 So we have basically these, I want to show you specifically right here, these 16 mic lines right here which are wired directly to the studio downstairs. And then there are these two and one of the things that I need to do that I haven't done yet, I apologize, is to actually label these so we can see what they are. But basically we have 16 mic lines ago from here to the studio downstairs and then two returns. And so those two returns are right here. And those can be used for a couple of different things. What we use for during the SAFO sessions is to run the audio back up here that goes to a channel. So that way the audio gets embedded directly onto the camera signal for a live stream. So that's probably a good workflow if the studio downstairs is being used for live streaming. It's all analog, there's no delays, you know, they have to be adjusted for, compensated for, and to have the audio just go directly onto a camera, you know, makes sense. So I can show you how we can patch that from downstairs. But as far as the overall capability from the connection, we have 16 lines going from here to downstairs and then two coming back up here. That's what we have at the moment. Can I ask you a question? No. No questions are allowed. Because I thought downstairs, the white wires and the blue wires are blue wires that you're talking about. These blue wires? Yeah, this is the actual snake cable that goes down to the floor and pops out into the observer room behind the studio. That makes sense. And so that yeah, these are the actual lines that connect them. The way the way I have this set up right now is this in this box, these are mic splitters. So what this allows you to do is to connect microphones into here, then from the direct output of this splitter, it's a three-way splitter for each channel. It's set up right now to actually only use two of those splits. That's all we really need right now. So it means you can plug in a microphone here and take the direct output into this, which is the mixer, which controls just the live sound up here in the studio. But then the off-the-back of the splitter, that same microphone signal, then can go downstairs to the studio. So what that allows you to do is, like for example, what I do during the sound post sessions on the last Saturday, I had eight inputs, eight microphone inputs essentially, up here on the stage. So each of those eight inputs came in here to the splitter. And then the direct output came here to the console so that I could mix the live sound. I didn't have anything to do with recording at all. But those same eight mic signals went downstairs at the same time via the splitter and it was patched in right here so that it could be recorded at the same time. So that what it allows you to do is to do two totally separate mixes. One that's just for either recording or maybe for live streaming, because again that mix from downstairs could be brought back up here to go to a camera. So someone can be down there and mix whatever they want for the live stream audio while I'm doing a separate mix, doesn't have to be me, but in the case of Saturday it was me doing the mix for the live sound upstairs. Does that make sense? And a good example of why you want to have in general different mix capabilities is that what I usually do is I connect to what I call room mics right here to these cables. And so the purpose of those mics is to really pick up the audience sound, you know, so that you hear the audience applause and so you get a more and more of a sense that you're there in the space as opposed to just everything being close mic'd. But since those mics are way back here and the speakers right there, I would never want to use those mics for amplification in the space because it would just be a feedback nightmare, right? So the only reason to have those mics at all is to for the recording. And so that's just one specific example of why you want to be able to do a separate mix for video and what you're doing. So this set up up here allows us to do that. So we were just talking about the patching upstairs and this is the panel here where those signals come into the studio. So there's along here there are 16 of those mic returns in this case is they're coming this direction and then here are the patch points for the two audio signals going back up to the studio. So this can be all freely patched differently depending on the needs of a given production. Those and I think that those be and see these video connections you see on here right now these are not currently actually connected to anything but they could be in the future. So what I usually do is keep this panel sort of in front of it just to help walk a little bit of that noise that comes through this big opening. This room behind us a little bit noisy. And one of the things we might want to do still in the future is to improve kind of that closure on the back too. Because there is a bit of noise that comes in here which isn't ideal at the moment. So the studio itself is really based around this device right here which is the Apollo interface. And so what this does is acts as an interface between the analog world or the mic signals or it could be a line level signal as well coming from a keyboard or something like that. Any kind of audio signal. This is the device that gets it into the computer. So it looks like this is where all of those are obviously connected. This is where it's connected right now. And so what I thought we'd do today is do a little test recording in here. And we'll actually have to this is still read configured from the way I had it on Saturday. And so we should probably put it back to more of a default configuration so it's a little easier to get just record signals from here. But so the power on procedure is to turn that on and turn the computer on. I should say also that this other piece of gear here is an 8 channel mic preamp that's connected digitally to the