help with home studio?

[andrewecko]

This might be a long one. I'm no producer (hopefully taking a college class for production this fall). My friend built me a third bedroom, so we decided to use it as a studio. He put some pretty thick insulation in the walls, so when you close the door, the sound is pretty muted.

Let me tell you what I've been doing so far.

I've got a thick, white, dirty carpet laid down over concrete, and no acoustic treatment whatsoever. I'm considering taking the carpet out and just leaving the floor bare. I'm considering staining or painting the cement, and I'll add foam to the ceiling/walls if needed. Is this a good idea?

I'm using an Allen and Heath Zed 12fx mixer with Ableton Live on a Windows 7 PC. Windows sound cards are tricky, and I can't get the USB function on the mixer to work. :/ so I take a 1/4" to 1/8" wire, plug one end into the mono output on my mixer, and the other end into the microphone input on my PC. I then have a 1/8" to two 1/4" splitter that goes from my PC's headphone jack to my monitors. I know none of this is right, but I haven't found an easier way yet. I also heard that if I did get the USB to work, I could record two tracks from the mixer into two tracks in Ableton at the same time.

After tinkering with the settings, I got the USB to work, plugging in my powered speakers to the mixer. But the USB is both sending AND receiving. That means that if I hit a note on a guitar, it's playing through the speakers, getting sent to Ableton, then coming back to the mixer, and playing through the speakers again. Basically, it sounds like two guitars instead of one.

I'm just really frustrated! Does anyone have some advice on the way you usually set up hardware for your studio (where you plug your monitors, headphones, setting your mixer USB interface)? Seriously, anything would help so much. Thanks

 

[gecko zzed]

You are just about there.

The basic idea is to ignore your PC's internal sound and shove everything through the A&H.

You need to check settings in Ableton to make sure you don't have software monitoring on. My guess is that that's the cause of the sound coming back.

I'm not familiar with that A&H mixer, even though I use an A&H myself, but you will need to get very familiar with it. In particular, you will need to figure out how to listen to stuff you are recording while listening to stuff you have recorded, without the two messing up with each other.

 

[andrewecko]

Yes, I'm probably going to have to do a lot more reading on my mixer. It also complicates things even more that I have to use ASIO4ALL, or else the audio will lag...

 

[ecc83]

Hi Andrew,
I have the A&H Zed10 USB but have only used the USB function to test it for yous guys on forums! It is however probably the best of the USB mixers around.

Yes, you need to get into Win7's sound menu and make the mixer the default sound device. Also kill all windows sounds, bleeps and bloops and in Device Manager deactivate the On Board Sound probably AC97/Realteck?

But you would be far better off to do as I did and feed the audio from the mixer into a decent PCI sound card. In my case an M-Audio 2496. They are getting rare now (but you are in USA?Should find one.) Such a card solves all the "echo" problems and gives you 24 bit operation and MIDI + S/PDIF. Probably for less than $50!

Yes, read and absorb the mixer manual but also contact A&H they are really nice helpful guys. Not at all sure you need ASIO4all?

Feel free to ask me the silliest of questions I can easily setup the mixer for USB and have a do.

Should have said...Whilst in Win sound, check the recording level. Probably slammed to 100%, you need to back it off to 5% (yes five!) or less.
Dave.

 

[Paschalis I.]

It also complicates things even more that I have to use ASIO4ALL, or else the audio will lag...

it's better to use dedicated asio drivers from the audio interface's company itself. You really can't work decent with windows drivers :/

Maybe a scarlett 2i2 can get you going, its cheap and good

 

[ecc83]

it's better to use dedicated asio drivers from the audio interface's company itself. You really can't work decent with windows drivers :/

Maybe a scarlett 2i2 can get you going, its cheap and good

Agreed an AI is the best solution but the Steinberg UR22 is even cheaper and at least as good! AND! gives you MIDI and Cubase.

Dave.