Advanced Recording & Playback

Welcome back. In the previous video we showed you how to record tracks using the TouchMix and an external hard drive.

Now that you have the recorded tracks, let's show you the different things you can do with them.

Let’s start with Playback. Once you’ve recorded a session, you can playback any number of the recorded tracks.

Just go to the Record/Play screen, deselect arm, and turn on “Track" for each track you want to hear.

This will override the channel’s XLR or Line Input with the channel’s recorded track from the hard drive.

A Playback indicator will appear for any fader that’s in Track mode.

Take a look at the Transport and Control bar at the bottom of the screen.

You can see the total duration of the session on the right,

and you can adjust your location on the Timeline by moving the Play indicator.

The Locate indicator lets you mark a point that you can return to later.

If you tap the Set button, the Locate indicator will move to your current Play point.

You can adjust either of these indicators by dragging it on the screen, or by using the Master Wheel.

If you want to move the Play indicator to the Locate point, simply tap “Go To." Overdubbing

Now is a good time to talk about overdubbing.

Let’s say that you have an additional track that you’d like to add to a live recording.

Let’s say that your band has a recording of a song with an electric guitar,

and you’d like to layer in an acoustic backup on one of the available channels.

Well, let’s do an overdub. First, find a point in the session just before the song starts

and set the Locate point. Next, make sure that all the channels are set to Track as their source.

Arm the acoustic guitar channel, and set up the headphone mix for the guitarist.

Once the guitarist is comfortable with the mix, return to the beginning of the song by tapping “Go To,"

and touch the Record button. The TouchMix will play the recorded tracks,

and record your new tracks at the same time.

When you’re done with that take, touch Stop. And that’s it. You’ve done an overdub.

You could also use overdubbing to replace a portion of an existing track,

rather than adding a new channel.

Let’s say your guitar player messed up a couple of bars in an otherwise awesome performance.

You want to fix those mistakes.

Plug the guitar into the same channel it was originally recorded on,

and locate a point before the section you want to replace.

Tap the Record button. When the section arrives, arm the channel and play the part better this time.

When the passage is over, you can disarm the channel or just touch Stop.

When you overdub a channel, TouchMix works like tape.

Tape was this stuff that people used to record audio on,

it came on big reels and got loaded onto big machines.

Oh, I think my grandpa told me about that once. Exactly. If you playback the track now,

the section you overdubbed will completely replace the old audio on that part of the track.

Basically, only the last take can be played back on the TouchMix.

But don’t worry, those other takes are still in there if you need them.

In fact, let’s take a moment to look at how files are saved on the hard drive.

If you prefer to do your post-production editing with a DAW,

then it’s helpful to understand the TouchMix file structure works.

Each session will be in its own directory labeled [its name].tmRecord.

If you’re doing a lot of recording, we recommend labelling your sessions starting with the date,

so that you can quickly find your session chronologically.

Inside each session folder are 22 subfolders, or 14 for the TouchMix-8, one for each channel.

Every time you stop and restart recording,

a new WAV file will be created in each folder that represents an armed channel.

The WAV files will be named “Region-1", “Region-2", etc.,

so you can find your previous takes for overdubs in these files.

There will also be a document named “DIRECProject" that contains the header data for the session.

This will be useful when importing your tracks to edit in a DAW.

Different DAWS handle multiple takes in different ways,

so you’ll need to check the documentation for your software.

Follow the procedure your DAW uses to import digital audio files, and you’re set.

To make it easier to move files back and forth between your DAW and your TouchMix,

QSC provides a free DAW utility program that runs on both Windows and Mac computers.

You can download this for free from our website. When going from TouchMix to DAW,

the DAW utility consolidates all the tracks into a single folder,

which makes it more convenient to import into most DAW software.

And, if you’ve got a DAW that doesn’t handle the TouchMix 32-bit floating point WAV files,

this program will convert from 24 or 32-bit integer format.

But what if you’ve got some tracks that you made on your DAW,

maybe some backing vocals with a click track, and you’d like to use them in your live show?

Well, you can’t just drag and drop these files onto the hard drive

and expect them to play back properly on the TouchMix.

Once again, these files must be in 32-bit floating point format,

and they must be saved with the right XML header files, in the correct file structure.

Well, the new DAW utility takes care of that too.

Just change to “DAW to TouchMix," and you can easily export them to use on your TouchMix.

All you have to do is select the tracks that you want,

and then choose which TouchMix channels you want to play them.

Once again, you can download the free DAW utility from the TouchMix page on qsc.com

Did we mention it’s free?

Here’s a workflow tip: after the gig, it’s a good idea to log your session.

A simple spreadsheet with one column with a start time, and another for the song title,

and then maybe one more column for your notes or a rating system.

So now, let’s finally talk about what to do with these recorded tracks.

Your session tracks can be really useful when it’s time to teach someone how to use your sound system.

Let’s say the TouchMix is in a house of worship,

and you need to teach a volunteer how to operate your rig.

Well, rather than bring in the whole band for the sake of one training session,

you can use the recorded tracks to play back and then show the volunteer how to mix them.

You can also use the tracks for a virtual sound check.

But remember, the mix of the playback track is going to be different than the mix

of actual instruments making noise on stage.

Plus, tracks won’t feedback the way live microphones can.

Another thing you might want to do is get your session mixed down to a single stereo track

with each song as a separate file.

One way to do this is to simply connect the analog stereo output of the mixer

to the analog inputs of a recording device, for example, your favorite DAW.

The TouchMix has all the processing for a fine mix,

and your DAW can deal with all the cutting and saving to MP3s or WAV files.

Our last bit of advice is actually a serious disclaimer. Mixing on your TouchMix recording is highly addictive.

You may start off with just wanting to do a quick mix of last Saturday’s gig,

but before you know it, you get wrapped up with experimenting and perfecting

and fine-tuning your mix for hours.

So don’t say we didn’t warn you. Thanks for watching, and we’ll see you next time.