Apollo. So while the Apollo has capacity for 8 inputs if you're doing a project that requires more than 8 inputs then we have this mic preamp too which brings us to a total of 16 possible simultaneous inputs which is why we have 16 mic lines. Well actually the main reason I have 16 mic lines coming from those is because that's what the keyboard would hold. But so here you got to enter the password to start which is, should we tell everyone what the password is? I'm sure it's password. So there, so in the computer here there are two probably two pieces of software that are most important ones to know about. The first one is the Apollo console. So as I over here here I see it's here. I'll open that. So console is basically the digital mixer for the Apollo interface. And so I have all the inputs named here. Analog 1 through analog 4 and then the way I had this set up is that the two inputs which we'll look at in a minute which are in the booth over there we're coming into channels 5 and 6 of the Apollo and then analog 7 and 8. Those are all, this first set of 8 inputs are the inputs directly on the Apollo. And then grace 1 through 8 are the 8 mic preamps on the the M108 because it's a grace design M108. So that's why grace 1 through 8 makes sense. So on this, so on the Apollo console it allows you to route in real time the signals coming in to the Apollo to anything coming out. Any questions so far? Does this make sense? I guess, like which one, the ones 1 through 4 correlate with, so there's 8 that come down from the studio, yeah? There are 16 that come down from the studio. But which device they come into down here depends on how you patch them from the wall. Right, okay. Right, so you could, you could take channels 1 through 8 and connect them directly to the Apollo if you wanted to. Gotcha, okay. Or you could take the bottom row and connect those to the Apollo if you want. So there's no strict number in scheme per se between the inputs here and the inputs on the panel upstairs because you can just depends on how they're patched at that panel. No matter what, no matter what the primary ones have to go through the Apollo. Yes, okay. I mean if you want to use the computer it has to go into the Apollo. Okay. I mean theoretically if you had your own reporting device you could use just this preamp because it's just a mic preamp and it actually has a set of analog outputs which are not currently being used. So if someone came in and had their, for example, their own computer interface they wanted to use because that's what they're familiar with using or if they had their own little portable recorder but they wanted to be able to use the space upstairs and they wanted to maybe be able to use that mic preamp because that's a very high quality mic preamp. Okay. That would be another option and so someone could do a recording without using a computer at all. That's possible. So the other piece of software, I'm gonna close this. I'll show you why I'm going to close it in a minute. The other, probably the main piece of software to be aware of here is LUNA. So LUNA is a DAW or a digital audio work station and it happens to be the one that is made by Universal Audio which is the company that makes the Apollo interface. But it's really a full-featured DAW. I think we've also had some conversations about possibly adding some other DAWs to the computer as well because it's just software that would still work with this as the interface. But I've been using LUNA as the, it's gonna ask me to install an update. I'm gonna say remind me there to do all the recordings. So maybe just as a place to start, let's open this session from last Saturday with Covino and I can just show you what that looks like and then maybe what we'll do is we'll start a new session from scratch as if you were gonna start a new project. So these are all the tracks that were recorded from upstairs down in here. The one other thing you should show in the video here is that there's another switch here which turns on the speakers themselves. You know the speakers are on and the little blue lights are on. So now we have sound right? Another important thing to know is that the volume control is right here for the monitors. So you can see here in the DAW that there's a separate track or separate line for each of the inputs we had. So we had a couple of vocal mics, we had a couple of guitar, we had a looper pedal, porch board. That was the one I was forgetting earlier. It was like a little kick drum thing. And then the keyboard. And then we have a track for the announcement mic that I use for announcements at the top of the show and then the room mics that I mentioned. So in Luna then you can, you have two basic views and they're probably not going to give an in-depth discussion of how Luna works here but the basic idea is that you can record and see the clips you're recording in this view and then command equals brings you to this view which is the mixer. Sounds good? Yeah, sounds great. How did you change between those interfaces again? There's two basic views on Luna which you command equal to toggle between. You can also come up here to view and switch between different views there as well. So there's one of the things I like about Luna is that there's usually more than one way to do the same thing. But the more you use it the more you kind of gravitate towards some keyboard shortcuts. But I think maybe what we should do is set up a microphone in here and just start a Luna session from scratch just to kind of show that process and how that works. Another important thing to know about is there's this drive right here which is an external SSD drive and it's called LPM Audio. You see on the, I think you may have seen it there. This is the drive to use to actually record audio too. And then the other reason that becomes important is that it's fast enough so that when you're actually editing a project like with multiple