Hi,
i live in an apt in new york city and can't disturb my neighbors.. I play drums but at home I use an electronic drum kit and have been practicing with my friends using headphones to monitor ourselves and we'd record sessions into my computer using the rca tape outs. I have only been playing with one musician at a time so a dual headphone splitter worked fine until now.
I organized a jam session with 6 other musicians in my building and would like to record it the same way I used to. My problem is I have no way of splitting the headphone jack 7 ways. My plan was to daisy chain 2 analog mixers together and use the headphone jack on each one split with a 4 way 1/4 splitter. but here's the problem. . How can I run half the instruments in one mixerA into the other mixerB and then back to the mixerA finally resulting in hearing all the instruments using both headphone outs on both mixers? In other words.
I have :
1 drummer
2 guitar players
1 electric violin player
2 synth players
= 7 musicians
I could run everyone through my stereo at a low volume but would prefer everyone use headphones so we can turn it up as loud as we want to replicate a live practive environment.
I have 2 mixers with all the goodies.
How should I do this?
This is my 1st post here so please help me out.
Thank you!
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How about using a headphone amp??....8 channel model should work
How about using a headphone amp??....8 channel model should work just fine!
Headphone amps are available with separate volume controls....there are also 4 channel varieties...
Use the headphone output or mix output from either mixer (or both) into the headphone amp....
If you want the band to sound like its live? You need everybody
If you want the band to sound like its live? You need everybody playing together, live, without headphones.
After your initial live tracking session, you could go back and re-record other parts, again & again & again if you shoot so desire?
Working without headphones means crosstalk/bleed between instruments and their respective microphones. This is not a bad thing. It's bad if musically you guys are a bunch of crappy beginner amateurs. And can't get through a song without falling on your face? And without headphones, after tracking, leave everything in place. Do a second pass, with the studio speakers on. Don't touch any of the microphones. Don't touch the tracking recording levels. Record everything without the musicians again. These pair of multiple tracks can now be combined with inverted phase. When you do that, the Speaker bleed will magically disappear while taking down your tracks by a single digital generation. No where near as horrible when we did this in the analog base since the buildup of tape noise could become excessive. You won't have this problem with digital.
If you really want to use headphones? Go out and purchase yourself a couple of inexpensive headphone amplifiers. They generally feed a family of four headphones. Two can be paralleled together for a total of 8 headphone outputs each with it's own volume control.
Besides, headphones are expensive and stupid musicians are always breaking them. So I like fold back to the speakers. You break a lot less headphones that way.
Magic disappearances through phase manipulation
Ms. Remy Ann David
You need to split the problem of instrument/vocal mixing from th
You need to split the problem of instrument/vocal mixing from that of headphone monitoring.
For the mixing, group the instruments so that one mixer generates a two-track sub-mix which you then feed as a stereo input into the other mixer with the rest of the instruments/vocals.
For monitoring, take the two-track output from the second mixer and feed it into a small hi-fi amp. Use the loudspeaker outputs of the hi-fi amp to feed all 7 headphones in parallel. You may need to wire up some jack sockets for this, but it's easy stuff. A refinement would be to have 100 Ohm wirewound dual (stereo) potentiometers wired as rheostats in series with each headphone so that each player could have his own volume control.