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Post subject: New Multi Track Recorder Arrived Today
Posted: Thu Aug 27, 2015 5:30 pm
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Roadie
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I bought this Zoom R16 multi channel SD recorder and interface the other day on Amazon and it arrived today. My intention is to use this as a remote multi-channel recorder to turn our band rehearsals into studio sessions. I'll capture the raw multi-track recordings and bring those into Sonar X2 to do the mixing and mastering. I got to play with it for a little bit today just checking out the features and functionality. I'll probably try my first recording session at rehearsal a week from Saturday and report back on how it went. It looks like it will be simple enough to get everyone hooked up and from what I can tell the preamps are pretty decent based on my testing today.

http://www.amazon.com/Zoom-R16-Multitra ... =zoom+r-16

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Post subject: Re: New Multi Track Recorder Arrived Today
Posted: Fri Aug 28, 2015 5:33 am
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Aspiring Musician
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Yes - I have an R24 for exactly that purpose. It's brilliant for a cheap, easy to use, multi track. One of my best buys along with the M III of course. 8)
No computer, hooray!
Of course some mug has to do the mixes afterwards - there's four in the band but only two of us do mixes - we don't do rock, it's more random or improv, so it can take a while honing and editing.


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Post subject: Re: New Multi Track Recorder Arrived Today
Posted: Fri Aug 28, 2015 11:42 am
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Yeah, I was using an Allen and Heath ICE-16 connected to our soundboard for capturing multitrack live performances and then mixing them, but it's way too much of a hassle to hook up for just capturing tracks in our rehearsal space, so this will be a lot easier to hook up. We have 8 people in the band, so this has just enough inputs. I won't be doing any mixing on it...just tracking then import into Sonar and mix/master. That's the long, hard part.

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Post subject: Re: New Multi Track Recorder Arrived Today
Posted: Fri Aug 28, 2015 12:03 pm
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Aspiring Musician
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Eight might seem enough, but we often have two keyboards in action and they both want the stereo feed, plus all four of us might sing (or make vocal noises) - and then there's two tracks for the software drum machine.
Next step another band member will buy an R16 and we'll sync 'em up!
A mixer could still be very handy for ease of routing and EQ.

Mixdown I just do all in a DAW - but playback sliders are useful to hear back what you've done.
It's mad really what you can get in a little box these days.


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Post subject: Re: New Multi Track Recorder Arrived Today
Posted: Fri Aug 28, 2015 4:16 pm
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Roadie
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Yeah we use an electronic drum kit so we take that in as a mono signal, and that's been fine on all our live recordings. The only thing I come up short on is the harmonica. Our lead singer plays the harp and I'd prefer it be recorded with the bullet mic. But it was hard to justify the larger unit for just that one channel. If nothing else I figure I can overdub his bullet mic separately on the 2nd bank, or just plug in the bullet in the place of his vocal mic if one of the other two vocalists are singing and he's just doing harp backup.

I'm trying to keep this as simple and non-invasive as I can so it will be more like just a rehearsal than a recording session. We seem to do a whole lot better and have a lot more energy in or performances that way.

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Post subject: Re: New Multi Track Recorder Arrived Today
Posted: Sat Aug 29, 2015 2:53 am
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dunedindragon wrote:
..so it will be more like just a rehearsal than a recording session. We seem to do a whole lot better and have a lot more energy in or performances that way.

Yep, with you on that !
Recording live is where it's at.
I think multitrack and click tracks killed a lot of bands 'oomph'.


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Post subject: Re: New Multi Track Recorder Arrived Today
Posted: Mon Aug 31, 2015 4:40 am
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Well...a very interesting day trying to use the r16 in rehearsal.

First, an explanation. We have a separate small PA we use for rehearsal only for the voices. All of the instruments are mic'd or DI'd into the recorder. Soooo..I figured I'd use a splitter cable on the mic's with one going into the PA and the other into the recorder. Bear in mind these are all dynamic mics so no need for phantom power, right?? Wrong!!

It seems that if I do this only the mic's that have phantom power can get enough gain to be heard. The mic's without phantom power can be gained all the way up and barely move the meter. If I go direct in with a mic all works as expected with no need for any phantom power. I've talked with 3 or 4 different people about this, but no one seems to have a good explanation.

