Connecting H7600 to SwitchBlade and Digital Mixer

[J20056]

Italo,

My H7600 is arriving this afternoon, so I wanted to get your advice as far a connecting it to my studio. Essentially, I plan to use it for two purposes:
1. My guitar rack, which consists of Mesa TriAxis and 20/20 pre and power amps, and a Vox AC15TBX. I also have some vintage pedals. All the guitar units are connected to a SwitchBlade GL with 16 analog balanced in/out.
2. My digital mixer, a Tascam DM4800, which has 2 AES/EBU and 2 SPDIF digital in/out in addition to a bunch of analog i/o.

As far as #1, I was simply planning to connect the H7600 via stereo analog I/O balanced into the SwitchBlade, then set the H7600 to 100% wet and control the wet/dry ratio by simply controlling the signal level into the H7600 from the SwitchBlade, which the SwitchBlade can do, via MIDI foot control, which is great. For presets where I want the full H7600 wet and no direct, I would set the dry (amp direct) level on the SwitchBlade to 0.
So the question here is really whether you think it is better to control dry/wet mix outside the H7600 or inside? I think as far as signal ratio and so on, it would be better outside, to preserve the dry amp tube tone (although I assume the Tide doesn't damage itt hat much at all) but aren't there a lot of presets where the dry/wet mix is "inside" the Tide algorithm and the effect would not sound good by doing the wet/dry mix "outside"? Also, and more importantly, would my approach require that I change a lot of the H7600 presets to set the dry signal to zero "inside" the algorithm?

As far as #2, I was planning to connect the H7600 to my Tascam mixer via AES/EBU, and use the Tascam as a master clock. I currently run it at 44.1Khz. Any issues with this approach? Ultimately, I want to use the H7600 as a ProTools plugin, and was planning to further connect it to ProTools via ADAT light pipe, which is how my Digi 002 Rack is connected to my mixer. Do you see any issues there, or is there a better way to do that? the Digi 002R has either ADAT as digital I/O (8 channels), or SPDIF via RCA.

Thanks for letting me know your thoughts.

PH

[IDeangelis]

 Hi PH

the way you will control wet/dry in your rig depends on how it is configured and will be based on your experience/preferences. So expect to do some of the usual test & tweaking as any new unit requires. Most H7600 presets don't have dry sound control in the algorithms. Those who have it may require you re_store the preset w/a setting that will work for your choosen configuration.

In general I like to control dry/wet outside of FX processors, so having a Switchblade it'll be easy for you.

I don't see any problem in using the H7600 slaved to the Tascam mixer. 

The H7600 has no ADAT ports. You'll have to use S/Pdif or AES-EBU. Both will work fine, even though S/Pdif is not professionally recommended for 96KHz sampling rates and AES-EBU should be the choice. At 44.1KHz both will be ok.

all the best

I 

[J20056]

Got everyhting working on Saturday after I received it. I am using Apogee AES/EBU cables, no problem there. I change my entire studio from 44.1k sampling to 48k as well.
I am able to control parameters via a pair of Behringer FCB1010 MIDI pedal boards that I use, but I have to admit that the section in the manual that describes Midi Groups is not totally clear.
Is it fair to assume that for each preset, the MIDI control of each parameter might have a different number, i.e. #71 for the "width" of a given preset, but #36 for say the range of another parameter in a different preset?
is there a way that I could have say 3 CC #'s that would always control say the top 3 parameters of whatever is displayed, so at least that would always work, although it might not give me control to some of the params that I might otherwise want?
Thanks

[IDeangelis]

MIDI Groups were implemented as a studio control feature and have a system global setup, not a preset one. Using a desktop MIDI  faders device one could have the 8 displayed parameters being controlled by a number of MIDI CCs being in a natural numeric sequence.

The choice then is selection of the first CC# and the other 7 will follow the subsequent numbers (for example if you chose CC #1 you'll have 1/2/3/4/5/6/7/8 working as a group of 8).

To control parameters in performance you have two ways:

-edit the algorithm in Vsig and add CC control inside the structure, for those parameters you want to control.

-highlight the parameter you want to control, then press and hold the SELECT key to call the patching screen. Here you can assign any controller to the parameter and set scaling and more. Then press *done*. repeat this for every parameter then you must store the preset to retain these assignment or they'll get lost when you load another preset.

 best regards

I 

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