Daisy-Chaining and Pro Tools

[ajcarr]

Yo,

So I just bought several midi cables to daisy-chain my synthesizers together and use them with Pro Tools. I use Pro Tools 8, an M Box 2, on a PC with Windows 7. Anyway, it's been working great. I have two MIDI tracks with MIDI data triggering two of my synths. Daisy-chaining saves a lot of time because I can have two synths playing their separate patches at the same time. Before I had to have the MIDI data play an individual synthesizer and bounce that to audio before I could hook up another synthesizer. So, in sum, daisy-chaining is awesome.

Here comes my question. My M Box 2 only has two audio inputs, so I can only use daisy-chaining to play two synths at the same time. I have four synthesizers, and if I can figure out a way to use MIDI to trigger each one on four separate MIDI tracks, than I can perform my compositions live instead of being a recluse synthesist. I could really turn my life around. So I need a digital mixer or control surface, I guess. But I don't really have any money, and don't want to spend more than 200 dollars. So how can I turn two audio inputs into four audio inputs without spending a lot of money?

Thanks in advance for replies,
Andrew

[promixr]

The problem is with an external mixer (a control surface would not help you) is that audio from multiple synthesizers will end up getting mixed in Pro Tools. So while your MIDI parts will be on separate tracks in Pro Tools, the audio data will be mixed. You really need an audio interface with more inputs if you want each synthesizers audio to be recorded on it's own separate track. And $200 is not really enough to get you there. There are audio interfaces that will help you for about that much, but you'd need to upgrade to Pro Tools 9.

The other thing you can do is just make multiple passes. once you are satisfied with the MIDI parts, you record each synth in one at a time. This would involve a lot of cable switching, but at least you could achieve the result you are looking for ...