In the end it doesn't really matter as I figured I'll just bypass the PA and go directly into the R16 with the mic's. Although the stereo output lines are disabled when channels are recording, the headphone output isn't. So, since I have an extra powered monitor, I'll just take the headphone output into the monitor for the vocalists. I verified that I can take the faders down on the instrument channels while recording as their levels are determined by the gain. That way they won't feed into the vocalist's monitor. Simple, huh?

I guess this is the kind of problem you run into when you try overthinking the problem. Anyone need to buy some very slightly used microphone splitter cables????

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Post subject: Re: New Multi Track Recorder Arrived Today
Posted: Mon Aug 31, 2015 5:50 am
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Well, if you had asked before, we would have told you ;)
Microphones have microscopic (badadum-tssh) voltage levels as they are, if you halve them by using splitter cables there is pretty much nothing left (as you have found out the hard way).

I'm guessing your "small PA" doesn't have insert channels you could have used?


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Post subject: Re: New Multi Track Recorder Arrived Today
Posted: Mon Aug 31, 2015 10:15 am
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ChrisH1 wrote:
Well, if you had asked before, we would have told you ;)
Microphones have microscopic (badadum-tssh) voltage levels as they are, if you halve them by using splitter cables there is pretty much nothing left (as you have found out the hard way).

I'm guessing your "small PA" doesn't have insert channels you could have used?


That was my first guess as well, and it may have had something to do with it. But according to the sound engineers I talked to and the research I did it wouldn't explain how the phantom power would have boosted the signal as there's nothing in the dynamic mic's design to respond to it to increase the signal level. Most technical white papers you can find on the subject do talk about creating an increase in the the overall impedence of the signal path which can become an issue after 3 or 4 splits, but generally it's a pretty acceptable practice within those limits. This happens even in transformer isolated splits such as a splitter box whose only real function is to defeat a crossfeed of DC current from a phantom powered signal from one mixer to the other.

It's all mute now anyway as this is a cleaner fix. And no, the small yamaha PA is pretty rudimentary, especially how we use it in rehearsal. No insert channels. We can get everything we need from a powered monitor.

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Post subject: Re: New Multi Track Recorder Arrived Today
Posted: Mon Aug 31, 2015 10:47 am
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Aspiring Musician
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Seems to make sense ? - phantom powered mics put out a much higher level.
I've used dynamics with my R24 and the gain has to be pretty much at the top, so split mics will probably not show anything on the very basic led meters.

Incidentally in some bad recording cases (I get to be engineer so only me to blame ) you can import the track into your DAW , see the audio levels and think '####! .. nothing there'.
But normalise will bring it back - maybe a little noisy but better than having it gone.

I've also used the mix out to feed a pair of powered speakers when we ran out of amps one time though I don't remember it being via headphone out. Feels counter intuitive taking recording sliders all the way down mid performance!


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Post subject: Re: New Multi Track Recorder Arrived Today
Posted: Mon Aug 31, 2015 11:57 am
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markcc wrote:
...
No computer, hooray!
...


I have a pathological hatred for laptops! Small multitrack recorders much more appealing to me as well... then work with DAW on a desktop, but that's a solitary activity. Have fun!!!

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Post subject: Re: New Multi Track Recorder Arrived Today
Posted: Tue Sep 01, 2015 3:21 am
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markcc wrote:
I've also used the mix out to feed a pair of powered speakers when we ran out of amps one time though I don't remember it being via headphone out. Feels counter intuitive taking recording sliders all the way down mid performance!


In a way I agree it seems a bit counter-intuitive, but it appears to be consistent with their definition of the difference about the use of gain and the volume slider in their documentation. Gain is used to control the level of the recording whereas the slider is used to control the level of playback. There's no doubt you could use the unit in place of a mixer as long as all the channels were set to playback (green light) which would enable output through the mix out.

It seemed weird to me at first but that's only because my reference for how gain and volume sliders are used come from gain staging a true mixer where gain is used to maximize (and somewhat limit) the amount of signal, and sliders are used to manage the live mix of those signals. If I think about this as a recorder in which there's a recording stage and a playback stage as in a studio, I can appreciate the design desicions.

During recording you wouldn't want to be going out to speakers typically because that would increase the possibility of cross-feed into live mics, but you would want to monitor the recording with headphones. Once you've recorded and you want to get a feel for the live mix for everyone, it makes sense to send the signal to the mix out.

It only seems counter-intuitive because I found a way to bypass their design paradigm. But then...I've always been a bit of a rule breaker... ;)

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