How to hotwire a behringer mixer for multi-track recording

Manfred-Klose

[b]WARNING: PLEASE DONT TRY THIS, THIS WAS JUST A EXPERIMENT THAT CAME OUT A SUCCESS!!!![/b] Recently one my friends asked me if i could help out with a drum recording for his Black metal band "Rigormortem", all we had for the recording was a few mics, ESI ESP10/10 soundcard and a beaten behringer MX2004A mixer, so basically got the brain wave to solder line jacks to the end of each mono channel(8 channels) so that we could record in multi track mode. Before approaching this project i learned a valuable lesson, always follow the wiring diagram, you cant go wrong. [u]Here is some steps i followed:[/u] [b]1.[/b]Open up the mixer and analize it with the wiring diagram. [b]2.[/b]Solder the tip and sleeve wires to each channel, remember to number each wire so you wont get confused, and use a special soldering that is used to solder PCB circuits. [b]3.[/b]Solder the numbered wires to female jacks and connect that to a external box. [b]4.[/b]Attach the box to the mixer, and begin recording. Came out real nice............i'll post the link to the recordings when the mixing is finished ;) Any questions are welcome. And again if you want to try this , do it on a old mixer or unused one so that if blow up your new mixer i'm not to blaim.

AlanRatcliffe

Umm... am I being stupid here? Why didn't you just take lines from the inserts? I'm pretty sure those mixers have inserts?

Manfred-Klose

NO your not stupid, they do have inserts, but thing is acording to the diagram inserts is before post EQ, and we wanted the EQ and main fader also functioning.

AlanRatcliffe

OK, I get what you wanted to do (and did), but I don't actually think you should have. ?

You need the strongest possible signal going to tape (or DAW to you young'uns) for best S/N ratio and best sample rate conversion. If you're clipping the inputs on your interface, just turn down the trim on the mixer channel.

You also shouldn't be applying any effects (including EQ) except possibly a highpass filter (which is usually part of the preamp, and so pre insert) - you can't undo any EQ later if you do it at the tracking stage. Also, you will find that the EQ on your DAW will more than likely a lot better quality and a lot more powerful than you will find on the vast majority of mixers.

Well, either way, I have to hand it to you - takes balls to have at something as involved as a mixer with a soldering iron. Delicate traces and thin wires, etc.. I did it once with a Mackie CR1602 - which was a mod documented in the owner's manual, and I sweated absolute bullets until I'd done the first few.

You mention using a special solder - what was that?

Manfred-Klose

Well we recorded in a very weird way. I added the EQ's so that if ever i need it in the future it is there, but for the recording we didn't use any EQ on the mixer

We didn't use a kick drum mic(D6, d112 are expensive), so we isolated the kick drum and triggered it with a roland TD-6, boosted the highs on the mixer so the drummer would hear it clearly(this kick track was just a guide track), and used the midi trigger signal to sample a kick drum sample.

This was my first real big project, and i gained alot of experience out of making all this effort, it might not have been the best way, but it was alot of fun.

You mention using a special solder - what was that

Oh yeah, a isolated soldering iron, but they where a bit expensive, so i got one that runs from gas, can also be used for circuit boards. I think it is RekRow soldering iron?

AlanRatcliffe

I added the EQ's so that if ever i need it in the future it is there, but for the recording we didn't use any EQ on the mixer

I get you. Does the EQ section have a defeat (bypass) switch to take it out of circuit? I know I'm harping on, but I'm a "shortest signal path" nut.

we isolated the kick drum and triggered it with a roland TD-6

Cool! I've used triggers before, but never used a mic signal as a trigger. How well did it work? Any problems with mistriggers and did you do any additional gating, or was the sensitivity setting on the Roland good enough?

Manfred-Klose

It's cheap mixer doesn't have any fancy bypass switches.

NO, we didn't use a mic to trigger, we used one of those D-DRum drumshot midi triggers that went straight to the module to get a midi signal.

Explorerlover

Massive respect Manfred...I wouldn;t dare to that

Martyr

well done dude,you got balls to try this...

just 1 question,on the box why are the numbers 5 6 8 7?did you house the last 2 back to front by mistake?

Manfred-Klose

on the box why are the numbers 5 6 8 7?

wezz, i thought that you would notice that, the wires for 7 and 8 got mixed up, so i just swopped the number around.