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Ok, I'm just trying to figure out what the best overall routing scheme for my studio is. It's just getting a bit overwhelming now that I am about to record entire bands at once. Here's the basics of what I have going on.

I have a Tascam DM-4800 with 3 TDIF cable going to a MOTU 2408 which serves as my soundcard for my DAW. So I use the DM as a 24 channel front end. The MOTU delivers signals to my M1 active monitors. I use Cubase 4 as my DAW. So, that works well as a one way ticket to get audio into the DAW, up to 24 mono tracks at a time. I've tested it, it works fine. So then there's the whole thing of monitoring for the musicians in the studio. Right now, I only have one live room and it's the same as my control room. I will eventually have two other rooms but for now, I have the one live room and I can kick the singer down the hall with a sey of cans and a mic.

I bought a 6 channel headphone amp that can recieve one stereo mix plus an additional stereo mix per channel and then each channel can be balanced between the main mix and the individual stereo input on that channel. The MOTU has 6 mono outs I can still use to feed the headphone amp or, I have all the aux sends on the DM I can use. In addition to that, every channel that goes to the MOTU from the DM, can also be sent back to the DM on channels 25-48 through the same existing TDIF cables. I have know idea what is really practical to do here. Plase dont hate on me because I have all this stuff and dont know exactly what to do with it. I can get it to work a few different ways, I'm just trying to figure out what the best way is to do all of this. I want to give myself as many options as possible to make good mixes for the bands when they are here. Once the audio is in C4, I keep it there and only generally use plugins for effects. But maybe I should keep the possibility open to add external effects someday.

I'm just looking for the most practical way to do this. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

E

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anonymous Wed, 10/01/2008 - 09:06

Patch bay?
I'm not sure.

But having a stereo mix of the drums as the main stereo feed to the headphone amp would prolly be the best. Then depending on who wants what in their cans, either more me or more bass or a little bit of everything or drums and that triangle guy over there... You can then patch up a feed for each headphone individual stereo in.

I could be talking shit because I've never seen a patch bay. You may need some sort of summing thing, I dunno if a patch bay sums tracks.

anonymous Wed, 10/01/2008 - 09:21

Your plan sounds good to me. I wouldn't worry setting it up now for external effects you may use some day. Having control over all the headphone mixes on the physical mixers is key for me. It makes the work flow much quicker when you don't have to pull up a software mixer in the middle of what ever you are doing on your computer.

RemyRAD Wed, 10/01/2008 - 14:36

Eric, in the old days, we would utilize a cue send, of track playback, to each individual track we wanted them to hear. The cue send would feed the headphone amplifier. It was simple. It worked. Everybody does not need to have their own headphone mixer. That's much easier to do with a digital Cat 5-based system when you're only dealing with a single skinny wire. You can also develop a stereo mix for them by feeding out 2 cue sends. Or you could create multiple mono headphone feeds with individual mixes by assigning cue 1 to the singers and cue 2 to the keyboard guy, for instance?

So if you want to a headphone system? Let me know I'm good at headphone systems. You can then buy me some of the dinner at the Chinese restaurant you recommended, then? Mmmmmmm, I just love the smell of Chinese food mmmmmmmmmmm.

Head phony girl
Ms. Remy Ann David

EricWatkins Thu, 10/02/2008 - 04:41

Thanks everyone. I know that I could just paralell the outputs to my monitors and give them that. Then I guess I could use one send per person to the headphone amp's aux ins for the "More me" scenario.

Remy, you're going to have to pick the resturaunt as I havent been on the east coast since 93. You can believe that I'll definitely look you up if I ever get out there. Right now I need approximately $700,000,000,000.00 in gas money to get there. Anyone know where I could get that?

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