Headphone mix help

[briaboy]

Thanks.

Yes, there's something not quite right about my Pro Tools/Apollo routing. When I playback the session, I hear all the channels coming through the headphone amp despite the send faders being at zero. When I solo the Mixbus or the vocalist's headphone channel, they sound identical (send faders stay silent until I raise them) from both the Apollo and the headphone amp. I can't work out how to "separate" them...!

[Darryl Ramm]

You have to look in the Apollo console and see what is going on there. Same approach there... make radical changes to see what happens. Mute/pull down fader levels etc. in the console. Don't be shy about using (a loud) signal gen in Pro Tools and follow that in the DAW returns and use the the console meters to see what is going on.

Going back to my early posts... you are essentially using an outboard hardware mixer to send a mix to the vocalist headphones as well as send monitor out to your main monitors and you are also recording through the mixer as well, it's very easy to get stuff mixed up there.

If you are not comfortable with the Apollo Console my suggestion for all hardware mixers is to play with them first with no DAW running and start by playing with creating say a monitoring mic in the Console that only goes to a pair of headphones. Learn the very basics of mixer before adding in a DAW. This is often a case of slowing down to go fast. Take time to just play with stuff, follow along tutorials etc to learn the Console mixer before coming back to your current problem. The Console is a really nice feature of Apollo interfaces so worth really getting good at even if you don't plan on using it much... you want to be able to solve any problems that come up because of the Console and you never know when talent might want a lower-latency monitoring mix.