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Yamaha f4 Usb Mixer Manual
Yamaha f4 Usb Mixer Manual
Yamaha f4 Usb Mixer Manual
There’s nothing more exciting than listening to a live performance, especially when it’s your band. But how do you go about making a recording of a show or rehearsal that accurately represents what the musicians are playing? In this article we’ll cover live stereo recording; in Part 2, we’ll show you how to do live multitrack recordings. The Basics
Live recording can be as easy as using a smartphone or a handheld stereo recorder.
However, with such a simple rig, the quality of the audio will be highly dependent upon the room acoustics and the location and quality of the microphone(s) being used. The mics built into most handheld stereo recorders can handle the high sound levels typical of a gig or rehearsal, but the microphones built into phones aren’t usually up to the task
(no surprise, since they were designed to handle the low levels required by phone calls), so you may need to add an external mic or two to avoid distortion and capture a wider frequency range. Another problem with recordings made with handheld devices is that there’s no way to “remix” them, so the balance between the instruments and vocals
heard in the room at the time of the performance is what you’ll get on the recording too. As a result, these kinds of recordings can sometimes contain a lot of room ambience and background noise, which make it difficult to hear the music. The bottom line is that recordings made with a phone or handheld recorder are probably best used for reference
purposes only, and not for distribution to your fans. Recording directly from the outputs of your mixer can significantly improve the audio quality while avoiding some of the issues described above. Because it’s coming from mics onstage, the signal from the mixer will have minimal room ambience and crowd noise, and (as long as you maintain correct
gain structure and don’t overload the audio path in the mixer) these “board” recordings will be distortion-free. Creating Board Mixes One way of recording the outputs from a mixer is using the mixer’s USB port.
Yamaha MGXU Series mixers all provide a 2-in/2-out USB interface that can be used to record and play back stereo files.
Connecting this port to a laptop running DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) software such as Steinberg Cubase AI (a free download that’s also included with MGXU Series mixers) enables you to record the digital stereo output from the mixer straight into a computer. Using an appropriate cable, this USB port can also be connected to an iPhone® or
iPad® running the free Yamaha Rec’n’Share app. The USB output from a mixer can be used to route digital audio to a laptop. Yamaha MGP24X and MGP32X mixers incorporate a USB Type A port that accepts a USB storage device such as a thumb drive, enabling you to record directly to (or play files back from) the storage device without the need
for a computer.
If your mixer doesn’t have USB capabilities, you can create an analog board mix as long as it has an extra set of stereo outputs (that is, in addition to the main stereo outputs feeding your PA system); all you have to do is connect those outputs to the inputs of a handheld recorder or computer audio interface. As convenient as board mixes are, there
are some disadvantages too.
The main one is that the audience may be hearing something different than what you are recording. That’s because they are listening to a combination of sound coming from the stage and the sound coming from the PA system. The smaller the room (i.e., in a club setting), the more the stage sound contributes to this blend, and so the fidelity and
accuracy of board recordings made in such venues may be compromised. Complicating this is the fact that some instruments don’t need to be very loud in the PA system due to their stage volume. For example, if the bass player’s stage amp is really loud, there may not be a need for a lot of bass in the PA. This may work fine for the audience, but when
you play back a recording taken directly from the mixer, there will be a lack of bass. Ditto for massive onstage guitar stacks. That’s one of the reasons why many board recordings feature overly loud vocals and anemic bass or guitars. Enter The Matrix One way to solve these problems is by using a mixer that has a built-in matrix. A matrix is kind of
like a mixer inside a mixer. It allows you to internally combine different mix buses (a bus is an audio path that combines multiple signals) and send them to another destination.
As an example, the two matrices provided by the Yamaha MGP24X and MGP32X can be used to combine the main stereo L/R mix with signals sent to Groups 1, 2, 3 or 4. (See our Tools of the Trade article about grouping for more information.) These matrices are mono, so you’ll need two in order to create stereo. This is accomplished by routing the
main stereo L bus into matrix 1, and the main stereo R bus into matrix 2. The USB recorder built into the MGP24/32X gives you a choice of recording either the output from the two matrices or the main L/R stereo mix.