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Post subject: New recording gear day ... and pontificating about music
Posted: Fri Jun 27, 2014 6:00 am
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I bought a used audio interface yesterday, a lovely Focusrite Saffire Pro 24 DSP box. Great piece of kit, frightening amount of routing options and a stunning level of detail and clarity to show up all the faults in my mixes :/

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But what really stunned me was the studio setup of the bloke who was selling it. He'd "done a course in sound recording" then decided to become a "music producer" i.e. making WUBWUBWUBWUB noises in his bedroom and posting them on the internet. So he'd bought a Mac, a 31" monitor, Pro Tools, KRK active monitors and headphones, the Focusrite box and even a gold-plated (!) Firewire cable. He had spent thousands on his dream of being the next Skrillex (or whoever it is people listen to these days)

And he was giving it up because it was "too hard to learn".

This made me think of a comment George Harrison once made, something along the lines of "if you really want to be a musician then buy a bloody guitar and learn to play it".

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Post subject: Re: New recording gear day ... and pontificating about music
Posted: Fri Jun 27, 2014 6:29 am
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I use the same unit but mine doesn't have the DSP.
It's just a Saffire Pro 24.
It's a very good unit.
Best interface I've ever owned, anyway.

You will want to be sure you find a Firewire400 to Thunderbolt adaptor if you plan to use it with a newer Mac.
Most adapters available today convert from Thunderbolt to Firewire800 not 400.
400 is getting pretty long in the tooth these days.

Enjoy!

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Post subject: Re: New recording gear day ... and pontificating about music
Posted: Fri Jun 27, 2014 6:36 am
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Also, I have found that the Firewire400 cable doesn't like to stay plugged into the back of the interface so I taped mine. Not very aesthetically pleasing but it seems to work.

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Post subject: Re: New recording gear day ... and pontificating about music
Posted: Fri Jun 27, 2014 6:48 am
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All that expense and technology and it has to be held together with a bit of tape! No worries about the Firewire/Thunderbolt here, I'm using a Windows PC with two 800 ports.

There's a pretty steep learning curve with the routing on this thing though. I've messed it up and restored the factory presets a couple of times already.

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Post subject: Re: New recording gear day ... and pontificating about music
Posted: Fri Jun 27, 2014 6:52 am
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You must mean to do with the DSP I imagine.
Mine was pretty straightforward with regard to setup.
Pretty much Plug n' Play ... to borrow a Bill Gates term.

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Post subject: Re: New recording gear day ... and pontificating about music
Posted: Fri Jun 27, 2014 6:55 am
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There's a lot of options to route the inputs from analog/insert FX or the room modelling VRM system. Plus I'm trying to figure out adding the onboard reverb the the headphone monitor mix only without routing it to the main record outs. I'll play with it for a few days more before I finally resort to looking at the manual.

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Post subject: Re: New recording gear day ... and pontificating about music
Posted: Fri Jun 27, 2014 7:00 am
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Ahhh ....
I get you.

Yah, I just roll my board over. It's on wheels. All my F/X gear is wired up to the console so my setup is pretty easy. I like it that way because I already know my gear so I don't have to reinvent the wheel.

I gave myself a forgotten chuckle just now. I've had that hunk of tape on there for almost a year now and I just remembered how I decided to use white tape to match the woofer cones on my HS8s. :lol:

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Post subject: Re: New recording gear day ... and pontificating about music
Posted: Fri Jun 27, 2014 7:11 am
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This weekend's task is to transfer some tracks from a laptop running Cubase 3 and some old plugins that won't run under my new version of Cubase 7 onto the main computer. Sync the two using SPDIF and VST system link and send the projects over track by track on the optical input. Should be easy. Probably won't be. But I should have a good idea of how to use the Focusrite by the time I get finished.

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Post subject: Re: New recording gear day ... and pontificating about music
Posted: Sat Jun 28, 2014 6:30 am
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I have a Lexicon Lambda which has served me well. It came with a lite version of Cubase that I cannot upgrade and a Lexicon reverb plug-in that works only with Cubase. I don't use Cubase.

I was looking to upgrade with a unit from Focusrite's Scarlet series. Not sure what to do. I guess Scarlet is USB and Saffire is FireWire.


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Post subject: Re: New recording gear day ... and pontificating about music
Posted: Sat Jun 28, 2014 8:07 am
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I haven't used the Scarlet series but I would guess the preamps and DAC's are the same for both product ranges. If you need the room modelling then Focusrite do a separate VRM box for a ludicrously small amount of money.

http://uk.focusrite.com/usb-audio-interfaces/vrm-box

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Post subject: Re: New recording gear day ... and pontificating about music
Posted: Sat Jun 28, 2014 10:51 am
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Joe Walsh: "I just don't get making music these days."
Interviewer: "What do you not get?"
Joe Walsh: "Back in the old days when we made albums, you would have a producer and maybe an engineer working with anywhere from four to five musicians. These days is totally different; most modern music is made with maybe one musician working with four to five producers, songwriters, and computer samplers. I just don't get it."

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Post subject: Re: New recording gear day ... and pontificating about music
Posted: Sat Jun 28, 2014 2:18 pm
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Good luck with it - the specs look great!

I'm still using a Tascam US-1800, works for me. :D

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Post subject: Re: New recording gear day ... and pontificating about music
Posted: Thu Jul 03, 2014 4:26 am
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01GT eibach wrote:
Joe Walsh: "Back in the old days when we made albums, you would have a producer and maybe an engineer working with anywhere from four to five musicians. These days is totally different; most modern music is made with maybe one musician working with four to five producers, songwriters, and computer samplers. I just don't get it."

+1

This made my day! The mainstream music industry is in a sorry state of affairs these days. *sighs*

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Post subject: Re: New recording gear day ... and pontificating about music
Posted: Sat Jul 05, 2014 9:42 pm
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GilgaFrank wrote:
All that expense and technology and it has to be held together with a bit of tape! No worries about the Firewire/Thunderbolt here, I'm using a Windows PC with two 800 ports.

There's a pretty steep learning curve with the routing on this thing though. I've messed it up and restored the factory presets a couple of times already.


Bandwidth isn't really a problem whether it's FW 400 or 800 - with 24/96 recording, you need a bandwidth of under 300 kB/s per channel, so with four input channels, it shouldn't matter.
What's more of a concern is that it's getting harder to find PCs with Firewire.

As for screwing up the routing - does the Focusrite have multiple banks, like the MOTUs? That's great for learning, as you can have one experimental bank, and just switch to a bank with "last known good" when you need to have everything working.


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Post subject: Re: New recording gear day ... and pontificating about music
Posted: Sat Jul 05, 2014 10:01 pm
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Firewire is disappearing from PC's these days, I had to buy Firewire cards for the last two computers I owned. I bought a Firewire 800 card as the Focusrite has ADAT compatibility and the option to connect another eight analog inputs/digital outputs with the Octopre mic preamp. Not that I'm planning on recording live drums just yet but it's there if I need it.

The routing thing was straightforward, by default the room modelling only appears on one headphone output. There's a tiny button in the control software to activate it for both headphone outs, I just happened to be plugged into the wrong one, basic RTFM error.

All the hardware setups can be saved and recalled, the only use I've found for that so far is resetting it to defaults when I messed up and lost the signal. Got to say the software is incredibly good but I would have liked to see the line/instrument level switches on the box itself instead of hidden away in a software menu.

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