tracks like that that drive has a fast enough read speed to be able to allow for editing. Whereas the internal drive, I found this out sort of the hard way initially, the internal drive doesn't have very much space on it and I was doing a project and it basically the hard drive filled up and it wouldn't let me keep going until I had to go backwards and offload some of the data to a different drive and it was a big mess. So that's why you always want to make sure you're driving to recording to this drive. So with this location here, if you click on this, this will show you where it's recording to. So here's LPM Audio. So it's this drive here. So let's create a new folder called Test Session. So now it tells me the location is Volumes LPM Audio Test Session and then I'm going to give a name to the session itself. So I'll just call that Test. Got it? Yep. So I'm gonna say Create. Okay, so now I have just an empty session. So what I'm going to do is I have that microphone plugged in to Channel 1 on the Apollo. I'm gonna first create a new track here and then so anytime you create a new track, you can decide which input you want that track to look at. Right? And so in this case, I'm gonna use just the first channel here. So that's all I have to do. So on the Apollo now, let's see. If you push in this knob, you'll see it'll cycle between the different inputs here. Right? So I can go to input 1. This microphone we have connected is a condenser mic, so that means it needs fan and power. So I'm gonna turn fan and power on. If you cycle between, if you push the input button, you'll see it'll go between mic or line. So if you have a line level source, such as a keyboard, then you would set that to line. That's now mic level. And you would do that for each input that you have, correct? Correct, yeah. So then what I need to do is turn the gain up. I forgot, one other thing I forgot to say is that you have to record and enable the track like that so then you can start to see what's happening. So then notice here as I'm turning the knob to increase the amount of gain on that going to the microphone, you see that correspondingly happen here in the channel of you and Luna. So what's nice about that is that Luna has a very tight integration with the console, so you don't actually have to have the console app open at the same time as Luna. You can see it all within Luna, which is actually really nice. Yeah. And so if I do this command equals thing, we're gonna talk about that before going back and forth in the channel view and kind of the track view. And now already you can start to see the signal on that channel that we're gonna, if you want to tap on that microphone you can see. So actually that's probably too much preamp game we have on there right now. So I'm going to dial that back a little bit or talk into that microphone for us. I'd like to do something. Okay, so you can see that. Okay. So great. So let's record that. I'm going to go back to the track view now that I and I'm going to call this I'm going to name the track. I'll just call it vocal one because I don't know what else to call it. And I'm going to hit record. We'll do that little countdown before it starts. No, talk to us. Tell us something interesting. LPMX music mix for long month. That was fabulous. That was really, really good. So voice actor. So now if I bring this up in our music mix LPMX music mix for long month. Okay, good. I thought I heard a little static, but I guess it wasn't. So we've just made made a recording. Yeah, we keep that I need that for the station. So now, you know, since we're now in the DAW environment, we have a clip which we can move around, we could shorten that up, you know, we could you could we could fade put it faded out, we could fade it in we could split this and, you know, because we didn't like the way you did it. I mean, there's lots of things here. Use it. Mix. So you hear that. And shivers, man. So now, now that we've recorded that, let's how you switch between those controls of the fade in fade out, or if you want to like cut something. Well, this is where we're going to get into like actually working in Luna. And that's probably not too detailed. That's probably more. Well, first off, I'm really not the best person at Luna. I'm not the best. I mean, Zach, who's was recording down here on Saturday, would be a much better person to tell you about like how to actually work in Luna. Because he's better at it. He's way better at it than I am. So I'm just trying to kind of give an overview of kind of signal flow and how to move things around and how to make sound and capture. So right now, this is obviously coming through the speakers, right? But what if we wanted to send this recording to someone in the booth? On the for the headphones? Okay. So there's someone like someone who's going to be in there listening. So if you if you're in the channel view in Luna, you'll see that there if you come down here, there are these Q outputs, which are separate from this main fader. This main fader is going to control what you're hearing out of the monitor speakers, right? So if I lbmx music mix along. So if I do that again, right, that that faders controlling what we're hearing here. But we have two sets of Q outputs here. So Q one, the way it's set up right now, which I think will probably be sort of our default setup is that Q one goes to these headphones right here. So maybe we're going to record something else. And we don't want it to come through the speakers. And so I'm going to mute my main outputs. But I want to hear them in the headphones. And I'm going to send that track to Q one. See if this works. And what did my recording go? Okay, so now I hear it in the headphones, but you don't hear anything here, right? And so that mix is controlled here, Q one. What does the P mean? Here, P and P means pre or post fader. So you can set it up to be either to follow this fader level or to be independent