Live Mixing

Hi Chaps,

I do a lot of live sound work, and do a lot of smaller jobs, which I want to be able to do without the need for my larger desks, as my smallest desk is 16 channels, which for some events is too large.

Does anyone have experience with using any applications for Mac, with an interface that will allow me to mix via my Macbook?

I know of Allen and Heath iLive, however wanted to ask if anyone else knew of any good applications.

Thanks in advance.

Gaz W said:

Hi Chaps,

I do a lot of live sound work, and do a lot of smaller jobs, which I want to be able to do without the need for my larger desks, as my smallest desk is 16 channels, which for some events is too large.

Does anyone have experience with using any applications for Mac, with an interface that will allow me to mix via my Macbook?

I know of Allen and Heath iLive, however wanted to ask if anyone else knew of any good applications.

Thanks in advance.

Click to expand...

To be honest. If I were mixing with the equipment it sounds like you might already have, I would weigh up where I feel the hardware is falling short and go from there. Whether it's hardware or software, I would still NOT want to be pushing a mouse around to adjust a level when a guitar player or a singer or a tom was overpowering the mix. It's slow and potentially unreliable as when an analogue desk fails, it usually a noisy pot or fader. When a computer dumps, it's gig off for too long..

Just an opinion..

I do a lot of live mixing too. And I would prefer to have a physical fader than to move a digital fader.

I guess if you really wanted to you could run your inputs into Garageband on separate tracks, turn monitoring on, and use your headphone jack as the output. But

If you're looking for a smaller board, I know Mackie makes smaller consoles.

Mackie - Onyx 1620i

+1 on using a board.

I do have a question though. Has anyone used DAWs as as effects unit? I run sound for an acapella group and we were thinking about hooking up a powerbook with logic express to our board via the input jacks and a MOTU828mkII (firewire).

I haven't actually physically touched them so can't vouch for the build quality, but Korg's Nano series Keyboard Controllers | USB MIDI Controller | Korg nanoSERIES are stupidly cheap and used in conjunction with some software could be the perfect bridge between having some physical control over a digtal desk....

steelcityrocker said:

+1 on using a board.

I do have a question though. Has anyone used DAWs as as effects unit? I run sound for an acapella group and we were thinking about hooking up a powerbook with logic express to our board via the input jacks and a MOTU828mkII (firewire).

Click to expand...

I haven't used them in a live environment, but I was always screwing around in the studio putting stupid effects on peoples voices, so it would be an option.

You just have to keep in mind though, that if a software program crashes or has some other malfunction, then it could really put a damper on the performance by bringing everything to a dead halt and requiring troubleshooting.

I ended up killing a whole night of recording where I was finishing up guitar tracks for a friend's band. We were recording in their practice space and my retarded self had the MBP on top of the guitar amp. The vibrations were tripping the motion detector and killing the HDD, so it would stop writing and throw an error. We didn't figure out what the problem was until later that night after we packed up.