I am trying to decide how best to organise the widgets in my rackspaces and wondering if I would be better off putting the mixers in the global rackspace or not. I don’t think I will use the panel via my touchscreen much at all and will map the controls to my upper-tier MIDI controller (Nektar LX88+).
I’ve attached screengrabs of my panel and the wiring of my basic rackspace setup. Should I put all the mixers in the global rackspace or are there any downsides to doing this?
It really depends on your setup. If you have different plugins in different rackspaces all routed to the same inputs in the “To Global Rackspace” and going to the same inputs in the mixer in the GR, you will have to put widgets in the reg rackspace that are linked to the mixer in the GR if you want to control their levels through variations. So, you haven’t given us enough info about the rest of your rackspaces how they would interact with your GR/mixer.
I put my mixers to where my plugins are. I have a lot of plugins in the GR that’s where my mixers are with widgets linked in the reg RS.
I just thought I’d update the thread with the route I have taken on this. Thanks to @ztones’s comment, I thought about what I need to control per rackspace and what is truly global. So I have now put one mixer in the global rackspace and the two larger mixers in each of the individual rackspaces.
My setup has 2 keyboard controllers, a weighted StudioLogic SL88 on the lower tier and a synth action Nektar LX88+ on the upper tier. I tend to map 1-4 sounds across either of the keyboards for the type of pop and rock covers we play live. Audio interfacing is provided by a Behringer Flow 8 (or a UMC202HD as an emergency backup).
I will run all plugins through 2 mixers in the rackspace, each one nominally dedicated to upper or lower keyboards. I will be mapping the 1st 8 sliders on the LX88 to the 1st 4 stereo pairs on each mixer so that I can balance levels between the sounds mapped to different zones on the keyboard. As this changes per song, I have them in the individual rackspaces.
The stereo output of each mixer feeds into the global rackspace where I have a 4 channel mixer with a global panel to virtually balance the levels between the top and bottom keyboards (controlled by two panel knobs which are mapped to two physical knobs on the LX88). Alongside those in the global rackspace are further sliders to control the 9-band graphic EQ on the output bus of the Behringer Flow 8 via MIDI (to tweak the overall EQ to suit the venue during soundcheck) and two further knobs to control the monitor bus output level for my onstage monitoring and the main bus level to go to front-of-house. These volume knobs will be mapped to a pair of knobs on the LX88.
I have a few spare channel on the feed to and from the global rackspace as I will need to route an audio input signal on some songs to handle a vocal feed into a vocoder.
