The evolution and improvements to digital recording software has really brought professional quality to the home studio. If you’ve already got Pro Tools, it might be time to consider investing in another great Digidesign product, the Digidesign Digi 003 Factory. This piece of gear will seriously change up your workflow and how you approach music production. And I mean that in a good way.

First of all, the 003 Factory has better recording quality and less glitch and lag than the M-Audio MBox. It features 24-bit/96kHz audio resolution, which is important if you really want to push your home studio to professional levels.

A great thing about the Factory is also its versatility with instruments and MIDI. Whether you’re hooking up your Sennheiser SKM5200 microphone, a Korg SP 170, your guitar, or a MIDI controller, the Factory will handle it all. It also comes bundled with a bunch of great software plug-ins and effects (which would be a lot more expensive if purchased separately) to really tweak and master the recording you do in Pro Tools.

The Factory 003 is intuitively designed and gives you great hands on control of Pro Tools. It features transport controls, eight touch-sensitive, motorised faders, and eight motion-sensitive rotary encoders. This lets you handle multiple mixing functions at once, in addition to giving you a more hands-on approach to mixing in general. Trust me, it’s a lot better than adjusting individual parameters with your mouse.

Another great thing about the Factory 003 is its size and build. It’s quite sturdy, but also small and light enough to make it more than viable to travel with it. Speaking of build, the dual headphone input is a great addition to the Factory as well. This saves you the hassle of buying a splitter and allows more than one set of ears to listen to a mix.

Though the software comes bundled with Pro Tools LE, I wouldn’t recommend this as a starter kit. It’s a relatively big investment, but well worth the money. If you’re spending serious coin on a piece of equipment like this, I would also highly recommend that you upgrade to the full version of Pro Tools.

Did you know?
Hip Hop producer 9th Wonder almost exclusively uses Fruity Loops to create his tracks.

-Thomas

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