The Black Box was a product that I had always wanted to make. An audio interface that was specifically made for guitar players. The key ingredient was that the processing that provided the amp and FX sounds had to be built-in.

I chose to contact Roger Linn who had recently released a really cool product called "Adrenalinn." This product had decent guitar amp tones, but had unique effects that would either lock to the tempo of the built-in drum machine or to incoming MIDI Clock. We worked out a deal to license the Adrenalinn processing for use with our product.

Together Roger Linn and I improved the amp sounds and implemented a subset of the Adrenalinn features so that this new product would not cannibalize his product. We offered fewer parameters and made accessing and manipulating them MUCH easier.

The Black Box allowed the user to record the amp and FX sounds to their DAW while at the same time recording a dry track that provided them the ability to insert amp and FX modeling plug-ins such as IK Multimedia's Amplitube or Native Instruments Guitar Rig.

A microphone input and preamp was also included so the user could record a real amplifier with a microphone. Also vocals, acoustic guitar, etc.

The Black Box provided two momentary foot pedal inputs as well as an expression pedal input. The functions were all programable. The user could switch presets, tap tempo, control volume, etc. So I also designed the Black Box Pedal Board that provided two momentary switches and an expression pedal. M-Audio already produced these products individually, so making one high quality product with these functions was quick and easy and made the Black Box a more compelling product.