How to Use an Audio Interface 2020

you don't went out and got that new interface and you don't know what to do with it you don't know how to use it even what the whole point of an interface says don't worry wave you got [Music] what's up family welcome back to another wavy way tip of the day I'm way B Wayne and I'm here to help y'all out now today's video is definitely gonna be for beginners I'm gonna be showing you how to set up your audio interface how to use it in your home recording studio setup or wherever the hell you might be if you're new to the channel I drop videos like this at least once a week sometimes two or three times main so make sure you go ahead and hit that subscribe button and you know you're gonna get some value about this video too so you might as well hit that like button right now before we talk about setting up the interface let's talk about what the job of an audio interface is and why the hell you might even need one okay so basically the audio interface the point of it is to take your analog signal that's coming from your microphone so when you speak into a microphone it's gonna create some electrical impulses that's gonna travel down the XLR cable and your computer don't know what the hell to do with that data alright well you know most computers have a sound card or something now but they don't have professional level inputs for your XLR right that's where an audio interface is gonna come into play when you need to convert that analog signal over to a digital signal that can be read by the computer all analog to digital conversion is not created equal so the quality of your audio is going to be determined by the quality of that analog to digital conversion based on what interface you have so that's why you want to go with a professional quality audio interface to get the best possible signal while you are recording the next primary job of the audio interface is now to convert that digital signal that ones and zeros back into a signal that we can hear so it also does digital to analog conversion so you got a 2d analog to digital conversion and then you got D to a digital to analog conversion the a to D conversion happens on the input of the audio interface where your mic is plugged in or whatever source you are recording that is gonna happen on the input and then once you've processed everything inside your computer the output of your audio interface also is doing digital to analog conversion and going back to your headphones or studio monitor now the audio interface also has your preamp which is going to amplify your mic signal to get it up to an audible level because mic signals are pretty low and without a preamp you pretty much it's unuseful most audio interfaces you'll also find phantom power some microphones like the one that I am gonna be using today condenser microphones who require additional power for them to work your audio interface provides that power sends it out to the microphone to power it up and that would be the 48 volt phantom power that you might see on your audio interface a good audio interface will also allow you to control your monitoring levels so maybe this is the headphone level of the output or maybe the studio monitors you will have control over that as well so that's the primary functions of the audio interface so let's just go ahead and get into how we would set up our audio interface so what I have here is my Apollo twin okay make sure we call it so the audio interface that I had that I'm using today it's gonna be my Apollo twin duo but most of this stuff will apply to whatever audio interface you are using ingest depends on some stuff might be labeled differently or in a different location or it's different to access it but for the most part this is all going to apply okay so the first thing that you want to do with your audio interface is make sure that it's powered up if there is any power cable or anything like that that needs to be connected then you want to go ahead and connect that this particular audio interface has a power cable let me just make sure you can see that yeah this particular audio interface has its own power supply other audio interfaces may just be powered by the USB or whatever kind of connection is going into your computer so you might not even have to worry about that step okay this one also has an on/off switch which we're not going to activate just yet but if you have a bus powered or basically a USB powered or whatever it's being powered by your computer then there probably won't be an on/off switch as soon as you plug it in the you will notice that the audio interface is turned on now for best practice you want to have your computer shut down while you are powering up your audio interface that's the best practice you want to have your monitors off and you want to have your computer shut down now of course some audio interfaces work very well on plug and play like the one I have right now this is gonna work perfectly I never ran into problems but most manufacturers recommend that you have the computer shut down while you are powering up your interface and of course if you use an external studio monitors you want to make sure that their outputs are also powered down basically what I need to do is connect my audio interface to the computer and then I'm gonna go ahead and get it powered up so that we can take a look at everything that's on this audio interface then I will connect my microphone connect my headphones and my studio monitors um yeah and set the best mic level to get started all right so since of course I'm using my macbook pro right now I have to have this dongle that y'all can see here on screen so I'm just going to go ahead and connect to the dongle life and then I'm gonna connect this to my audio interface or you can do it vice versa