been throwing cash everywhere and skipped basics...

dunwich

New member
I'm not new to recording but I'm an amateur for sure. I have way too many cool toys and not enough of the basics.
I bought a big mixer on the cheap that turned out to be more broken than I could fix. I think not having a great mixer while having tons of hard n software not really connected at once is why I have been unable to get where i really want.
I'm a bass player mainly..
I have midi keys, bass, drum pads, a monome, a million boxes, tons of vst/I, Eurorack syhth.
A MOTU 8pre with FireWire and optical Etc.
3beastly computer s... mac, Linux, windows.
I getting a neutral bass speaker soon and may add some 600pair jbl monitors. I use headphones.

I'm just realizing today I somehow copped all this cash and skipped a proper mixer. I'm sorry if this post is confusing. I've been buying too much crap I don't need and I'm overwhelmed to connect it all at once plus soundproof big space. Pix coming.
 
(I feel like i had a better post in the OP but i spent so long on it i got logged out and im adding details in additonal posts bc i am still so frustrated i lost an hour long "perfect" post)

this is in a 6000 sq ft basement btw. I made a panarama i cant get off my ipad unfortunately.

Ive gone and re read about mixers but all i know is i need to find the right one, hopefully for 500 or less so that greatly limits options. Browsing my sweetwater catalogs is just frustrating me.


i canot seem to upload from mac... illl try from another box.
 
Shortened Gear List of things i need to be all connected together via(mixer? midi routing box? a midi clock coming from a secondary computer from different midi out/thru stuff?)

Bass Guitar DI/Mics/ETC
Bass Pod Rackmount
MIDI Bass w/ Axon 500 rack unit and Graphtech Piezo pickups
Two Akai MIDI keyboards
Monôme 128 plus the Monôme “Trinity” Eurorack devices
Moog Moogerfooger Clustterflux, MuRF
Moog Minitaur
Moog CP-251
An insanely complicated system of FX loops using fx boxes, an alexis comp, BBE SM,
misc other instruments

Because it seems like as soon as i get something the company puts out an upgrade,
no matter how much i read about mixers I am still very unsure if need one thats an interface to use with the MOTU 8PRE (not with the other MOTU stuff in the interface chart)
I will cry if i get a mixer with firewire and then a thunderbolt one comes out in the same price range.

Mixer i have(works): Mackie 1402-VLZ PRO
Mixer than won’t turn on, not sure if can fix: Studiomaster Diamond Pro 24-4-3
 
(I feel like i had a better post in the OP but i spent so long on it i got logged out and.... i lost an hour long "perfect" post)

Yeah, frikkin hate when that happens. When you log in, click the little Remember Me box and you won't get logged out during a long post.

Somewhere in one of the forums is a Stickie Thread about Mixers vs Interfaces. Common wisdom leans towards not using a mixer to record at home as it's not really necessary if you're doing computer based recording. It is better to record a raw track the process it after you have all your tracks recorded. You don't want to be applying EQ or effects until you hear the tracks in context with all the other tracks.

If you're a one-man band like most of us, you can get by with just a 2 channel interface. That is, if you're not recording acoustic drums. In fact, for drums, using a VSTi like EZDrummer can give you satisfactory results in place of acoustic drums.

For the bass, a lot of people will plug the bass directly into an interface and let rip. There are some decent bass sim plugs out there now.

If you're recording a whole band, then a larger interface with more inputs would be necessary. There are some on the market that can stream 8 channels to your computer and stay under the $500 mark.
 
I HAVE been known to go on a bit but, I am never going to read somebody's hour of work! Here's a tip: Write your post in (say) Word then copy and paste it into the reply box. You can spend as long as you like polishing your prose!

As our esteemed Mod Mr C said, if it is just you, all you need it an AI and two inputs (unless you want to record a drumkit) . If indeed you want to connect all that gear in some rational way and record other peeps, look into a patch bay (or three!).

Dave.
 
Cash will never make you better at music or engineering and won't act as a shortcut. Dig in and get learning. You'd have been better off spending time reading $15 on a book about engineering and reading manuals for your gear.
 
Cash will never make you better at music or engineering and won't act as a shortcut. Dig in and get learning.

Nooooooooooooooooooooooooo! :eek: Truth!

However, cash definitely does help once you've got the knowledge of how to play and record to get the creamy slick n groovy toys that make for an awesome recording........ that said...buying them before you know how to use them is definitely putting the cart before the horse.
 
Nooooooooooooooooooooooooo! :eek: Truth!

However, cash definitely does help once you've got the knowledge of how to play and record to get the creamy slick n groovy toys that make for an awesome recording........ that said...buying them before you know how to use them is definitely putting the cart before the horse.

