So in this video, you'll learn how to turn off direct monitoring in a Scarlett 4i4 interface made
by Focusrite. Why is this important? Well, direct monitoring is great normally; if you want to play
as a musician and you want to hear exactly what you're playing straight away without any latency.
However there are some times when you don't want to do that so in my case I and my friends are
using some software called Jamulus which is to allow musicians to play online at the same time
and the whole point of this - to keep some sort of synchronization for our playing - is that we
just hear the sound from the software - the 'virtual room' in the cloud - we do not want
to hear the sound that's coming direct into the Focusrite. But first of all let's
look at the signal flow I'm using so you can understand where I'm coming from.
If you look at the top left, you've got my keyboard with a stereo signal
and a microphone in mono that goes into a mixer and the stereo mix goes into
Focusrite Scarlett directly. There are other ways to do this but I've found this is the best way to
maintain a good signal and minimal latency. So we've got a stereo mix coming in
that goes to the computer via USB and if you can look on the right hand side now you'll see
Jamulus and the setup i'm using there: the device I'm using is the Scarlett interface
in and out and the channels that are coming in are input one and two - that's important for it to
work. This is the important bit if you look in the middle you can see some large words that say 'no
inputs' so this is the important thing you need to set up what you're looking at is Focusrite's
own software called Focusrite Control which allows you to do quite sophisticated setups
within Focusrite but you can't do it from the panel itself you use the software called Control.
You can see that I have set it up so that I have a headphone mix which is what I'm interested in and
you'll see there's hardware inputs at the top right now it's important that there are not
any hardware inputs so the signal will still go through the Scarlett into Jamulus
but I don't want any of those inputs there and that's how you do it - you turn that off
and you rely on the mix that's coming back from the software - so if you look at the
bottom you'll see it says 'software playback' and that's what you will hear so if I show you...
let's see if I can show you...yes there's Focusrite Control so the signal's coming in
I've also got my keyboard there and no hardware inputs but it's just coming back
through the software playback. I could actually - this is what it looks like when when you first
go into it you will see a hardware input so if I just go to Focusrite Control now,
and I add at the stereo input you'll hear that it it is sort of doubled-up so the way I got rid
of it was basically just deleting it like that and that seems the best way to do it. Okay, so
if we go to Jamulus now you will see that I mean there's various settings here that are specific
to Jamulus but the main thing to remember is that the channels are coming in as input one and two
and uh yes I think that's the main thing I wanted to explain it's really ...it can be very complex
and Focusrite Control is let's say it's easy to get into difficulty with it if if you don't
know what you're doing...there is a manual...it is very powerful but I would think uh it's probably
best to keep with a basic setup first and it is possible if you do get into difficulty to
blank the whole thing and start again and just add your inputs and then tell it where to send those
inputs so in fact for the setup I've got if I go back to the Focusrite
actually at the top of the screen on one of the menus...not sure if it'll show here
not sure sure if you'll see this but it says Load or Save Snapshot and it's possible to
save a snapshot of what you've done and call it 'Focusrite' for example or 'Jamulus'. So I hope
that's been useful - it's a bit of a murky subject monitoring, but if you get it right, it really
really helps so yes please put any questions in the comments and hope to see you soon!