Mixing Desk Busses And Soundcard Ins Options

[karambos]

Hi,

I don't understand the relationship between the busses on a mixing desk and the sound card. It seems to me that if you are using 8 microphones to record simultaneuosly and you wanted each of those microphone signals to be recorded on seperate tracks in the sequencer then obviously, you would need a soundcard with 8 ins.

The way I picture it is that in order to be able to control the levels, you would plug the microphones direct into the mixing desk and then connect the busses to the ins on the sound card.

However, if my mixing desk only has 4 busses, am I right in thinking that I can only record a maximum of 4 signals seperately and simultaneously? In other words, to be able to record 8 individual signals and have them record on 8 individual tracks in the sequencer, you have to have
a) a mixing desk with 8 busses
b) a sound card with 8 ins.

Am I also right in thinking that normally, you wouldn't plug the 8 microphones directly into the sound card? Because if you did, you have no way of controlling the input (apart from within the sequencer)?

And what happens when you want to record using more than 8 microphones at once?

I run LOGIC and have a 16 track mixing desk which has 4 busses. I want to be able to record a full drum kit so I'm looking into buying a soundcard like the Aardvark Q10 or Creamware Luna II or M-Audio 10-10 but I just don't know what I actually need until I find out how this whole thing works.

I'm grateful for any help

Karambos

[leamatic]

The best way to record the 8 mics simultaneously is to use a mixer with direct outs on each input channel. I use a Mackie 1604 which has this feature (along with a really great sound). Although I rarely record tracks simultaneously, if I wanted to keep them seperate for further processing in the computer I would wire the direct outs of the 8 mic channels into the ins of my MOTU 828. The busses are there principally for you to group faders. If you wanted, for example, to mic up a drum kit with a set of mics, but control the level of the entire kit with one stereo pair, you would send all the drummic channels to a stereo pair of busses. That way you could bring the kit up and down in the mix without altering the relationships betwen the kit's various elements.