I've been studying the issue of how to mix in Cubase and bypass the d8b for a while. The problem is that I have some nice external reverbs that I'd like to be able to use during mixdown. And there's this lovely bit of kit from RME that will take an ADAT lightpipe signal, convert it to AES/EBU so that I can send it to the reverbs, then take the output from the reverbs and convert it back to an ADAT lightpipe signal so I can get it back into the Cubase mix.
One of the actual mixing projects for this week is trying to get The Grim Roper together so I can have it at OVFF. And I really wanted to mix it down in Cubase, all things considered. So I went to Sweetwater this morning and ordered the lovely bit of kit from RME.
Which, it turns out (and I would have realized if I had been paying attention), is a special order item that will take a couple of weeks to get here, which is sadly beyond the time allocated for my vacation. And that put paid to my little plan to mix in Cubase.
Except that I am exceedingly stubborn. :)
I grabbed eight channels off the end of the d8b (because I seldom use more than 16 in a project anyway) and routed their output signals to the eight submix buses on the d8b. Those were already going out AES/EBU to the digital patchbay that allowed me to route them to the external reverbs. The output of the reverbs came back to the return channels on the d8b, which I assigned to the inputs for the last 8 channels on the board.
I linked the eight input and output channels in pairs and panned them hard left and right. Ok, save that setup.
Now, let's go over to Cubase and unassign channels 17-24 on the RayDAT card from Mono 17-24 in and out. Then, create an FX channel for one of the external reverbs and another channel for the other external reverb. Assign those channels to the mix. Then send the vocal and guitar channels to the FX channel for the reverb that I want to use.
And after a bit of futzing around, there was sound! More to the point, there was reverb.
I've now mixed down the first song -- at 48 KHz, because that's what the original recordings were at, so I'll have to convert later -- and taken a listen to the result.
So far, so good.
Whee!
