Brandon Leafblad: Welcome everybody. My name is Brandon Leafblad. I’m the co-founder of Audiofusion Systems, and I’m here today with my friend Doug Gould from WorshipMD.com. How are you Doug?
Doug Gould: Good Brandon. Thanks for having me.
Brandon Leafblad: Tell me what you brought with you today.
Doug Gould: This is a StudioLive Series III Mixer from PreSonus, which is a pretty cool mixer. They come in three sizes. It’s a 32-channel mixer in a smaller format, so you’re only seeing 16 of the main faders at a time. Then you would page over for the other channels – lots of mix outputs.
We just upgraded the firmware on this one so we now have 64 channels back and forth of USB send and return. You can also send by AVB, analog, and digital AES…so lots of cool functions. One of the coolest things I like about it is the fact that you’ve got a built-in multitrack recorder on an SD card.
So, we’ll do 32 tracks plus the stereo livestream mix at the same time. If you’re using USB to drive something else, I can use the SD card for things like stems pre-recorded to play along with my live tracks. Then I can send all of that to something else either via AVB or USB.
Brandon Leafblad: Okay, what we’re going to talk about with you today is USB. We have the StudioLive connected to SoundCaster today by USB out. And as Doug mentioned, with the new firmware that the series III has, we actually are seeing 64 channels of audio coming through on SoundCaster.
The way the SoundCaster works, is it will automatically broadcast the first 16 channels that are enabled. By default, the way that the mix of the audio is coming in from the mixer: USB 1 is “Channel 1” and USB 2 is “Channel 2”. But now we have 64 channels to work with.
Doug, tell us a little bit about all the different ways that we can route audio to the USB in the new firmware.
Doug Gould: USB sends can be anything. They can be analog inputs or inputs from the SD card itself, which is what we’re going to use for our demo today. They can be networked inputs, but you’re not just relegated to channels. You can also use mixes. So, if we have 64 channels of audio but you can only broadcast up to 16 channels of those channels on SoundCaster…how are we going to be able to do that?
We’re going to show you how to do the routing, which is enabling us to do some different things with those 64 channels.
We really have only 26 tracks on this demo. But even 26 is more than 16. What we do in the first example is combine sub-mixes with individual channels. Routing defaults to every channel going to USB. Then as you get down beyond the channel count…you have aux sends, effects returns, etc.
Brandon Leafblad: So, in our example today we can show 26 channels plus effects returns for the first 32?
Doug Gould: Yeah, but somebody who is running SoundCaster is probably going to reduce that into sub-mixes. We have some channels like lead vocals, Rhodes Piano, strings…whatever. We’ll leave those as individual channels.
But we’re going to put the twelve drum channels on a mix. So, some of our USB sends are going to be individual channels and some of the USB sends are going to be mixes. This way, we don’t need to worry about 12 drums in our personal mix…but just one or two faders for drums, right?
Brandon Leafblad: All right, so you’ve got 26 tracks of audio pre-recorded on your SD card and you’re going to play those as if we had 26 live instruments coming into the mixer. Great. Go ahead and hit play on that, and we’ll see how it shows up on SoundCaster.
As the demo started, you can hear we’ve got all the audio coming in and see the way that we have the first 32 channels routed. We just have them routed 1 for 1. So Channel 1 is USB 1 and Channel 2 is USB 2, as mentioned before.
If I was to control this mix, I would only get the first 16 of those channels coming into Performer. Doug, show us on this on the StudioLive mixer how you can create a subgroup and route that to the individual USB channels.
Doug Gould: It’s a little bit weird for the musicians. The first thing we’d want to do is create a mix of all those tracks that I don’t need to have individual control over. No vocalist wants to pull down kick drum and hi-hat. So, let’s just give them one or two faders for drums.
We can put it on a mono mix or a stereo mix depending on what you’re what you want to do. On this console, it’s really easy. I’m looking at a main mix right now. But if I wanted to createa mix, I would select “mix one”. To make it stereo I would hit the “link button” and that would connect the odd number with the even number. That’s how it works.
You can’t link 1 to 3. You can only link 1 to 2 and 3 to 4. Then I’m going to select my drums and just make a mix of them, which is 12 individual channels out of the 26. Half of them are drums, right? So now I’ve got “mix one” and “mix 2” all set. I want to send that pair as a USB send to two of the SoundCaster channels.
