Playing the guitar becomes much more interesting when you have a variety of ways to change your instruments sound. The M-Audio Black Box is a valuable tool for unleashing creativity during practice and song writing. The Black Box also has numerous features that make it a great addition for live performances. Although there are many buttons and knobs on it, the unit itself is very easy to use. There are 100 presets that include different amp sounds/settings with associated effects and drum patterns. The presets make it easy to find a starting point to make your own sounds, which can be tweaked by entering the edit mode and twisting a knob or two. Once you've created a sound you like you can store it as a custom preset.
The unit itself is well built and feels very durable. It comes with a mic-stand mount that can be screwed into the bottom. You can also set the unit on a table top, although you will have to take the mount off first because the rubber feet are about 1/8" too short to sit level with the mount screwed in. The front of the unit has the 1/4" guitar/bass input jack as well as a 1/4" headphone out jack. I found that using the Black Box alone with just a pair of headphones let me hear the nuances of the box the best without any added extra colorations added by an external amp/speaker. The back of the Black Box has a XLR microphone input and audio outputs in the form of stereo (L/R) 1/4" jacks and a coaxial SPDIF connection. Many of the effects (ex. reverb) produce a stereo output which you could run to your mixer. There are three input control jacks used for assignable foot control of the Black Box including an expression pedal and two momentary switches. Lastly, there is the USB port for connecting to a computer and the power cable.
Amp Modeling
First, the Black Box is a digital amp modeler, and with their “version two” of the internal software (firmware) it now has 40 ultra-realistic virtual amp models. What this means is that you can easily try out different sounds. All the standard amp sounds are here, so if you are after a particular sound you can scan through the amp model presets to find something close. Adjusting the amp sound is easy by pressing the amp button and using the input knobs. Adjustable parameters are Amp drive, Bass, Treble. With the newest firmware, the Black Box has even more adjustable parameters by entering the Shift mode. This is done by double -tapping the amp button. The shift mode lets you adjust midrange for the amps and other settings for the effects mode.
(Sidebar) Amps are based on:
- Fender Bassman
- Fender Deluxe Reverb
- Fender Twin
- Fender Deluxe
- Fender Champ
- Vox AC-30
- Vox AC-15
- Marshall JTM-45
- Marshall Plexi Super Lead 100
- Marshall JCM-2000
- Marshall JCM-800
- Hiwatt DR-103
- Soldano SLO-100
- Mesa Boogie Mark IIc
- Mesa Boogie Dual Rect
- Bogner Uberschall
- Diezel VH4
- ENGL Powerball
- Peavey 5150 MkII
- Bogner Ecstasy
- Budda Twinmaster
- Matchless Chieftain
- Acoustic 360
- Ampeg SVT
- Gallien-Krueger 800RB
- SWR SM-500
- Roland Jazz Chorus
Effects processing
The Black Box has 121 effects that can be used to create totally unique sounds. Some of these effects are beat-synced to the units own drum pattern or can be synced to an external MIDI clock. Other effects take advantage (or require) an expression pedal, like the wah-wah and talk box effects. I recommend the M-audio Black Box Pedal Board to take full advantage of all the effects capabilities. My favorite effects were the delays and arpeggios, particularly the preset labeled Random 1. With some tweaking you can come up with some terrific unique sounding licks.
Drum machine
The Black Box has 100 drum patterns, however, there are no intros or fills associated with the drum beats and there is no way to move from just one to another without stepping through the series of presets, so using the drum machine won't work for any live use. The beats themselves cannot be altered beyond changing the tempo. There are enough styles to get the creative juices going though, which makes it a great tool for song writing. I'm guessing that the drum machine was included mainly as a way to demo the beat-synced effects and as a practice tool. It is a great tool for this and is much better than a metronome! The beat can be started by either tapping the start/stop button or remotely through MIDI (including your sequencer software). The tempo can be set by dialing it in, or using the tap tempo button. If you are using the Black Box with a computer the tempo can be slaved to your DAW project's setting.
