hooking up the equipment - home studio

[stefdza90]

Hello everyone!

After 2 years of piano lessons i've decided to build my own home studio. I have the list of equipment i intend to buy over the years but i don't have any experience hooking it all up, so i'm looking for help.

Equipment list:
1 - PC (cubase as a main sequencer)
2 - two keyboards (i will use both their own sounds and as midi controllers)
3 - headphones
4 - studio monitors
5 - drum machine

so far it looks like i'll get tired of mixing by mouseclicking, so the last thing i plan on getting is control surface, i suppose that until then i must have 6--audio/midi interface? what will the control surface change, considering my connections inexperience?

i will mostly use vst instruments, without recording via any other source except the drum machine and 2 keyboards (no live guitars, drums, vocals etc...)

[orpheus2006]

Logically, you connect all the audio outputs of your sound generators (the two keyboards, VSTs, etc.) to a digital mixer (which can be the build-in mixer in Cubase or the digital mixer of your audio interface). Finally you connect the mixer's audio output to the monitors.

Physically: All audio cables from sound generators go to the IN-ports of the audio interface, the monitors are connected to the OUT-ports of the audio interface. The PC is connected to the audio interface via USB or Firewire or PCI (resp. Cardbus or ExpressCard for Notebooks).

If the audio interface can function as a digital mixer (not all audio interfaces support this feature!), you can listen to the sound without running Cubase, otherwise you need to route all signals via Cubase.

For MIDI Recording you would have to connect both, MIDI IN and MIDI OUT, from each keyboard to your PC. All newer keyboards/synths do have an USB midi connection, so you usually do not need a MIDI-Interface and MIDI cables.

For more details refer to the manual of your audio interface.