use of vs-880 with a computer..

[iank]

Hello everyone, this is my first post, I just joined up a couple minutes ago. My name is ian, i play in a band, winter in august.

ok enough about me. This may have been asked before, but i didn't see anything in the archives. here is my question/issue:

we have a vs-880 that we are using to record in out little project studio.

Our lineup is pretty standard, 2 guitars, bass and drums. however, we are using a lot of multiple layers, organs (we just got an old hammond!), pianos, etc.

Here we come to the problem...not enough tracks!

So an idea we came up with is to use the virtual track capabilities. So we would record the base instumentation and vocals, then go back and record the additional stuff as virtual tracks.

Our hope is that there is a way (possibly through the SCSI port?) to dump all the tracks (real AND virtual) into a multitracking program (cakewalk, or something like that) on our Mac. Its a G4 with 80 gigs of HD space.

We could then have ALL our tracks available (and hopefully synched!), and do the final mix on our computer.

Does anyone know of a way to do this? What software do we need and where can we get it? Thank you!!!

-Ian

http://www.winterinaugust.com

 

[RKB]

Welcome, Ian. I'll give this a crack...

I have 3 VS-880's linked together. I also found the 8-track barrier a problem, and found that it was cheaper to buy two used VS-880's rather than buy a new 1680 or 2480. With this setup, I now have 22 tracks I can use, with the last two used for mixdown. That way, my mix stays in the digital domain.

I use Cakewalk for sequencing, but have just begun to play with the audio capabilities. Using Cakewalk Pro Audio software, you could sync to the VS-880 and record each track as a wav. But there's no real good mixing feature for combining these tracks with any kind of effects, at least not the kind of effects I would want to use.

Before I got the extra 880's, I would do a submix of some of the parts to conserve track space. My rig is completely midi, but I would typically fill up my available tracks with the rhythm section and mix those down onto two tracks. Using virtual tracks, you could then add guitars, additional keyboards, solos, etc. If you still don't have enough tracks, you can keep creating submixes in the digital domain. This obviously gives you less control over the final mix, and you have to be pretty sure the submix is something you're happy with. I produced some pretty decent sounding songs using this method.

You may also want to check Ebay for used VS-880's. They're pretty easy to hook together using MTC, and with a digital cable, you can bounce tracks from one machine to the other all in the digital domain.

I can't really help you with the computer software part. I personally prefer to have my hands on faders and pan pots during mixing, and only use the computer for final mastering touches.

Best of luck!