Yeah, it was just the swapping from TS to TRS for part of the signal journey that had me second guessing.
I suppose if you plug an unbalanced source into the balanced patchbay, it’s probably only causing the incoming signal on the sleeve to be carried onward by the ring and sleeve ?
Anyone use a patchbay for a synth studio?
Had mine one day now…
How is your approach to the normal, half-normal modes?
Is it best have it in normal to not get feedback loops?
And can feedback loop damage equipment/ears? The manual just say to be very careful to not get feedback loops…
I’ve had patch bays for ages. For a long time had nothing normaled other than inserts on my mixer. Everything else was basically all the I/o staring at me. Currently I have 8 channels normaled but also have a splitter. So those 8 channels go direct to my audio interface and then to the normaled channels on my patch bay which has those 8 channels normaled to the inputs of my mixer for monitoring and routing aux sends etc.
If you’re worried about it the easiest thing to do is have nothing normaled. And route everything via patch cables. Then once you figure out what would make sense to normal you can reconfigure it to make your life easier.
yes, for years now. they’re absolutely necessary once your studio grows to a decent size. which usually means when you run out of I/O for your mixer or audio interface, or you have more options than space and cabling to leave it all hard wired at once.
anyway… I do HN with mine. I route the synths/machines to the top and the bottom goes to an audio interface or mixer input. typically the only time I want to break that connection is to add effects. occasionally I want to route the audio elsewhere entirely and need to turn off the HN-ed channel in the interface/mixer. but that’s pretty rare. and I could just flip the channel to N instead.
My uses/configuration:
Can’t put moly finger on the third kind I have setup, but it was a very peculiar case anyway.
Ricky Tinez’ naive approach was eye-opening.
The threads here were also extremely helpful:
Trying learn what mistakes would make a feedback loop.
If i for example have my syntakt in patch bay 1-2 on a half normal going to audio interface 1-2 and then have another synth on patchbay 3 and maby sometimes want to take that patchbay 3 synth out to the syntakt input for using the effects.
Does that pb 3 connection need to be on normal instead of half normal?
if its in half normal the synth 3 would go to syntakt in-> audio interface 1-2 at same time like it goes to audio interface in 3… and would that be a feedback loop?
heh really hard explaining this kind of things ^^
Here’s an old post of mine about the use of patchbays. I think it’s still relevant.
If I’m understanding what you mean correctly, I don’t think that would be a feedback loop, you’d just get the dry signal in audio interface 3 and the effected signal via the Syntakt in audio interface 1&2. If you don’t want both signals at the same time, you could make patchbay 3 normalled.
Ok thats, good, then could keep it at half-normal and just mute the dry signal synth monitoring in the audio interface control app when connecting it to syntakt effects
I have a question about how to route mono synths to stereo effects on a patchbay.
For some of my synths I have dedicated stereo delay pedal, the outputs of which go to a patchbay. Some of those synths are mono, so I plugged them into the L/Mono input of those pedals, this splits the mono in to both input channels.
Now that I sold some gear and made space on my patchbay, I want to connect the synths and the inputs of the delays to my patchbay, so that I can route any synth to any pedal via the patchbay, in a way that each synth is normalled to a pedal.
This would imply that both inputs of each pedal are connected, otherwise I could not route the stereo synths into them.
But since the mono synths have just one out on the patchbay, how can I normal them to an effect, and patch them?
The only way I can think of to make them “stereo” is a split cable that connects the synth to two channels of the patchbay, which are then normalled to the pedals inputs. When I patch them into another effect, I need to use 2 patch cables.
Now to make things a bit more complicated, I also have a couple of synths routed via a patchbay to mono channels on a mixer. I’d like to have the flexibility to route them to any of the stereo effects too.
So I could use the same trick, and split them into two channels with split cable (leaving the second output unconnected until I actually route them. However, that wastes a couple of inputs on the patchbays, and I have no idea if this could do anything to the signal, after al the other end of that cable goes to the mixer in via the synth.
The other idea I had was using split cables for patching, which I’d probably have to build myself, as I found none for sale.
I feel this is overly complicated, is there maybe a simpler solution, or a more robust one? Are there split cables for sale, and I just didn’t find them? And when I build these myself, how would I go about proper strain relief with two cables in one 1/4" TS plug?
Personally I would just use a mixer with an FX send
I’ve wrestled with this question a bit trying to set up a pedalboard for guitar and bass, but to also be able to bring a stereo signal in at the point where the board changes from mono to stereo.
I don’t think there’s a solution to this that isn’t overly complex and requires compromises.
For example, even with a mono to dual mono cable that doubles your mono synth output to left and right channels, does this sound good on all the stereo pedals, vs going mono in and stereo out of the pedals?
Maybe a mixer as suggested with some stereo aux sends is a better approach, but could also get expensive depending on your needs. But it also means you can send more than one source to each effect at the same time.
Or there’s always the simple approach, just get a set of pedals for mono, and another for stereo. It might not be that much more expensive than another approach, pedal tastes depending.
There shouldn’t be any difference.
