5 Moons is a slab of wood with 5 faders for 5 tracks of audio recording and looping. Simple minimalist desktop multitrack.
5 Moons
It’s a multitrack recorder. Hit record, play your instrument, play it back. Set it looping as you add another track. It’s all the simplicity of a cassette PortaStudio without all the rewinding and having to play for the whole song (although you can do that too). If you run out of tracks, you can bounce to the first track freeing up another 4 tracks for you.
It’s really simple, easy to use, could probably do with some labels, and you’re making music in no time. It comes with about 20 hours of recording time at 48kHz and 16bit to a microSD card, and you can open that up on any computer and pull out the files.
You might be tempted to suggest it’s an alternative to the Teenage Engineering TX6, which it most certainly isn’t. The TX6 is a mixer, synth and effects box. This is a straightforward 5 track recorder; they just have some vague form factor similarities.
5 Moons is basic, and this is where a lot of people are going to be put off. It has a single mono input and mono output. No stereo, no panning, no effects and no recording more than one thing at a time. There’s no input gain control, so you’ll have to get the level right at source. That means you’ll need an amp for your guitar and possibly a preamp for a mic. The Critter & Guitari mics seem to be able to plug straight in, which is cool.
However, it is the basic nature of 5 Moons that makes it very cool. It’s unburdened by menus, feature creep and complexity and just lets you do exactly what you want to do – record, loop, playback, multitrack. It will get you experimenting; it will get you bouncing ideas, looping things and messing about much more creatively than sitting down with a DAW or hardware recorder. It’s very cool.
It cost $325 which is about the same as a Zoom R-12 multitrack studio. It all depends on what you want to do.
- Critter & Guitari website.
