Quote:
Originally Posted by brandondrury  You never said what your problem was? What's wrong with half-normaling?
Those have a seperate send and return on them. They are fully normaled. If you do it this way, you would have to send the audio from the mixer to the soundcard, through all of your computer stuff (and the latency that comes with it) and back to the mixer. Of course, you would be essentially monitoring within the software and defeating the purpose of monitoring with the mixer anyway.
There is nothing half-assed about half-normaling. I've been doing it for years, when necessary. I've never had a cable ever pop out. It's always been very reliable.
In my opinion, you are completely wasting your time trying to invent a new knot for shoelaces while you are being chased by wolves. In other words, you are probably half assing about 20,000,000,000 things in the recording realm. (Everyone who hasn't dumped $4,000,000 into their studio is). So with that said, is your studio monitoring system accurate?
Join the crowd. We all have limited time. Because of this, we need to pick and chose our battles wisely.
That's my opinion.
Brandon |
Brandon - All good points and as I learn more about this world and all the options that can be pursued, the things you are saying start to make a lot of sense.
UPDATE: I am OVER my mission to eliminate half-normaling. I now understand it to be a very common practice from posts here AND from reading all the documentation for each of my mixers which specifically state that the INSERT can be used to send a signal without removing it from the channel by half-plugging - so my question here has been answered in spades.
As you all may recall from when you decided to move behind the mixing desk, all those faders, knobs, boxes, meters, and lights can be quite bewildering even after you begin to learn about what they all do. Sometimes it's hard to know that you are chasing rainbows until someone grabs you by your neck and tells you - which is why I am here.
Thanks for all the great advice! I really feel like I have a certain part of my many-faceted puzzle more clearly defined.
To recap:
1. Half-plugging/half-normaling is perfectly OK and I should not be worried about that per se.
2. Line-level vs. mic-level signals are very different creatures and need to be treated as such.
3. A patch bay would make my life much easier.
4. With 4 (admittedly entry-level) mixers at my disposal, if I cannot properly get each instrument's signal into my DAW and provide effective monitoring I need to abandon my mission and start saving to pay for pro-studio time - WHICH I AM NOT GOING TO DO!
I WILL solve my low-level, writing, arranging, pre-production studio needs. I will NOT pay for pro-studio time until our material and our personal understanding of what a studio can do is greatly improved. When we have fully explored our material's composition, arrangement and production options, THEN we will pay for the real thing.
Thanks!