# On hooking up mixers to your digital interfaces in your home studios



## Guest (Jan 18, 2008)

This thread was inspired by this post by Kapo_Polenton in Roidster's home studio thread:



> > I like the look and feel of those big analog mixers.. how would you track all the mics into your computer? Do you condense the tracks down and send them out? I have to admit that with a presonus firepod I can't help but think some of the analog magic is missing when I record..
> 
> 
> if you look at the little pix with the Marine from hell in them,you will see
> ...


I personally have always found the whole connection-to-computers problem a little hairy. I have a multichannel mixer and a multiple input and output interface. How do I wire it up all up? Is there a right way and a wrong way? I'm still on the low end of this learning curve for sure. My home setup is small (2-in, 2-out card with a small mixer) so it's easy to solve. I run the inputs off the 2 sends on my mixer. This lets me send any of the 10 inputs on my mixer into the soundcard by simply dialing up the appropriate send bus on that channel. And then I run the outputs from the sound card back into a stereo channel on the mixer so it has it's own fader associated with it. Just have to remember never to dial up send 1 or send 2 on that channel strip.

Is that the right way to do it? I don't know. Works well for my simple setup. It gets more complicated though if you have a bigger I/O interface on your computer, say something that has 8 or 10 inputs and outputs.

With The Apollo Effect we used an awful older Mackie VLZ board that had 8 mic pres and an Aardvark 10-in 10-out PCI-based box to record our demos. The story of how that Aardvark came to be is a tale in and of itself...needless to say it was a stupid purchase (always check to make sure a company _still exists_ before you buy used gear kids). Anyway, we first set it up using the inserts on each channel -- we'd run the insert into the Aardvark's input and then take the same numbered output and run it back into the mixer all with the TRS to Y-cables. This mean the signal going to the Aardvark was pre-fader on the mixer (might have even been pre-EQ) and if you forgot to route the outputs correctly in the Aardvark's mixer you could end up with mixer channel 1 going into input 1 but coming back into the mixer on strip 5. We also ran two outputs (9 and 10) from the Aardvark as the "master stereo" outputs back channels 11 and 12 on the Mackie (which had line in's but no pres IIRC).

We played around with things for a bit and I think in the end we settled on using the 6 "tape out" outputs (I think the latest VLZs call these "direct outs") on the Mackie to send to the Aardvark which were post-fader outputs. And then we just ran the "master stereo" outputs from the Aardvark back to 11 and 12 as before. One thing that troubled me with this approach was it dropped our tracking from 8 tracks to 6 because well...that's all the direct outs the Mackie had. We had to keep using the insert approach for two tracks.

We used the Send 1 and Send 2 busses to dial up two mono monitor mixes for anyone tracking.

Was that the right way to do it? I have no clue. I'd love to hear how it should have been done from someone with more experience setting this stuff up.


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