Yeah exactly, so you start with simple books and basic tools and learn them, and then when you learn their limitations you know exactly where to drop cash where it will matter most. That's the way to go. It sounds like the OP has a lot of cash to spare and went all in and now he's getting overwhelmed and playing catch up. That's fine I guess. If I were him I'd put the gear away, buy a book, learn everything, then take the gear out of the closet in 6 months after the learning curve is curbed.
 
(Yeah sorry for verbose posts, however all your simple advice has lifted a fog of anxious confusion! Much thanks all.)

Great replies. Right on to for the most part. i was understandably misunderstood a bit(I never meant to imply gear can substitute for brain power).
Fear of colouring the sound with a mixer is why i have little experience with them outside of a PA, and a bunch of reading made me think i needed a nice new digi one.
but hell i have 8 inputs on the MOTU 8PRE, plus MIDI, stereo outs, phones, optical, firewire,spdif...

Cash will never make you better at music or engineering and won't act as a shortcut. Dig in and get learning. You'd have been better off spending time reading $15 on a book about engineering and reading manuals for your gear.

I thought I had self-chastised in the other posts on that very subject.
I have more experience than i sound like but i do need to go back to basics.
Though i do refer to a floppy 15 dollar book often, that post hurt... in a good way.

I may get a patch bay, which i never considered until i now. It will solve a lot of hassle, but i wont continue to cart before horse with excellent self made content and comparatively poorly implemented busses/layers/automations/etc. If that makes sense...

my basses/instruments with a couple dozen fox boxes/loops/Pre's into a DI and or POD rack.
VS
MIDI stuff. gigged/slacked for a while, forgetting so much of my training in REAPER and Ableton live.

Ive heard good things on ez drummer,
Right now ive been HATING BFD 2 for a year or two, tabbing drums in notation software and just exporting it with some Joe B. evil drum kits.

I take full responsibility for sounding uhh... stupid and im so far from a great engineer. Back to basics indeed

I hated making what i feel was a supernooby UTFSE kinda post, but i saw the "we wont laugh" statement and decided embarrassing myself a bit to get some nice gems from you all was worth it!
Im going to research more to see how i can properly interconnect my MIDI in a more streamlined manner without a thru router box.

I will post "smarter" in the other forums, dont worry =P

(and yes, I learned basics over 5 years ago, slacked and forgot after an injury, then did put cart before horse. I may just have to put away all the weird stuff i have bought and made and EQ bass-guitar-percs a while)

I so very much appreciate the replies, smacked me right into gear and out of a state of confusion/doubt.
 
my basses/instruments with a couple dozen fox boxes/loops/Pre's into a DI and or POD rack.
VS
MIDI stuff. gigged/slacked for a while, forgetting so much of my training in REAPER and Ableton live.

Most (not ALL) home recording artists only use the outboard gear they feel is still superior to the virtual software, and therefore necessary. Arguments are often made for particular guitar amps and heads, keyboards, and preamp for vocals/mics. This doesn't mean you can't get a good sounding recording using mostly software, myself and others have been managing pretty well for the past couple years once computers got fast enough.

The basics are on youtube. Knowing where to start can be tricky. It depends person to person. If you know what a compressor is, proper EQ'ing, how to use effects (reverb, delay), how to avoid phase issues, etc... then you're looking at more advanced videos/tutorials on how to refine your mix, and perhaps mastering. If you don't have a solid understanding of those basic things, well then go look them up. There's probably even videos on how to tackle these things in your specific DAW.

Before someone else feels obligated to mention it - having a good space to work on music is important. You mentioned sound proofing. What exactly have you done? What are you currently using for monitoring other than headphones?
 
Before someone else feels obligated to mention it - having a good space to work on music is important. You mentioned sound proofing. What exactly have you done? What are you currently using for monitoring other than headphones?

Sound proofing is barely underway because of the scope of it... im in a unfinished portion of a basement that is 35feetx35feet+ anothr 25 or so behind a door/wall(a finished room). Ill have to show pics.
Foam seems like such an expensive nightmare, but i plan to use some in select spots.
THUS, i have a bunch of wood to make fractal diffusers. Most of my audio doesnt touch the air, and i guess im praying the diffusers work like the theory behind them.

Right now just Audio-Technnica monitoring headphones. I had the JBLs that were 250 each come damaged, so i returned em and will probably re-buy them soon. I also have a new 3-way sonically neutral bass cab on the way that can be used as a monitor, so im gonna try to connect em all together with a Crest Pro-Lite 2.0 DSP if i can. Dunno if it wil be OK to have 3 speakers in a stero situation... L - bass/Mono - R?

