in this video i'm going to show you how to connect a mixer to pc
for recording without an audio interface i'm zane welcome to simple green tech
where i do weekly audio tech tips tutorials
and reviews to help you conquer the tech and unleash your creativity now for this
video i'm using the behringer xenyx 1002 mixer
but this method will work with most behringer and mackie mixers and similar
ones to those this is not a usb mixer but it is
extremely easy to set up you just need a couple of
cables and your computer will need to have a headphone jack
and an input jack i know some laptops are
dropping the input jack and if that's your case then
all you need is a usb audio adapter you can pick those up for around eight
dollars or they range between eight dollars and
twenty dollars i'll link to one in the description so
you can see what i'm talking about i'll also link to the cables that i'm
using so you can easily check those out too now let's jump in
now what i recommend getting is a couple of cables like this they have
rca on one end and 3.5 millimeter or eighth inch
on the other end and you're going to need two sets of these
so now let's look at actually connecting them and before you connect them i
recommend unplugging the mixer from the power
now first up let's connect our mixer so we'll connect one set of these to the
two track out here
and the other set will go to the to track in
some mixers might call this something else like tape output or tape
input now connect the end from the two-track output
to the input on your computer
then connect the other cable to the headphone jack on your computer
and once that's all set up you can now power on your mixer
and now i'll connect my headphones to the headphone jack
and if you want you can connect speakers or monitors to the main
outputs here now i'm just going to place some audio back on the computer to make
sure everything's set up correctly
all right it looks like we have a signal going through it which is great now if
you're just using headphones you can use this to track to control
make sure that buttons pressed in and that's going to send the audio to
your headphones if you were using speakers you could
listen back using the two track to mix and then you would control the levels
with this but when you're recording with this setup you want to disable the two
track to mix or else you're going to be recording
any audio that's being played back on your computer along with whatever it is
you're recording so you just want the two track to
control room button pushed in when recording and you can monitor
yourself through your headphones so i'm going to connect a mic right now
and then we'll see how that works now before i get into the recording i
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now let's jump back in all right so i have audacity open up and you'll notice
that i have mic in at the front selected and that's
because that's where i have the mixer connected
i also have the real tech speakers set as my output which is the built-in sound
card and that's going into the mixer so let's
give this a try for recording this is a test of
recording my mixer that's connected to my pc without an
audio interface i have my mixer connected to the input jack
on my computer currently and as you can see i recorded my voice
no problem and the quality is actually pretty good
you'll want to adjust your levels and get that all straightened out before you
start recording i just did this quickly for now your
gain control is right here and then the level of that is right here
you'll also want to make sure that the main fader is set to zero or
whatever level works for you as this will also control the levels going into
audacity or whatever daw you're using now let's check out what happens if we
enable two-track to mix while recording so i'm going to put a
backing track in there and then i'll talk over top of it and
we'll see what happens all right this is a test of recording
with the two track to button pushed in let's see what happens here
all right this is a test of recording with
the two track to button pushed in let's see what happens here
and as you can see we recorded both the backing track and my voice onto the same
track and this might be useful in some cases
but if you're recording music or anything where you want to adjust the
levels individually you should keep that two-track to mix
disengaged when recording now what if you wanted to record two
tracks at the same time using this you would just pan one track all the way
to the left and the other track all the way to the
right and then in audacity you could record to a stereo track
and then just split it like this
and now you have two separate mono tracks and each one would be
whatever you recorded if you were using a more traditional daw
you could just select input one or insert one whatever it's called
on your sound card and input two or insert two
as the other input now this was just the basics of how to connect a mixer to a pc
for recording without an audio interface if you want
to see my video on how to connect a mixer to an audio
interface click up here or click down here to see what youtube thinks you
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thank you so much for watching for simple green tech i'm zane
keep creating and we'll talk soon