At home I used a Digidesign 003 on Quad-core Intel based Mac tower...but outside the house I travel with a Macbook running a basic Mbox 2 setup. I used this all the time to recording friends bands when they played out live by patching into the console and stealing two aux tracks to create my own little mix. After this they would always beg me to come over and record their work tapes and new songs to demo but always wanted more than the two inputs the Mbox 2 offers.

I began thinking of ways I could get more inputs and record more things simultaneously on my portable rig. My first thought was to buy a small mixer and run everything into that and out a stereo source to the Mbox. I then realized that I had no editing or mixing power once I got home. One day I was sharing this with my good buddy Robb Wenner, foley and sound for film master, and he told me about making use of my S/PDIF inputs on the back of the Mbox 2.

Now we all know that on the back of most consumer pre-amps there are two silly outputs that say S/PDIF that mean you can connect it to your TV, right? Wrong! These are the perfect way to add 2 more inputs to your Mbox! If look in your protools session you will see that there are 4 default inputs, Channel 1, Channel 2, S/PDIF R, and S/PDIF L.

So what I did was hit up Craigslist and bought a used DBX 386 and voila! 4 inputs in Protools and a very portable and versatile studio.

Obviously, many of you may have known of this but at the time I was only 18 and knew none of this and a forum like this would have been very beneficial in my education!

What have you done to enhance your home or portable studio? Share your little insider tricks and let us all be as handy as you! What things are worth the investment at home and which things should you leave to the big dogs?