of it. You might want to there might be different situations you want to do that. So she's nodding her head. Yes, so she's hearing something. Okay. And Q two goes to the sound booth, Q two goes to the booth. So if someone wants to go into the booth and put those headphones on, then let's see if you want to volunteer to do that. I'm going to send that track. I'm going to bring the fader up in Q two. And let's see if he hears that in there. So what did you actually do to send the track? Just just turning that knob? Correct. Okay, just turning this knob here. It was loud but it was there. And so if we want to go to the booth first, we know what we can do is let's just set this little clip to play in a loop so we can hear it. We can do that. I think we'll do that and we'll just repeat. Yeah, there we go. Okay, so now let's go into the booth. So here there's also a separate volume control here for the headphones. So if you guys want to put on the headphones and you can see you can adjust the level for yourself. Okay, so that's so let's take this one step further. So now let's say, okay, we're going to do we want to record something on top of that clip? What we want to record it from in there? Well, we have that we have a microphone set up there which is connected to the Apollo input number two at the moment. That's how we have it connected at the moment. So the first thing we want to do is come up here to tracks and create a new audio track. So let's say let's create one mono track and let's call it booth vocal. Okay, so now we've got another track here called booth vocal. And now we're going to come down to its input and set its input to number two because that's the physical input that that microphone is connected to right now. Okay, and now let's come back to our preamp and let's go over and select input number two. That's also a condenser mic in there so it needs phantom powers. We'll turn phantom power on. It's already set to mic mic level. Then if we turn the knob, we'll give it some gain and if uh someone want to go in there and uh put on the headphones and talk to us, we'll be our voice actor. Yep, and close the door. When should she start? Talk to us. I feel like barely hear her. Oh, it's because we uh we muted the uh keep talking. We I muted the main monitors. But now we should hear it. Yeah. Talk to us. Keep talking. Um hello this is Emily. It is Tuesday afternoon. Okay, so my signal is a little bit low on here so I'm going to increase it. And that's all I've got. Keep talking. Keep talking. La la la la la la. That's just really loud so I turned up the mic preamp gain too much. This is where it's important to have good voice talent when you're recording. Um okay so put the headphones on. LPMX music mix for long month. LPMX music mix for long month. Actually before we do that um so this is where what we don't have let's see what we don't have set up right now is so she can't hear me very easily. Can you hear me Emily? Okay so that does work. Okay good. I hadn't actually tried that. Been able to try this with anyone before so this is good. Okay so now you can hear me. Um where is that control? So over here there's a there's a talk back and so if you just hold the talk button the actual microphone is right here. Okay. The Apollo so I'm talking now she can't hear me but when I push talk then she hears me. Okay. Right. Um okay so Emily what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna send a little bit of your own vocal sound into the headphones so you should hear yourself in the headphones. Tell me when you hear hear that which means you have to talk again to us. Just talk just talk. You don't have to see anything interesting. No just talk for us because otherwise you won't hear anything. You are the source. Okay. Hello this is Emily McDonald. Do you hear your own voice in the headphones? I do not. Oh wait yes I guess I do now. Okay uh-huh yep I do. I can hear myself. Would you like that to be a little louder or a little softer? A little louder. Okay so we're gonna send a little bit more to Q2 so yeah that is good. That's pretty loud. Okay is that too loud should I back it off a little bit? Um maybe just slightly. Okay just a little back off. How about that now does that feel better? That is great. Okay so now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna play back the first clip and um why don't you just uh so you should hear the clip in your headphones and then just say something else. Are you with myself? So now I'm gonna record but the only track that I have record enabled is for a track. Right. LPMX music mix for long line. LPMX music mix for long line. So I'm not actually hearing myself. Oh LPMX music mix for long line. What's going on Andrew? LPMX music mix for long line. This might be kind of. Did you just book that? Yes. We're doing an orientation right now. You taught me to be a guest. Yeah you say. Did that did that make sense at all? Theoretically yes. I mean I think this experiment would be better if there was something more sensible for you to record over. Yeah yeah. But does that kind of give you guys the idea of how to so basically what we what we've done is we recorded um well actually we didn't actually record her. Can we just record you saying can we record you saying something real quick? Because we didn't actually record that. Can you go make sure the door's closed or something? So whenever you're ready just say something and insert a microphone for us. Tuesday afternoon. It's great. That was a perfect take. So now we can. Hi this is Emily McDonough. Wow. Sounds so good. Sounds amazing. So Emily are you hearing that take in your headphones? Did you hear that in the headphones Emily? I did yes. Okay. Are you wanting me to talk over it? No. No no no. I just wanted to make sure you could I just wanted to make sure you could hear it. So that's the I think that's the basic workflow for for recording sourcing recording in here.