Hey guys what's up, this is Andy from Audient and I'm here today with
singer-songwriter Emily Denton. And we're going to be having a look at our high
performance interface iD4 and why its feature set is perfect for singer
songwriters such as Emily. So Emily, tell us a little bit about how you approach
the recording process and about your music. Well I guess it's acoustic purely
'cause it's just me and a guitar. But I like to do it live because I feel like I
get the best performance out of myself when I'm live so having both the guitar and
vocals recorded at the same time I feel it that that's the best way. Yeah so when
you approach a session you want to be able to track your guitar track your
vocal set up quickly and just start recording. Yeah, plug play and get the idea out.
So let's take a look at iD4 and why that would see those needs. So first of all the important thing to note
is that it's completely bus powered which means you don't need to carry
around like an annoying power pack and you don't have to find a wall plug.
Yeah exactly so I know on your next album you're going to be recording on location
throughout the streets of London so something like ID Falls gonna be
perfectly because you can just chuck in your backpack, your car, plug into a laptop
and you're off and you've got a recording rig that you know is going to
sound really good and you have the Audient mic pre which brings me on
to my next feature so iD4 like all other Audient products has the class a mic pre
which was y'know designed by David Dearden one of the founders of audience so
you're getting a little bit of heritage in this box
everywhere you go yeah but more importantly you're getting a really
really good sounding mic pre I know you've had some experience of iD22
right iD22 yeah so quite clean transparent lovely yeah very nice well
good you get a clean sound back yeah yeah exactly which is really useful for
you know when you get to the mix process because you just you can do anything you
like and you know it's not too colorful and against that I mean honestly it yeah
it is the cleanest and it captures my voice perfectly as far as I'm concerned
yeah so as well as that class a mic pre you're also getting a JFET D.I which
means you can plug in your electric guitar or in your case your acoustic guitar
electro acoustic guitar and just start recording instantly so again
Great sounding mic pre great great sounding D.I yeah exactly so perfect for you if you're on the move.
iD4 also has dual headphone outputs which means you can plug in two sets of
headphones yeah it has a core inch jack and the mini jack so you don't get in so
much trouble if you lose your headphone adapter I know we've all done that a
recording session and it's also great because it means we can both get our
headphone mixers from the same unit yeah we don't need to set up multiple
headphone mixers we can just share one get on with the session quickly nice
you're also getting high quality converters having good converters really
really useful because it means you're getting a more honest interpretation of
you know what you've recorded which is going to allow you to mix better and
also make sure you get better translation on to other stereo systems
yeah quite often when you're recording you'll want to switch between your
monitors and your headphones and we've put this handy little mute speakers
right on the ID for so if you just want to quickly switch over to headphones
hit the button speakers muted you're not going to get any nasty feedback issues
from still from the from the monitors again you get a nice clean headphone mix
and you can it just really speeds up your work flow essentially so definitely
it's also worth mentioning when you're in the studio for example like me and
you would be now working in a session with iD4's volume encoding you can
actually press it in and activate dim which just brings your overall playback
volume right down there which is great if you just want to have a conversation
in the studio or you just want to talk to artists quickly yeah quickly minimize
playback hit it again and bring playback back up and simple as that
let's talk about one of iD4s coolest features which is monitor mix
what this allows you to do is blend between what you're hearing in your
inputs so you know your guitar and your D.I or your microphone in your mic input
so you can blend between those two input signals and what you're hearing on your
computer so if you wanted to know you've created a multitrack recording and you
want it to either record a vocal over it for example or go back into a guitar
part when you want the mix of that as opposed to having to have it yes exactly
so you can blend between what you're recording and what you'll hear and
you'll cook from your door or your computer so you can set the headphone
mix to make yourself or your whoever you're recording
feel really really comfortable so you're going to get better
recording because your artist is more relaxed and feeling more happy with what
they have and quicker too I guess because it's not messing around mixing
it all is actually just changing it on the unit itself yeah exactly like if you're happy with
your mix in your DAW you can you know you can just simply switch to it and
just set the headphone mix gives you complete control of what you're hearing
in your headphones oh yes below the monitor mix feature you've also got
monitor pan which you can see labeled on top of the id4 here what this allows you
to do is pan what you're hearing what you're recording so you're recording
like we are going to see today and at our and a vocal mic you can essentially
pan each one of those from left to right in your headphone that is going to be
perfect because engine cymbals that hold the mute speaker and ID button down
switch the volume encoder to one side and when you're happy, start recording
the final feature I want to show you is iD4s ScrollControl mode this can also
be found on iD4's bigger brother the iD14 what it does is it allows you to
turn your volume encoder into a virtual scroll wheel so bear with me on
this one because I'll explain yeah if you ever wanted to ride your vocal with
automation to get a more natural take we have to change certain parts yeah yes so
for example to make certain hooks slightly louder in the mix or duck
really dynamic parts so they don't sound you know so much other than everything
else yeah what scroll control does on iD4 is you
can hover over any compatible parameter so for example in this case you would
hover over your your channel fader is within your DAW and you can just ride
the volume encoder like you would an old-school piece of hardware and ride
the vocal and you know shut your eyes just listen to the music just get a
really natural take without staring at a screen with a pencil tool and drawing it in. And having to change
and listen to it back over and over and over again and just doing it in real time. Yeah it's really really painless
really quick again and just speeds up your workflow massively so for today's
session let me talk to you for you the set up we're going to be using we're
going to take a D.I of your electro acoustic guitar and we're also going to
use a Rode NT2000 condenser microphone to record your vocals
okay the cool thing about this mic is that we can change the polarity button to a
figure of eight which essentially allows us to capture the front and the back of
the microphone but not get much from the sides which allows us to
get a really direct recording of your vocal but also capture the ambience of
this amazing sounding room and which is perfect for your style because like we spoke
about earlier you're all about performance and the vibe of the
performance and that's what we really want to get for this yeah the room
definitely makes it it yeah having that figure of eight polar pattern
also basically stops us getting loads of spill from your acoustic guitar into
your vocal microphone so when you come to the mixing stage it you're not
plagued by getting nasty spill from your guitar and it'll be a lot easier to take
control of the vocal take in a mixed situation so tell us a little bit about
the track you're going to be recording today um it's fairly old actually I
think about six years ago I was actually on the way home from the train station
it's about a mile and a half walk from the train station to my house and this
song just was playing through my head I mean a lot of my songs have happened
that way and so I got home played on the guitar and then got it recorded but I
guess from what we've been talking about I could have literally just stopped on
the way and recorded it if I had this with me. Cool so shall we have a go at
recording it and hear what sounds like? Very good, yeah excited. Let's do it!
My advice to other singer-songwriters, artists such as myself, who don't have an
engineering background, it's not too difficult, but it can be. And with
with units like this, it's just making it so easy so we can just focus on the
music and get down some really solid ideas with some amazing sound quality I
think that's all we really want but a lot of people it seemed don't record
themselves, will go to a studio and when they simply don't need to not if it's
just two tracks and you're just getting down a song you know this this is
perfect for that and so easy to use