Using the Black Box with a computer
Besides being an outstanding effects tool, the Black Box doubles as a 24-bit/44.1kHz audio interface, something which M-Audio is great at. The unit has standard audio drivers for PC (WinXP) and MAC as well as ASIO drivers, making it compatible with all major sequencing programs including Pro-Tools M-Powered and Ableton Live. A version of Live is included with the Black Box, so for my evaluation I used both Live and Pro Tools M-Powered.
There is just one connection from the Box to the computer and that is via the USB cable, although sadly the unit cannot draw power from the USB cable and still needs its wall-wort power supply. Once plugged in and installed the Black Box provides both inputs and outputs for the computer. There are four inputs available: Processed stereo from the DSP (same as what you would here from the audio outs or headphone jack), dry mic input and dry guitar input. During most recording with the Box I recorded from all four inputs simultaneously.
The Black Box control panel is fairly basic when compared to some of M-Audio's other interfaces. In the control panel you can choose either the guitar or microphone as the effects input. Ever want to apply distortion to your vocals? If you want to slave the drum machine and beat-synced effects to your sequencer you'll want to change the Timing Source to the External setting. On the Presets tab you can save and load presets to and from the Black Box, this makes sharing libraries easy. There is actually a whole site devoted to this at: http://www.blackboxtoneroom.com/.
The latency tab allows you to adjust the latency from the default 256. I had no problems using the 128 setting. Lacking from the Black Box's software is the ability to create presets using the computer. All that has to be done manually by pressing the buttons and turning the knobs on the unit itself.
As mentioned previously you can use the Black Box's drum machine from the software. I set this up easily in Live be just turning on the Midi sync and remote switches. I found this to be a much greater improvement than the standard click track. The bad thing is that the drum beat gets recorded with the processed stereo effects. My workaround was to just record a drum-only track to use as my click track and then turn sync off so I could record a new track with the effects without the drumbeat. I wish there was some way to not feed the drum beat through the internal audio outputs. My workaround did cause me to work with the drum beats though. I don't like messing around with drum loops typically, but with the black box I was able to record in a few measures of various patterns and then layer them in the software to create fills and intros.
I found the sound quality to be great. I definitely recommend recording using a 24-bit setting to get the best quality recordings. The sample rate cannot be changed from 44.1 kHz, but because it is digital the whole way from the Box into your sequencer there is no quality degradation. While most software sequencers will offer various guitar effects, they will always take up computer resources, so if you can create the sound you want with the Black Box you'll be able to capture the audio directly with no increased CPU load.
Using multiple Black Boxes together did not work as well as I'd hoped. Unlike the M-Audio Delta 1010, adding more Black Boxes to a system does not just add more I/O. You can only access one black box at a time. I had hoped to have three units all working together going into one computer directly, thus providing an easy way of connecting guitars, bass and microphones for the band. I did find a good solution using an application called ASIO4ALL that works well with Ableton Live and allows me to use all the inputs. In Pro Tools I could not access more than one unit at a time.
Getting the most from the unit
First, I would definitely recommend getting the pedals. With the expression pedal you can control a variety of effects parameters in real-time as you are playing. Some effects such as wah-wah and talk box would be impossible to take advantage of without the pedal. The other two pedals can be programmed to turn effects on or off, scan through the presets, and more.
Using the mounting plate on the bottom of the unit makes placing the unit on a mic stand a no-brainer. For live performances you can have the black box mounted to a stand right in front of you for easy access with the pedals at you feet for ultimate control, and to make the cabling easier you can plug your microphone into the Box allowing you easy access to volume control. Did I mention that you can also feed the mic signal into the effects processor for some crazy effects!
Buy one now!
I think the Black Box makes a great addition to my studio, but more importantly it is a great creativity tool. Its small size makes practicing/song writing easy to do anywhere with a pair of headphones. The Black Box is full of features and even includes a built-in guitar tuner.
Guitar Box upgrade
I should add that you can get the Black Box in a couple of different packages. The basic package includes The Black Box with the Ableton Live LT software. The GuitarBox bundle includes the Black Box, Pro Tools M-Powered, and a bunch of plug-ins. The GuitarBox Pro bundle adds a total of $4255 worth of software plug-ins.
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