Mobile Recording/DAW on a Netbook

I've been recording with Cubase for many years, whether it be in connection with bands I've played in or just home demos. In the mid-nineties i was programming MIDI backing tracks (keyboards and drums mainly) for my bands demo recordings using an Atari ST and recording the final audio tracks onto a 4-track cassette based system (complete with hiss) to sit alongside vocals, bass and guitar - much track bouncing was called for! In recent years PC's have become very powerful, very cheap and very capable of recording and playing back many tracks of digital audio.

My current main home-studio PC (an ageing Athlon XP2400 I think with 1.5GB RAM) running Cubase SL2 can play back many audio tracks, virtual instruments and runs many plugins with no problems. In my last originals band we recorded a full album on a similar spec machine running around 30 or so audio tracks (including 8 tracks for drums), virtual instruments (keyboards mainly) and many many plugins.

However, like many singers/songwriters/musicians, recording in a domestic environment can be a nuisance to neighbours, whether it be recording lead vocals or perhaps loud acoustic guitar strumming - electric guitar is not usually a problem for me because i use amp modelling (and hence can turn the volume down or use headphones) and like-wise for drums (which i program using samples) - recording a full acoustic drumkit or micing up an electric guitar amp at home certainly isn't an option for me!

Anyway, the idea of a portable/location recording setup/DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) using Cubase to record parts at rehearsal studios or fellow musicians houses (certainly lead vocals or loud acoustic guitar parts) to bring them back home and load onto my main home-studio PC has been a goal for a number of years. Even a nice two channel (stereo) recording of a drumkit in a rehearsal room (with me playing them - or perhaps a more capable drummer) and some well placed microphones would sound much better then any MIDI drum programming i'm capable of - you can't beat that human feel... Some years ago i recorded a practice session of my band in a rehearsal studio using just two overheads on drums and they sounded wonderful.

A technique worth investigating for recording drums with two mics is demonstrated here.

Another use for having such a portable setup would for example be popping round to a saxaphone players house and getting him/her to put a solo down on one of your tracks. So, that's where i'm coming from on this...

Now, before i begin i'm in no way suggesting here that a netbook is the best way to go about location recording your music, obviously a high spec laptop with an 8 input (or more) USB2 or firewire audio interface would be much better - but there are many people asking questions about netbooks and recording so if you need to do some location recordings yourself (rather then hiring a recording studio) using a very compact setup here's my report.


I bought an Asus Eee 904HA netbook recently for mobile internet etc.. and to be honest web browsing on the sofa without switching my main PC on but I was also intrigued as to whether or not it would be any good as a portable DAW for my own recordings.

I bought the Windows XP version (boo hiss i hear from the Linux crowd) - a 904HA with an Intel Atom 1.6GHz processor, 1 GB of RAM and a 170GB Hard drive (not a solid state drive like on some other models). Apparently the processor works out to be equivalent to a Celeron 900MHz and the hard-drive is only 5400 rpm - eek, perhaps not great for hard disk recording? Still, i gave it a bash, installed my (legitimate) copy of Cubase (with USB dongle) and hooked up my M-Audio Fast Track Pro USB interface to another one of it's USB ports (it has 3 in total).

To my surprise (and relief) it's very capable of multitrack recording. So far i've only recorded a few test tracks, all at 24bit 44.1KHz which is good enough for me. The timing (with the ASIO drivers) is rock solid, latency is 8ms and i've been able to record 1 or 2 tracks (a vocal and an acoustic guitar for example) whilst playing back others with no problems. The maximum number of tracks i've had playing back simultaneously is 8 (a kind of Queen style harmony vocal test dittie) and it coped no problems. This means that for a solo singer songwriter (acoustic guitar and vocals for example)putting down whole songs would be no problems and certainly location recording lead and backing vocals (or other instruments) to an already recorded backing track (perhaps mixed down if the song comprised of many tracks) would be no problems too - cracking !

I haven't experimented with any mixing but i suspect that once i load a few plugins the system would start having CPU issues but this isn't what i'm attempting to do, location recording is my goal.

Anyway, I'll continue mucking around and report back on my experiences.... in the meantime here are some more photos of my Asus Eee/Fast Track Pro portable DAW setup.






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