Category Archives: Gear Choices

Problem Solvers in the Studio and On the Road

Gear Choices, Mixers, Problem Solvers, Rack Gear, Shure Mixers, Studio Workflow, , , , , ,

Being ready to solve problems at the last minute is a crucial skill for anyone working in the studio or in live productions. There will always be that one last thing you get asked to do on short notice or a last minute equipment failure that needs to be worked around. For many of those situations I find the solution is some kind of strange mixer that has some uncommon feature you’d otherwise never expect to need.

I was recently working on a musical production and during dress rehearsal the night before the show opened the director came to me and asked for four wired handheld microphones to be setup and left back stage for a scene in the production. The scene involved four ladies on a platform singing background vocals. They would need to grab their mics, in the dark, and climb up onto a raised platform. Because of the set design the closest place I had to plug microphones in was about 50 feet away and I had nothing but a pile of questionable 20′ cables to work with. When that scene happened, two mics worked, one was totally dead and the other just crackled. No amount of cable swapping or poking and prodding would get all four mics working at the same time.

I had the good fortune of having a friend of mine there with a lot of experience in radio broadcasting at the show the next night and I asked him for a hand in getting things working. I thought if we tried to run the cables nice and high where no one could bump them we might get all four working at once for the scene. I explained the issue to him, he thought for a moment and then said ‘I have just the thing, in my car.’

Moments later he returned with a Shure M267 mixer.

We taped the very small unit to the inside wall of the set, plugged four mics into it, plus one line back to the snake and everything worked great. Since we had only one long cable run to deal with we could easily get it out of the way where it couldn’t be disturbed and we could then run short cables from the singers to the mixer. Better still the mixer could be powered by a few 9V batteries so we didn’t need to search for power and make more tripping hazards in the dark back stage.

This little mixer, which Shure no longer makes, is not something I would ever expect to find in the arsenal of a live production. It, and it’s many siblings, were made for field use by broadcast pros doing interviews or other similar duties. After the production finished I did some research on the unit and I discovered a whole host of other similar mixers that Shure made.

Another common problem I find is never being able to get enough headphone mixes out to musicians. Usually your main mixing board has 4-8 aux feeds that need to be used to do the work of dozens. In larger productions you’ll find all kinds of expensive gear to increase the number of headphone and monitoring mixes that can be made. Those are great solutions but money is not always as free flowing as it could be and I often find myself looking for a way to do more with less money. My current goto mixer for this is the aged Tascam M-1b, or the even more aged, though nearly identical, Teac M-1.

These are simple 8 input stereo mixers with two headphone outs and the ability to be chained together to form a larger mixer. The manual lists no hard maximum so you could, if you really wanted to, chain 4 or 8 of these together to get up to 32 or 64 inputs. By that point I suspect the self noise and limited feature set would get in the way. These mixers have no EQs, no insert points and only peak lights for metering. Don’t be put off though, they are magic for one simple reason. In addition to those features the mixer has one ace up its sleeve. Each input is half-normalled to a matching output. That is to say that when you plug something into channel one, that signal is passed through to an output as well as to the mix bus of the M-1b and any change made to the incoming signal on the mixer does not effect that output. You can take one signal from your main mixing board and connect it to the input of 1 Tascam M-1b and then, without changing the source signal, connect it to the next M-1b on down the line until you’ve built as many additional outputs as you need.

I use these in the studio, 5 of them, all connected together to take one set of 8 outputs from my main console and use them to create 5 additional, custom headphone mixes. When the singer needs more reverb I can turn it up for them without also adding more reverb to everyone else’s mix. Additionally, once the recording process is complete and it’s time to mix you can use them to create custom mixes to and from your effect boxes without taking up a lot of space on the main console.

The offer a lot of versatility for short money. When I started buying them on Ebay they would sell for $20-30, though they now seem to only be listed for much higher prices and don’t sell as often. Keep your eyes peeled for them and other similar mixers, like the Fostex 2050 and you’ll be surprised how much these dinosaurs have left to offer.

