I won't lie, I laughed when Aquabats started playing. Not because I dislike the song, I actually love it, not because I think it's weird that Glen is working on something non-metal, I think it's good to diversify, I'm just so conditioned to hearing metal on this channel, that hearing something like Aquabats out of the blue kind of caught me off guard and I fell over laughing.
Haha good one - I've cut my voice off too mid video by trying to explain the patches. Great video man! Cool to see what you use for pres and processing.
I just purchased a patchbay and it does make the connection process much easier, plus it's a great way to not wear out your inputs and outputs swapping on expensive gear. See even as a bass player I understood it lololol
I never realized how much fun it is to have a patch bay, until I started getting more and more outboard gear. Now I need another one.. 😎 Excellent video Glenn🤘🤘
I see the 1/4" crowd has already chimed in. I'm in that camp, but use Switchblades for all of my patch building needs. Signal splits, 1/2 Normalling, this is the 1st time I've heard about it so I will watch and rewatch this video. For me, all of that is within my routers, but they're not line level and would not function as you require. Must learn more about patch bays! Thanks Glenn!
I know some of our former interns watch this channel, but for those who haven't, their rite of passage was to start a full 4x24 standard TT patchbay build, 1/2 normalled, to ELCO 96's at the point where the incoming interns reached the start of the fourth and final bay.....and they had to win. Epic times and epic fails! Patchbay philosophy was a lot of what went into the heart of REAPER's design. I always said, give me the computer equivalent of a patchbay, a soldering iron and a screwdriver
We had one in every studio at the recording school I went to but they never got used. Our instructor never taught us how to use the rack equipment and had us do everything digitally. Thanks for explaining this to us. Cheers from Tulsa, Oklahoma
Oh god! Thank you!!! thank you and congratulations for the simplest and easiest way to explain a patchbay flow. I've been days figuring out how to route my studio into a patchbay and this has been an amazing pain release to my problem! Now I have everything clear so I can route my studio whatever I like into my patchbay. Thank you again :). The only thing I cant figure out is if I need a bigger interface for my outboard gear, or an AD/DA converter will do the work. I will appreciate so much if you could take time for showing some light to this little problem. Thank you again for this helpful video.
I'm pretty sure i linked Matt McGlynn's tips on voice-overs (from one of the two interviews Warren did) in the comments of another of these videos ;) TL;DR - keep it *off axis* . Check out any voice-over photos / videos, the mic's a foot or two in front and above the person.
It might be worth noting that what you are referring to as "isolated" is also commonly referred to as "Through" or "Thru". That's how I have my bays wired up. Way less confusing on a larger session where you're patching into all kinds of eq's/comps/pres/fx, and easier to understand for engineers visiting or renting the space for a session. Actually the one GOOD thing from Behringer is their patchbays. I've got the PX3000 and it actually has a switch on top so you can toggle between how you want each connection to be wired, for each in/out. Way more solid connections on it than my dbx patchaby too. And for the dbx you need to manually remove each in/out slot and spin/flip it around in different ways depending on how you want each specific in/out wired. Switches are SO much easier, lol.
This tip is more for live work than for the studio, BUT A friend at a telephone mains used to have all his patch bays set to "normal" with everything unplugged as the default, most used setting. Then no matter what changes he had to do at a particular time, he could always "panic mode" everything back to normal by grabbing all the patches and ripping em out
I don't really need to watch the video, but am here to give you a like for the topic. I have several patch bays with nearly every jack of my mixer / outboard gear brought out to the bay, so I'm a patch bay convert already. Like Glenn says: If you don't have a lot of gear, you don't need one. If you find yourself with a moderate amount of gear and you're constantly re-wiring for new sounds then you're ready for a patch bay. I don't use TT - my bays are 1/4" TRS so it limits you to about 48 points in a 1U space. My bays are TRS front and back, so my snakes are all TRS-to-TRS. If you decide to add a patch bay, make sure you consider the cost of the snakes/cables to go with it. And don't forget a few dozen 12" and 24" cables for the front. It can be add up to a significant amount, but if you have enough gear you won't regret it in the end.
Thanks for the refresher on normaling, though I'm sure I'll forget it all again before I actually have to worry about it. The struggles of only having one piece of outboard gear...