@Lizard-of-Oz I believe you are thinking right about it. You just forgot (or rejected?) one other possibility - wire both mono and stereo signals into a single jack. Then you are not wasting any patch points and simply use balanced / stereo cables for patching and it should always work. You just need to get proper cables adapters to connect the boxes to the patchbay. If this doesn’t make sense, look at the Boredbrain Patchulator Pro, you will get it from there.
You will need something like this for mono sources
(duplicate mono output into stereo signal)
And the left half of the cable assembly above to connect stereo pedals / synths.
The rest of the connections should work with stereo / balanced cables if I am not mistaken, assuming your your mono devices don’t use balanced inputs / outputs.
This is what I’m doing. Everything connected to the patch bay is already stereo. There is indeed no way to handle this only at patch bay level.
Instead of an adapter cable, I’m using a male mono to female stereo adapter piece. The important part about this adapter is that it reverses the phase of one of the channels to avoid the dry signal from being cancelled out in a mono summing effect such as the Strymon Volante or Deco.
Some guitar pedals offer such mono in stereo out conversion via switch (eg Chase Bliss Audio Onward, Strymon Deco), so that I don’t even need the adapter piece, while with mono out only effects, there is no other choice.
Isn’t it the other way around? If you feed duplicated mono signal into stereo inputs, it should double the volume. If you invert the phase of one channel, it should cancel. It must be the pedal that is actually inverting the phase. Can you share the adapter product you use?
To be perfectly honest, when it comes to the topic of phase, it is usually my mind that becomes inverted, so I can’t tell you for sure but I I think that you do understand what I’m trying to say 
Here is the adapter piece IIRC, not easy to come by:
Thanks, that seem to do the same thing as my cable assembly above. Cool adapter, I don’t have that one yet and will certainly get a pair of two.
Thanks for all your input, was indeed very helpful, very much appreciated.
That makes sense, alas I don’t have the space for a mixer with 6 effect sends. And some of my synths already are stereo.
That is an added benefit, however in my case I’d rarely use that. I am very happy with one delay per device, because I mostly see use delays more as integral part of the sound of an instrument, and less as part of the “space” that is shared by several instruments. Plus I already have other delays on the FX sends that I use for other synths.
An interesting idea, I would need a balanced patchbay for this (I have two, but the third is unbalanced), as well as stereo patch cables.
I need to figure out how that might work with the rest of my stuff, because I do have mono sources connected to mono channels on the mixer, and a couple of other stereo synths with internal effects. I think need to make a decision first how much flexibility I actually need, and what would be nice in theory, but irrelevant in practice.
I checked out the Strymon Deco, it has a single TRS socket for the input, with the switch on the back you can tell it whether you have connected a mono cable or a stereo cable.
That is pretty cool, if my effects had this, I’d simply wire up both channels to the patchbay and flick that switch accordingly.
I considered building an external switcher that does this, however for 6 stereo effects that thing needs 24 sockets, that’s one hell of a box to have sitting around in reach, and requires 12 additional patch cables,
But what I could do is simply unplug one cable when I use a mono input. I need to check if I can place the effects where that is not too much of a hassle.
No worries, that is confusing. Here is what happens:
The balanced output splits the signal, and inverts one channel (the red one).
Any noise that is introduced in along the way affects both signals in the same direction, look at the little spikes. But relative to the “encoded” signal, they go into opposite directions.
The input inverts the inverted (red) channel again. This inverted channel now contains the original signal, plus the inverted noise.
Now when you sum both channels, the inverted noise is subtracted from the “normal” noise in the blue channel. This kills the noise, the signal remains intact.
Of course, this also doubles the volume of the “real” signal (not visible in the picture, which I shamelessly stole from this article about balanced audio, so the signal is then usually attenuated accordingly.
The exact same principle is used in noise cancelling headphones, they pick up noise with a microphone and invert it at the speakers, which cancels the noise.
Now the adapter you linked does not invert the one channel (for that it either needs power, which it does not have, or a solenoid, which is big), it simply splits it into two signals. Which is an excellent thing to have, but I can’t find one in Europe.
You still need a stereo cable to use with that adapter, correct?
I found this ridiculously expensive cable (available in 6m and 3m)
But in fact you can simply use any mono cable, cut it in half and solder a stereo plug to the ends where you connect the hot wire to both ring and tip. If you need a number of those cables, that is probably the cheapest option.
That got me thinking, and indeed, HOSA also features the opposite of the adapter mentioned above adapter above:
Behold the GPP-419:
This allows you to use a mono cable for your application. However, when using such a cable at the back of your patchbay, take care that the cable does not pull the socked downwards, the adapter doubles the leverage the weight exerts on the socket, if you connect a multicore, and for some reasons one or two of the cables takes the full weight, that might be damage the socket in the long run.
Our local distributor shop.disk.cz has those HOSA adapters in the catalogue.
You’ve made a good point about the leverage of the cable-adapter-patchpoint, therefore it might be better to use the adapter in the instrument output and use a stereo cable to wire it into patchaby. Or get a short cable version of the adapter.
Regarding using the patchbay with everything on single patch points, I will be putting together such patchbay in the coming weeks, so I should be able to report on the experience at the end of May.