doesn't really matter cool you know also I guess at this time too it'll make sense for me to go ahead and connect my microphone to the audio interface and so let's just go ahead and do that here's my mic I'm just gonna take my cable and plug it into a microphone now if you need help with knowing how to set up your microphone properly I have another video for that too so you can check that out and I'll leave a link to it somewhere over the rainbow so here we go now I'm on to my audio interface what you want to do here on the back of it you have input so I got my client input 1 and then I have my client input 2 it doesn't matter which one you use but let's just use once this is the only input source and this is a basically a combo Jack to where if you had a quarter inch input you can plug in a quarter inch input as well as an XLR well either or not both at the same time obviously but you can choose which one that you need to use and plug that in so it is a combo jack it's not just your standard XLR input back here so that's very helpful while we back here I might as well show you how to monitor inputs or outputs as well so on this interface I do have additional outputs depending on your interface you might have more or less outputs or inputs available but on this particular interface I do have my monitor outputs this is what's gonna go out to my studio monitors mark the left and right and then I have two additional line level outputs that I could use to go wherever I might need them in the studio maybe I'm setting up an alternate cue mix or I'm sending out to some Hardware processors in the studio that's what those could be possibly used for so I got my mic set up where I plugged me and now alright now that the mic is plugged in let's go ahead and connect the studio monitors so as we seen that the outputs for the for the monitors are quarter-inch TRS cable so I'm just going to need two of those quarter-inch TRS to go from the audio interface into the studio monitors so when I am connecting to my studio monitors I'm always use balanced cables and most of the time I use these cables that go like this right to wear it so quarter-inch on one side because most of the time the output doesn't make sure I'll just bring this come on man the monitor cables that I like to use or quarter go from quarter-inch TRS two XLR on one end now most interfaces like just like this one will have a quarter-inch output only available if I could go from XLR to XLR I definitely would do that but most interfaces only have a quarter-inch output to go to your monitors and then but most studio monitors will allow you to either come in at quarter-inch or use an XLR so I prefer to go to the XLR so that's why I use a cable like this one a little split cable like that well not a split cable but you get what I'm saying a two headed cable so with this I'm just gonna take the quarter-inch in the left one will obviously be connected to whatever monitor is gonna be on my left side and then the right cable this one is going to be connected to the right monitor okay so you got those two cables in there like that make sure that they're pushed in nicely and then you'll be good to go you just connected other ends to the back of your studio monitors now I already got my monitor set up so I don't want to call behind my desk to pull the plugs out and put them back in but you see the point here you basically just take the monitor outputs from your interface now if you're just using TRS 2 TRS that's perfectly fine as well I just prefer to go from TRS to XLR next up it would let's just talk about connecting the headphones because you definitely gonna need some headphones if you plan to do any recording you can't just record with the studio monitors playing out loud so I'm just gonna grab my headphones my sennheiser HD 280 pro's I do have a wavy Wayne prototype headphones and back here in the studio and I'm sorry I think I've been actually working with a couple companies on development of my own headphone so if you're interested in that let me know down in the comments if y'all would possibly cop some wavy Wayne headphones but in the meantime until my own custom pers ready I rock with the Sennheiser HD 280 pros and of course all the gear that I'm talking about today you can find it on my Amazon affiliate link in the description baby alright so for the actual hair phones though there is an input on the front now most interfaces will have this because they know that you're gonna need to access the headphones pretty often so they will have some type of a input for you to be able to connect your headphone so I'm just gonna plug my quarter inch headphones in right there and I'm good to go everything that I need to have set up is set up and what I just need to do now is go ahead and power on the audio interface alright so now that the interface is powered on let's just take a look at some of the controls that we have here all right so I'd have my preamp control again most of the time for yard you probably just gonna have a preamp knob maybe it will say gain ok now the gain control that will basically determine how loud you are making your microphone how sensitive you're making that microphone so on channel 1 preamp control I got the preamp selected all I do is use this big knob in the middle to turn the gain up on that microphone right but and here's also my input meter is very important to always look at your meters if you have a meter on the interface that's great you can look at that but if not you will have meters inside of whatever dog you are using this out the software so that would be another good place to look but one thing I need to do for this microphone like I said before was to activate the phantom power and so you'll see a button maybe it's a switch or a knob or whoever knows what kind