Using a Patchbay
Section outline
-
-
To record the output from anything in a studio (be that a microphone, synthesiser, or hardware audio effect) in your DAW, you need to connect that thing to an input channel on an audio interface and set the audio channel in your DAW to record from that input.
Most of the equipment in our studios is already connected (i.e. “normalled”, more on this below) to an input channel on the audio interface; in most cases, you need only check the channel number indicated on the device with a sticker. However, sometimes something isn’t connected, or it isn’t connected in the way that you want it to be, or you’re just not entirely sure whether something is connected. In these instances, you’ll need to use the patch bay to make (or confirm) the connections that you want.
To do this, in brief,
- Find on the top row of a patch bay the thing from which you want to receive audio.
- Find on the bottom row of a patch bay the thing to which you want to send audio.
- Make a connection between those two points with a patch cable.
In detail:
What is a patch bay? Why use one?
A patch bay is a device that we use to simplify the process of making connections between audio equipment in the studio. It can look intimidating, but it’s just a big rack-mounted thing with lots of small, densely arranged connections sockets. Each of these sockets is connected to either the input or the output of a piece of audio gear. Therefore, if we want to send audio from one thing to another, we can just connect a standardised cable from one point on the patch bay to another. This is much easier than having to get up and reach around something to plug in an XLR cable to the output of one piece of gear, only to walk to the other side of the room and discover that the input of the next piece of gear only accepts TRS jacks…
"Normalled"?
There are many ways to use a patch bay, but a common convention (and the one that we follow in all of the studios) is to connect all of the outputs of the studio equipment to the top row, and all of the inputs to the bottom row. This helps to ensure that if we ever want to make a connection between two things, we know to look for the output of the source on the top row, and the input of the destination on the bottom row. No extra labelling of ins and outs needed.
To support this convention, many patch bays are “normalled,” which means that each connection point on the top row of the unit is internally connected to the one directly beneath it (see the green arrows in the image above). This means that even without any patch cables connected, i.e. with all of the sockets empty like in the image above, the stuff on the top row is connected to the stuff on the bottom row.
How to “read” a patch bay (and a little day dream about what that might look like)
With this knowledge, we can “read” a patch bay to figure out how everything in a studio is connected by tracing the paths of outputs to inputs, and comparing the labels on the patch bay to the equipment that we can see in the room around us. In the above image, for example, we can see in the top left that the output of the first tie line (a wall-mounted connection point) in the control room (“CR Tie Lines”) is normalled (connected by default) to Mic Input 1 on something called “API Box.” If this was confusing to us, we could just look around the room for a panel labelled Control Room tie lines or something similar, and for something that might be called “API Box”...:
“...Aha, there’s a panel on the wall over there with some numbered XLR sockets. It says “Control Room” on the top, so XLR socket 1 on that is probably CR TieLine 1. And the big mixing console in the middle of the room says “api” on it, so that’s probably the “API Box.” So if I plug a mic into that XLR socket, it’ll be connected to the API Box. Great, but now I need to connect the API Box to the audio interface so I can actually record it. Just need to find the outputs of the Box...here they are in the top right! “API Box Direct Output.” They’re sitting above RME UFX III Line Inputs, which is the audio interface. Okay, so, a mig plugged into CR Tie Line 1 is normalled to API Box Mic input 1, and the output of API Box 1 is normalled to the input of UFX III 1, so in my DAW I create an audio channel with Input 01...”
...or something like that. It can be helpful to follow the signal flow step by step like this if something isn’t working how you expect. It will be tricky the first few times, but it will soon become natural with practice.