Please help... a confession

[signalchain]

Greetings.
Im an old guy, old enough to have started with a console and tape. My confession is... I cant wire up my patchbay properly to play with my Sonar based computer. Without an actual console, Im kinda lost. Does anyone have a recommendation for me as to where I might find help? I have some very expensive outboard gear that I can't easily access, and some very expensive computer simulations of similar hardware that I can easily access, and don't want to as it sucks by comparison.

This is my AA moment..... "Hello.... my name is Scott..... and it's been months since I've actually done a mix the way I can hear it in my head"

Thanks all..... I am ready to get this s&*t DIALED!

signalchain

[dfuruta]

What's your setup like? If you give enough detail of what you've got and what you want to do, I'm sure the tapeop hive mind can help you get everything going.

[evilaudio]

A few basic preliminary questions:
What is your interface to your computer?
What kind of patchbay do you have?

I run a similar setup using a DAW and outboard pres, comps, EQs, EFX, etc... even a summing mixer... it is very possible and you get the best of both analog and digital worlds!

[fossiltooth]

It really depends on how much gear you have, how much I/O you have and how many patch points you have available.

If you have 4 rows of patchpoints, and this is a mixing or single-overdub environment where you don't have to worry about tie lines from a live room, you might put your 4 broad categories of I/O on 4 separate rows. (These would be your ins to gear, outs from gear, ins to DAW, outs from DAW) If you only have 2 rows, you might put them side-by-side instead.

If you have 6 rows or 8 or 10 rows, then you might put different types of devices on different rows. In this case, you could even try normalling things so that live room lines flow into mic pres, which flow into compressors, which flow into eqs, which flow into DAW I/O by default. Even if you don't normal them and always patch manually instead, that's probably the way I would arrange them if there was no console. Other people might just do pres above DAW inputs and then put the eqs and comps elsewhere, maybe at the bottom. That'd be a little more similar to what you'd see in a console-based studio. That works just fine, too, although it is maybe a little less intuitive for quick-patching.

This is pretty basic stuff for an experienced engineer, and if you need some help getting this up and running, I'm sure there are some really nice, friendly professionals in your area who would happily make a house call. Use the resources that are out there. Real live people are often the best ones, and wiring up a patchbay is a fairly labor-intensive chore. If you like, you can definitely do this yourself, although based on your original post, please remember that there's no shame in brushing up on a little signal-flow with a good book on the subject! We should all do that from time to time.

Once you have your analog gear accessible on the bay, you'll be able to readily A/B them with your digital tools and disabuse yourself of the notion that all of those digital tools suck. You may even come to find that you like a few of them quite a bit.