Rack effects to stabilize DAW recording 16 tracks?

L

Lonemusician

New member
Thanks for any advice ahead of time.
A friend who has been to college for recording/engineering helped set up new equipment in my home studio. I have two Focusrite 18i20s into a PC with Studio One Pro. We ran a snake from the live room, and ran it into my effects rack, then into the 18i20s.. My friend said we should use rack effects to minimize glitches, crashes, etc., recording 16 tracks.
Problems I see are not having my live rack (use it with the A & H GL2800 mixer), and possible analog noise.
My question....... Is it 'normal' to use outboard effects (pre-interface) to minimize crashes? I'm set up for recording 16 tracks (4 vocals, A. Guitar, E. Guitar, Bass, Sax, Keys L/R, Kick, Snare, Tom 1, Tom 2, OH 1 and OH 2).
Bonus question...... Recommendation for inexpensive 2 channel analog to spdif so I can connect electronic drum kit to 18i20s and get 18 channels recording.
Thanks everyone.
 
The problem with running an FX rack on the input side is you are recording those FX, no chance to change the settings during mixdown.
If you are using processor-intensive FX during mixing, like reverbs and delays and VSTis, then there can be glitches if your computer isn't up to the task, however there are ways to work around this - such as using a reverb buss so you are only using one reverb VST instead of a separate reverb on each track. You can also render a track so that you have 'locked in' the effects and can turn off the live-running version on your original track.
Of course, you can also send tracks out of your DAW to the FX rack during mixdown, and record the new FX tracks back into your DAW.
 
Mike's got you. If you run the effects before recording, you can't change them. OTOH, if you record dry (with the effects only going through the monitors for the performers to hear) then you can re-amp exactly those if they were perfect (unlikely) or tweak to your heart's content to get them "just right".
 
I use a rack of effects, but that's with a big mixing console that lets me add reverb to things in the monitor mixes without recording it.

Besides which, our old computer records 16 tracks without the slightest trouble. Recording a lot of tracks doesn't use much processing, it needs throughput to the hard disk. Your friend "who has been to college for recording/engineering" is confused, but that's pretty typical for people with formal sound education.
 
Thank you. And I agree. It's a brand new ASUS pc with 32 gigs of ram and a 4th gen i5 running at 3.8 GHz. I understand my friend thinking there may be problems recording 16 tracks IF I load them with FX, etc.
I'm taking the rack out of the equation because it seems like a waste (rack has a Furman power conditioner, 2 effects units, an ac88, a sonic maximizer, a stereo 31 band eq, and another compressor/limiter.
Thanks. I'm going to try it with the snake going directly to the 18i20s, and load up the tracks to see what happens........
 
Lonemusician said:
I understand my friend thinking there may be problems recording 16 tracks IF I load them with FX, etc.
Click to expand...

If your computer can handle them during playback it should handle them during tracking almost as well. Besides, it's not usually a good idea to do track-level effects (compression, eq) during tracking unless you really know the band and your process well. And if you do add track-level processing in the DAW and expect to hear it while tracking you'll defeat the low-latency monitoring of your interface (though some interfaces now offer effects while tracking).
 
Lonemusician said:
I have two Focusrite 18i20s into a PC with Studio One Pro.
Click to expand...

Wait a minute, you're using two audio interfaces?

Lonemusician said:
Bonus question...... Recommendation for inexpensive 2 channel analog to spdif so I can connect electronic drum kit to 18i20s and get 18 channels recording.
Click to expand...

What kind of electronic kit are we talking about? I'm assuming you mean a MIDI kit, in which you're going to want to connect it with MIDI cables and run it through a plugin (yet more processing power needed though).
 
Yes using TWO 18i20s linked together so I have 18 tracks (16 + 2 Spdif). Interface has Scarlett Mixcontrol (software mixer lets you record with zero latency). Works incredibly well with DAW.
 
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