I have an out-building at my home with a room (30' x 24'). It has a 10' ceiling. I have set the room up for live music with a PA and side fills. I also do multi-track recording sessions (separately). I do live broadcasts from this studio in a "Home Concert" format with a live audience of 30 people. I am currently using a Mackie Onyx 1640i, Xsplit Broadcast software and a few cameras for the live broadcasts. I am routing all channels through an Aux for the broadcast audio feed, so I'm mixing the broadcast audio somewhat blind because I can't hear the broadcast feed in the live room well enough to do a dynamic mix. I'm using Sonar Pro and an 8-channel headphone amp for the recording sessions.
I do all this basically on the cheap, and as a philanthropic endeavor, giving artists an avenue to play private shows for profit as well as providing a place to record original music on a shoestring budget. Besides, I'm old now and I just enjoy helping people musically. I don't make any claims of engineering prowess nor do I have polished producer skills. It is what it is.
Switching back and forth between live performances and recording sessions is a chore for me, and with only 16 tracks from the Mackie (via firewire), I would occasionally find myself short. So now I'm adding a Mackie 2404VLZ4 4-Bus which is a 24 channel mixer. I do love those Onyx pre's, but the VLZ4 only records 4 busses, so it looks like with the 1640i and the VLZ4 on the Mothership I can have a total of 20 tracks.
Okay.... there's the background for the purpose of this post, which is to hopefully get some consultation on the best way to integrate these two mixers for my purpose. It looks like there are many ways to do it and I want to choose the best one I can, at least for the first attempt anyway. I'll be able to post some images after I obtain some cred on this site.
The VLZ4 has 2x onboard effects that could come in handy with the live performances. Both mixers have 6 aux sends.
My preferred track/channel list is:
8 drums
4 vocals
3 GTRs
2 KEYS
1 Bass
2 Misc
I have no idea if this is the right way to go about asking this community for advice, but here it is. I, of course, will try to answer any pertinent questions. Thank you for even reading this in the first place.
I do all this basically on the cheap, and as a philanthropic endeavor, giving artists an avenue to play private shows for profit as well as providing a place to record original music on a shoestring budget. Besides, I'm old now and I just enjoy helping people musically. I don't make any claims of engineering prowess nor do I have polished producer skills. It is what it is.
Switching back and forth between live performances and recording sessions is a chore for me, and with only 16 tracks from the Mackie (via firewire), I would occasionally find myself short. So now I'm adding a Mackie 2404VLZ4 4-Bus which is a 24 channel mixer. I do love those Onyx pre's, but the VLZ4 only records 4 busses, so it looks like with the 1640i and the VLZ4 on the Mothership I can have a total of 20 tracks.
Okay.... there's the background for the purpose of this post, which is to hopefully get some consultation on the best way to integrate these two mixers for my purpose. It looks like there are many ways to do it and I want to choose the best one I can, at least for the first attempt anyway. I'll be able to post some images after I obtain some cred on this site.
The VLZ4 has 2x onboard effects that could come in handy with the live performances. Both mixers have 6 aux sends.
My preferred track/channel list is:
8 drums
4 vocals
3 GTRs
2 KEYS
1 Bass
2 Misc
I have no idea if this is the right way to go about asking this community for advice, but here it is. I, of course, will try to answer any pertinent questions. Thank you for even reading this in the first place.