Focusrite makes a variety of different high end and budget audio interfaces for home recording.
In this video, we’ll cover how to setup a Focusrite audio interface and use the MixControl
software to control our inputs and outputs.
We’ll be using the Focusrite Scarlett 18i20, which has a bunch of different inputs and
outputs, but this will work with basically any of the new Focusrite interfaces.
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The first thing we need to do is get our audio interface unboxed and get all our cables.
Find the USB or thunderbolt cable that came with the audio interface in the box.
Connect one end to the audio interface, then connect the other end to the computer.
If your audio interface has a separate power plug, connect that as well.
Some of them are connected over USB, but others require additional power.
To get this all working, go to the Focusrite website for their downloads, select your audio
interface, and download the Focusrite Control software for your operating system.
Then just run the downloaded file to install it.
If we launch the Focusrite control, we’ll get all the options to control the signal
routing in the audio interface itself.
The top gives us a way to switch between device settings and output routing.
Device settings can set the sample rate and clock source, and you may want to adjust the
clock source if you’re using an additional ADAT preamp with more inputs and outputs.
The outputs section has all our outputs on the left.
We can click on these to get the signal routing.
Outputs 7-8 and 9-10 also include the headphone outputs.
The outputs you see here will differ based on what audio interface you have.
Clicking on one of these gives us the signal routing options.
At the top, we have the hardware inputs.
These can be mono or stereo inputs.
We can remove them by pressing the X at the top and add more with the plus on the side.
They are set as mono or stereo when we add them.
Each input has controls for panning, volume, mute and solo.
This allows us to adjust the balance in our headphones and speakers of all the inputs,
without having to go through the software or even the computer first, so we get 0 latency
monitoring.
One trick I might use sometimes is to boost the level of an input and cut the level of
the playback at the bottom, then turn up the headphone volume, that way the input is louder,
since these tracks aren’t mixed in our software yet and we don’t have things like compression
to boost it.
The bottom is for the playback outputs, which are just the outputs from all the software
on the computer.
Next, we need to go to our software that we’ll be using for recording.
This can be things like Cakewalk by BandLab, Tracktion Waveform, Pro Tools, or whatever
else you use.
In that software, find the settings menu that’s used to configure the audio device.
Set the audio device driver type to ASIO, then select the USB or thunderbolt Focusrite
audio interface as the device.
When that’s set, we can change the sample rate with the ASIO configurator down below,
and sometimes we may even need to enable some of the additional inputs that might not be
turned on by default.
So that covers everything for getting a Focusrite audio interface setup.
Now we can just select the inputs on our tracks, arm them for recording, and start recording
our music.
Thanks for checking out this video on setting up a Focusrite audio interface.
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