Connect Mixer To Audio Interface For Recording

in this video I'm going to show you how to connect a mixer to an audio interface for recording check it out what's up everybody my name is Matthew stri and bring you the best tips and tools on how to create music and record audio on this channel I'll do set of videos tutorials overviews and reviews just like this one if you're new to the channel here consider subscribing any of the gear that I'm talking about today will be linked in the description below so check out the description for any of the gear I'm talking about as well as show notes for this video so there's gonna be various reasons why you want to connect a mixer to an audio interface I'm going to show you a technique that I used to use all the time to go ahead and record inside of a digital audio workstation and I used to use this technique all the time this way I can connect a bunch of different devices to my mixer connect them into my two input audio interface and just select whatever thing that I wanted to record and so I'm gonna show you how to do that I'm gonna use this microphone here so this is a condenser microphone and I'm gonna use my MPC one that's located here and I'm going to use this electric acoustic guitar right over here and I'm gonna show you how you can set your levels inside of your audio mixer and send online out of your audio mixer into your USB audio interface or whatever audio interface that you may have in this case I'm using the focusrite scarlett 2i2 now the mixer I do have in front of me is the Barringer cue 1202 USB now this does have a USB interface built into it let's pretend that this doesn't have a USB interface built into it let's gonna show you how to do this because you might have a mixer and you might have a USB interface and you might want to combine the two for whatever reason so the first thing you're gonna need are your cables and you're gonna need to connect everything properly and set your levels alright so here's an XLR cable only connect this to my rode convince your microphone here simply going to plug it in just like so so I plugged it into the microphone and then I'm gonna plug it into channel 1 on my mixer and then I'm gonna plug in my acoustic electric guitar with this cable here I'm gonna plug that into channel 2 and plug the other end into my electric acoustic guitar and then I want to plug the line out of the NPC into the mixer now this might be any kind of line device I'm just using an NPC here because this is actually what I used to use back in the day you should use the MPC 1000 I always throw a line out of the NPC so I plug that into the line out of the NPC and I want to plug it into the line inputs okay five and six on this mixer here so now that everything's plugged into the mixer I'm going to go ahead and turn on the mixer in this case all I had to do is plug in the power cable now once that's plugged in I'm going to go ahead and set the levels so I'm going to start with a mic so I have the gain turned down on everything now have the volume levels turned down on all the channels here and then I have the volume on the main mix turned down now right here on level one I do want to put that on zero now your mixer might say you or unity or judge this might be an arrow pointing you know to where zero would be so go ahead and put that on zero now once you have that set on zero make sure your main mix is on zero as well and if you do have a condenser microphone like I'm using here you're going to need to turn on your phantom power so you can do that at this time if you have a dynamic microphone you don't need to worry about turning on your phantom power so now that I have the phantom power turned on I'm going to talk into the microphone and turn up the gain alright so I'm talking in the microphone I'm slowly turning up the gain as I'm turning out the gain you're gonna see the meter over here start to glow now eventually it's going to go from 20 here this is minus 20 and it's going to go to zero once it hits zero we're going to be in a good level in a good position check alright so we're about zero right there so we're looking pretty good now every once in a while this might go into the positives that's okay we don't need it to clip but if it goes into positive that's gonna be okay we're looking pretty good about right there so after your mic gain is set you can go ahead and set up the gain of your other inputs in this case I'm going to set up the gain on my acoustic electric guitar now before I set the level of this I'm going to have to turn the level down of Channel one and the reason why is because there's no pre-fader level button on here or the PFL button or there's no solo button so there's no way to single out this channel and if I start playing the guitar now it's going to go through the microphone and I'm going to get a fossa going here so I'm going to turn down the level now remember channel 1 is on 0 so I'm just going to turn it to minus infinite so now right over here I could turn the level up of channel 2 I don't put that on unity or 0 and I'm gonna start to get a level here I might need to boost it a little bit all right so we're looking pretty good there so the levels are set on that so what I can do now is actually turn down the level of channel 2 and then I can move on to the next device now I don't have anything plugged into channel 3 or 4 but 5 and 6 is a stereo channel here alright so now I need to set the levels of my MPC so I have the output of the MPC turned all the way up and then that's going to be lying out into the line-in here on the mixer now I'm gonna push play on the MPC ok so once I start playing that beat I'm gonna start turning up the level here and now 0 should be fine okay now depending on how you set your levels inside your MPC you might want to turn it up a little bit past 0 I'm gonna put it a little bit past 0 now in order for me to do this I am going to remember where I put that so a good way to remember is just to write it down so alright so now I have my note so I could remember where everything is that's