Integrating Patchbay into Home Studio with Ableton ay my DAW

[Nephew]

So I've been getting more into picking up external FX units and Synths/Drum machines and want to find an easy way to integrate them into my studio setup. I'm assuming getting a patchbay would make the most sense. What kind of interface would I be needing to get, or are there other alternative options? Any links to guides would be useful as well.

Thanks guys for any and all help, much love!

[invol]

First off, your audio interface is key, as is the internal mixer that comes with it. The RME Fireface 800 is worth looking at for its routing capabilities and also its general awesomeness. Depending on how much outboard gear you get, that and one good patch bay should be more than sufficient. If you plan on lots of outboard gear and drum machines, you might want to hookup additional DI/preamps with ADC to the ADAT IO available on your interface. A solid line level mixer might also be a good idea, like the Speck LILO pictured on a lot of Ableton promo pics. Midas also makes a nice series of small mixers with FireWire IO, and they sound really good.

[memes_33]

wow, a $10k mixer recommendation for someone who is just getting into a patchbay and some outboard gear seems a little outlandish.

here's my setup: i have all of my outboard gear running into a patchbay and normalized to my soundcraft EPM12. that way, i can audition stuff immediately and, if i like it, i will patch that source to the inputs of my DAW. i have the aux outputs from the mixer going into effects units, and the effects units outs going into line input channels.

[invol]

Ha, yea, the Speck is a bit much... but I did also recommend other things too : ) You can get one of the Midas FW boards on eBay for about $1000.

[Nephew]

Thanks for the responses guys, going to start looking into the RME interfaces and see where that takes me.

Thinking about it more, would I really need a patchbay? All I really want to do is to have all the external gear (hard synths, drum machines, FX units and so on) actually be 'hard wired' so I don't have to keep unplugging/plugging stuff in. So as long as I'm able to get an interface with enough I/O's that should be an issue then, right? Is there a crucial step I'm missing here?

[memes_33]

the nice thing about a patchbay is you can normalize things so, when nothing is plugged in, its as if the connection was "hard-wired". for instance, you can have a synth running into channel 2 on your mixer when nothing is plugged in. but if you wanted to route something else into channel 2, you can use a patch cord. same thing with synth output- just plug in a patch cable and route it anywhere you want.

[oblique strategies]

In my studio: RME TotalMix + a pair of patchbays = no need for a mixer!

I love mixers. But until I get one that I really want, one with faders, or a nice summing box for audio quality, I don't need one. I do want some form of analog gain attenuation for my monitors though, so will be researching that.

Traditional patchbay wiring:
Top: output from gear
Bottom: input to gear

And Normalling, as suggested above, is great. You can also make mults: one source in, that same source out two outputs.

Bottom line, they're basically just placing all the inputs & outputs of all your gear in the same place, in close proximity to each other to facilitate easy patching.

The more gear you have the more useful a patchbay can be.