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Virtual outboard rack for LIVE


ghance

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Hi,

 

Working on a gig at a long-haul destination. Gig is cabaret / musical with 8 turns on UHF headsets & a click track. I'm taking DPA4066's in hold luggage. House kit is Senni e300's, a soundcraft TWO & a pile of Tannoy on FOH. Outboard is Behringer EQ & FX.. hmmm...

 

SO was seriously thinking of buying a MOTU Ultralite v3 & an insert loom. Plan on using MOTU in standalone mixer mode but as a virtual outboard rack.

 

i.e. a couple CH's of parametric EQ to stick across a UHF sub-group, maybe an insert on one or two of the quieter twirlies, maybe a comp across another group for matters arising and a RVB / DLY on a SND/RTN loop so I don't have to soil myself with the B*h*r Virtulizer UTLTRA MEGA PRO FX or whatever its called.

 

I'm NOT talking about using VST pluggins in a VST host, so lets not get bogged down with laptop stability or interface latency.

 

Am I being a) ARE YOU CRAZY!?, b) slightly over ambitious but maybe it could work or c) .. that would work.. infact we do this all the time

 

thanks

 

.g

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Hi the MOTU is a multi input effects processor when used standalone, so compact but you still need a mixer? I have a SAC system and it works really well, I have a full on madi one with rackmount pc for big shows and a laptop based rme digiface system for smaller shows, dynamics on every channel multiple vst's 24 monitor mixes via netbooks if needed. The SAC is very stable and works flawlessly with RME and MOTU (from the forum)

 

Andy

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thx for speedy replies.

 

No.. don't mix mixer element. in order of need: 1. Para EQ 2. RVB 3. Dynamics

 

A&H ?? hear what your saying.. used an idr for instal. was ok, but if I was going down that route I'd go bss soundweb or possibly yamy mix engine.

 

what I really like about the MOTU ultralite is that it will slip nicely between my smalls & T-shirts nicely without costing me excess baggage.

 

SAC - not seen that before.. hmm very nice. certainly worth a look. with a reasonable pre-amp like a digirack or motu 828 (presonus firestudio, tc konnekt etc etc etc etc) I can see that being neat little solution.

 

BUT for this job I need something really wee & lightweight... anyone got a motu ultralite?

 

ta

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No you are not being mad, a very sensible option...

 

Have a look into either using Ableton Live or the dedicated Waves MultiRack as plugin hosts.

 

If you are just looking for say a dela and reverb even using jack outs / ins on a mac would proably be good enough for a delay and a mono reverb. But the Moto would give you more quality.

 

Peter

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I think virtual outboard will soon be the way to go.

 

I spend a lot of my time on the Digidesign Venue platform and so own a few TDM plugins that I use on a regular basis. I've oft wondered about buying some hardware to build my own version of Waves Multirack using something like Forté (or some mac equivalent) to host plugin 'chains' for me to use with any console. All I would need is an interface with a few connection options - ideally balanced analogue I/O and ADAT/AES. Could be a winner...

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ah.. we've started down the VST/Plugin route.. I wanted to avoid soft plugins just yet.. yes the time will come where we all turn up at gigs with a USB key & a laptop (yes... depressing isn't it.. sound engineered by accountants with delusions of being creative.. oh well I guess it saves time working out our expenses later. copy of Waves in one window and for the middle 4 numbers in the set where the mix is dialled in and our mind has wondered to questions like "why are we here?" and "did I pay the gas bill?", a spreadsheet of taxi receipts & long distance calls to mother in the other window)

 

but to bring this back to the OP.. I'm talking light weight - carry on - over-head locker friendly DSP boxes. setup with a laptop a leave.. Metric Halo, Motu Travel/Ultralite

 

james drake on PSW writes:

 

"I have done this with the 828mk3 and a macbook pro. I think this is just the same as the ultralite, just more I/o. I tested pulling the firewire connection during rehearsals and no glitches at all. the motu keeps running along happily. in theory if the computer dies you can control everything from the front panel, but it would take forever going through all the menus. if it's all programmed and rehearsed though, you could run standalone and just recall presets from the front panel.

 

eq is eq. you get all the control you need. 5 fully parametric AND hpf and lpf with variable slope. and you get eq on every in and every out, so if you route each input to each respective output, you can use the motu ultralite mk3 as an 8 channel eq with 10 parametric bands on each channel. eq can also give you an fft or 'waterfall' overlay which is useful if you like watching your feedback on a screen.

 

reverb, don't know. controls are a bit strange I think, but if you get into it I would say sounds better than the spx standard offering.

 

dynamics is a bit weird. you get two comps on each channel. one with full control and one with less control. unfortunately the one with full control has auto make up gain, which is really S**T. it gets really fiddly because if you turn the threshold down a bit it will give you more gain relatively, and then you have to turn down by the same amount. I think they really ######ed up here because the comp is great and better than any standard analogue offering. but the controls just don't fit in the right place for me and would make it really dangerous to do vocals with.

 

the second compressor is better because it doesn't do this ###### around with you, but you have less control. but maybe that works out ok for you.

 

the routing is s**t. you are stuck with 8 stereo buses, which be default go nowhere. so if you want to do eight channels of eq, for example. you allocate busses 1-4 to to outputs 1-8. then each bus has a separate fader page. then for each mix you just un-mute the one channel, and pan route it hard left or right. so bus 1 would have inputs 1 and 2 unmuted and panned hard left and right etc.

 

there is no global mute, so basically everything works like a pre-fade pre-mute monitor mixer."

 

anyone else done this?

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