Another benefit patching vs direct wiring everything that's less thought about is Jack wear. Particularly with stuff that relies on spring tension like 1/4"s the more you plug and unplug things the more the jacks wear out. When a jack gives up in your expensive gear it can be pain and expense to get it properly replaced. If you connect everything to a patch panel then the connections from the gear to the panel almost never change, the wear is on the jacks in the panel instead. Those are relatively inexpensive and easy to replace compared to ones soldered to boards inside your active gear. Some patch panels are even modular so you can replace individual jacks in them without replacing the whole panel.
A= top B= bottom Isolated/Through: A back goes to A front. B back goes to B front Half Normal: A back goes to A front and B back. Plugging anything into B front breaks normalization and turns it into Isolated until you unplug the patch. (Most common) Normal: A back goes to B back. Plugging anything into the front breaks normalization and turns it into Isolated until you unplug the patch. Intended use is to connect gear that will be normally connected for most things you do so you do not have to patch anything but you have access to gear without having to rewire every time you change gear. Other examples are connecting all of your outputs from your audio interface into the inputs of a mixer and the outputs of outboard gear (such as instruments) into the inputs of your audio interface. Allowing you to keep things like compressors or effects out of the normal loop so you have clean signal but if you want it you patch from the instrument to the compressor and then back to the interface. I like to sketch up the lay out in Excel before I wire up a patchbay just so I know what the plan is. It also helps to label all of your cables. One thing to keep in mind is some patchbays have switches to make it easy to go between the three modes but others have jumpers you have to put in the right spot to do so. This is important as in many settings you may want to have the output and input of the same device on top of each other to save space (Compressor out on A and Compressor in on B) but you do not want to create a feedback loop so you have to set that number's channel on the bay to Isolated either by flipping the switch or moving the jumper. If your patchbay has jumpers and you are not sure how to change it even following the sometimes very bad manual, and if you have the space then you can just put the in and out of such gear in side by side channels but then you will have empty spots above/below unused. The only downside to patchbays is now you need twice as many cables just to connect everything and you need patch cables to be able to patch things. So many cables....
As a guitarist who uses rack gear and records silently with a load box, a patch bay allows me to take my head away from my rack gear and not have to reach behind my massive rack, or I want to reroute my rack delay to my interface, or swap my preamp to a different power amp.
This is some advanced stuff for me....... Maybe I'm wrong, but I did learn that you can patch an analog device into your daw to beef something up (say the compressor here) and render the song out while the compressor is active as an after effect. I am a rookie, but I just though you had to do everything with outboard gear going in. I wish I would have started to learn about this stuff when I was in my teens. Going on 34 and just feel so behind :(
Techniques for mixing bass perhaps? Whacking up mids, double tracking and seperating frequencies for bass and that type of thing. I'd enjoy seeing how you process this Glenn :)
Pro tip: Turn off phantom power before patching a microphone. Even then, MUTE YOUR SPEAKERS before making the patch. The resultant pop from 48V phantom power going into your mic pre as a signal can blow your tweeters. It's probably not great for your preamp, either.
Hey Glen. Idea for another tutorial: how to use the ins/outs of reaper (or any other saw for that matter) so that you can have outboard gear ,or just how to set up the ins /outs in general
I once imagined something like this but for guitar effects to create unusual sounds, like the middle section in Whole Lotta Love. I thought I would have to get one custom made, but this seems like a good start.
Blaaah, Patchbays are epic if you have a tiny studio like mine, running a MOTU Ultralite mk3 racked. Would go to patchbays that shared DB25 and TRS ins as I could patch my outboards and keep all my synths connected without wearing their jacks out. Or at least putting them onto a wall. Issue is finding patchbays that run both without breaking the bank. Good to see a dedicated db25 patcher for 500.
I wish I was able to do this kind of stuff. This just really hurts my brain. There are too many plugs. I've been playing guitar for four years, but I've been playing my bass a bit too much recently i suppose.
A question for the next Q&A! What would you do differently live vs studio mixing, especially with respect to reverb / compression? I live mix in a fairly dry room, not a bad environment... Just not getting a full sound from my band all the time.
