Focusrite Scarlett Solo 3rd generation: first impressions


What is it?

It's a digital audio interface for Mac and Windows. Basically an external sound card that allows you to feed a microphone and guitar/instrument into the computer at the same time. Each of the inputs has its own gain control with a color LED to warn you if the signal is too hot. The microphone input also has a switchable 48V power source. The headphones/monitor outputs can be used to listen to the sound as processed from the OS, or you can bypass all processing and listen to the signals as fed into the device.

Setup

Be prepared, this device ships with a gazillion licenses for two Digital Audio Workstations (DAW) and about a gazillion plugins and even your choice of one of four virtual pianos. It is almost overwhelming, the software bundled with this device probably costs twice as much as the box itself.

My workstation is a Dell Windows 10 Enterprise workstation with Intel Xeon E3-1270 V2 @ 3.5GHz, 32GB of RAM, operating system and data are on separate physical SSD drives. Video card is an EVGA GeForce GTX 750Ti with 2GB GDDR5 and two Dell U2412M monitors.

When you plug in the device, it'll mount as a drive and will tell you to go to a webpage, which will already have picked up your hardware serial number. It also has what has to be the most incredible on boarding procedure I have ever seen in over 20 years of dealing with computer stuff. Every single thing that you could possibly want to do has a tutorial, and that includes each piece of software. It felt nice to see that some companies still pay attention to the onboarding process for new users.

That said, my setup was a little bit of a nightmare, but some of it was self-inflicted. For example, the ASIO4ALL drivers that I had already installed for a botched experiment were giving me blue screens of death, which is something that never happens to my machine. Once I exorcised the drivers, the BSDs went away.

The rest of the setup involves making a lot of accounts online for each of the DAW and plugin providers, and for their DRM providers. I spent probably two days on and off just installing stuff.

Once your interface is up and running, you can go to the audio control panel in Windows and assign it as the default input/output audio interface, which then allows you to do the same from whatever audio tool you want to use. I was able to do this in Amplitube 4 (not part of the bundle, I already had it installed) and Pro Tools First. Amplitube really doesn't like ASIO in this machine, but Directsound works OK. Pro Tools First was happy with ASIO. I probably spent more time installing plugins for Pro Tools First than what it took me to figure out how to feed a guitar signal into it, record it and play it back mixed with backing tracks.

Next Steps

I'd like to grab a microphone for it, and maybe a piano keyboard. I don't think I'll be plugging speakers into it because this is a headphones household. I did pick a pair of OneOdio over-ear DJ headphones that sound phenomenal, and they were dirt cheap ($33 plus a $5 coupon). These headphones have removable cables, and ship with both 1/4" and 1/8" cables, plus check this out: you can Daisy-chain them! For example, you can plug an audio source into the 1/4" socket, and a second pair of headphones into the 1/8" socket, so you can have two or more pairs of headphones listening to the same audio source without using  Y connectors.

Also, my VOX Amplug 2 AC30 only has 1/8" out, so I need an adapter so I can feed it into the Scarlett Solo.

Finally, I need to take a stab at Ableton Live 10 Lite, which was NOT as intuitive as either Pro Tools First or Amplitube 4. But what the hell, it won't hurt me to learn it too.

Amazon Links

Focusrite Scarlett Solo 3rd generation
OneOdio over-ear DJ headphones
VOX Amplug 2 AC30

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