We still needed one more element to add to the show: A USB pad controller for Brian. We decided the Alesis ControlPad looked like it would do the job, and had ordered one. But it was now or never time, even though we didn’t have anything for it to trigger, so we hooked it up into Brian’s MacBook Pro.

Feeling much more confident, I thought I’d experiment with two more options:

Time to go to Austin and do Summer NAMM. Obviously we couldn’t rehearse, but Brian did the next best thing: He always has a Roland R09 recorder handy, and is into recording our playing.

I slept on it and woke up in the morning with a revelation: I had to track down all possible active processes in the machine and stop them so that the computer just hosted plug-ins and nothing else.

Well, my optimism was unfounded. Brian came over, we started playing, and he thought the guitar sounded great.

For hosting the plug-ins, I decided to use Sonar. It ships with the Digital Les Paul, but more importantly, it’s my main DAW software and I know it like the back of my hand.

Time was getting short now. We sort of limped along on the 20th with my existing system, but spent most of our time writing and arranging songs because my guitar setup wasn't really up to spec yet.

After our rehearsal on the 18th, I realized that the only way to get what I wanted was to bite the bullet, run the audio through a computer, and use plug-in effects. It still didn’t seem like an ideal situation; I needed the computer and breakout box, but also an audio interface.

I tried running the three bottom strings out through three pieces of hardware I had that could do octave division, and the sound was glorious.

Trying to run the three bottom strings through a single octave divider clearly wasn’t going to work. As long as only one string played, all was well.