gonna be good for you now depending on what song you're working on the MPC and how you have it leveled it's going to probably determine where you're gonna put the level on there but everything's set up there so I want to push stop on the MPC ok so now that I wrote down the levels everything what I can do is turn this level back down to minus infinite so now I can recall these levels at any time now keep in mind if your mixer does have mute buttons you could simply mute the channels that you're not using or actively recording but mine doesn't so in this case I'm just turning a level down so this way we don't get additional noise from the pre ants into our main mix so for the next step you do need to make sure that you have your focus right drivers installed and everything like that and then you know make sure that your USB cable is plugged into your focus right and into your computer and then you need to find the main outs of your mixer plug a stereo cable into that if you don't have a stereo cable like that you can - you can use mono cables like this ok so this is just you know happens to have left and right built into it it's not a big deal if you don't have this but I'm going to put the black in in to where it says L and the red in to it says our and then I'm going to take the other black and red in and plug those into the USB interface so right here I want to put the black in into one and then I'll put the red end into two and then that means that the black end is going into channel one of the interface and that's going to represent the left channel of the mixer the red end is going into channel two of the interface and that's going to be the right channel of your mixer now in this example keep in mind I have the gain turned down on the USB interface on both channels 1 & 2 they're all the way turned down and right here there's a button for instrument I have that button turned off if it was turned on it would be glowing like that I have it turned off because these are actually line level inputs so you do not want to have your instrument level inputs activated another thing to know is to keep your phantom power off on your USB interface you don't need that on and then you're pretty much set up right there now if you do want to monitor this you can use the headphone out on your interface or you could plug your interface into some speakers just like you normally would in this example I'm gonna use two headphones out so I don't have to worry about the speaker's feeding back into the microphone all right so here are my headphones I'm gonna plug this in into the headphone jack so right here's the headphone jack plug it right into that so I got my headphones coming out and this is the actual volume knob for the headphones right there and the next step is to open up your digital audio workstation or your doll or da W if you don't know what that is I'm about to show you right now so stay tuned for that so let's open a digital audio workstation I'm going to open Ableton Live 10 light this version does come with a scarlett 2i2 so I'm going to go ahead and open that up alright once that's opened up make sure you do go to your preferences and you know by going to options preferences and then select your audio interface so right here in the Audio tabs okay so make sure you go ahead and select the correct one so I am using the Focusrite USB azio driver and you know I don't need to work it so hard I am going the 44.1 kilohertz because I am doing screen recording and doing a bunch of stuff and for those haters out there and the people who are skeptical you know if you wanted a lower latency you could always adjust your sample rate alright so we got our driver type at say do we got Focusrite USB Azio we got the input configuration as mono input one and two and stereo inputs 1/2 so that's gonna be good for different things now over here this is simply our stereo output so we can hear them in our speakers or headphones so I'm going to go ahead and close out of that now I'm just going to delete these extra tracks over here so we don't get confused and in addition to this I'm just going to make this right here larger so we can see all the different numbers on the level here so now what we got to do is pretty much just pick what we want to record so for example if I wanted to record the microphone always simply turn the level of that microphone up to zero now if you had a mute button you would simply unmute channel one but I don't so I had to put it back up to zero and then at this point everything set up and if you look at your doll here we got audio from external in one so this is the left channel of the mixer and then you have audio from external and two that is the right channel of the mixer now if you want to you can monitor this by pressing in now if I talk into the microphone we can see the level is around minus 18 and you'll hear me say set your level around minus 18 a lot I'll leave a link in the description about article why I say that but it's safe to say as long as this green area here is between 50 and 75 percent of this meter you're going to get a pretty good signal you just don't want the green to go up into the red and you don't want it to clip and you also don't want it way down here at like negative 54 because if you go too low you're just going to hear a lot of noise and you're not gonna get a nice strong signal of what you actually want to record now what I'm gonna do now is a test recording let's say for whatever reason you want to record audio from your left and right channel you could select that here alright so right there you can select 1 & 2 now that's going to recall at a stereo track inside Ableton Live now you don't have to monitor in here while you're recording you can actually turn your monitor off alright and then you can go ahead and press record and I'm gonna go over here so we can actually see what we're recording and I'm gonna press record here this is a quick audio test this is rode nt1 going into the behringer 1202 the 1202 is going into the Focusrite and then we're recording right inside