Muff's Modules & More

dzlvs8 · Posted: Sat Apr 14, 2012 11:27 pm Post subject:

Well, I have bad news and I have not so bad news.

Bad news:
There was a guy from Craigslist the other night that told me everything he could think of related to recording gear. I mentioned that here. Today I bought his Yamaha MG16/4 and Fast Track Pro for $200. Its a small investment that gets me taking a baby step into making a decent recording and if I decide to, I can sell it and not lose money. But I think this setup may be the most convenient for me (I still have a real mixer!)

Not so bad news:
I like how the MG16/4 has a separate ?out? for 8 of the channels. This means that in the future if I feel the need, I can get a new computer with firewire and get an audiofire 12 or an 8 channel rme. ....as long as the outs on the first 8 channels occur AFTER the fx loop.

So thanks for the help. Sorry I didn't take the plunge to multi chan, but this was a quick, cheap fix and is probably all I need. I dont want to be in the box while I'm in the middle of playing music.

By the way, since this thread is about recording gear; the dude I bought the stuff off of seemed to get a bigger boner from mixing and recording rather than from playing. That means he had some pretty cool stuff though. He had sonar running and then as we were there he tried out the wifi/midi app for the ipad that has a midi controller specifically for sonar. THAT is a midi controller I can live with because every knob and button is labeled specifically for sonar and the song you are in. Each track had its name next to it.....man it was sweet. My next purchase may actually be an iPad because I finally saw a use for it. Only problem is that its like a $600 midi controller.

Anyway, I gotta go hook up my new gear and get to fap fap fap...

dzlvs8 · Posted: Mon Apr 16, 2012 7:56 am Post subject:

Yep, its me again. So I now have a yamaha mg16/4 and fast track pro and bypassed getting a computer with firewire. .....But last night I actually found an awesome deal and bought a desktop with firewire. So, I am already looking to improve my setup to a multi channel recording setup. Id rather go multi channel than deactivating all channels on my mixer that im not recording
But the problem is i still want to have the capability of the fx routing of my mixer because I use a roland chorus echo. How do I acheive this in the simplest and cheapest way possible if I decide to buy an audiofire 12.

I thought the separate outs for each channel of my mixer would acheive this but the separate outs send the signal out BEFORE it is routed through the effects processor.

Basically I think the easiest way to do this is to get a mixer that has individula outs for most channels (aka, not a mixer) and those outs send the effects loop signal too. any ideas?

lilakmonoke · Posted: Mon Apr 16, 2012 9:20 am Post subject:

:-) there you go! basically everybody has to work his way through a big pile of stuff until you find something that works ... and there are no shortcuts. now that you have the mixer, ever thought about getting a good tape machine/deck? im serious, a direct mix through tape will always sound great.

Babaluma · Posted: Mon Apr 16, 2012 9:58 am Post subject:

patchbay!

a lot of good mixers have individual outs on each and every channel, and they are really mixers. wink

quoting myself from earlier in this thread:

dzlvs8 · Posted: Mon Apr 16, 2012 10:26 am Post subject:

sydilaxe · Posted: Mon Apr 16, 2012 10:40 am Post subject:

Behringer ADA-8000 isn't a terrible bit. It sounds extremely mediocre, but it is far from useless. Name something else that does what it does for the same price...

dzlvs8 · Posted: Mon Apr 16, 2012 11:26 am Post subject:

My feeble little brain is starting to understand exactly what I need. Ultimately I would like an 8 channel interface (2 for my mixer and six for my drumtraks that will never be routed through my tape delay).

So what is a cheap but good 8 channel interface? Is there something cheaper than the audiofire 12? i dont need any mic inputs. what about going with a hard wired pcie card based unit? Anything like that on ebay for less than an audiofire?

jeannot · Posted: Mon Apr 16, 2012 6:59 pm Post subject:

dzlvs8 · Posted: Mon Apr 16, 2012 9:27 pm Post subject:

dzlvs8 · Posted: Mon Apr 16, 2012 9:50 pm Post subject:

SO I've figured out a bunch of stuff and got this stupid piece of crap fast track pro working. The latency at 24/48 with one channel recording is 8.9ms and it is VERY noticable when hearing two tracks that I played the exact same thing on. One track was pre recorded and I played along with it on the second track and there was a noticable delay when on playback of both tracks. This in the box recording seems like a major frickin step backwards with my music. And its really not cool if 2 channels are going to be 17. If my assumption is correct, I should be investing in firewire and something with better a/d converters. Correct? or will I have the same problem with firewire (like, its a HDD write problem and I should just use the feature to shift the track after recording live?

Also, it seems like I can't get very loud before the stupid bast*rd starts clipping. What I mean, is that there is not a very large range of volume between not hearing the stuff and having it clip. Is this me being stupid with the fast track settings or should something like this be expected of lower end devices..or expected of all a/d devices? I'm dumb, but I'm thinking this is what people call head room, or lack of head room?