I am honestly and perhaps obviously struggling in both of those areas - nice picks lol. I felt like i had noobed up my thread so much that making additional queries on those subjects here was overboard/something so broad it belonged in a different forum/its forum.

As far as comp, eq im good with bass guitar but as far as delay effects...if its something other than say some reverb on guitar solo an such then sure.
when i think compression i mainly think of bass and vox, and as far as EQing its a constant state of referring to books for freq ranges.
If im honest and direct, i need to brush up/learn very horribly. I had some health problems for a while blah blah im ok now.

I downloaded a bunch of Youtube vids. I am watching em but TBH im tearing my hair out between training, moving hardware around every day, and having a non-finished studio for so long - so i stopped practicing bass as much to make my studio "official" asap.

I will look up stuff about phase issues, i assume youre talking about overlapping sine waves off by half = silence...etc..and stuff =/ =)
 
I wasn't trying to insult you Dunwich, sorry if it came off that way. It just sounded like you didn't know how to use the gear yet had purchased expensive gear. Maybe I interpreted the posts wrong. Are you making money recording other bands? Unless you're going to be making income recording bands, soundproofing to that degree is over the top, imo. Though, if you have a ton of money and want to do it as hobby for the sake of it that's cool and it probably would be fun.
 
And I will say that I am confused myself. You 'Dunwich' have a bunch of experience. Yet you are wondering what you need...

Please don't take this wrong, but I am not sure what you are asking man?
 
Now that I'm creeping up on 62, I am sorry I did not take the time to get into the technology back in the early 80's to learn about midi and the developing recording potential of home recording studio equipment. I'd already been a guitar player for 25 years. In one respect, I did exactly what you did and bought some nice gear and spent a few bucks. Never learned how to use it fully but time to be a musician was so limited. Damn I had a mortgage and two kids now and priorities changed.

Now the kids are 35 + yrs old, I'm working only 2 days a week and I gave up some activities that took time. So my studio today has some great vintage stuff as well as a new RME UFX+. Great mics and the first fuzz box I bought back in 1969. I think I paid $800-$900 for the Moog , $2100 for that Yamaha DX 7II, $700 for my Gibson Les Paul Black Beauty. There are loads more. I was making $242.00 a week take home and my wife and I had no bills. This equipment was big money for the time period.

I think as mentioned here, if you're really into making recordings, invest the money but more importantly, invest time to put it all together and make crap recordings and save em all. Then start getting them tweaked and improve them. We all seem to learn by doing. Brain overload happens quickly with DAW options and goes a long way in creating enough frustrations to distract you in lots of other more productive directions. Your 6000 Sq basement is gigantic so this needs to be tempered and controlled if you have any microphone tracking.

As a guitar player, I still set up mics in several areas and track some nice sounding acoustic music. I have a few other players who come over and we can play for a few hours and just see how it goes. These tracks come out pretty well and mix down as if we were in a paid studio. YouTube and the internet are as confusing as finding the right book but once you get into a few techniques, it will take off.

Best of luck...

By the way: changed my computer to an Asus Z270 and several high performance components to enable thunderbolt on the UFX+. The thunderbolt is amazing and my latencies at 32 buffers run about 1.6ms.
I don't use this setting but compared to my previous setup, it's day and night.
 
Hey np Nola, its all good.
And I will say that I am confused myself. You 'Dunwich' have a bunch of experience. Yet you are wondering what you need...

Please don't take this wrong, but I am not sure what you are asking man?

For example, say i want to say i want to use a midi keyboard to control Absynth + use the pads(drum pads, Akai) on the keyboard to control a little drum machine.
But i also want to be able to pick up my MIDI Bass guitar and use both a hardware and software sources.

Plus I must use the midi port on the Moog Custerflux, Minitaur, Midi button matrix boxes, Digitech Whammy, Modular synths, and such. Making it work seems a nightmare because even with the extra ports on the Bass POD Rackm i cant make it so im not always pulling cables and moving expensive gear all the time to change things up.

For some reason a midi patch bay and an analog patch bay are things ive never even considered / i got stuck wondering why the hell i cant just have all this crap plugged in permanently. Thats my central problem/source of frustration.

In additon, most of the gear isnt set up because i moved it and had some personal issue to deal with, and on top of it all im not sure if im going back to Ubuntu Studio plus Macbook Pro with REAPER/Ableton and other bc the latency is killer for stuff like Komplete, BFD, and such installed on it. OR i have a very powerful windows box too.

ill figure it out, but right now the gear isnt connected(I moved it all into a basement) and after a while realized I must be missing some sort of info or gear that someone with a wall of Moog stuff etc has.

