Gear Question: For Recording Beats

MekOne · Gear Question: For Recording Beats

My set up now is:
SP 404 Sampler Midi In to SP 1200 Midi Out.(SP 1200 is the sequencer)

I have two choices for recording:
A) Midiman USB Midi out that's USB to my PC.
B) SP 404 directly to my Delta Series 44 External Sound Card device that hooks up to the sound card on my PC.

What I would ideally like to do is have full control over each midi note or individual sound (like kick, snare, high, etc.) coming from my SP 404 or SP 1200. I'm not sure how to do this with the little equipment that I have? I want this to be a more automated approach. In other words I would like not to have to record each sound solo and have the pain of moving and sliding pieces around in Sonar Cakewalk or some other program. Any body have any ideas on what method works well for recording music from two machines midi'd up and this equipment that I have or if I should buy some other piece of gear to make my life easier? Confused

Drinks

Not sure what you mean.

If you want to record MIDI events remotely from the PC, then the MIDI outs of your SP's will need to go into the MIDIMAN. To retain sync, you will need to have the PC clocking the SPs.

If you want to record audio, then you will need to route your SPs Output to your soundcard.

But I'm still not sure what you are trying to achieve. Do you want to record MIDI events AND audio?

MekOne

Basically I want to be able to have control of each (sample ) sound coming from my sp 1200 or Sp 404 on my Sonar Cakewalk software program. I'm looking for a more automated way of doing this.

1. Recording Audio from one of my sp's would mean

A) SP 1200: using a snake with a mackie mixer (that I do not have) or some other mixer to match up with the 8 channels on the SP 1200. This also means that all the sounds would have to be recorded onto a floppy disc and coming out of the sp 1200. Since I'm using the SP 1200 for all the sequencing and not the SP 404 because I'm not too thrilled with the SP 404's pattern and swing mode methods. It's a swing it your damn self thing going on with it. But works like a champ for sampling.

B) SP 404: using this would mean I could only use something that has midi out or midi thru since the 404 only has midi in. On top of that the 404 is only a sampler so RCA red and white cables no quarter inch thing here I have adapters to plug into the sound card device from the 404 but you cannot capture all the sounds coming out of the 404 at once it seems like it needs to be done one by one sound manually or some other way.

Recording Midi would mean:

A) SP 404: I can only capture the entire track all sounds together unless I manually record each sound and then slide shit around inside cakewalk which I do not want to do. Too much hassle and work.

B) SP 1200: Same as above.

worldwide

So you want to individually track out each output from your SP1200 and SP404 into Cakewalk - which would at any given time be a maximum of 8 mono channels and 1 stereo channel of audio. If that's the case the I am not sure if you have the equipment to do it in one go.

I am not a midi expert and furthermore I do not know about the MIDIMAN but if the Delta soundcard has only 4 analogue inputs, you would only be able to track 4 individual output channels at a time.

Midi Set-up (assuming the MIDIMAN only has one MIDI OUT):

PC Midi Out -> SP1200 MIDI IN
SP1200 MIDI OUT (or THRU depending on your preferred method of control) -> SP404 IN

Audio Set-up without a mixer is going to be a pain. As I said above you only have 4 inputs, so you can only track 4 channels at a time. So either you will be swapping cables or using the mix-out of the SP1200 and muting out individual outputs on the SP1200.

MekOne

The midiman midisport 2X2 has two outs and two ins but this does not help me that much since I want to capture all 8 channels from the SP 1200 in out shot. But, the thing I do not understand is Midi. It seems like everytime I record Midi I'm only able to record the entire track unless I mute individual sounds and record a lot of midi tracks then having the pain of moving and sliding stuff around in cakewalk. I was wondering what would make my life easier for workflow? What is some other gear I could buy in order to make my workflow a little less tidious for recording audio then swapping cables back and forth or recording midi then having to slide and move things like midi tracks inside cakewalk. In both cases either recording audio or midi tracks I'm still left with either swapping cables or moving midi tracks around. There's got to be a more stream line way of doing this?