 Why would you need a guitar interface? Can you record other things with it? I answer these and your other questions as we take a look at the Axe IO solo from IK Multimedia. Hi folks, I'm Mike and I hope you will. When I let my viewers know that I'll be testing the Axe IO solo from IK Multimedia, a number of people had a number of really interesting questions. So I'll try to address as many of those as I can in this video. Actually, there's quite a lot to go through, since not only is this hardware very interesting indeed, but the software that comes with it is extremely significant as well. And I've made a demo to demonstrate both of those aspects. So let's get started with the core of it all, the hardware specs. The Axe IO solo is a two-in three-out interface, capable of recording with sample rates up to 192 kHz at a bit depth of 24. In terms of build quality, the Axe IO feels solid, the body is a combination of metal and plastic, and all of the knob switches and connections feel sturdy and durable. On the front, we see our first input, a quarter-inch jack designed for guitar and bass, with a gain control above and some handy LEDs to indicate level. Right away, we see some other controls which may not be familiar to you. For example, we have a passive active switch to match with guitars or basses, which may have passive or active pickups. Switching this changes the circuitry to something more suitable for that type of pickup. Next to this, we have a switch to either use pure or JFET preamp types. The pure selection, as its name suggests, keeps things clean, whereas the JFET selection adds a little color and harmonics. The Z-Tone knob above this is essentially an impedance control, which will have the effect of changing the character of the sound a little, all the way to the left, and you get a more crisp sound, all the way to the right, and it's a little warmer and thicker. All in all, right here, we have a lot more control over the character of our input than most interfaces offer, but I will say that some of this is pretty subtle. To the right, we have controls for our second input, which is actually at the rear. This input is designed for microphones, so we see a switch here for 48 volts of phantom power, as well as our gain control and level LEDs. Some of you ask, so I tested using a popular dynamic microphone, the Shure SM57, and I can report that it had more than enough gain to record a guitar cabinet, even when it was a low speaking level kind of volume. Next, we have a monitor control to balance our monitored input with our door while recording. Next to this, we have our headphones level and connector. I'm pleased to say that I was able to operate my 250 ohm Bayer Dynamic DT770s to a reasonable level. Not all interfaces can boast this. Finally, we have our master volume and one of the most useful features, the amp output. This makes reamping a breeze and we'll take a look at that later. To the rear, we see our second input, the XLR combo for regular XLR input or a quarter inch jack. To the left of this, we see our two quarter inch balanced main monitor outputs, and then next to them, something unusual, because here we see two sockets for foot pedals. These can be assigned in the software and accept inputs from expression pedals and both single and double switches. These can either be momentary or latched. I quite easily used my M audio expression pedal and both of my momentary and latched boss switches. We connect to our computer using a USB 2 type B connector, and this is where we get our power. Finally, I know some of you will be delighted to see some MIDI connections, useful for connecting up pedals that use MIDI, as well as many other devices of course. Now although a massive part of this product is the amp simulations, it also caters really well for more traditional ways of recording electric guitar and bass. We can plug our guitar straight into the interface like so, and then send another line out straight to our amplifier. This means we can record both the dry signal and the mic up amp at the same time, simultaneously, no need for splitters or anything like that. Now if you decide later that you want to change the sound of the amp or maybe even the amp itself, the microphone etc, then you can send the recorded sound straight out again here to the amp and re-record just the sound of the amp without having to perform the part again. A process known of course as re-amping, but the great thing is here we reduce the need for splitters or re-amping boxes, so we're keeping down the complexity and also the cost as well. Normally when I review an audio interface the software is a little bit of an afterthought, not so with this. The software forms a significant part of what you get, and I'm not just talking about the control software where you can change the settings or set your signals or control the pedals and I'm not just talking about the awesome amp sims, we'll talk about those later. You also get a set of premium plugins which are really useful, especially later in the mixing stages. Let's take a look at those now. In terms of plugins, we start with the very mu compressor limiter based on the Fairchild 670, followed up with the EQP1A, a classic Pultec style EQ. Then we have the White 2A, based on possibly the most well-known compressor limiter, and if it isn't then this one is the Black 76. Next we have the wonderful White Channel Channel Strip, followed by Mic Room, a mic modelling tool. We get some nice warm echoes with tape echo as well as DSR, not just useful for vocals but great for distorted guitar also. We then have the beautiful CSR Room Reverb, followed by possibly my favourite plugin of all time, One, a mastering plugin that feels like magic. Of course, many of you will want to be using an amp sim and I don't think you're going to be disappointed because with this interface, you get the deluxe version of Amplitube 4 and you also get the SE version of Amplitube 5. Let's take a look. Amplitube 4 deluxe gives you all of the gear normally found in Amplitube plus an additional 101 pieces of gear making a total of 140 pieces of gear. This includes amplifiers, cabinets, stompboxes, speakers, microphones and rack effects, and there's a wide range to suit many genres of music. As if all of that wasn't enough, you also get the SE version of Amplitube 5 with a total of 80 pieces of gear and some feature upgrades over the basic CS version. Now before we get on to that demo, I just want to quickly ask you, if you are finding this video useful, could you go ahead and hit the like button for me. Do it right away so that you don't forget and if you do like this kind of content, make sure you subscribe and ring the bell so that you're notified about my other videos. Now honestly, I don't think there's any way for me to show you the massive amount of gear that you get with these two versions of Amplitube, so instead I've put together this demo to try and demonstrate what you can achieve and the kind of sound that you can achieve. I've included clean guitar sounds and overdriven guitar sounds and bass as well because that forms an important part of this package. Now I've kind of focused on the martial range of gear that you get with Amplitube 4 deluxe. That's sort of significant in terms of what you're