Help with an Analog Mixer

McShmoopy

Senior Member
Hey all, Ive decided, after seeking advice from some friends and the nice people of Drummerworld to go for analog mixing, digital just seems too complicated for me at the moment and it would be nice to have everything wrapped up nicely as soon as its on my PC.

I know most things with mixers, just monitoring seems to come up as an issue for me. I have some pretty sweet isolation headphones, what I would want to be able to achieve through my recording process.

1) Isolate a large amount of the sounds from my drums with my headphones.
2) Be able to monitor and listen to my drums as I play them.
3) Be able to plug in my iPod and play the track aswell through the mixer at the same time.

Would this be possible with an analog mixer? I realise thiers several headphone ports so I imagine this could be possible. An example mixing board could be a Behringer Eurorack or Soundcraft Folio as im leaning towards them.

Many thanks.
 
1) Isolate a large amount of the sounds from my drums with my headphones.
2) Be able to monitor and listen to my drums as I play them.
3) Be able to plug in my iPod and play the track aswell through the mixer at the same time.

Sounds like you want to be able to hear your drums through the headphones, but not in the room. Is that correct? They best way to accomplish this is to drum quieter. It will enable you to not hear the drums from outside the headphones easier, it will allow you to control what you actually hear through the headphones easier, and it will usually give you a fuller drum sound (as long as your heads are tuned for that kind of playing and the room has *some* life to it). The problem with playing too loudly is that you can't help but hear some live drums over the volume of your headphones, and you get in the dangerous situation of trying to turn up your headphones to block out the sound of your drums. "Everything louder than everything else", so to speak. This is unpleasant to experience, AND can result in hearing damage. Also, drums choke when you play them too loudly, but I won't get into that.

Plug your iPod into the board, and set your channel to PFL (pre-fader level) monitoring, and then turn the fader down all the way. That way, the iPod will only come out through the headphone monitor path, and not through the mains. Plug in the mics from your drums and direct them accordingly as well, either out the channel inserts into an A/D converter, or through a sub-mix (either through the mains or a separate sub-mix of your choosing). If you decide you want your iPod track to record as well, then direct it through to the PC as you did the drums.
 
depending on your budget...... the Mackie 1620i (or 1640i) is a great analog mixer and also can have a firewire card installed for direct I/O to your DAW. Well worth the money to be future prepared.
 
Hey all, Ive decided, after seeking advice from some friends and the nice people of Drummerworld to go for analog mixing, digital just seems too complicated for me at the moment and it would be nice to have everything wrapped up nicely as soon as its on my PC.

I know most things with mixers, just monitoring seems to come up as an issue for me. I have some pretty sweet isolation headphones, what I would want to be able to achieve through my recording process.

1) Isolate a large amount of the sounds from my drums with my headphones.
2) Be able to monitor and listen to my drums as I play them.
3) Be able to plug in my iPod and play the track aswell through the mixer at the same time.

Would this be possible with an analog mixer? I realise thiers several headphone ports so I imagine this could be possible. An example mixing board could be a Behringer Eurorack or Soundcraft Folio as im leaning towards them.

Many thanks.

Hmm. What you're asking for doesn't have anything to do with whether or not your console is analog or digital. You just want isolation.

In theory, both analog and digital consoles do the same thing: they route signals where you want them to go. One of the advantages to the digital consoles is that they can remember all your settings for a particular set-up. So for example, if you were mixing a number of different bands, once you had them all dialed in, you would simply save it, and when you wanted to come back to mixing them, you just recall the settings - that's ultra cool. You can't do that with an analog board! The circuitry is also pretty clean, on the upscale digital boards (the smallest I would use would be the Yamaha O1v96) there's virtually no noise to be heard, and it has effects and compression built-in on every channel (on an analog board, you'd have to add these, which makes the console cost as much as a digital one in the end).

But what you're looking for is a certain type of headphone that will keep out all outside noise so you can hear what's going through the console. Years I found it in the form of the GK Ultraphones. Basically, they're 26 dB shooter's headphones outfitted with the drivers from the Sony MDR-7506 studio headphones. Awesome. I got found them because I was put in the position where I'm mixing a band from behind them, so there was no way to hear what I was sending out into the house unless I could only hear what was going through the console!

Pick up a pair of those and you'll be set.
 
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