I have the hardware straight in to the addas so the software has access to them always,and if I need a different patch I can use the converters mixers... nice
I like the White on Black, have to admit that's a combo I've never thought of using, actually making a change to my setup now using that ... also if you haven't used PatchCAD, worth checking out, makes for some really nifty labeling work (not an endorsement) just a recommendation
Wow, you read my mind. I was thinking about a patchbay yesterday but I was still confused about normaling so usually just skipped it. Now I see what I've been missing. Thanks! Oh, how did you make your labels? They looked nice and tidy.
Glenn, it would be nice if you mentioned TT patchbays are crazy expensive ($500 without cabling) and even if you solder cables yourself, DB25 is expensive as well, and TT plugs are hard to get (and also expensive!). Just you know, so people know the option of going TRS exists and is MUCH cheaper.
If you haven't already, I think you should do a video on how to record drums for under $500 or £500. This would include an interface, plugins and software. Greeting from Leicester, England. You rock Glen :)
Reaper's cheap ($30 last time I bought it), and that's what he uses. Prolly have spend most of that on the interface just to get enough inputs to record drums. Plenty of good free plug-ins out there. That assumes only what you named specifically, though. If you need Mics too then forget about it. I don't think you could even get a 3 Mic setup running for that money.
Hey there big fan of your channel. At 8:03 when you run the recorded snare (channel 8 from patch bay as you said) to the outboard compressor how will it end up back on your daw with the outboard rack compressor?
6 лет назад
THIS is a beautiful patchbay ! :) Halfnormalled FTW imo ^^
Hi Glen. I'm sure that you'll reconfigure your patchbay as you go, but if I may I'd like to give some suggestions that might make it a bit more configurable and flexible. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but it looks like you have your compressors and eq's OP's hardwired to the RME IP's? It seems to be working great for you at the moment, but perhaps bringing the OP's to the patchbay as well would add some flexibility to the setup. Bringing the gear OP's to the patchbay and having them half-normalled to the their RME IP's means that you could patch in other units before and between them. This way, you can setup a chain of multiple units while recording before it even reaches the RME. For example, a processing chain for Vocals could be: GR1-SA2A-Dist-WBEQ-RME Input. Just an example, but (please correct me if I'm wrong!) it doesn't look like you could do that at the moment with the compressors and eq's hardwired to the RME.
Never used a patch bay before guys? well check it: fully normal goes top to bottom, and if I want to take it to a different preamp I jump it off there... so if I want to do a molt, that's GREAT... or I can go straight into a dry track... on an isolated system there's no top to bottom, so bring the outputs right to the front like you'd work on the back. Got it?
Hi Glenn, I'm profoundly Deaf and can only hear through a Cochlear Implant. I was a musician before needing the Implant, and continue to be now, refusing to take my impairment as "No I can't". I have my own home studio, and would appreciate any advice on how to overcome my "disability" and make music, like my hero Beethoven did. Thanks!
Great video explaining the help of patchbays. On a totally different topic, what db are your monolog vocals on your daw for output to youtube? Which ceiling to use in limiter for output to youtube, spotify, etc. for metal?
a funny experiment for you to try. try recording a kick drum without the foam inside or the pillow inside the drum. lets see how it sound. but i think ill be ridiculous. learned a lot abt this video. extra milestone for my brain 👍
I feel like I still know very little about patchbays after watching this video! So basically, you connect all of your mics and outboard gear returns to patchbay's inputs, and all of your outboard gear sends to the patchbay's outputs? And then just connect cables in between them? I don't think I have enough gear to make this useful! Do they make this sort of thing for lighting rigs?
hey man thanks a lot for the video! I'm still confused tho.. could you maybe tell me pls where I put the outs of my compressor and the ins so I could connect to it from the front?
Sub-1k views club! Most studios I've worked in have everything half normalled, except the tie line to mic pre connection (these are almost always full normal to keep phantom power from going to things it's not supposed to).
You've forgotten one other thing every studio has or does. Patchbay snake wall unit for the amplifier heads in the control room with the producer and guitar player (also bassist too haha) and keep the cabinets and combos in another room Isolated or non Isolated depending on the building set up by the producer-owner. This gives the studio a clean professional look & vibe. Maybe Glenn would a video on this sometime.
