Hey!
I’m a new user of the Qu-5 and I was wondering how to run a channel through my DAW.
The mixer is set to Multitrack and hooked up to my Mac. I can see all the channels in my DAW, but no sound is coming through as of yet.
Here’s what I wanna do: Main vocalist’s microphone is connected to the mixer’s physical input 1 (Local 1?). I want to send her vocal/this channel from the mixer → DAW on a channel with an effect VST on it → back to the mixer.
How do I do this?
Thankful for all help!
I use the Qu7 at our church. We recently got it and I was able to connect to Cubase on a PC. Mapped the channels and thus far it works! I am not in front of the board, so this is from memory.
There are 2 ways I can think of to route back to your vocalist. 1. By default, the USB input on the board, should be connected to stereo out of your DAW. If it isn’t, route the DAW outputs, channel 1 and 2. On the board, route the USB input to your vocalists mix. Cubase has a listen mode per channel and your DAW may have that and you may have to use it. 2. Route the individual channel back to an unused channel on the board. Route that channel to the vocalists mix.
If you get stuck, try running track(s) or song from your DAW back to the board.
Follow-up with hopefully some useful info.
I have the Qu-5, and before that I used the Studio One 7 Pro DAW basically as a processing device for the Livestream mix. I gotta lot of work needed since I’ve not used the DAW for a few months time without any mixer this past summer. It appears I’ll need to go through the plugin list and update a big stack of stuff.
So anyway, we now have a Qu-5 mixing for FOH and Livestream, plus the other mixes involved in my Church audio video.
I bought the Blue Cat Patchwork app which hosts plugins. I just created an effects process for the Livestream mix, inserting the Blue Cat Patchwork on the Livestream Master. Now I can go louder as needed.
The insert I mentioned is using USB channels 1/2 send and 1/2 return. And yep it’s got signal round trip.
From your post, I think what you want to do is use your DAW to apply processing to an input ie a mic and then send it back to an input on your mixer for blending into your mix? If this is correct, perhaps you can try an “old school” or pre digital mixer approach where you send your mic signal to an external processor, process ie add reverb and then send back to a seperate input on your mixer.
To do this, I think your DAW will need to route your return signal to a dedicated channel on your mixer AND then mix the return channel just like a a normal mic channel. Can your DAW route to a specific output channel? If so you can route your return signal to a MIXER input set to receive USB signal; noting that input channel must match the output meaning if you use say channel 3 out on your DAW, channel 3 in on your mixer must be set to receive USB streams.
A simpler approach might be to use the default setup of your mixer meaning by default your Qu 5 (like my Qu 6) receives USB stream out put from my DAW on channels 1 and 2 out. Which means try setting your DAW to use channels 1 and 2 out giving a stereo mix that should come back on your USB mix on your mixer.
If you have setup multi track inputs on your DAW, when applying this processing you might just want to mute all other inputs whilst you apply the processing if you want to keep it simple, otherwise if you are recording whilst applying processing you are probably forced to use the old school method. At your mixer you will then have to mix/blend your USB (under button B) into your mixes. The question is can your DAW do this?
As a Cubase Pro and Pro Tools user, I can say you can do this old school method fairly easily using external processing.
S
I forgot to mention that latency may become an issue so be mindful of your processed sound taking to long however unto 50milli seconds will probably not be a problem.
S
I do this with the Waves auto-tune plugin. I don’t use a DAW for this though. If you’re on a Mac, you can use “MainStage” and send the signal from the mixer channel (vocalist) to a channel in MainStage where you can apply the plugin and then send it back to the mixer - this is all done over the USB-C cable to send (USB-send) back to the mixer (USB-return). I believe Waves makes a studio rack app that can do the same but it’s a lot more expensive.
Either way, this is definitely possible using the USB channels on the mixer. Depending on the plugin, if it is low-latency, it’s not perceptible and works well for me.
Actually the Waves StudioRack app is 100% free, but you have to install Waves Central (their way to watch all that you do, I guess), then do a search, find/download/install the StudioRack app.
I played with it yesterday for the first time… fairly simple, excellent for a free app, and… here is a little plus… you are not limited to using only WAVE V14 plug-ins, you can use any 3rd party VST3’s as well.
It also comes with a version that is compatible with OBS so you can now run your unsupported VST3’s along with the supported VST2’s inside OBS. I suppose it’s best feature is a little gain knob that, if used in a setup where your mixer cannot get enough gain out to your live stream, it can boost it via StudioRack’s gain knob.
A feature I like to see is that when you click on an installed VST, it gives you the added latency if that item in the “rack”… very cool!
If you use very low latency VST’s and integrate it in to your DAW and you really tsake care to optimize latency in your computer, it may be a way to use VST’s in a live event, used as an INSERT in a QU-5,6,7 environment. I’ll be testing this out when my QU-6 arrives in a week or so.