RECORDING IN MULTITRACK, CHANNEL ROUTING ETC (a guide for dummies)

Hello and welcome to this week's article!
Today we're going to talk about Multitrack, recording, and this article links to our Drum Recording article, which I invite you to check out because it's quite complete.

The topic of the day is "how do we get the sound of multiple microphones into our Digital audio workstation, in an ordinate way?".
First off we're going to need a multichannel audio interface or a mixer that brings the individual tracks into separeted tracks to the Daw; usually audio interfaces features 2 to 8 ins, but they can be expanded via ADAT devices, for example we could use a Behringer Ada 8000, which is a  8 channel interface that does not connect directly into the computer via usb, but it's used to expand the inputs of another interface, so that for example we could obtain the 8 channels of our interface + the 8 of the adat, for a total of 16 preamplified mic inputs.

Now it's important to mark all jacks with a number, in order to find them more easily once we are creating our project: Jack 1 into channel 1, Jack 2 into channel 2 and so on, and if we have configurated the interface drivers properly, we should find the right channel already routed to the corresponding track of the Daw.

Once everything is set it's important to rename each track in the Daw project to make order: every channel must have the name of the instrument that is tracking (eg. Snare, Kick, Tom...) then we can proceed to the project preparation phase. 

One last thought: avoid to have the jacks tangled together as in the picture above, the studio must be as clean and ordered as possible to be efficient, and if we have the mixing room separated from the tracking room (something that not happens often when home recording, but that usually small studios have), all jacks should be brought from one room to the other though a channel box, which is a box with a serie of microphone inputs that takes them and unites them all into one single cord that ends with all separated connectors (for example, 24 inputs and 24 outputs), and it is used to tidy up and help bringing the jacks from one room to another, instead of sending for example 24 separated cannon - cannon jacks.

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