I like to use very complicated split signal chains for...everything to get unique effects but will use a A/B box and go from space bass to wah/whammy/distortion/delay etc. So between having a buncha fx boxes with split cables, a/b boxes, and peripheral chains with an on on stomp(some of which will take a midi clock in) plus the MIDI controllers Im frustrated i cant seem to have it all mostly permanently hooked up like i want.

I dont know if a Keith Mcmillin midi ex-pander is the key or if i need a midi bay. I had tunnel vision on what to do until very recently. For being hard to help or Mr 99 problems im sorry.

If youre still confused... Note all the gear i mentioned plus an army of stompboxes and circuit bent crap and imagine combining them all for use any time. Im not even certain what is best case to allow my controllers, Midi bass, and various stomp fx and basses/guitars/instruments live in harmony =P

If it counts i feel so bad i drop these large posts that may not be as clear as i think they are due to IRL confusion. I appreciate all the posts so very much-TY =)
--
Nola- its all good =) I wasnt even mad and understood why you had interpreted the post that way. Since i am having cetain probs i feel i should know how to deal with by now, it actually helped put a bigger fire under my ass!

Knuckle - a 69 fuzz? woah. I, fuzz lover, and quite jealous. Thanks for the words as well! Im hoping ive overlooked a simple solution i guess =0
 
You can pretty much have as many MIDI I/Os as you need. Just keep plugging in interfaces til you have enough holes. It's nice (and probably cheaper) if you can get all of those holes in one box, but it's not essential. Before you know how many you need, you have to calm down and count them! Just ignore thoughts of trying to merge things or use MIDI Thru or whatever to start with. How many total ins and outs do you actually have to connect?

Same goes with audio ins. It's not always as easy to just run multiple audio interfaces, but until you actually count everything up, you can't know what you need. In this case it probably will end up best to get a decent half-normalled patchbay and carefully work out some priorities.

Really, just calm down and count. You're kind of trying to attack this from the middle.
 
Dunwich, you realize that fuzz box sat for over 40 years...got some rust on the bottom but, a new 9 volt battery and it worked fine in the original Princeton Reverb amp it was used on way back when.
 
until you actually count everything up, you can't know what you need. In this case it probably will end up best to get a decent half-normalled patchbay and carefully work out some priorities.

Really, just calm down and count. You're kind of trying to attack this from the middle.

Wow, that is exactly what i needed to hear/know at this point of the thread/my life lol. !!

I am close to deciding which MIDI interface vs price i shall get first along with a 4 way audio patch bay from Behringer.

Its finally going to be a studio official/a space of great pride rather than a pile of gear!

Its all disconnected for a revamp which has been hard on my spine, but im almost done turning a big basement full of boxes into a studio (and an electronics workshop/bench) =)


---

Hey Knuckle - I love that im unsurprised it works, and that is is giving me a big smile. I have a Swingline stapler hand me down from the 60s that still works better than any other desk stapler.
It is unfortunate that gearheads and the like are some of the few who want to pay more for gear that will outlive humanity. For self defense, those thick steel enclosure doubles as a noggin knockin weapons lol. =P
 
oi, this talk of Princeton Reverbs is making me sad. I had a '73 I bought new, it was my first amp. Had it for 32 years. sold it so I could stay home with my dad while he went through chemo. Both Dad and the amp are long gone now. But the fuzz box you still have reminds me of my MXR Distortion + that I bought when they first came out. It's a Bud box and it still works great. I had it put away for about 30 years and took it out a few year back. I almost sold it to buy some rack gear but I held off.

I'm sort of in the same boat as the OP, got a bunch of gear without really learning what I needed to do first. Due to the obsolescence of my old recording rig (G4, PT LE, Digi 001), I yes through some cash about but hopefully in an efficient manner by getting a USB interface with enough inputs to take my old cassette outputs (up to 4 tracks). I'm trying to learn Garageband so I can throw down and get semi-decent tracks without having to spend more money.

One thing I did do was get a patch bay and that allowed me to get everything hooked up without having to go behind them and plug cables in every time I wanted to use them. It made a huge difference. Look at what you go, the goezintas and goesouttaz, plan a layout for your patchbay and diagram it on paper and label everything. Do not lose that paper. Then as you might make some acquisitions and delete some current stuff, every once in a while, unplug everything from the patchbay and do another inventory of your connections. I did that when I brought my USB interface online.
 
Just a thought. I got a Yamaha MIDI Junction Controller (MJC8 I think) 8 in/8out that simplifies a lot of midi routing. Memories for various connections are handy for quick rerouting. I also made a list of all the ins and outs plus every type of connector on every piece of my small collection of equipment in preparation for building/buyind cables. List everything and think out the cable routings. I got a Behringer patchbay and set it up for nornals, half-normals,ect. Now my setup is almost standard or untill i have need or cash for another toy.
 
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