How to use outboard gear with typical small studio DAW setup.

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I'm resuming recording after a layoff, and I'm still at a very early stage of understanding digital recording. I've been playing music for a long time, so I've acquired some outboard gear over the years, an eq, a noise gate, compressor, etc., but I'm confused as to how I would actually integrate them with my DAW (Reaper and a Tascam 16X08 interface).

Let's say I have a guitar track, and I want to use my outboard comp or eq on the track. How do I actually do this?
 
It helps to have an audio interface with more than one pair of analog outputs. That way you can have one pair always connected to your studio monitors, and then use the others to feed the outboard gear. Then you just feed the output of your outboard chain back to an input and capture it on a new track in the DAW. It's going to take learning how to route things in and out of your DAW.

I doubt you're going to have much outboard that's better than a decent plugin, and outboard is much less convenient. Maybe use some of it during tracking, but after that it's just a pain.
 
Thanks for the reply. The Tascam 16X08 specs say it has eight 1/4" balanced outs, but curiously, it doesn't if they're digital or analog. I trust it's more likely that they're digital outs. Perhaps solving another mystery for me, if they are digital outs, would this be a case where a digital converter would come in, to change the signal to analog, in order to get signal to analog outboard gear?

I do realize I'm better off with using good plug ins, but I'm also trying to understand exactly how outboard gear is integrated with DAW's by the big boys, for the future, and the only way for me to really understand it is to do it in some small way. Two pieces of my rack gear are half decent. One is a Loft parametric EQ, which actually came out of Second City Studios in Toronto (Starting point for Dan Ackroyd, John Candy, Martin Short, etc.) and the other is a Drawmer DS201 Noise Gate.
 
I would think you can use the routing software to send a signal from a channel, to one of the outputs, through the external gear, and back into a line input to the DAW.

There are no direct digital outputs on the 16x08, other than the USB. All the input and outputs are analog.
 
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