Presonus Firepod and Mixing Advice

ahendy

New member
For my recording interface, I own a presonus firepod firewire interface, which as you guys know, has 8 mic/line inputs.

Now, when I record drums, I use an 8-piece mic setup. 3 toms, 2 overheads, snare, kick, and hi-hat. When doing this, this takes up all of the inputs on my firepod. While this isn't a huge deal, since I don't record multiple instruments at once, I find it inconvenient to switch cables back and forth for different recording setups.

In a perfect world, I would purchase another firepod, daisy chain them, and boom, I would have double the inputs. But, the firepods don't run cheap, and I wont be able to afford another one for a little while. That being said, I have a spare outboard mixer sitting around that I think I could put to good use here.

The mixer I have is a Behringer Eurorack UB244FX-PRO. It's a great mixer, with 10 mic inputs, 4 aux outs, direct line monitoring, etc. Check out that site for more details.

Anyway, I was thinking I could go about running all the drum mics into the outboard mixer, and mixing them down into 4 or 5 outputs, then bringing them into the firepod. That being said, how should I combine the mics? I like to pan the overheads, and the toms.. so should I pan those in the mixer, or should I set them into separate outputs and pan them in Cubase?

Not exactly a simple situation, I know. How would you go about doing this? I don't mind using 4 or 5 inputs on the firepod, but anymore than that is kind of a pain in the ass. Like I said, the outboard mixer that I own has 4 aux outputs, and 2 separate sub outputs.

Anyway, all and any advice is welcomed. Thanks in advance for your help.
 
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Welcome to this forum.

I`m a happy owner of a Firepod myself.

My advice to you is, use your Firepod and only that, the Behringer unit has much weaker Preamps IMHO, I``ve tried both and was clearly happier with the Firepod.

But for all means experiment, you might like the pre`s in your Euro-rack better than me.

Good luck :)
 
Nakatira said:
My advice to you is, use your Firepod and only that, the Behringer unit has much weaker Preamps IMHO, I``ve tried both and was clearly happier with the Firepod.
I'm with her
 
Would I really notice a huge difference with just drums? Either way, I'm trying to save money and be more convenient here. It might be my only option.
 
as far as my recordings go... drums are never "just" drums. Drum sounds and tones can completely shape the sound of a song. It's something to think about. If you record a crucial part of a track with multilple noisy pre's, you end up multiplying that noise, and no matter how amazing that you may get the rest of the track to sound, you have a noisy song polluted by those drums.

No part of a song is ever "just" anything. Consistency is a key.
 
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