Control Room - A Solution To Faulty Knobs



In my opinion, I think the most notorious sound cards for developing a noisy gain knob are the M-Box series by Avid. While the notoriety of this great sounding audio interface might have inspired this post, engineers who adjust gain faders on a mixer or any other sound card incessantly during recordings still risk damaging that physical component before its intended life span.

The scenario where there is no vocal booth (and if present is not sound proof) is very common in small and medium-sized studios, so to keep the recording clean the engineer has to turn down the volume of the monitors just before every record take to avoid bleeds. Most engineers will manually gain these knobs, faders or encoders on the sound card or mixer every time a record is to be taken. This will in no time wear out these knobs and before long they'll start to malfunction and introduce noise.

Volume riding can be done right from your DAW's mixer! In its simplest form, you can just adjust your master out fader every time you need to record but most times this will also affect the volume on the artists headphones. To overcome this, you will need to set up two mixes on your DAW - Monitor and Headphone, and also route them to different physical outputs on your sound card. This will give you remote CONTROL over your monitor and headphone levels right from your DAW, saving your audio interface's volume knob from your tactile menace.

This is no new knowledge as most classic hardware mixing consoles have a Control Room section where different mixes can be created and sent to different performers. This means that the guitarist can hear a different mix from the violinist and the saxophonist can hear a different mix from the cello player. But if you own a bedroom studio with just one mic for vocals, a monitor and headphone mix will be just fine.

The control room helps you create different mixes for different performers and each gets a mixer channel for volume riding and other functions. Setting this up will vary from DAW to DAW but our next post will look at how to set up a simple Monitor and Headphone control room mixer using Cubase 5. We will also look at a manual way of doing it on any DAW and any hardware mixer that can allow for that.

Stay tuned.


Written by
Chidi 'Tite' Nnadi

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