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New Mackie Board and Multiple Instrument Looping Setup

Title: New Mackie Board and Multiple Instrument Looping Setup

Lately I have been integrating more instruments into my looping performances (dumbeks, darbukas, frame drums, kanjira, vocals, etc), and also other players that don't have looping gear, which has proven to be rather frustrating with my Mackie 1202VLX Pro because it has only two effect loops, and an aux 3/4 loop that is activated with the mute button, but creates some more frustrating results when going out of the aux 3/4 lines into my EDPs and back into the board - viz,. pressing the mute button includes that channel/instrument in the EDP mix, but it removes it from the headphone mix, and visa-versa with you deactivate mute. Poor design in my opinion…they should have made another button besides mute to route the aux 3/4 mix to the main mix.

Anyway, I resolved the issue. I bought a Mackie 1642VLX Pro, which I love!  http://www.mackie.com/products/1642vlzpro/

It has four busses and four aux channels, but the busses work great for multiple instrument looping. This is what I did, which makes is super easy to press a single button and pop any instrument in out of the EDP mix.

I ran out of buss 1 and 2 outputs in the back of the board, into the inputs of the EDPs, and then out of the EDPs into two channels of the board (in stereo). Each channel on this board has a series of buss activation buttons that allows you to send the signal to one of the busses (in pairs). So I make buss 1 left and buss 2 right and then pan the channels appropriately. Hence with one button push, I can remove or add the channel to the EDP mix. I can do this with any of the 16 channels on the board. So I have my guitar in two channels, the EDP mix in another two, and then the rest are for other players, my hand percussion, vocals, etc.

Works great! Plus this board has two separate headphone outputs and a monitor output, which I use to route to my other laptop for streaming to the web. I got a screaming deal on this board from Sweetwater Music for $465.

Kris

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Krispen Hartung
Improvisational / Avant-Garde Looping Guitarist
http://www.krispenhartung.com
info@krispenhartung.com / 208-724-5603
Mojam Performance Calendar:
http://www.mojam.com/concerts/search?key=performer&value=Krispen%20Hartung