getting above the normal versions of Amplitube. Now I just want to say a couple of things in advance. First of all, I'm not a great rock guitar player so I beg your forgiveness in advance for that. And also remember tone is a sort of a subjective thing and just because you're not sort of that keen on what you're hearing here doesn't mean there isn't something in this huge package which will be great for you. So anyway let's do it. Let's rock. Your mood killer for recording guitar through amp sims is latency. That's that little delay that you get when you're recording your guitar through your computer and using an amp sim such as Amplitube. It can be really disconcerting and can really put you off of your performance. So a number of you have asked me about this in terms of the Axe I.O solo. Now I want to say that the interface is not the only factor in terms of latency. Other factors would include the rest of your hardware, especially your computer and the specs for that and also the software setup and also your operating system setup. So there's lots of variables in there. Now I'm using an i7 7th generation so it's around about three years old with 32 gigabytes of RAM. So you know you may get varying results with your specific hardware but regardless let's go ahead and do some testing. So I've got this set up in such a way that you can hear exactly what I'm hearing. You'll hear the sound of my guitar as it's plugged into the interface with no processing at all. That's the most immediate sound you can get and then you're going to hear the sound of the guitar as it's gone through the computer through the door and it's made its round trip back to the interface. That's when you hear latency. Now in terms of the project I'm going to be using this plug-in here which is the aptitude 4 plug-in and using this amp, the red pig amp. This comes with aptitude 4 deluxe which you get with this interface. And I've got it loaded up into a pre-populated project. If I did this in an empty project that would be the best case scenario. You find that latency gets worse as you add more and more tracks with more and more plug-ins. So I've got some virtual drums in here. I also have a number of guitars. In fact I've got eight guitars and including a bass guitar and they've all got the aptitude plug-in on them already. Okay so with all of that said let's just take a quick look at our initial settings. If I open up options here this is the worst setting that you can have for tracking. It's got it's on 2048 samples which is in creating an input latency of 47 milliseconds, output latency of 53 milliseconds. That's going to be pretty awful but it's our starting point. I'll click on okay let's just have a quick listen to the guitar as it sounds by itself with no processing. Oh the lovely sound of a guitar plugged straight into an interface knob. So anyway let's switch on input monitoring. Now I don't have the plug-in switched on yet but you already hear that there is some latency as the sound is just processed by the door. You can hear that sort of delays or the echo-y sort of sound. Now that may sound quite nice to you at the moment yeah but it's very very off-putting because later we're going to change the mix on this so that we can only hear the amplifier. We don't want to hear our original sound and even with that amount of delay it feels really strange when you play. It feels like you play a note and it comes out a few milliseconds later. Very very off-putting. But anyway we'll get to that later. Let's switch on our amplifier. This is a sort of sound that we're getting. Now it sounds, it sounds thicker right but this is not what I want to be hearing. I'm still hearing lots and lots of the original guitar so we will be turning that down later so we can only hear the amp. Now that is unacceptable to me so let's play with the settings. I'll go to my options again and I'm going to make a big jump. I'm going to go from 2048 samples and I'm going to change this to 128. This would be fairly typical for me on most other interfaces. You can see the input latencies jump to 5.17 milliseconds output of 4.5. If I click on okay let's just play with that. That feels absolutely fine. I could work with that no problem. So what I would want to be doing is just hearing that amplifier. So I'm just going to change the mix on the interface. I use the monitor knob so I'm only hearing now the door. That's absolutely fine. I could definitely use that and I get to hear the sound of the amp and particularly with a sort of a clean sounding amp like this which is just a little bit of break up. That means when I start to push it you know I can hear that break up and that's what you want. You want to be sort of playing into that. It's a part of the feel of being a guitarist. You don't want to be playing with just a completely dry signal. So that's great already. How far could I push it? Well let's just try something here. I'm going to open up options again and I'm just going to go to let's try 32 samples okay. We can see that it's halved our latency again 2.17 and 2.5. Click on it okay. I'm just going to make sure I'm playing the track in the background this time so I'll press play. You can see all that happening. Okay and that's just broken up just a little bit there okay. So that would be unacceptable. That's where I would back off. So in this case I think if I was to go to 64 that may work for me. That's fine I can work with that but I would normally go if I can I'll go one step back from the one which is working 64 in this case. I'd probably still go back to my 1, 2, 8. I think that's absolutely I mean a really good result for an interface in this sort of range. So let me know what you think about that in the comments down below. So there's no doubt that this is a decent quality audio interface. Great for recording guitar and bass of course because it's got those specific features but you can also use it for other sources as well like vocals and of course use it as your main audio interface for mixing. But what I'd like to focus on here is value for money. Currently if you look on Sweetwater you can buy the very popular Focusrite 2i2 and it will cost you almost $170 and it has nowhere near the features of this interface. Add the very modest ART dual RDB for reamping and your total is up to around about $266. Throw in Amplitube 4 Deluxe and you're suddenly up to $565 worth of value. Now let's pretend for a moment that you don't even bother with $100 worth of Amplitube 5 SE and the other $700 worth of plugins that you're getting. My point being is that for $249 it's like you're getting a free set of awesome software and they've thrown in a free audio interface as well and it's no slouch. As they say what's not to like? Well let me know in the comments down below about that. What do you think of this audio interface? Are you considering buying it? Love to hear from you on that. Also check the links in the description including my Patreon page where for as little as $1 per month you can help me help you by making more videos like this. And by the way for my patrons I'm going to be making available the multi tracks for the demo that you heard today so that you can listen to those guitars individually. Thanks so much for joining me today and I'll see you in the next video.