Probaly my favorite feature of the fast crap pro is the sonic boom it sends to my amp when I power it off or on. >:(

lilakmonoke · Posted: Tue Apr 17, 2012 2:22 am Post subject:

like babaluma said you are riding the horse in reverse. its not about the options you have its about what works for you to get the music you are hearing. once you have that figured out do it as simple as possible.

here is how i work at the moment: i compose strictly by ear, no grid, no scales, no seperate tracks. just one single sculpted sound cloud, if you know what i mean. so all my synths go into the fireface and then are being mixed into one stereo channel with a midi controller. another mix goes into the modular and effects and a tape delay. those two mixes go into a looper vst called moebius that records everything i do. i keep stacking sounds until i like something, then i hit save loop and have an audio file. then later i remix those files into a "finished" track.

that way i can do it all from one midi controller and keys and dials and never have to look at the computer. thats a very fast way of doing ambient music for me. if i did techno i would have to completely redesign the whole process. dig?

dzlvs8 · Posted: Tue Apr 17, 2012 7:51 am Post subject:

Dude, that doesnt make any sense. You I need ti understand what is out there and how it works before I can figure out what works best for my needs. Maybe you should start from the begining and see how this started. it started with me listing my needs and then people have been making suggestions on what might work best for my setup.

Im first testing out this fast track pro, to see how i like everything, but Im trying to find out why more expensive interfaces are more expensive, besides because they have more inputs.

Does something like an audiofire 12 or presonus firepod have better sounding a/d converters. I dont know if its just me but the fast track seems to sound pretty terrible. Also the head room seems shitty. Maybe I just need to do more tweaking of the knobs??? Will something like an audiofire 12 or firepod have noticeably better head room and a/d converters resultinging in sonic improvements even if still recording at 48khz?

jonah · Posted: Tue Apr 17, 2012 11:36 am Post subject:

I know the focusrite and rme software has a feature where you can send audio from the inputs to the outputs with no latency for monitoring and what have you and still send that audio into a DAW for recording. I think MOTU can do something like this and from reading other people's posts the Echo seems to be able to do this too.

RME's software felt way less maddening to me than focusrite's.

I'm curious as to why you want to get so many separate tracks into the computer at once? I only ask because it sounds like you don't want to do a lot of post recording mixing and editing.

I can think of some ways to integrate live playing and computer recording, but I really think you're going to go mad with timing issues if you try to get any processed or recorded audio out of the computer without stopping playback.

Now, if you don't mind stopping playing and syncing your live playing to the computer you could do something like use the AUX sends on a mixer into the computer and send a few separate tracks into Live, do a rough mix, send the stereo out of live into the mixer, start playing along, repeat the process of sending AUXs to new tracks in Live, stop re-sync, rough mix, go back to playing, etc.

I'm the same about like liking to work live and quickly and I run a bunch of smaller mixers on the way into a zoom r24. Maybe if I had a second computer and an engineer to record and mange tracks for me I could make it work, but when I tried to use the computer for recording, playback, sequencing and effects I'd always end up making some stupid audio routing error.

dzlvs8 · Posted: Tue Apr 17, 2012 12:56 pm Post subject:

my fast track pro seems to be lag free for playback from the computer and live playing. its just the recording issue with latency thwt I have and I havent been able to get the auto correct to work in cubase yet.

Im just concerned about head room and a/d conversion sound quality.

I want 8 inputs because I want stereo in for my synths and i want six more channels for my sci drumtraks, which is a six channel drum machine.

jeannot · Posted: Tue Apr 17, 2012 1:43 pm Post subject:

Why not just mix down before you send to the audio interface.

A few people here have been suggesting that, and from the sound of it, you also would like to be mixing out of the box. In which case, a 16 channel mixer, like a Yamaha MG166 would do just fine to sub mix all of your tracks before sending the stereo outs (mixer) to the audio interface. You won't be experiencing the same kind of latency problems, since you will only be listening to the roundtrip latency of two inputs.

You could still use the fast track pro as your interface for the mixer outputs, so all you'd need to find is a decent 16 channel mixer like the MG166, or something equivalent by Mackie, like Babaluma suggested, and you should still be in your price range.

As far as A/D headroom on your interface, obviously make sure you are sending a hot signal from all of your synths. If so, and headroom problem still persists, look for another interface.

edit: also make sure you aren't sending TOO hot of a signal out of the synths. Many will output much higher than a 1.2V line level signal, which is what the interface inputs are looking for.

dzlvs8 · Posted: Tue Apr 17, 2012 2:16 pm Post subject:

I have a spare six channel mixer to mix down the druntraks. the drjm traks also has its one volume level for each drum. BUT after I record the drums I would like to omit the high hat at points, change the levels at other points, etc. and it would be way easier to do with an 8 channel. I know what I want as far as channels. Im just making sure my head room concerns and questionable a/d conversion sound quality thoughts about the fast track pro are valid.

Heres the head room issue explained again:

Basicall if I pump any more signal IN from the mixer/keyboards its loud enough but it starts clipping. If I kee the signal at a reasonable level so Im not in danger of clipping I have to crank up the output to hear it loud and the signal to noise ratio gets really bad.

dzlvs8 · Posted: Tue Apr 17, 2012 7:17 pm Post subject:

I spent some more time tweaking and although the method of using a fast track causes a higher signal to noise ratio, its not really that bad. I found a sweet spot. I just really think this is all becoming a pain in the ass because there my signal does this shit.....

synth to mixer gain, to channel level, to mixer level, to fast track input level, to fast track output level, to amp level.

I also fixed the latency issue. Although Cubase was set to auto correct recording latency, it didn't automatically calculate the latency. WTF?!?!?! Why the heck wouldn't Cubase just auto calculate it based on the maudio latency call out and sample rate?!?!

Anyway, I'm all set for now. I will end up getting a multi channel as soon as I save up for one. Now it's on to Microphones.....

Babaluma · Posted: Wed Apr 18, 2012 3:36 am Post subject: