Complex DP Monitoring Techniques

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Published in SOS February 2008

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Monitoring 'in the box' with

DP. This looks a littlecomplicated but actually is

very straightforward. Twopre-recorded tracks (bass

and drums) are shown in red.

Two tracks currently beingrecorded (vocals and guitars)

are in green. There are 'Auxmasters', for controlling

headphone monitor level, inblue. As DP records, the

engineer in the control roomcan set up a working mix on

the main audio-track faders.

Meanwhile the Aux sends areused to create two entirely

independent headphone mixes. They're routed via buses tothe blue Aux masters, and these output to headphone

amps that are connected to separate outputs of an audiointerface. When you set up like this, if the vocalist decides

they don't want to hear any drums, for example, you can

just turn down the topmost send level on the drums track.The other mixes are entirely unaffected.

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O c t o b e r 2 0 1 0

Complex DP Monitoring Techniques : February 2008

Complex DP Monitoring TechniquesDigital Performer Notes & Techniques

Technique : Digital Performer Notes

Everyone performs better when they can hearexactly what they need in their headphones.After our guide to simple DP monitor mixingoptions last month, we follow up with ideasfor those with more complex monitoringrequirements.

Robin Bigwood

In last month's Performer workshop I started an in-depth look at Digital Performer's monitoring facilities.Good monitoring is all about providingyour 'talent' witha useful headphone mix while they record a new track.That mix may well consist of a click track, 'guide' tracks

you've already recorded, and a live feed of the trackthat's currently being recorded, and being able toproperly control the relative levels of these, with theoption of adding a bit of reverb to the track that's beingrecorded, lets you provide a reallyuseful, supportivemonitor signal, improving your chancesof building agreat recording.

When you work in a small, one-room project studioenvironment, your approach to monitoring can be fairlystraightforward. Typically you'll only record one livetrack at a time, and you can afford to make yourstandard 'control room' audio outputs do double duty forboth mixing and monitoring. This is what I describedlast month, and it's a quick, convenient and intuitiveway of working that is a real strong point of a modernproject studio DAW setup. You can seamlessly flipbetween writing, mixing and tracking at all stages of project development.

The 'main mix through the heaphones' approach is less suitable in a bigger studio, though, or whenmonitoringrequirements become more challenging. For starters, you're probablygoing to have a separatecontrol room and live room (or at least a booth), acoustically isolated from each other. With this little luxury inplace there's no need to turn down the control room speakers every time someone records something in thelive room at which point maintaining separate control room and monitor mixes becomes a useful possibility.You can give your talent exactly what they want to hear in their headphoneswithout having to mess up the'working mix' you're building up as the project develops. And you can go further, providingmore than onesimultaneous monitor mix for whenyou're recording more than one personat a time and theywant differentthings in their headphones.

In the old days, when we sat behind huge analogue mixing desks looking cool, setting up separate controlroom and monitor mixes was comparatively easy. The different areas of the mixer main mix, monitorsection, groups and aux sends could all be pressed into service. You effectively had lots of individualmixers in one box, each doing one clearly defined job.

With a typical DAW setup, things are not always as straightforward. First, there are so many ways of goingabout monitoring. You might still use a hardware mixer, or the zero-latency mixing and routing of a PCI,

Firewire or USB audio interface. You might even take on the menace of latency and set up monitoring 'in thebox' in DP. Every combination of Mac, audio interface, external hardware setup and project requirementthrows up different possibilities for how monitoring might work in practice. To top it all, we often set up mixesin more than one place perhaps one (or more) in DP itself, and others in our audio interfaces' mixerapplications, or on an external mixer or monitoringcontroller.

So what are the best ways forward? That's what this month's Performer Notes is all about. Because it'simpossible to consider every conceivable setup, I'm going to describe how you might take on 'bigger studio'monitoringusing several typical setups. These cover all the main approaches using DP, so you should findsomething close to your own setup.

Routing The Click

If you double-click DP's metronome button toconfigure the way it works, it appears that it canonly be routed to a single output at a time. If that'sthe case, how can you route it to several monitorsignals at once not to mention having it at

different levels (or turning it off) in each? Theanswer is to route it not to a hardware output butone of DP's buses. Then you can create an Auxtrack using the same bus as its input, and yourcontrol room outs for its output. This effectivelygives you a 'click track' in the Mixing Board, andyou can then treat it just like any other pre-recorded track, using Aux sends to send it invarying amounts to your headphone mixes.

Routing The Click

Getting Started

Doing It All In DPZero-latencyInterfaces

New SoftwareFrom Audioease

Using A HardwareMixer

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Getting Started

Here are our basic ways of working:

'In the box' mixing,using only Digital Performer's Mixing Board.

Mixerless, but using audio interfaces with zero-latency monitoring facilities.

Using an external hardware mixer.

Each of these requires a certain minimum of audio hardware too:

A multi-output audio interface (possibly with zero-latency monitoring facilities).

One headphone amplifier (and headphones), capable of being driven bya mono or stereo line-level signal,for every headphone monitor mix you need.

If you're usinga MOTU audio interface, make sure you select 'Monitor record-enabled tracks througheffects'in Setup / Audio System / Input MonitoringMode. The other mode you'll see there is a convenience feature forsimpler monitoring, as covered last month, and isn't suitable for this more advanced work.

Let's now have a look at the setups in detail. In each case, we're going to create two separate headphonemixes for a guitarist and vocalist, in addition to a separate control room mix, working on a project that alreadyhas a bass and drums backing track.

Doing It All In DP

With this quite bold approach you use DP's Mixing Board for everything to set up all your real-timemonitorsignals, with effects if necessary, as well as manage your tracking and control-room mix. There's no need foryour audio interface to have any monitoring facilities,so you could use an older MOTU 2408 or 1224 model,for example. In fact, if your audio interface does have zero-latency monitoring, either disable it or just mute allof its zero-latency mixes. Also, chooseBlend in Studio menu / Audio Patch Thru, to ensure we hear both trackaudio and live inputs on record-enabled tracks. We're going to make all audio pass through DP, so latencywill be unavoidable. Running a small buffer size in the Configure Hardware Driver dialogue box can make itworkable, but you'd better have a fast Mac...

The basic idea is that your control-room mix is what's on the main track faders,which are routed to the mainouts on your interface, which in turn feed your control room speakers. A headphone mix is then set up usingan Aux send on each track specifically a pre-fade send, so that its level is not affected by the tracks' mainfader or pan positions, or their Muteor Solo status. The sends are routed (viabuses) to an Aux Track feedingan output or pair of outputs (separate from your main outs) on your audio interface. This output then feeds theheadphone amp for a musician's monitor mix. Since DP lets you create a lot of sends, you can set up a lot ofseparateheadphone mixes. Sends have their own level knob, pan pot (if they're stereo) and Mutebutton, sothey're like a little mini-channel within the main Mixing Board. It's actually just like one of the traditional waysof working with a hardware mixer, and very intuitive.

What's very nifty about this approach is that the Aux track for each headphonemix becomes that mix'soverall volume control; on a hardware mixer it would be called an Aux master. This is very useful, and allowsyou to change the monitor level in a musician's headphones without having to adjust all the send-level knobsthat contribute to the headphonemix. You can then set up a new Aux send on the 'headphone mix' Aux track,routed back to your main control-room outputs. Normally you'll keep this muted, but if you unmute it you'll hearthe monitor mix on your control-room speakers: a useful thing to check, especially if your musician startscomplaining about it!

Adding a bit of reverb to a particular input that's present in a headphone mix couldn't be easier: just instantiatea reverb plug-in on its channel and you're away.

Zero-latency Interfaces

Working without an external mixer but using one or more audio interfaces with zero-latency monitoringfacilities is becoming increasingly common these days. It's a streamlined and cost-effective approach formany studios, and the challenge of avoiding latency byrunning very small buffer sizes is sidestepped.

When your monitoring needsare anything other than very basic, though, this approach requires you to workwith two mixers. The first is DP's Mixing Board, and it's here that you set the levels of pre-recorded tracks.The second is the 'live mix' of the signals being recorded, and you usually configure this in a separateapplication whicheffectively controls a digital mixer built into your audio interface. For example, MOTU havethe CueMix Console application, which looks like a mixer and controls the interface's on-board zero-latencymixes.

Let's consider our little scenario once more. How do we give our vocalist and

guitarist what theywant to hear as they record? Firstof all, we don't want DPcontributing to input monitoring at all that's going to be handled elsewhere. Soin the Studio menu /Audio Patch Thru,choose 'None'. Then, create Aux sendsand Aux masters, linked viabuses, as I described for the 'in the box' approachabove. These allow us set up our separateheadphone mixes. But this timedon'tbother creatingAux sends for the tracks that are record-enabled. Remember,DP's input monitoring has been disabled, so we're going to use the audiointerface's mixing features to co-ordinate the live signals instead.


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Working with DP and a zero-latency interface's mixing

application. This is similar tothe previous setup, but

monitoring for the tracksbeing recorded is now set up

in the CueMix Console shown

opposite.

The CueMix Console application is

maintaining three simultaneous mixes:Control Room 1, Monitor 1 and Monitor 2.

