I know I’m not alone, when new gear enters your studio it could be frustrating as hell rigging it up to jive with your existing pieces. New equipment can mean new cables, a mixer upgrade, an incompatible audio interface, or even a whole new power chain. Some of us plan it out and some of us plan as we go. I’m in the middle, and surely am a visual learner, so it’s been helpful for me to sketch up some diagrams here and there and to better explain my mumbling garble.
In theses sketches I’m trying to figure out how to rig up multiple inputs to run into one pedal chain. The last is just some document sketching to remind myself of how a particular Synth worked with a particular midi setup.
Hopefully operators can chime in as I’m ALWAYS needing help and input, and am ALWAYS confused. I’m hoping other noobs can get the visualization and info here too:
Here’s an old gear layout from my 2006 setup. I had fun using Illustrator to make the various gear icons. This is back when I had an Alesis mixer to get 2 tracks via USB into my computer. I have a vastly different set up now - though I still use that old Roland PC-200 as a midi keyboard.
I now use a Mackie Onyx 1220i - multitrack firewire into the computer (a PC Audiolabs box with 16gig of ram). Running Cubase.
I have the HR-16 boxed up now but there are 4 outs on the back and I used two for kick and snare - you pan them to isolate the tracks - and then I’d use the other pair for stereo out for everything else.
My main portable set up is just a Mac laptop running ableton suite 9 now and the op1 and a portable recorder. We have a full studio which has more of a manual of patching, but found these sketches from a year or so ago on my Instagram.
I like preparing little "battles" for myself, keep the creative juices flowing and all that jazz. For summer 2015 I have decided to pull together an album's worth of songs (entitled "trios") based on the principle of using different combinations of all the pieces of gear that I own, limiting myself to using each synth 3 times and only using 3 synths in each song. This way I can gauge what works well with what, as well as hopefully letting me focus on synths I haven't used for a while. In the end I will have 11 songs.
Although some parts will be sequenced, all tracks will be recorded / played live. I have prepared a schematic for the first track, #1:
yea i like playing little games too. switch around the setup and just go with it, keep it small. its a lot of fun, keeps things fresh, and you learn alot along the way!
@ghostly606 good idea with the mini battles. How is your Br600 holding up? I checked out the version after yours and it’s a shame it has no onboard editing capabilities. I’m still on the hunt for a digital multitrack with midi …
Just realised that my KS4 only takes a mono input so I have split my output from the vSample, one side going into the KS4 for vocoding, and the other going straight into the mixer. Just need to pan each part in the vSample accordingly.
@kites I love my BR600. Was the first purchase in my music production adventure back in about 2005 which saw me eventually move to Logic 8 on a Powerbook a couple of years later. Although my tunes were more polished I missed the immediacy of using a hardware multitracker so purchased another BR600 a couple of years ago and I haven't looked back. Onboard editing is basic but adequate and the effects sound great to my ears, although you are limited to a single insert effect so lots of bouncing needed if you want effects on multiple tracks. As outlined above, I tend to use it to record jams and only overdub the odd guitar line, sample or vocal, but the 8 tracks are there if I need them.
There are no portable, quiet (i.e. flash based) hardware recorders with MIDI as far as I can tell. This is a downside of the BR600 but if I need audio clocked to the rest of my kit I use my OP-1 these days. I also have the Micro BR which is fantastic too, only downside is that the only way to EQ tracks is via an insert effect.
@ghostly606 ya there are a few recorders with midi from around that 05 and back range that i’ve seen, but more recent is the Cakewalk Sonar/Roland v-studio 100. It only allows you to add markers as far as I know of it’s editing features. Right now, i’ve been kicking around the Zoom R16 (no midi) or to just use my iPad with the soon to be released Keith McMillen K-mix.
I had their Pencil stylus, but it vanished 