Mixer Problem

[Mish]

Hey guys - I've just joined the board after I've read some really cool topics/questions on this board - and I'm absolutely fresh to home recording so I've run into this thing after I bought my mixer couple of days ago. So I've recorded all instrumental tracks for my album and when it came time to record vocals - I thought just my BR-600 multitrack wouldn't be enough, so I've decided to buy a mixer, and an AKG condenser mike in addition. So the sound is crystal clear, I love the equalizer controls on the mixer and everything.

The problem is this - I can't record just a vocal track while sending instrumental tracks to the headphones. As far as my home recording knowledge goes here's what I get -

A) I plug the speakers out of my laptop into mixer's CD in. I can hear intrumental track, I can hear myself singing BUT - my multitrack picks up both vocals and instumental tracks.

B) Same connection - but now there is this "CD/tape to CONTROL" button on the mixer, that if pressed does NOT send the instrumental track to the recorder, BUT - I can't hear myself singing in the headphones. It does send the vocals track though - no problems there, but not being able to hear your voice is a huge drawback.




Here's my setup -

And here're two clear images of my Xenyx -

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I guess it's a long shot, but I'm sure there is some way to solve this thing and I hope someone could tell me what I'm doing wrong.

 

[Wish]

Why don't you just monitor from the BR instead of the mixer? Seems like that would be the easiest. You should be able to hear the vocals and the backing tracks from the recorder at the same time.

 

[Mish]

Why don't you just monitor from the BR instead of the mixer? Seems like that would be the easiest. You should be able to hear the vocals and the backing tracks from the recorder at the same time.

That's the problem - if I hear both backing track and vocals thru BR - that means it would record both of them on the same track. I need just a clear vocal track. Besides the phones output on BR is very quiet, you can hardly hear anything.

 

[Wish]

I guess I'm not understanding something.

Are your backing tracks on the laptop or the BR? Sounds like the backing tracks are on the laptop, which if you are trying to record to the BR doesn't make sense to me.

But I'll just go with it at the moment. So, if I assume the backing tracks are on the laptop and you just want to send vocals to the BR without the backing track:


The headphones mix on the mixer are from the control room.

So if the backing tracks from the laptop are input to the tape in on rhe mixer, select CD/Tape to CTR (control room). Do not select CD/Tape to Main mix.

Then send the main outs to the BR (instead of tape out) - that should send the vocal only to the BR and still allow you to hear the vocal and backing tracks from the headphones (control room). You'll probably want to hard pan the vocal on the mixer to just send it to one channel of the BR as well.

How about that?

 

[Mish]

Yes that was exactly the case.

The Main Out didn't work - but I tried sending CD/tape out to BR and that was it! Actually I don't know why it does work - it shouldn't coz in theory it would only send the signal it receives from the laptop to the recorder - but nope - it lets me hear both vocals and the backup track while sending only clear vocals to the BR. Heck as long as it works it doesn't bother me

Thanks for the suggestion mate

 

[Wish]

Good deal. Glad you got it working!!