Before we go on, then, here's a run-through of how this setup works. Outputs 1-2of the audio interface are feeding the control room speakers; outputs 3-4 arefeeding a headphone amp for the vocalist; and outputs 5-6 are feeding theguitarist's headphone amp.

So, as before, set up the two headphone mixes of pre-recorded tracks byadjusting the pre-fade Aux send levels in DP. Then, in the zero-latency mixingapplication (in this case, MOTU's CueMix Console) create separate mixes for thecontrol room and the two headphoneamp feeds. I've called them Monitor 1 andMonitor 2 in the screen on the opposite page. Then bring up the live inputs to thedesired level in each separate mix 'layer'. Inside the audio interface the livesignals are mixed with the track audio coming from DP, and your two mixes arecombined.

It's at this point that having the 'Aux Master' Aux tracks in DP comes in so useful.Let's say the vocalist asks for more backing track and less live signal in theirheadphones.You can simply increase the Aux Master 1 level in DP anddecrease the Monitor 1 master fader level in CueMix Console. Alternatively, ifyou're using a non-MOTU audio interface whosemixing application includes a'From Computer' channel fader, you could turn up the backing track level there.

What if you want to add some monitoringreverb to one of the live signals?You're laughing if you own an interface with built-in DSP effects (such as theMetric Halo 2882+DSP or a TC Studio Konnekt 48), as the reverb can simplybe added within the mixingapplication. With MOTU, RME and other interfaces it's a little harder,but by no means impossible, and I'll betaking a look at this along with a few other monitoringniceties next month.

After recording vocals and guitar, you might want to configure Aux sends for their tracks in DP, ready toprovide an even fuller pre-recorded track monitor mix for the next round of live tracks.

New Software From Audioease

I'm a big fan of Audioease's plug- ins for DP all beautifully done, interestingand useful, and available in native MAS as well as Audio Unit format. Theirnewest is Speakerphone, which takes the convolution technology from theAltiverb reverb and bundles it with a clutch of other processors, includingdistortion, EQ, dynamics, delay and pitch-shift, and a big sound library ofambiences. The result is a plug-in that makes it almost ludicrously easy tomake your pristine audio sound as though it was being heard in a railwaystation, or a car, or on a mobile phone connection, or being played out of anold-fashioned record-player. This ability to place audio in a variety ofambiences has obvious uses for film and TV work, but it has wider uses foraudio production too. What Speakerphone excels at is imbuing audio withcharacter, roughing it up, and giving it a bit of context. It opens up fascinatingnew possibilities for treating vocals, guitars, drums and piano, not to mentionsynths, and I can see it being fantastically useful for music production. It costs395 Euros for a download that can be authorised to your hard disk or an iLok.More info from www.audioease.com.

Using A Hardware Mixer

It's arguable that, for maximum monitoring flexibility with minimum hassle, an external hardware mixer hookedup to an effects processor is still the best way to co-ordinate signals going into and out of DP. As I mentionedin this month's introduction, it's as if most hardware mixers were born for setting up monitoring.Theygenerally have a number of aux sends on each channel, just begging to be used for monitor mixes. Even thelittle Mackie 1202 I use sometimes for live submixing has two, with plenty of extra facilities for incorporatingeffects units and so on. And more sophisticated models allow aux signals to come back into the main mix, orgo out on groups, for subtly sophisticated routing that can deal with really fiendish requirements.

There are too many variables in the worldof hardware mixers forme to be able to recommend specific ways of working with them you couldhave anything from a 50 Behringer to a room-filling SSLhooked up to your 828MkII! But a reliable basic approach is to useyour desk, not your audio interface, as the main studio 'hub'.First,you'll have your control room speakers hooked up to the desk'scontrol room output. Second, the outputs from your audio interfacewill feed stereo input channels (or pairs of mono channels) on thedesk, alongside channels for the mics, guitars and line-levelsources you want to record. Then you'll use the desk's groupoutputs to get to the inputs on your interface, and its Aux sends tofeed headphone amps. In this way of working, although DP is stillresponsible for mixing the pre-recorded tracks, it's slightly removedfrom the cut and thrust of input monitoring and this is no badthing.

In essence, you work with DP exactly as if you were using the zero-latency interface approach described previously. You still set upAux sends to build separate headphone mixes, and you route themto separate outputs on your audio interface. But everything else happens on the mixer balancing therelative levels of the DP mixes and the live signals, incorporating outboard monitoring reverb, and controllingthe level of control-room and monitor mixes. The tactile nature of an analogue mixer, particularly, seems tomake all this a whole lot easier.

Published in SOS February 2008

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