 

Robert

Choosing a New Digital Front End

Gear Choices, Rack Gear, Reverb, Studio Design, Studio Workflow, Tascam M3700

From the very early days of my fascination with audio recording, I’ve been drawn to the Protools DAW software. I’ve used lots of other applications and am always checking out new releases of other software but it’s Protools that I like the best. It’s interface makes sense to me and it works the way I like to work. I have on occasion coveted a feature or two from competing software but it’s just never been enough to make me want to leave. The biggest draw back it’s always had was that I was locked into a very small selection of choices for the audio interface.

For many years Avid (Formerly Digidesign) made a small number of interfaces that were supported. The interfaces are the gateway between the analog world and the digital one. You plug your signal into the interface and it converts it to digital 1s and 0s that Protools would capture. As a drummer I always picked the interface they offered the highest amount of simultaneous inputs and outputs and went on my merry way. I started out with a Digi 001 which I used for many years and then upgraded to a Digi 002 when the need arose.

Recently though Avid has begun allowing many more third party interfaces to be able to talk to Protools. This happened with the release of Protools 9. Protools 9 comprised a huge multitude of changes and updates but that small part of their announcement opened up a world of interface options to me.

As I was in the process of re-thinking what I wanted my studio to be it really allowed me to broaden what I thought feasible. Starting in Protools 9, I will be able to record 32 simultaneously tracks and I could play back up to 96, which is a huge change having been only able to record 16 before and playback a total of 32.

The first real hurdle though is, what interface or interfaces do I turn to? My current setup with my Digi 002 Rack is working fine but is not ideal. The interface can easily handle a total of 18 inputs and outputs but to do that I would need a series of extra converts and cables. Additionally, many of those inputs unavoidably have gain stages which I do not need or want.

What I want is a large number of inputs and outputs that I can use to feed my Tascam M3700. The M3700 already has all of the Mic Pres I’ll need and even if I don’t want to use them, I don’t want to be bound by using the ones on the digital interface either. It’s options and flexibility that I’m in search of and to get that, my interface needs to be a vanilla as possible.

Unfortunately for me, the market is saturated with dozens of interfaces featuring Mic Pres and digital I/O that will only complicate my setup. Very few people make interfaces that are as simple as just offering jacks for audio in and audio out plus an interfacing cable to the computer. The few that do offer that minimal functionality are usually the most expensive, if that makes any sense.

The only option I’ve found so far that meets my needs is the Echo AudioFire 12. It is a simple firewire interface with 12 inputs, 12 outputs, Midi I/O and digital sync via word clock. The face of the unit features a power button and metering for the Audio I/O. This unit looks great and gets good reviews both generally and in concert with Protools. Add to the mix that the unit is $600 here in the US and it’s likely the interface I will choose. The only demerit it earns, if you can call it that, is that it’s not easy to end up with the 32 inputs and outputs that would ideally compliment my M3700’s 32 channels. I at first considered buying three units and just not using the final 4 ins and outs on one unit but I have since decided that buying two units and wiring only the first 24 channels of my console will be ideal.

Many of the more famous mix engineers actually take the massive sessions they receive, that often have well more than 100 tracks, and whittle them down to between 16 and 40 tracks for mixing on their SSL or Neve desks. I’m not likely to ever work on a session that has anywhere near that number of tracks so I don’t expect I’d have any trouble getting things down to 24 tracks and, as is often the case in art, putting up logical limitations often enhances the final product. I can still use Protools to manage and play back a nearly limitless number of tracks but likewise, I can use it to sub-mix logical groups into one or two faders on the console. I don’t need to lay my hands on 30 tracks of backing vocals, I can process and sub-mix the backing vocals down to a stereo pair and then have just two faders on the console. Even if I need to do a lot of work on those backing vocals, I can use us the Protools automation system to make that happen and still get the benefits of working on a console.

Working with only 24 channels of digital I/O on the board also opens up the final 8 channels for other uses. During mix down I can always be sure to have channels available to use for reverb and delay returns with EQs inline. I can use a couple of those channels for monitoring the playback from the 2 track recorder or to have a couple of keyboards or sound modules wired up for easy access. Perhaps more importantly, it means that even if channel on the console fails I don’t have to stop everything and get it fixed. I can just move that audio to another free spare channel. Not a bad thing to have on a 20+ year old console.

I’ll keep an eye on the market as I wait for the right time to buy the interfaces but so far, I think the Echo AudioFire 12 represent a very solid option for people looking for a simple, not too expensive audio interface.

Robert