- Hi, I'm Jordan from Kettner Creative. In this video, we're going to show you how to set up and connect an audio mixer to your Focusrite Scarlet
2i2 audio interface. This is useful for
unlocking a ton of features that aren't typically included with your Focusrite Scarlet. It allows you to plug in anywhere from one to 48 inputs depending on the size of your audio mixer and you get other things
like compression, EEQ or whatever other bells and whistles are included
in your audio mixer. Now, you can use those with your Focusrite Scarlet
2i2 audio interface. One downside to this setup here is that you cannot multi-track
with that many inputs. Whatever happens on your audio mixer is essentially locked in because you're just taking the
stereo left and right output out of the audio mixer and putting that through
your Focusrite Scarlet 2i2 and sending that to your computer for live streaming or recording
or something like that. Now, if your audio mixer does
have a built in USB output, I would suggest that you just
bypass the Focusrite Scarlet and just use that. I'm a big fan of just simple setups. So if you have the ability to
go straight to your computer, from your audio mixer, just do that. It's less cable, less things on your desk way easier to manage, less points of failure, all that type of thing and it can keep you focused
on what you're trying to do which is create or mix or
whatever you're trying to do. But if you want to use your mixer that doesn't have a USB output and connect it to your Focusrite, this video is going to show you how. Now, if you want pricing or links for anything that we
mentioned in this video, we do have links in the description below with the current pricing and where to buy anything
that you see here. So please check that out as well. Now for this video, we're going to use the
Audio-Technica AT2020 condenser microphone. So the first thing we're going to do is we're going to connect
this to the audio mixer. The audio interface is already
connected to our computer and the audio mixer is already powered up. So I'm going to turn off phantom power. Everything else looks like
it's reset on the audio mixer. So I'm going to plug the XLR
cable into the microphone, reset a couple more things that I missed and plug the XLR cable
into the audio mixer. Now this is a condenser microphone. So we do want to turn on
phantom power for it to work. Then we're going to turn
up the main stereo output on the audio mixer to this triangle. On some audio mixers, there's a U or zero. It all means the same thing. It's turning it up to zero or unity. Then we're going to do the same thing for this microphone
channel that we're using, turn up to the triangle or zero or unity. And then we're going to increase the gain. When we increase the gain here, we're going to watch the meter and we want to keep turning
it up until we get to zero. So we're right about there. Just bouncing off zero
is absolutely perfect. And like I said, if we're
just using one microphone, I would just plug this
straight into the Focusrite and go from there. But maybe there's something that I want to use on this mixer. Maybe I want to do a high pass filter and add a little bit of compression and that's why I'm using the audio mixer for this purpose today. So the mixer is all set up. Everything I have is plugged into it. Now we can connect the audio
mixer to the Focusrite. So let's take a quick look
at the Focusrite first. When you look at the Focusrite 2i2, you'll see that it has the XLR combo jacks so that the XLR input
is a mic level input. The quarter-inch input can be instrument or line level input. Now we want to connect
a line level source, the audio mixer to our audio interface, the Focusrite Scarlet. So by default, it is a line level input. If you want to instrument level input, you just have to turn
on instrument mode there but we do want that off for
the purposes of this video. So now what we're trying to do is we just need to take a
quarter inch balanced output and connect that to the
quarter inch balanced inputs of the Scarlet Focusrite 2i2. So what we have here is we have a quarter inch balanced cable. It has two rings on it so does the tip, the ring the sleeve three different sections. So that's a balanced cable. So we're going to connect that to the left output of the audio mixer. Now, if you are at a live event and you're using the XLR outputs for your main mix at the live event, you can also use this from an ox send and then you can dial in a custom mix for your Focusrite Scarlet
2i2 audio interface. But for this video, we're just
going to use the main left and right outputs. Connect the balanced coordinates
cable to the left output and connect the other end
to the input channel one. We can see as we talk in the microphone, we're hitting zero and we're getting that glowing green ring. We're going to leave the
pre-amps turned all the way down. You do not need to turn them up when you use a line level input like this. Now, if you don't need a
stereo input source at all, you're already done. Just one cable will do it. You get your mano source all the way through to your computer. If you want your second cable so you do have a stereo input, then we can do that now as well. So again, we have another
balanced TRS quarter-inch cable. We're going to plug this
into the right output of the audio mixer. Then we're going to plug
this into the second input on our Focusrite Scarlet 2i2. Just like the first input, we don't need to turn
the preamp up at all. We're just coming in line level. There's no need to attenuate that. So we're just gonna
leave that the way it is. And now we're set. If you look over at logic here, I'm just going to reset the meter. You can see that we're coming
in at about minus nine. If you're recording, I would
suggest bringing it down a bit. I'm just going to come in somewhere between minus 18 and minus
12 is usually my goal. So I'm just adjusting the gain
on my microphone input here. If you're coming in between
minus 18 and minus 12 that does give you a good
amount of the headroom so you are protected against
peaking or something like that. So this is what it sounds
like when you connect an Audio-Technica AT2020
condenser microphone to the audio mixer and connect your audio mixer
to the Focusrite Scarlet and connect the Focusrite
Scarlet to your computer for recording or live streaming. If you have a question about anything that we've said in this video, please leave a comment in
the comment section below. If you want to see more videos
like this in the future, please like and subscribe. Thank you for watching. (upbeat music)
