The Song Fight Bulletin Board

Hey Guys and Gals,

I just purchased a Tascam US-1641 USB Audio Interface, and I'm having a little trouble figuring out how to attach my Motif ES Rack to it. The Motif has outputs, but they are 2 1/4 Stereo outs, and my Tascam's inputs only allow 1 input for each channel. Should I just go out of the Left on the Motif and run it mono, or is their a way to run stereo out and somehow get it into the Tascam.

.B

Yes. You plug each side into a different input (1&2, 3&4, 5&6, 7&8 - they have to be adjacent) then in your software record them as a stereo track. What software are you using? Do you have the option to create mono or stereo tracks?

Also, what do you think of the 1641? I'm considering buying on as well.

Ken

I don't know if I understood you correctly, but professional audio interfaces tend to treat stereo channels as two separate mono channels each, so that you can combine them on the software side but you can use them completely separately, too. They are sometimes optically grouped but there isn't really anything that ties them together in hardware. So if the Tascam has mono input jacks and the Motif has stereo output jacks (I wasn't sure from your description if it's two mono outputs or two stereo outputs for separate signals), get yourself a Y cable that splits stereo into two mono parts and see if that works out.
Of course, if the tone generator doesn't actually generate a stereo signal (or doesn't in your situation, or you don't need it) you can just use a single channel and be done with it.

Thanks for the info guys, i just went to Guitar Center and picked some TRS cables up and the pro audio guy explained things to me and you guys basically verified it. I am using Sonar 7 Pro. In that software it gives me the option of recording From inputs 1, 3, 5, 7 & 9 of my audio interface. Also, their are subdirectories of these which lets me choose left, right, or stereo. I'm assuming, if i choose track 1 stereo then i should have 2 TRS's going into inputs 1 and 2 on my interface.

Ken, the interface seems pretty decent so far. I did a little tracking (vox and acoustic) last night and it picked everything up no problem. I still have a lot of fine tuning, latency and whatnot but i should be done with all that tonight. I'll PM you and let you know how it works out.

What jast said. As jast is particularly aware, because I accidentally just sent him a right-channel only track as part of a collaboration. He was gracious enough to covert it to mono himself.

also, the outputs of my motif are mono i believe, because they say R & L/Mono

Yeah, so you really just need two mono cables.

Yup. But the good folks at Guitar Center are about as unknowledgeable about such things as they are knowledgeable about the fact that the TRS cost significantly more than plain old TS. Yay customer service.