Erich has a knowledge of using various Digital Audio Worksations (DAWs), including Apple’s Logic Pro and Pro Tools. However, these come with a hefty pricetag.

During his time at Eastridge Church in Issaquah, Washington, Erich was working with Waves plugins and recording services with Waves Tracks Live. He noticed that the file format that Waves was saving in was from an open source DAW called Ardour, from which he discovered Tracks Live was derived.

Realizing this, he began recording using Ardour, and discovered its mixing capability and plugin hosting format. He realized that Ardour, combined with the JACK audio connection kit and an audio interface, made a decent audio mixer on its own as long as the latency could be reduced to minimum. With that, Erich started using Ardour as an outboard mixer utilizing a midi control interface as its controller.

Erich eventually ran across a derivative of Ardour from Harrison Consoles called Mixbus. Harrison works very closely with the upstream developers of Ardour and adds their own proprietary digital signal processor (DSP) to make Mixbus sound like their award-winning studio analog consoles. Erich found a copy on sale and started using that for various applications, but decided it’s best used for post-processing of recorded sessions.