Mixer and microphone - small - for use with PC

Bob-Dubery

I am thinking that some rudimentary mixing facilities might come in handy. Say something that would have 4 inputs (thumb suck figure) accept mic or unbalanced inputs and be usable with the sound card on a PC or that would be visible as a sound source to other software. I'm guessing such a device would interface to the PC via USB. It would help to have some simple on-board effects - especially reverb.

And of course once I've got that I'd need a reasonable microphone (or two) for recording vocals and maybe miking up a guitar.

Any recommendations?

Heath

Imo , a behringer ub502 or 802 and uca242 sound card and a couple of sm58 mics should see you well on your way . The 802 has full eqs on all channels , and the behringer mixers work bloody well .

AlanRatcliffe

Alesis have the MultiMix 4 USB - two mic/line inputs and a stereo pair. A bit limited in features, but does the job with a decent sound quality and reliability.

One step up would be the Peavey PV 6 USB, with four mic/line inputs and a stereo "tape" input.

Neither have effects - you have to get to some of the bigger mixers before that's available.

Bob-Dubery

Thanks for the replies guys.

So what is the better proposition here? Buy a small mixer and add outboard effects or buy something a little more sophisticated that has effects built in? I'm only really thinking of reverb at this point. I think compression may come in handy too, but what do I know really?

Heath

where can we get the alesis mixers

AlanRatcliffe

It depends on what you are doing: For live sound, built-in effects save you having to patch in external units. Easier to carry around, set-up and tear-down.

If you want to record with your mixer, even the simplest recording software has a whole host of effects that you can apply after the fact and tweak to your heart's content until mixdown. "Printing effects to tape" is a bad idea unless you really know what you are doing. So if you want to record rather put the extra money into a mixer with a better sound quality .

Tailon. wrote: where can we get the alesis mixers

I'm not sure who the distributors are at the moment.

Bob-Dubery

The Alesis web site lists Bothner's as the local distributor.

It occurs to me that some of the Line 6 pods will do the job I'm looking for.

Bob-Dubery

Alan Ratcliffe wrote: If you want to record with your mixer, even the simplest recording software has a whole host of effects that you can apply after the fact and tweak to your heart's content until mixdown. "Printing effects to tape" is a bad idea unless you really know what you are doing. So if you want to record rather put the extra money into a mixer with a better sound quality .

OK... next dumb question. Say I record a video clip with sound - this would be output as an mpeg or MP4. Is there a way to later tweak just the sound?

AlanRatcliffe

Mpeg is a compressed format so you lose quality if you edit - you can do it, but each edit loses vieo and audio quality. Ideally you should record to an uncompressed format (what's that for video? RAW?) - then any image/audio editing software (Steinberg Nuendo and Sony Vegas spring to mind) can edit anything in the video or audio. Only once you have done all the editing do you save to a compressed format for upload.

It's the same kind of thing with MP3s (which are part of the MPEG standard) - you record in WAV (PC) or AIFF (MAC), do all your mixing and editing and then only save as MP3 when you have done everything else/