby" (minoring in music, majoring in engineering). I thought I might gift him a more serious tool - an Mbox mini and an SM57 - as a graduation present. So my questions have to do with how PT Express does as a DAW. I don't know much about GB but I'm thinking, for a $15 app, it's a pretty serious DAW as it is. But he said he wanted to learn a more powerful tool. So I was looking over the feature comparison and it seems like PT Express does the majority of what full PT10 does, just with fewer tracks and a little less bundled instruments.

So I thought i'd come to the experts, that is, the people using it to see if it'll do what he want and ask a couple questions:

The instruments are Boom, Xpand!, and Structure Free, and that's it, right? No Minigrand, no DB33? I don't think he'd miss them too much. (edit: and Vacuum is gone, too, yes?)

Because it's 10.3.x, we're OK with Mountain Lion, correct?

What kind of audio editing tools are included? Is there a full implementation of Elastic Audio? That's really the big one - he's seen me do neato stuff with Elastic Audio that Garage Band can't do - it does very basic stretching without much in the way of correction tools beyond basic quantize, and I haven't figured out at all how to render edits in place with GB like Xform offline rendering in PT. It's just a checkmark in the above without a whole lot of detail.

The track counts are not an issue at this point. 8 instruments and 16 audio tracks are going to be plenty. Especially if he's using multi-timbral instruments like Xpand! with MIDI tracks.

I guess that's pretty much all my questions. Let me know what you think - I think it's a pretty good intro to Pro Tools but I haven't used it myself to be sure.

[nst7]

It looks like it has Elastic Audio, but does not have Beat Detective, FWIW.


On a side note, rather than getting him an SM57, you may want use that $100 and get him a large diaphragm condenser mic, that he could use for vocals and a variety of other sources. It would be much more useful and versatile.

Something like the Audio Technica 2020 or AKG Perception 120 are surprisingly good for the price ($99).

[derFunkenstein]

Yeah, that's probably a good point - I was thinking of him being in an untreated room and using a dynamic microphone to prevent a lot of room noise getting into a vocal, but it's for sure not as versatile. I have a 2020 that I use for guitars and I love it, so that's definitely a recommendation I can get behind.

Not really worried about Beat Detective. With only 4 simultaneous record channels possible in the software, and with 2 inputs on the interface, I doubt it's a huge deal. Besides, you can get a lot of Beat Detective manually using keyboard focus mode and tab to transients.

Since there aren't a gazillion and one disclaimers on the page regarding limited features, I've decided it must be at least a fairly full-featured (if not completely full-fat) Elastic Audio implementation.

I think this purchase is a go. Thanks for the reply, nst7, I do appreciate you talking sense into me on the mic purchase.

[nst7]

The nice thing is that having Express, he can upgrade later on to full Protools 10 for $399.

[derFunkenstein]

Also true, it's like buying the boxed version of Pro Tools and getting a free interface in that case. I only paid $199 for the non-EDU Mbox Mini. It seems to be $249 around the internet, but I guess I hit a sale on Unique Squared. lol

I saw that the new inMusic are bundling PT Express with the new M-Track interfaces, but the new M-Track interfaces look like recycled Alesis and Akai devices. They're not out yet, but I'm not holding out much hope. The Mbox Mini will be quite sufficient for a long time to come for him, I think.