Is There An Easy Way To Record Effects in Vocal Mix with DP-24SD?

[J Harrison]

For the last 10 years I have been "piping in" (the old "analog" way) songs without vocals and basically recording them onto track 1 of my old DP-01 8-track digital recorder and merely recording my vocals on the remaining six tracks. This has resulted in a lot of extra noise and unnecessary time to record (in real time) everything as a "song."

When the buttons to arm tracks 1-4 on the DP-o1 finally seized working I bought interfaces from Focusrite, TC Helicon and Steinberg, thinking I could jump into recording using Pro Tools or Cubase. After the last two months of frustration and problems with latency and software conflicts, I decided to go "back in time" to a stand-alone recorder. I anxiously bought a DP24-SD and formatted a 32G card, placed a number of instrumentals on it and prepared to record my own vocals on it. Ha!

I got as far as a few videos by Mr. Tipping that didn't really touch on vocal recording and had a lot of flow charts (and I apologize if there's something I missed, PT), and read only a vague paragraph or two in TASCAM's manual about "dynamic effects" as well as effects overall.

My problem: I'm unable to hear any effects (except for "exciter," "de-esser" and "compressor") in my vocal mix. All I want is a little reverb and possibly some chorus. (The DP-01 had an array - possibly 100 - of mixes that did everything from megaphone to robot to "echoplex", so I thought that this would be so much more advanced!)

What am I doing wrong? (Or, as I would say to my ex-wife: Was it something I said - or didn't say?) Do I need to add to (something that should be complete as it is) and purchase an effects processor, or - what? Help!

 

[Kevin Bailey]

There are some steps to send and return your reverb. I would try these steps.

When you are in playback, press the EFFECTS button and select reverb. Press on the "Select" button for your track to let the system know which track you want to activate for this reverb (your track # should show in the upper right of the screen).

Press the ON (f4) button to activate the reverb. Now, on the bottom right is a box called return. Use the arrow buttons to select that box, and set that too 100 by using the jog wheel. (That is what sends the effect back into your channel).

Now, press on the MIX button. (Your Track # should still be showing on the upper right side of the screen)

• Using the curser buttons, go to the Aux send 1 button. (it will say either OFF, PRE, or POST) Use the jog wheel to set this to post, then rotate the "AUX send 1" knob (green) to somewhere around 70. (this is sending your signal to the reverb).
• On the "Master send 1" knob (white), just to the right of the previous knob, turn that up and you should start to hear the reverb on that track.

In a nutshell this is the process. You are turning on the reverb for that track, then telling the reverb to send a 100% wet signal back. Next you are telling your track how much signal to contribute to the reverb through the aux send #1. Next you are sending the global signal to the reverb by the "Master send 1" knob.

I hope I explained it correctly.