How to set up your audio interface and record audio

hi this is Leonard from cosmic sound and today we're going to be doing something a little bit different we're going to show you how to set up and make you first recording with your new audio interface let's get straight into it the one we're actually going to be showing you is the Presonus audio box it comes in this really great package actually gives you a microphone set of headphones and all the cables you're going to need to get going so first thing we're going to do is unbox it and we're going to see what you get inside so first thing we've got in here is our microphone so this is a large diaphragm condenser microphone so it's perfect for recording vocals or anything really so that's going to be a component we're going to come to a little bit later next thing up we've got two allowed cables we've got a microphone cable here which is XLR connection on both ends that's ready to be connected from the microphone to the interface we have a USB cable here which we're going to use to connect the audio interface to the computer and finally a set of headphones which we will use in the recording process so next thing is the audio interface itself so this is the the Presonus audio box USB interface it's one of the more basic ones in the range but it's perfect for what we're going to be doing today which is just recording a single track of either vocal or instrument just to run you through a few of the features on the audio box the first thing you'll notice is the most prominent feature which is the two inputs we have on the front now these are a combo input so we can either use an XLR connection for a microphone or we could use a quarter inch Jack if we wanted to connect a guitar or other instrument like a synth to it we have a whole bunch of knobs on the front here and these control the input level of the of these inputs as well as we have a knob to mix between what we're what we're actually inputting and playback which we'll show you a bit later on as well we've got a headphone volume knob which is for when we connect a set of headphones to the interface and of course our main volume level for the speakers that might be connected to the interface on the back we've just got a few more connections on here first of all USB connection which we're going to use to connect this to the computer we've got MIDI in and out which we won't be using today but that would be useful if you were to wanting to use an external MIDI device like a keyboard or possibly yeah since module finally we've got a couple of pairs of outputs here so firstly we've got the main outputs here so left and right which we connect to a set of studio monitors and finally the phone's output which we would connect it up simply to a set of headphones so let's get into setting this all up so the installation process will differ a fair bit from machine to machine particularly between the Windows platform and the Mac OSX platform you will notice the first thing we've got with with our device is a drivers disk so if you're on the Windows platform you'll need to install these drivers before you can do anything else the device itself won't work without the driver installed so it's very important to do this before you do anything else you will even find sometimes that windows if you plug the device in before you've installed the driver you may actually ruin the installation it might not work at all so very important to before you connect anything to the computer put the disk in and install anything that's relevant now with the Mac OS X platform there's a couple of differences variances in how this process works sometimes you'll have a driver that needs to be installed and some devices of what we call class compliant which this one is which means we just plug it in and it works straight out of the box we don't have to install any extra software for that to happen so again it's always safest to put the disk in first and see what's on there if you need to install the driver do so otherwise just plug it in and off will go so the next thing we'll need to install is some recording software so the one we get with this particular brand of interface is pre silencers own software studio one and this one comes with the artist version which is a pretty fully fledged version of the software and gives you everything you're going to need to get a recording happening so the process for installing the software there's a couple of ways you can do this the first thing to do would be just put two discs in and install it directly from the disc and then check online if there are any updates or most often now with most of these different software packages you can jump online find the latest version and just download it which is going to guarantee that you've got the absolute latest version of your software so that's what I'm going to do now so first thing we can do is open a browser I am going to Google Presonus and another point to note as well at this point is that if if you wanted to get download the latest version of your drivers rather than installing them from disk that would be a really good idea as well so you'd be able to check on this website and find all your ex controllers as well we're going to jump into products and then down the bottom here will find studio one which is the software that we want to install and where it says here download free demo that is actually the full version of the software it just means an unregistered version so this is what we want to grab and because I'm on a Mac I'll grab the Mac version here you also notice there are two different Windows versions it's very important as well to know whether your operating system is 32-bit or 64-bit if you're on a Windows machine because there's actually two different versions of the software so you need to find the right one for you so now I'm going to install the software now I've got it downloaded I'm going to jump into downloads here and have a look and there it is Presonus Studio Y I'm ready to go let's have a look so it's now opening it up and there it is so the process on a PC is a little bit different you'd have an installer ask you where you want to install it to and you'd go through the process of answering a couple of questions and then go through the installation on the Mac platform once we need to do is pick up this icon here for studio one and drop it into the Applications folder so I'm going to do that now and it's now copying across to the Applications folder and that's now ready to go we've installed so the couple of ways we could find it we could jump down into our dock and go to finder or we could go to applications and find it I find the quickest workaround for finding programs is use what we call spotlight so that's command and spacebar and I'm just going to type the beginning of the program in there and you'll see it pop up there studio one on a PC you would go into your Start