of Ableton Live so I'm going to put my headphones on it so I can hear it this is a quick audio test this is the rode nt1 going into the behringer 1202 the 1202 is going into the focus right and then we're recording right inside of Ableton Live if you're finding value in the video remember to give this video a thumbs up it's gonna help this video get seen by those who might want to see this information I appreciate you for doing that let's jump back into the video now let's say you want to record your guitar and your vocals and you want to record them on separate channels but you want to record them at the same time you can do that as well so if you look at the mixer here we already have channel one turned up let's go ahead and turn channel 2 up remember channel 2 is the guitar and then what we can do is balance channel 1 to the left okay and then put the pan to the right on channel 2 and then after you do that inside of Ableton Live you would basically select audio track 1 as input 1 and then audio track 2 adds input 2 and then you can record both your mic and your guitar at the same time and then in order to do this you need to arm both your tracks so if you push ctrl you're gonna be able to arm that 2nd track there and then you can see the guitars going in now I'm just gonna do a you know like a run this is a serious test or anything but I just want to show you that this is possible so I'm going to go ahead and push record recording the guitar and my voice separate tracks but didn't mic is going to pick up its are - alright so you can see that I recorded the audio on track one for the vocals and then the audio on track two for the guitar and we can listen to this as well forty the guitar and my voice separate tracks but didn't mic is going to pick up its art now if I wanted to solo out the voice I could do that alright before I do that I'm just going to take the record arm off so recording the guitar here's the vocal and my voice separate tracks but didn't my keys here's the guitar [Applause] [Music] alright that's enough so therefore you can record your vocal and guitar separately and you can make some how you want to do that using this method now the next thing I want to show you is how you can record your NP t1 or any kind of line in device into this and then after you record it you can add different things over top of it if you want to so in order to do this let's go ahead and turn the level down of one turn the level down of channel two and then let's add an audio track and then put the audio from external in 1/2 and then make sure that we turn up that channel 5 and 6 where the NPC one's going into to the appropriate level so what I'm gonna do is I'm just going to record this in 2 right here inside of Ableton Live so I'm going to arm the track and just record it right here in this loop alright and then what else I'm gonna do is I want to put this over here so I'm not listening to the other stuff alright so here we go I'm just going to record it right here on one of these April 10 clips I'm gonna let it play like a full sequence full alright so now let's play through that full sequence in here so I'm going to make this 100 bpm want to show you like some of this stuff you could actually do now we can play that [Music] all right I had to do a little bit of able to magic really fast but you can hear I have this loop now so what I could do is if I wanted to add a guitar to that I would just simply go over here to my guitar channel and then I return you know the mixer down on channel 5 & 6 where the MPC was I would turn the guitar channel up and then I could record guitar on it if I wanted to so we disarmed that track and record [Music] [Music] and then let's say I wanted to record vocals on that I would simply turn the guitar track down and then turn the vocal track up arm the vocal track and then I can do something else right here and Ableton alright so if I want to record a vocal track I would just hit record on there alright make music make music music I and then you know I could put that in there if I wanted to make music make music music make music make music music make music make music music all right so I hope you get the point I'm not trying to make a masterpiece here I'm just trying to show you that you can stand line out of your mixer into your USB audio interface and record whatever you want to record you can record separate tracks you can record an entire mix say you wanted to record your band in there you could do that whatever you want to do and I'm also not saying that the behringer 1202 is the best make sure to get this is simply the mixer that I have available to me to go ahead and illustrate this but I did want to do a video illustrating this because I used to do this back in the day because you know when you want to get ideas out quickly you don't necessarily want to plug and unplug everything over and over again you just want to scratch out ideas really fast this is a great way to do it and you don't have to worry about too much you could just go in there everything's already set up all your levels are set up you just go in there and you start recording and you know you can scratch out demos very quickly and efficiently alright if you enjoyed this video click or tap the screen over here you might find something else you like and if you want to subscribe to the channel consider doing so my name is matthew continue creating music we'll talk soon thanks y'all

Channel: Matthew Stratton

Views: 957,775

Rating: 4.7708244 out of 5

Keywords: MatthewStratton, MatthewCreating, connect mixer to audio interface, how to connect a mixer to an audio interface for audio recording, connect mixer to interface, connect mixer to usb audio interface, connect mixer to pc, audio interface vs mixer, mixer vs audio interface, analog mixer to computer, connect mixer to ableton, audio interface, behringer mixer, behringer xenyx mixer, behringer xenyx, analog mixer to audio interface, connect mixer to computer, Usb audio interface

Id: Z-BU6F4DL1Y

Length: 19min 21sec (1161 seconds)

Published: Fri May 29 2020