This board also has the unique ability to soft patch. I can do it from the console, or I can do it from the software that comes with it. The software is called “Universal Control”. This gives you a much more graphical look at the whole thing. The console is a little bit more cumbersome because you have to select and turn a wheel and all that…but I’ll show you how to do it on both.
First, go to the home screen and you’re going to see “audio routing”. There’s going to be four different boxes on how to set up your AVB, your stage-boxes, ear mixes, and digital patching. Under input sources, I have analog sends and AVB sends. We want USB sends.
The USB, by default, are all going to be assigned to a channel, which is what we have in the first section. But, if I scroll down a little bit and get to channel 33, we’re going to start using those other additional channels for an alternative mix for SoundCaster.
On USB send 33, I’ve got “drums left”. And 34 is “drums right”. I can change any of those sources too. Here you see “mix one” on 33, but it could really be anything. It could be a channel, a mix, an effects return…anything you want it to be.
If you go down to look at the other channel assignments, you’ll see there’s some individual channels there. And they don’t have to come into their actual channel input to be on the USB output. That’s what it defaults to, but you can make anything route to anything.
Brandon Leafblad: So, what we can do on SoundCaster is actually disable the first 32 channels. Then I would enable on SoundCaster just those 10 channels into which you’ve routed the sub-mixes. Some of them are individual channels. Some of them are sub-mixes, like the drum mix. And now those are showing up on Performer. I now have control over each of those individually plus those additional effects sends.
Doug Gould: Yeah, it’s pretty cool. And then we still have a bunch left.
Brandon Leafblad: That’s right. That’s only gotten us up to 48 so far. What about using Audiofusion in conjunction with the PreSonus Q-Mix UC App?
Doug Gould: It’s a great idea because you can assign a mix of everything to two channels of SoundCaster. Now they have all the channels routed to only two channels. Every musician may have a different mix.
If you pull out Q-Mix UC, you can mix those channels individually while Performer delivers the audio in the background.
Brandon Leafblad: That’s great. So, on our last 16 channels, you have routed all of the individual auxiliary mixes. We have “aux 1” through “aux 16”. As a performer if this musician was assigned to, for example, “aux 3” and “aux 4” as my stereo pair…then I would just go into “aux 3”: pan that to the left. Go into “aux 4”: pan that to the right. I would then mute all of the additional auxiliary sends. Then I’m just listening to my two aux channels.
Then I’d leave Performer running in the background. I’d pull up my Q-Mix UC, pull that on top, and now I’d have access to all 24 tracks running with the Q-Mix UC control on top. I’d also have complete stereo control with Performer; delivering audio to my ears in the background.
Doug Gould: And then I can EQ that entire mix beforehand for them. You can’t yet EQ on Performer or on Q-Mix UC but I can do that from the console.
Brandon Leafblad: The other thing I love about having 64 channels on the USB is that if you’re using 32 of those channels for recording in a DAW, then you can you can still have all those individual channels raw. And you can use the other 32 channels for sub-mixes, effects, and individual channels for any personal monitor mixes we want to do.
Doug Gould: We just came out with a StudioLive 64S, which is actually capable of doing 64 analog back and forth with stage boxes in addition to it. Now the SD card will still only record 32 at a time, but your computer could be recording or playing back 64 channels at a time…or having live tracks and pre-recorded tracks combined.
For using SoundCaster in that scenario, you probably would want to put your tracks on an SD card and play those out to SoundCaster. Then, use your computer for recording.
Brandon Leafblad: A lot of worship leaders use Ableton Live or some other software to run tracks into the into the StudioLive. Now they can run those tracks in on some of those USB channels where they would mix with the live instruments. Then they all come back together over the same USB for SoundCaster. At that point, they can choose whichever ones they want to include in the mix.
Doug Gould: It allows the sound engineer to get a lot more practice when you can have pre-recorded tracks to do virtual sound checks and practice mixing jobs. You can actually run monitor mixes with SoundCaster and get it all set up before the musicians even get there. Pretty handy…
Brandon Leafblad: Great. Well, thanks Doug.
Doug Gould: You’re very welcome. And thanks for having me.
If you’ve never used our Audiofusion in-ear monitoring system and would like to see it in action firsthand, we provide the ability to try it for free in “Gear Test Mode” so you know it will meet the needs of your band or worship team.
