Audio Interface Setup for Beginners

there are two parts to your USB audio interface setup there's the actual connecting of the cables and then there's the software setup and in this video I'm going to show you both I'm Zane from simple green tech and on this channel I do weekly audio tech tips tutorials and reviews to help you conquer the tech and unleash your creativity and now as you can see in behind me I have a stack of gear over here that's outside of my normal setup and for this video I'm using the very popular focusrite 2i2 to demonstrate the USB audio interface setup for beginners now if your audio interface is different than this one don't worry the basics are still going to be the same and I've linked to all of this gear in the description below just in case you want to check any of it out it's great beginner gear and it's pretty affordable stuff too now let's jump in and first we're going to look at the cable connections for our USB audio interface I'm just going to do a simple setup of microphone instrument which is my guitar headphones and studio monitors if you have a mixer that you want to include in your setup I've linked to another one of my videos in the description below that goes over that now let's look at connecting our microphone you want to use a male XLR to female XLR cable for microphones those XLR to quarter inch cables won't give you the best quality and if you use one you can't use the phantom power if your mic requires it now let's connect the male end of the cable into the interface and the female will go into our mic and in this case it's the MXL 990 microphone which is a condenser mic and does require phantom power now we'll simply connect our headphones into the front jack and i'm pretty sure every audio interface has a quarter-inch headphone jack so if you have the small style of jack on your headphones you'll need to grab a quarter inch adapter next you can connect your studio monitors and typically these are quarter inch cables going from the interface and into the monitors you may have an interface that has RCA outputs and you'll need to get a cable like this as it has RCA on one end and quarter-inch on the other also some studio monitors like these Mackie CR3's have both RCA inputs and quarter-inch inputs so they are very flexible with how you connect them and finally if you're recording an instrument like a guitar you're going to want to plug into the instrument input as most interfaces will have a specific instrument input or a dual input and some might have a switch like mine does here and this one you can switch to instrument or line a line input is not the same as an instrument input but there are some interfaces that can detect what you're using so it can detect if you have a line input or an instrument input and you don't have to worry about any switches or anything you may want to check your manual just in case it's not too obvious on your audio interface all right I just want to interrupt and ask if you're enjoying this video so far and getting some value out of it can you please hit that thumbs up button it really does help my channel out and I appreciate it so much now let's get back into the USB audio interface setup okay with all of our cables connected we can now connect our interface to our computer for this you'll want to use the USB cable that came with your audio interface now once you connect it to your computer it might install automatically and even if it does I still recommend going over to your manufacturers website and seeing if they have an updated driver some USB audio interfaces will just install a generic driver so be sure to get the best performance out of your device and download the driver from the manufacturers website if you locate an updated driver or any driver at all on this website be sure to download it and install it over whatever the default one was and once it's installed open up your digital audio workstation also known as a daw or D-A-W and if you don't have one yet I've linked to a video showing you some of the top free DAWs available at the time of this recording and you can grab one of them from there check the description for that video for this demonstration I'm going to open tracktion waveform as it easily demonstrates everything but again this process is going to be very similar across different programs now in your audio device type you want to change this to ASIO as this is going to give you the lowest latency and if your does like mine you'll need to then go to device after you select ASIO and locate your interface in the drop down menu then click on it if you don't see your audio interface listed in there it may not have an ASIO driver or you may not have installed the ASIO driver for it yet so be sure to check that and you could just start recording right away but I want to show you one thing first it's the ASIO control panel and you should be able to access this control panel from most DAWs that use ASIO drivers so click on the control panel and you're going to see something like this with buffer length options the smaller the number means the less latency that you're going to encounter the higher the number the more latency you're going to experience now if you're trying to record an instrument while playing a backing track the latency will affect your timing but here's the thing you can't just set it to the lowest one as your system and your audio interface may not be able to handle it so what I recommend doing is starting with the default middle setting see how that feels and then adjust it as needed if your computer can handle the lowest latency setting go for it you may hear some clicks and pops or sometimes experience stutters if your computer can't handle it and if that happens you'll know to increase the buffer size and as your projects get bigger and you add more plugins you may need to increase the buffer but hopefully by that time you'll have everything recorded so it won't matter as much you can also adjust your sample rate in here 44100 is typical for CD quality and 48000 is DVD quality everything higher you'll need to do some down sampling later and there's numerous arguments out there about whether or not higher sample rates provide better audio quality but the idea is that you're recording the most amount of information and when you down sample it it will be from a very high quality clip typically I record at 44100 or 48000 depending on what I'm recording for and after you set your sample rate you're now ready to record so create a project select the input that you want to record arm the track for recording and hit the record button if you want to learn more about recording and tracktion waveform free click this video here or click down here to see what YouTube thinks you should watch next if you liked this video please give it a thumbs up also subscribe to the channel if you'd like to see more videos from me thank you so much for watching for simple greentech I'm Zane keep creating and we'll talk soon

Channel: Audio Tech TV

Views: 93,961

Keywords: usb audio interface, usb audio interface setup, focusrite 2i2 setup, audio interface, audio interface setup, audio interface setup for beginners, home studio, focusrite scarlett 2i2, interface, home recording, scarlett 2i2, audio interface tutorial, what is an audio interface, setting up audio interface, budget audio interface, cheap audio interface, best budget audio interface, audio recording, audio interface for beginners, music production, audio interface focusrite

Id: vATI1NySpCo

Length: 7min 32sec (452 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 14 2020