For my recording needs I’ve been after something really portable with straightforward controls and a quick way to get sounds up and running. I am anything but a sound geek: in fact I am a sound engineer’s worst nightmare: a musician. Only joking! But now I know the difference between XLR, headphone socket and midi (and it took a while), I’m ready to start playing around on my own with a computer and a guitar. If I’m doing stuff on the fly, and I’m talking tour buses and kitchen tables here, I’m not interested in waiting two hours while somebody connects a bundle of cables into some complicated looking units. I just want to plug in and start playing.

Okay, first things first. I need to plug in the nio 2/4 and get it up and running. This is as simple as connecting it to your laptop’s USB slot. I’m using it with Ableton Live, also in the spirit of ease and speed. As a band, we use ProTools and Logic in the studio, and they’re both great tools, but I’ve been using Live at home after giving it a trial run and realising that I could be recording and arranging parts pretty much instantly, without having to spend two weeks reading the manual first. It seems set up so that you learn as you go. It took me less than half an hour to program in a beat, loop it, and arm a track ready for a guitar part. Simple!

The inputs on the nio 2/4 are self-explanatory. You can plug in a guitar and a mic and have one, the other or both armed for recording. With Live, the easiest way seems to be to use the nio as both your input and output audio source, and route the output on to your monitors or headphones. This way what I play or sing will be coming out of the same hole as whatever I’ve already got playing in Live. When using mics of course, headphones are safer. Now, you could play a guitar with your own pedal set-up straight into the nio, or there’s nioFxRack (these kind of things always have compound titles with capital letters in the middle of them I find). The nioFxRack is basically a digital pedal and effects rack that comes with the 2/4. You can easily get a crunchy guitar, or a bit of reverb or chorus going, whatever retro tones float your boat. What you might want spend a little time doing is getting a balance you like on the nio box. You’ve got input and output levels to play with and on top of that a monitor mix, so you can control the level of what you’re playing against what’s already recorded.

Now then, I think I’m ready to start laying down some licks…