menu find the program in the list and open it from there so we're going to get a few things that pop up here we've got to use the License Agreement here so the the appropriate thing to do is to read that whole thing if you can be bothered and then hit accept at the end and now what we've got are a few options for activation of the product now different software packages will work completely differently from program to program so it's all different depends what software you're using some of them you might just have to enter a license code some of them you may have to download things from the internet so like with Pro Tools you might have to have an eye lock account for example an avid account with ableton you need to create an Ableton account online and then it'll register the serial number to your user account so I'm just going to use the demo version here so I don't have to install it but what you would you'd normally do here is go to activate and then you enter the CD code that comes with the with the CD and then off you go so here we are we ready to go now we're up to the start screen studio one's a bit different to a lot of the other programs you can actually enter an artist profile and a whole bunch of information about yourself if you want to do that I'm just going to jump into creating a new song like that so we got some templates here we can choose so this is for pretty much the different hardware in the Presonus range so if you had a particular piece of hardware it'll set it up all the ins and outs for you so let's just create an empty song and we're gonna start from scratch and there it is so the first thing we're going to want to do to get into this is create a new audio track so I can do that by right-clicking here and we're gonna go add audio track mono so we've got a few choices here so the big question is which one did you want to pick well if you're going to record from a microphone or if you want to plug the guitar into there it's going to be a mono input so you want to select mono the only reason you would want to select stereo is if you're connecting a stereo device to it so that might be if you had say you wanted to record something from a CD and you were jacking that in there you could do that if you're recording from a synthesizer that was stereo and you Jack that in a stereo so the the big thing to remember is if you've only got one thing plugged in make sure it's mono if you have both things plugged in and it's going to be stereo so we're gonna create a mono track and that's now pretty much ready to record with so the next thing we're gonna do once we've got the software installed is actually connect the device to the computer so here's the USB cable that came with it and it's pretty hard to get this bit wrong the two ends of the USB cable are completely different so there's one end which is distinctly to plug into the interface and in one end which is for the computer so the first thing we're gonna do is connect this to the audio interface so there's a port on this side we'll Jack that in there you want to make sure it's pushed in all the way as well but don't jam it in there so just make sure it's nice and tight I'm not going to come out and then I'm going to connect this to the computer now most computers will have USB ports on the computer themselves as does the one that we're using but for ease I'm going to plug this into the monitor this actually has USB ports on there as well so you'll now notice that the power light is on this is what's called a bus powered device which means that it actually obtains its power from the computer as well as transferring data between the two devices so we have a power light on which means this is ready to go another way of checking especially if you're on the Mac platform you can do this on Windows as well if you want to make sure that the device is connected it's really easy to go into your preferences jump into sound and we'll have a look at the output and we should be able to see there we've got audio box USB so we know that this device is installed and ready and working with the computer so the next thing we're going to do is set up the microphone I'm going to show you what I would consider to be the right way to do this and the reason that I'm going to show you this way is so that you don't damage any of your hardware it's very easy to drop your microphone or do something you know stupid to it which you don't want to do with your new brand-new hardware so the first thing we're gonna do is get a nice solid microphone stand this is ready to go so what we're gonna do is get first of all this is the microphone and you'll see it's actually got the actual connection to the microphone stand already attached to it some of these will come in a shock mount so you want to attach the shock mount to the stand first and then attach the microphone I'm gonna do something similar with this as well so that we don't damage the microphone so first of all I'm gonna remove the microphone clip from the microphone and attach that to the stand itself all right so you'll notice when I go to attach this that it doesn't fit and it's a common problem and the reason is because it's actually a nut inside here which is for a different sized microphone stand attachment so the easiest way to get this thing out is with a 5 cent coin and there's a slot in there which I can insert a coin into and I'll just twist and there it is it comes right out make sure you keep this somewhere safe as well because you probably can't come up against a microphone at some point you're gonna need this for so next thing let's screw this on to the microphone stand there it is now next stage I'm going to put the microphone into it make sure that's in nice and tight and then I have this nut at the bottom which I can then fix to stand so that's now really secure so the microphone can't fall off the stand no matter what I do the next thing we're gonna do is connect the cable to it so another really great thing about this particular package is that it comes with a cable and often when you buy a microphone you won't get a cable with it so to connect a cable the first thing you want to do is connect to the audio interface itself and this means the reason we do this is if we were to connect this cable to the microphone first and then walk towards the interface we might actually pull this over so I always connect the end to your interface first so plug that in there so I'm plugging into input number 1 which is the most logical one to plug into your technically you plug it into the second one it doesn't really make a difference it's just a different setup in their software when you get to that so the other end here this is the female end is going to go into the microphone onto the underside of it so a couple of tips with this as well make sure your cables not tied up in knots and this is all just safety precautions as well if the cable has extra