TL:DR How do you get a set of stems to sound just like they do on the machine in to your DAW?
I have had a look through various posts on this and it doesn’t look like there is quite the answer I’m looking for so… I get some patterns going on the 2400 and it sounds great going in to my SSL Six Mixer and monitoring through there. However I can’t seem to get the stems out of the machine the way I want them to sound. If I do them one by one through the ssl they seem to lose something and also I open up the potential for jitter/sync issues. If I use USB the gain staging is a total nightmare, as its likely I will have used the internal amp gain on different samples. I feel like this must be something a lot of people do all the time and it’s not really in the manual? Thanks for any help.
I use separate outs for audio and midi for sync. It seems to work fine. I never use more than 8 tracks so I can record everything in one time. And I have an Adat converter between the s2400 and the sound card.
Thanks, it’s the one way I haven’t tried but am going to today. Do you mean you don’t use more than one bank? Because one issue I’m trying to get my head round is more than one track on a channel.
It happens I use more than one bank but sounds don’t play at the same time so it’s OK.
Now I m thinking about, it happens that I do 2 or 3 consecutive takes when I want to pass a stereo sample through the different types of analog filters. It has worked fine for me until now.
Bear in mind I don’t have the S2400 yet……it’s on a boat somewhere between China and the US…hopefully!
My understanding is that we have 8 outs plus the mix out = 10, the 32 tracks can be pointed at/out any of the available outs. If you had a sample on every track you could in theory send them all out a single output, but you probably don’t want to do that. In any case if at any moment there are more than 16 samples sounding at the same time one sample is going to get cut off because the S2400 has 16 maximum voices at any one time, maximum polyphony is 16 (used to be 8 voices).
The usb out mimics the physical outputs 8 + 2 = 10, the same rules will apply regarding polyphony.
The sound issue you describe is a result of ‘summing’.
I don’t know exactly what your doing at the moment regarding your outputs from the s2400 but either there is a summing effect in your mixer or a summing effect in the mix outs from the S2400 or both!
People bunch outs together and run them through other bits of kit for the sound, there are mixers that are purely designed as ‘summing’ mixers. In practice any multi input/output device is going be summing signals somewhere in the chain. An extreme example of doing this sort of thing is running a whole mix through a compressor, the sound is going to be way different than the scenario where you compress each track individually.
The Isla team have talked about using the individual outs and their analogue filters to play around with getting different sounds from the outputs. So you could try ‘summing’ different selections of tracks out through the separate out pairs with their different filter types?
Not sure if this is the issue, but also make sure you are committing your live changes to the patterns (the A’s and B’s shouldn’t need to be be lit up in the normal pattern screen prior to bouncing). I didn’t understand this for a while.
You’re mostly right, except the main outs are just a summing of the 8 outputs. You can’t send anything to the main outs themselfs. If you connect a cable to one of the 8 outputs everything coming out of that output will NOT come out of the main outputs.
So you basically have 8 separate outputs + plus headphones. But for the headphone out you can only set metronome and/or input monitoring in addition to the digital summing of the 8 outputs.
Over usb I think you have the 8 outputs + main outs but the main out will always just be the sum of all the other 8 outputs.
Are you saying that somehow the tracks in any given bank default to the 8 outs and only appear at the main outs in the case that no cables are plugged in to any of the 8 separate out jacks? I’ll have to re-watch that early video or read the manual.
Still if the OP was playing back through the main out into 2 channels on his desk there is ‘summing’ going on in the main outs which is going to produce a different overall effect than if he were to separate his sources as much as possible into stems and recombine in a DAW.
Exactly! Yes the summing in the s2400 sounds really nice to me. You can even drive the tracks into it a bit which sounds great.
Try make a drumbeat, then add a lot of gain to all the tracks in the track settings and turn the main out volume down to compensate and listen to the results.
I guess if you want to track out everything separately and are not happy with the sound you’ll need to come up with some other processing that you like.
I’m still not sure on what the best option is for me, the mixout sounds amazing and sound-wise is the best option but it means I have to arrange it on the S2400 and can’t do any track mixing in the daw. I find myself not trusting my ears cause when I’m in the flow, recording all the tracks separately via USB sounds great but when I A/B it after the fact, I prefer the summed mixout. Maybe I just need to get used to working on an already summed mix with just compression and EQ and just recording summed mixes with different variations of the beat