I'm looking for suggestions on how I could improve my setup a bit. The overview is that I want to be able to route audio from any channel to a send which actually just goes to my Korg Kaoss Pad 3 and then bring that audio back in, preferably on the corresponding return channel.
How I currently have it set up:
I have a Presonus Firebox as my audio interface and because I have too many analog devices and not enough analog inputs on the Firebox I use an old Mackie 1202 as a sort of patch board. L/R audio can be sent via Track I/O in Live to outputs 3/4 which go into channels 5/6 on my mixer. The KP3 is hooked up as an AUX send on the mixer, so I can use the AUX send on the channels to route to the KP3, which is set up in SEND mode so that the original signal does not come back on to the return in the mixer. The main outs of the mixer then route into inputs 3/4 on the Firebox. Currently I just have another dummy track set up in live to monitor those inputs.
Problem:
My mixer apparently does the AUX send post-fader (gain). The issue then is that my original signaled comes back as an input, not through the KP3 but through channels 5/6. I'd hoped I could just turn the gain all the way down while trying to use the mixer in this way and still get back the effects, but unfortunately with the gain down no signal makes it to the send in the mixer. The latency was surprisingly low though, only 1-2 ms, so that was kind of neat to see.
One solution is to not do this with a send but to just route the audio directly from that track out to the mixer and use that to control the channel volume. Honestly I don't like that idea very much though.
I'm just wondering if I'm missing some other way I could be routing this that would get me closer to what I want. The best solution, of course, would be to get a much larger audio interface and hook the KP3 directly to that and do all of my mixing in Live. This would be ideal, but unfortunately I just spent a ton of money on gear and I can't really afford to get a new audio interface right now.