Safety Harbor, FL (March 8, 2016)—Serving up a mix of French-Iraqi and Cuban-American acoustic pop, the duo D’ala has been on the road frequently since its start in 2009. Travelling light, the pair—Boogie Monsta and Ms. Mauikai—roll with an acoustic guitar, a pair of microphones, and a Metric Halo LIO-8 outfitted with four mic preamps and a paired MacBook Pro running Metric Halo MIO Console +DSP and Ableton Live.
“Minimizing our production has been an artistic revolution for us,” said Boogie, who does extensive work as a producer and engineer. “We enjoy playing stripped down versions of songs, with nothing but guitar, our voices, and midi pedals to control loopers and trigger sounds and effects. The loops we create at the beginning of a song are organic, and we’re free to vary the tempo to suit the mood of the moment. The triggered sounds can all work with any loop tempo, which allows us to really play our songs as acoustic musicians, but with a huge universe of electronic sonic possibilities.” Mauikai added, “Our new setup is so intuitive that it has transformed our song writing process. We can improvise and find new ideas that are so exciting we feel compelled to develop them into finished songs.”
On the road, the LIO-8 amplifies their two vocal microphones, the P-90 pickup on Boogie’s electric guitar, as well as its piezo pickup that makes it sound like an acoustic guitar. He uses MIO Console to build his own custom “+dsp graphs” (zero-latency processing algorithms running on the DSP in the LIO-8 hardware), that he uses to give the guitar different sounds for different songs.
“With most products, you have to sacrifice quality to get portability,” said Boogie. “Not so with Metric Halo. The conversion quality of the LIO-8 is incredible, and I’m really picky about my conversion. Moreover, I was able to put as many mic preamp channels as we needed right in the box. I used to be the engineer who was always chasing after some boutique sound, but once I heard the pristine quality of the Metric Halo preamps, it changed my thinking. They’re so honest, pure, and precise, while still being lively, musical, and dimensional. I love that sound, and if I want to tint it a little bit, I can just add Metric Halo’s excellent, but appropriately subtle, character emulations.”
Metric Halo
www.mhlabs.com
