FIRST DAW

[DaPhotoGuy66]

I'm setting up my first DAW. For reasons that I can't go into I can only do this on my phone. So I purchased a Samsung Galaxy S24 plus. My AI said it should have enough power to handle basic DAW duties. I plug that into an Anker of 565 hub. I power the hub with a hundred Watt brick. The hub allows me to have a full size monitor a mouse and a keyboard. Through Samsung Dex software this gives me a very PC desktop feal. Into the hub I will plug my interface which is a Focusrite Scarlett 4i4. I'll be powering the interface with its own power supply. Into the interface I plug my shure sm58 microphone for vocals. I have a pop screen for the microphone so that's covered. I will also plug the left and right XLR outs of my SoniCake Matribox II Pro into the interface for recording guitar. I am using bandlab as the software.

So now that you know my set up, can any of you give me any helpful tips for beginning my recording journey? I'm open to any tip you want to give but I'm kind of broke at this point so I'm not going to be spending a bunch more money on this setup.

 

[Solarflares]

You might find occasionally that interfaces don’t like sharing USB busses with other devices.
I now use a Mac Mini M4. I keep the front USB-C sockets for my input interface and output DAC.
Everything else is plugged into the rear Thunderbolt sockets, including USB2 devices.
Using a powered hub to power your interface is a great idea, but there is that outside chance it might be problematic.
I wish you luck. As for the rest of it - it should work just fine.
If you get on well with it, then do think about a Mac Mini M4 and some external storage down the line. Ableton 8 suite was very easy to learn.

Bandlab I don’t know, but if the Scarlett 414 works ok, then you’ll have a nice little setup to get you going.
If it doesn’t, then you’ll need a device with more than one USB bus.

 

[DaPhotoGuy66]

So far it's just been little technical glitches that are driving me nut. For instance my click track or anything that was coming from the playback of bandlab like the metronome would show up in my recorded tracks. It ended up being what's called a loopback feature that's turned on automatically in The Scarlet by default. It treats the sound coming from the bandlab as an instrument or as a sound source and expect it to be being recorded on the track you're currently recording. Apparently this is a common setup with podcasters. Anyway all I had to do is figure out how to plug in my old PC pull up the application that maintains the settings on the scarlet and change the setting to not consider sounds coming from bandlab as a source to be recorded.

The other glitch that I ran into was that the inputs that I'm trying to use for my instruments are XLRs coming from my SoniCake Matribox II Pro. I ran them into the balanced line ins in the back of the Scarlett. But what I discovered was the XLR is coming from my Matribox are mic level in the inputs are expecting line level. At first I just cranked the volume up on everything on them Matribox and it works okay but I eventually purchased a basically a line booster. To xlrs go in. Two line level lines come out. That way I didn't have to crank the gain on the actual device.

Now that most of the glitches have been solved it's working really great.

 

[Solarflares]

So far it's just been little technical glitches that are driving me nut. For instance my click track or anything that was coming from the playback of bandlab like the metronome would show up in my recorded tracks. It ended up being what's called a loopback feature that's turned on automatically in The Scarlet by default. It treats the sound coming from the bandlab as an instrument or as a sound source and expect it to be being recorded on the track you're currently recording. Apparently this is a common setup with podcasters. Anyway all I had to do is figure out how to plug in my old PC pull up the application that maintains the settings on the scarlet and change the setting to not consider sounds coming from bandlab as a source to be recorded.

The other glitch that I ran into was that the inputs that I'm trying to use for my instruments are XLRs coming from my SoniCake Matribox II Pro. I ran them into the balanced line ins in the back of the Scarlett. But what I discovered was the XLR is coming from my Matribox are mic level in the inputs are expecting line level. At first I just cranked the volume up on everything on them Matribox and it works okay but I eventually purchased a basically a line booster. To xlrs go in. Two line level lines come out. That way I didn't have to crank the gain on the actual device.

Now that most of the glitches have been solved it's working really great.

Good call not using the 414 preamps.
I’m so glad you got it working well.
Hope to hear some finished results some day.

 

[DaPhotoGuy66]

15 min quick test.

 

[Solarflares]

Cheers

 

[DaPhotoGuy66]

I mean I could have taken the mic level XLR outs from the SoniCake Matribox II Pro and ran them into the front of the 4i4 where it's got the built-in preamps but I don't like to keep unplugging my gear and plugging in other gear. I wanted to plug my mics into the front and my guitar into the back and leave it set up that way. Hence the need for the M-Audio audio buddy microphone preamp.

Also a nice thing about this setup is when I record a guitar track I get stereo effects recorded versus a monoline.