Hi folks,

Just extended my studio with an ADAT frontend via my RME soundcard and I'm having trouble working out how I can setup and recall various mixer settings to feed specialized monitor mixes for tracking; e.g. bass player mix, drummer mix, engineer / control room mix.

I tend to use a lot of sends on the mixer for effects so using these for monitor mixes is impractical for my way of working. Especially given you can only see two at a time and it seems to me that we dont have the same options for sends as we do for channels - swipe selecting channels and control clicking to quick group them works wonders for quick adjustments.

Surely this has to be a common problem. It's not occurred to me before as I've only ever had a single hardware out to monitor. What to do!

This makes me realise two things;

1 - We could use a way of saving / recalling basic mixer settings - volume, pan, sends - independently of effects. I can foresee some complications with automation but I'm sure a wise soul could crack the problem.

2 - In lieu of getting more sends on screen, imagine a 'submix' button that spawns a simplified copy of the current mixer with a different output. A new multidock tab pops up and there's the new submix ready to be tweakified. Ahh, if only.

Gimme some ideas folks, need to beat this nagging feeling that my needs are outpacing what Sonar can do. Love mixing with it but tracking these days is driving me slightly mad (take lanes...oh take lanes...)

You can make different sends on the Master bus going to different Main outs out of your sound card and using those for each band member. Then take each out of your sound card and take that into a Headphone amp with at least 4 independent channels so you can have at least 4 headphones. 

With this, each band member can hear its own custom sound that uis custom to his or her taste and you can adjust the sound in Sonar it self 


CJ

 I've always looked at tracking and mixing as 2 separate tasks. So I would use sends for headphone mixes while tracking and then delete them and create sends for FX when mixing.
  Or you could create a buss for each musicians tracks and insert sends on the busses for headphone mixes. 
  In my case the software for my Focusrite interface allows me to create separate mixes for each pair of outputs . I'm not familiar with the RME mixer. 
   One you decide on a method you can save it as a project template for easy recall. 

First off, You need a digital mixer if you want total recall. It certainly bien available for a long time now. There are some killer options now like the Mackie, Allen & Heath, Roland and Yamaha desks priced within reason. Real Studios still work this way. I don't think any pro studios monitor off the back end due to latency issues. I don't care if it's only 5ms,,, that's too much if your a bass player of drummer. 
You monitor your inputs at the desk along with the playback from the interface. 

If your interface has 16 outputs those will go back to the desk and are routed to the various headphone mixes. With some of the systems now the musicians can control the mix from their iPad.