length you can wind it around the stand if you want to actually take the slack out of it just to make sure you don't trip over it so that's just a couple of extra tips and we're going to now connect this end to the microphone so all I'm gonna do is find the way that it goes in it alone and go in one way and we'll click it in there so that's now locked in if you wanted to remove the cable just make sure you press the button in first there's actually a little button on here and this will just prevent it from from locking so plug that back in that's now ready to record we've got one end in the interface one in the microphone we're ready to go so now as I mentioned before I could have just chosen a template to get this set up properly but we're going to do this manually so this is quite commonly what you have to do with software anyway alright so let's get in here so we've got a drop-down here which would normally have all about inputs but if I drop that down all i've got is something which is audio i/o set up this is I oh stands 14 out will jump in here and let's have a look so the first thing you'll notice here is this is looking a bit strange if we go to the outputs we've got a pair of outputs here if we go to the inputs we've got absolutely nothing to work with and the reason this is a problem is because we're still using the internal sound card so it's very important in your software to make sure that your external sound card is the one you've got selected so we're going to jump into the options here we're an audio setup and you'll see here audio device is showing up as built-in output and this is wrong so if we drop this down we get a whole list of devices that are connected to the computer and then you can see audio box USB which matches the name on the device so that's the one we want to choose all right there we go so that's now changed over if I now jump back to where I was before you'll see we've changed over to audio box and I've now got two inputs here if I jump to outputs I've still got my stereo pair of outputs which is exactly what we want so we're going to say ok so now what you'll see is when I drop down this little menu here I've now got two options I've got left and right which correspond to the left and right inputs on the interface or they called one and two on the interface so for this first one here I'm going to select left so now what this means is that the software this particular channel in the software is receiving a signal coming from the microphone into the first channel on this interface so one other very important thing here because I'm using a condenser microphone is I need to turn on phantom power so you'll see there's a button here this is 48 volts and that is what we need to press if you're using a dynamic microphone like a shure sm58 you wouldn't need to do this but for these type of microphones we do so we'll press that button there we now have phantom power on so we should be receiving signal from this microphone if I'm the trap to record I can now see that I've got signal coming into the microphone and we're pretty much now ready to record so position the microphone pretty much what you're going to want to be in front of it and we've got two knobs here we've got one for channel one and one for the second input and we're going to use this to set the level for this microphone so you'll see right now when I'm talking into the microphone we're not even getting half level on here so we're going to want to crank that quite a bit more it's really important that you don't rev line here though so make sure that your signals never hitting the top of that bar but we want to be getting some decent level into it so that's pretty good right there it means that you can yell a little bit if you want to but you actually not going to have too low level of recording as well we want to find a happy medium so a couple of other really important things before we get going if you're going to record a vocal we're going to want to use a pop filter which I've got here so pretty easy to work these things we just fix it onto the stand and then we place it in front of the microphone like this and this will just stop really harsh sounding P&S sounds getting through and also the wind from your breath actually affecting the microphone the only other thing you'd want to do is give your instrumentalist or vocalist a set of headphones so we have a set of headphones that come bundled with this kit and also I'm going to do now is connect this set of headphones to the back of the audio interface so we've got headphones in there we'll just jack that in we're now ready to go now I mentioned it that pretty much at the beginning of the video that we have a knob here that can actually mix between the incoming signal and software so if you're wanting to monitor back just what you're what's coming in through the microphone you would just want to turn that two inputs so now we've got the headphones connected I'll find that if I put them on I can actually hear back what's going into the microphone so if we had other music that we wanted to play back as well we could that's when we actually use this knob here to actually mix between the level coming from the computer and the level coming from the input so we're pretty much ready to get a recording going now so all's I'm going to do is hit record and you will see coming through that we're now getting a recording of my voice as it goes in we're actually getting a pretty decent level of signal and now I'm just going to hit stop and I can very easily drop jump back to the beginning of the track now see how I started recording from a strange place so it's really easy to pick up the audio move it back to the beginning and there it is we ever recording so there you have it a very simple recording we've showed you a few things here so first of all how to install your audio interface which means installing the drivers if you're on a PC or sometimes on a Mac installing your recording software we've also looked at how to set up your microphone so attaching your microphone to a stand attaching the cable to the microphone into the audio interface and then we've just gone through very briefly how to get an actual recording happening into your software now we carry a whole range of these sort of products in both of our stores at Osborn Park in Kennington the one we've looked at today is the audio box to do by Presonus but for more information please give us a call or come in and see us or you can check out any of these products online at cosmic comte you

Channel: Kosmic Sound

Views: 1,126,326

Keywords: audio interface, soundcard, sound card, recording, vocal, first, take, setup, set up, computer, external soundcard, usb, firewire, mac, osx, windows, presonus, studio, how to, tutorial, instructions, instructional, help

Id: D18DiypgYuo

Length: 19min 53sec (1193 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 08 2012