of interface you may have and maybe a switch and Knobble button whatever but in this case there's a little button that says plus 48 V I'm gonna click that it'll flash a couple times on this particular interface and now on the input we see that we are getting an input signal now the input signal seems to be a little quiet so I'm just gonna turn it up yeah-yeah-yeah-yeah so whenever I'm talking into the mic I just want to get a nice strong signal I don't want it to be clipping but that is looking like a strong signal obviously if you turn it up and you start seeing red on any of your meters that is a big problem a red flag having a little bit of orange is okay but it's definitely an indicator that you're getting pretty close that's good I think this would be a good strong level I'm hitting that orange and but I ain't hitting the red so I would say that I'm happy with this input level right here now some other stuff that you might see on your interface you might have a filter right this is my high-pass filter this is by activating this with this will just roll-off any low frequencies well not any low frequencies but the super low frequencies that just aren't needed in most cases depending on what you recording most of the time I don't mess with that and then you also have a pad now if I'm recording some extremely loud and let's say I turn this all the way down there boom boom I'm still getting clipping because for whatever reason maybe it's a kick drum or a snare or something like that it is as being extremely loud or you got Little John in the booth so I myself turned up what it's so loud and you just got to hit the pad not a pad would depending on the interface will attenuate the input level by 10 to 20 DB somewhere in there generally we also have was that the face we also had a phase reverse switch so if you're recording something and steri almost at the time you'll run into some phasing issues but for the most part most of us don't need to worry about that and of course we have a link button on this particular interface that's going to be used for if I am recording something and stereo like maybe a keyboard or something like that and I want the gain of both the left and the right channels to be linked then you just hit that link button and it will link both of them so you can record in your stereo signal yeah so another thing about this on there so right now I'm on the preamp side if I go to monitor it just changes this whole big knob to control my headphone level or if I push it again it will control the monitor level for the output of the speakers okay so yours may have separate knobs for each one of them but that's what they do so on a monitor that's gonna be my speaker level that we plug those two quarter inch cables into and then headphones that's gonna determine the level of my headphones here and again if I want to change back and control the level of my actual mic preamp I just hit the preamp button over here and then we can do that right there very easily there is a high Z input so if you are recording any guitars bass guitars or anything like that any high Z instrument inputs you can just plug it in directly there and that will give you your hi z input so the input button on this particular interface determines whether you are recording a microphone or a line level signal so let's say maybe you plugged in your microphone and you not getting any signal and your meters nothing in your DAW then maybe your interface is looking for a line level signal so if you see when I hit that whole input went away no matter how much I turn this up I'm not getting any input there because my interface is looking for a line level signal that will be plugged into that combo jack back there into the quarter inch line level input okay so like a line level signal would be like a keyboard for example with some type of synthesizer that you might be recording in so but if you just make sure that you are on mic and you see there is even a mic line indicator to where it gives me the mic input level and if I hit that it lets me know that it's looking for a line level right there so boom that's pretty much all the controls on this other audio interface and one thing that I would just recommend is that you watch the meters as you are recording don't just set it and forget it you're your artist or client or yourself you might get a little too excited too loud or whatever it may be too quiet you might need to make some adjustments during the recording so make sure that you keep an eye on your meters while you're recording and you should be good all right ah thanks for watching this video if you found it helpful at all make sure that you hit the thumbs up and subscribe we are on the road to a hundred thousand and you know I can't do it without you so make sure you hook me up like I'd be hooking y'all up all right if you ever need professional mixing services visit wavy wane.com fill out my form and I will get you a quote as soon as possible you know I'm talking about and of course you know on that website wavy wane.com I got a bunch of templates to help recording and mixing go a whole lot smoother and faster for you guys so hope you enjoyed this video thanks again for watching and be dope [Music]

Channel: Wayne.wav

Views: 101,943

Keywords: how to use an audio interface, audio interface, wavy wayne, how to use audio interface, how to use a audio interface, wayne wav, wayne.wav, how to setup audio interface, best audio interface 2020, wavy wayne template, audio interface 2020, apollo twin, wavy wayne studio one, best audio interface for home studio, what is an audio interface, apollo interface, best audio interface for vocals, audio interface setup, best audio interface, interface

Id: fqNj5Bt-Igk

Length: 18min 23sec (1103 seconds)

Published: Wed May 20 2020