As I said I use Digital Performer as my primary DAW, unless I’m recording live or remotely. But the heart of the system, and the front and back end of the system is my Metric Halo ULN-8 interfaces. Specifically the console mixing board. In this case DP (Digital Performer) is little more than an advanced transport control. I mean more than that really, but kind of! Mic and instrument inputs go into the ULN-8. Input levels, phantom power is controlled in the ULN-8. I then send it over to DP via firewire. That’s soon changing but I can’t really say too much about this at the moment!
Mixing is another area that gets very exciting. I can and do use some plugins in DP itself, like the amazing UAD-2 plugins. But in most cases I actually prefer Metric Halo (MH) plugins, both from the console and hosted inside whatever DAW you’re using. Their Production Bundle is what I use, and especially Channel Strip. For reverb I favor Altiverb 7 from Audio Ease.
So with my set up one has to be careful. There are two mixing boards. Two sets of faders and channel where one can place plugins. DP’s and MHs Console. To take advantage of MH’s 80 bit wide console you need to use it. But I can’t use automation there. It remains at the level where I place it. I use the automation in DP. There’s a little dance going on!
But the MIO Console goes to/from the hardware ULN-8 (s), so it’s kind of like a hybrid summing box on steroids. I feed it stems from the DAW.
Above is the MH tracking/mixing console for My Amigo. I was tracking Dominic Edwards Garcia playing congas. There are three ULN-8s splitting activities. Over kill for sure. But I’m giving him headphone cues and recording three mic channels. When I record I set the levels in this console. When I mix the BASIC levels and often EQ is also set here. Headphones are set here.
And I don’t know what it is, but everything that comes through that MH console sounds better than anything I’ve been able to make come through DP’s alone. Wider, deeper, more 3 dimensional. I know digital is digital. I can’t explain it. But to me its magic.
Above you can see the mixing board in DP. This is mixing “Change.” It’s quite long and involved. Some tracks go individually to the ULN-8 console, while others are grouped in stems. For instance the drums are pretty much one for one, as is the piano, and bass. Multiple guitars are grouped in stems. There is no master bus in DP. The master bus is in the ULN-8 console. Each ULN-8 has 18 DAW output tracks over firewire. But each box only has 8 analog I/O.
Below is a MIO Console from a tracking session for my band rehearsal a couple of years ago. In this example I’m using two ULN-8s - boxes 575 and 312. The 575 ULN-8 is recording the drums 1-8 and the second box, 312 is recording everything else, including the drum hi-hat on channel 7, three guitar channels (Axe Fx II) 3,4 stereo and 5 for the clean DI, Bass on channel 1 and talk back on 8. The piano is Ivory Piano, a software program played through my Yamaha KX-88 controller to DP where Ivory is hosted and back again to the MIO Console. It’s being recorded midi.What you see in the fader channels are the individual cue head phone mixes. Each musician has their own separate headphone mix.
