Hey folks.
I make electronic music with live drums and want to play live with a drummer. Taking a mac onstage terrifies me.
I was wondering if a Tascam Project 12 or 16 would do the job.
I need to live mix 4-6 tracks of multitrack audio (pre-recorded as stems from Logic, including click / cue track for the drummer).
I want send probably 3 mono feeds to front of house, a click through a separate output and (if possible) a vocoder carrier synth track (from the tascam) to a vocoder pedal.
I know the 12 does midi sync and that would be a bonus. The 16 seems to have more output options.
Has anyone used a Project board like this? How is loading a new song?
Will this actually work.
Thanks
Nick
Do you mean Model 12/16? I haven’t heard of a Project 12, and it’s the Model 12 that has the MIDI sync.
The 12 lets you assign each channel to either main out, or sub out (or both, or neither) and has two aux sends. So I think you should be good. Main could be your front of house, sub your click, and that leaves the auxes for you synth input to the vocoder.
Should be good on tracks, too. Mono click plus three mono stems fits in channels 1 through 4. Depending if the synth is stereo or not, that could go on 5 or 7–8. Even if you need a return for the vocoder, you’ve got 6 (or 9–10 if it’s stereo) free.
But that’s just technical jazz. I’ve never used it (or anything) in a live situation like this, so I don’t know how appropriate it is for the task.
Yes, sorry Model 12 or 16
This from Tascam support, is this right???
Dear Nick,
The units can record live and record all the tracks to SD card.
Subsequent playback can only be by connecting via USB and playing back through a lap top or computer.
Kind regards
I don’t know what they’re talking about, there. You can switch each channel between playing the jack inputs, the USB inputs, or the “MTR” input. MTR just plays back whatever you’d previously recorded to the SD card for that track. It’s all pretty seamless.
That’s what I thought! I either didn’t make my question clear or they let an intern answer emails!
The only odd thing to know about the MTR of the Model series is that it treats SD cards just like 12-track tape (or 16- or 24- depending on the model). Tracks 1–10 record channels 1–10 and 11–12 always records the mixdown. There’s no way to record takes or to arrange or “nudge” tracks forward or backward with respect to one another, if that makes sense. Whatever you record is saved at the timecode you recorded it at and will always play back exactly there.
This makes a lot of recording and playback tasks much more straight forward, but isn’t great for composing or arranging a song. For your use case, though, it should be exactly what you need.
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Yes, I don’t need any editing, just routing flexibility and reliability.
Thanks
I don’t fully understand all your details (“send probably 3 mono feeds to front of house” ?
“a vocoder carrier synth track (from the tascam) to a vocoder pedal” ?) but I’ll try to answer what I can having used a Model 12 for some months now.
Playing back and live mixing of pre-recorded audio tracks (stems) is possible either through USB with a computer running a DAW (didn’t try this myself though) or by copying those audio files onto the SD and loading them into your current project (which I have successfully done after some trial and error regarding file specs). Those stems will need to be all starting from minute 0:00 of your song as to line up (as you cannot move different tracks forward/backward in time, it really does act like a multi track tape machine in that regard).
Be aware of the number of mono and stereo tracks.
Also, be aware that you won’t have any flexibility regarding changing the song structure live if you were to improvise. Don’t know about your song structure though. Well, I guess if you were using stems with audio loops on them and having the stems longer than needed, you could do some level of improvisation regarding song structure. Again, think of it as a tape machine.
You can send a click / cue track to the drummer either by importing one audio click track as described above (import audio to track) and send this track to one of the headphones out via Aux 1. Or by using Model 12s internal metronome (which you can also send to just one headphones out). For the latter, however, I’m not sure about how well the internal metronome will stay in sync with imported audio tracks.
I guess you could prepare different songs in one and the same project using time markers to jump between them. This might not work if you want to use the internal metronome and play songs at different BPMs.
Or you could simply prepare one project per song. To switch between projects you need to stop playback. Not sure how long it takes to load another project when there’s a lot of files in it but shouldn’t take much more than like 30 secs I reckon (the menu stuff is somewhat slow on the M12).
After all, I think you can do what you want using a Model 12 (just mind the number of channels) without bringing a computer.
I also don’t like having a computer around when making music so the M12 really is perfect for me in my home studio doing multi track recording of jam sessions with my small band. I do love it for that and will also multi track record some gigs to come.
Cheers.
Thanks evenmind.
I was just going to record my audio stems in via a multi out interface from logic, so hopefully no finicky file import to deal with…
Seems like the 12 will do the job!
Another question about outputs.
I would need to send different elements through different outputs to send to front of house. I reckon I need six outputs (bass synth, main synth x 2, click +cue track for drummer, drum hits, vocoder).
Assuming I hard panned tracks could I sent two tracks to main output (left and right) two more to sub mix (hard-panned left and right and two more via the aux sends (I realise this disables the internal fx)?
I’m getting hung up by the terminology here, so let me rephrase:
The Model 12 has 8 channel strips. 1 through 6 which are mono strips. 7-8 which is a single strip but stereo, so records and plays back two audio streams (one for left, and one for right). And 9-10 which is a single strip but stereo, just like 7-8.
Each of these strips can be summed to zero or more of these outputs: main (stereo), sub (stereo), aux1 (mono), aux2 (mono).
If you have a stereo instrument to record, you can record it on 7-8 or 9-10, and that will just work. If you’re already using 7-8 and 9-10, you can pick any other pair of mono strips, and pan one hard-left and the other hard-right to mimic a stereo channel.
Because main and sub mixes are stereo, sending stereo to them (either form 7-8 or 9-10 or hard panned mono strips) just works. But the auxes are mono. What I usually do in this case is treat aux1 as left and aux2 as right, and thus turn aux1 all the way up on my hard left channel and aux2 all the way up on my hard-right.
Note there’s no way to split the stereo streams of 7-8 or 9-10 between aux1 and aux2. On these stereo strips sending to either aux first sums to mono. So if you want to use aux1 and 2 as pseudo stereo mixes, you have to send to them from hard-panned mono strips.
Also note that by default, aux1 is pre-fader and aux2 is post. Only aux1 is adjustable in settings, and it’s helpful to set it to “post” to match 2.
So one way to look at it is you have a total of 5 stereo tracks that can be summed to sub or main, but only 3 stereo tracks that can treat aux1 and 2 as a stereo pair.
Why do you need to give the FOH the individuals? Why not just give FOH a stereo mix?
That’s what I do with my Model 12 live, and send buss mixes to the singer and bass player on stage.
Thanks ccmp
I spoke to a couple of live sound engineer friends and they said some separation might be useful in case the bass is really dominating. You’re right though, in most cases, most engineers are happy with a single stereo pair.
Sending a track in mono to a vocoder pedal is useful as will mean I don’t have to play keys while I’m vocoding (I’m really not a great singer or keys player!).
Sending an audio track out of a separate output to the drummer is useful as I can pre record one with cues to tell him when sections end / begin.
Thanks Jemmons. I think between hard panned main and sub outs and an aux or insert output, I’ve got enough options. If it works, it will be great!