Congrats on your purchase and welcome to the forum. If you are of the persuasion, Merry Christmas. Otherwise, Happy Holidays. How cool would it be to find a 3200 under the tree. Or stuffed into a huge stocking.
Happy to extend some knowledge.
To answer your question, yes, that will work just fine. A better option assigns the Cubase (or any Daw) outputs to DM CH1-32's INP RTNs (or 1-16 if you just want to mix stems from Cubase). You can set your FW card to send 32channels from the 3200 To Cubase and return 32 channels From Cubase, if you want to. Assigning the returns from Cubase into channels 1-32 (using something called Input Return -or INP RTN) allows you to switch into a "Mixing" mode while not taking up a bunch of extra other inputs that you may want for other things.
Summery first.
One of the main problems people have with the basic routing is that they forget to assign their input channels to the STEREO Buss, and the Stereo buss to the monitors. Remember that with a digital board, any input can be assigned to any output, which can be a little crazy. Also, it is this person's opinion that using a feature called INPUT BYPASS is the way to go as far as getting your DM channels into your DAW without any printed effect or fader's influence. "Input Bypass" is a lot like "Direct Out", PFL, would be on an analog board, and would be a preferred way to go to tape. This way, you know that your gain structure is correct, all effects would happen after the dry signal gets recorded, and any effects that you would like to use for your studio monitoring also don't get printed. I'll show you how to route your inputs this way. Hopefully it will make sense.
BTW, in DM speak, Channel Direct out, another mode of tracking, actually refers to the channels' output after the fader and effects. Although this way of tracking can certainly be useful for certain things, I will use the Input Bypass method here. You should experiment with the Channel Direct method later.
Lets start with Channel 1.
You plug a microphone or a line in to channel 1.
If you are using a mic, 48v phantom power is available in groups of 4, for your condenser microphones. Dynamic mics are unaffected by phantom power, so feel free to put dynamics with condensers within the same phantom power group. Just be careful with ribbon mics.
Now, press ALT (bottom right of your keypad--get to know this key...It's important!) so that it lights up. Now press ROUTING (Number 6 on the keypad)
This brings you to the routing pages on your display. Below the screen are four buttons and four knobs. Left to right are encoder knobs called PODS 1 -4 and buttons 1-4. Press button 1, to bring up the INPUT page of your ROUTING Screen. Using the arrow keys below your keypad, move the cursor to the top left corner. This will put you on Channel 1. If you don't see channel 1, then use POD 3 to move that cursor to CH 1-16 under LAYER SELECT. Now back at CH 1, just to the right of your cursor, you should see [INP], and below that is [RTN].
Think of "INP" as a physical input into the board, such as a mic or a line in. You actually can assign anything here, not just a mic or a line in. You could assign the internal effects returns here, your digital inputs here, your assign returns, or any input from an external SLOT Card, such as the IF-DM/AN, etc. But, for now, lets just use M/L 1.
In fact, lets get tricky here, and use the Batch assignments, because you probably want CHs 1-16 inputs to be your mic/line 1-16 ins and your SLOT1 (FW Card) returns assigned to the RTN portion of each channel. Using your arrow keys, move the cursor to the lager box above the OUPUT SLOT Tab, and use the jog wheel until that box shows "CH 1-CH 8". Now move your cursor to select the top long dashed line on the bottom of the screen, just to the left of "INP" at the bottom. Now, use POD 4 to select M/L in the SOURCE SELECT Box. With the long dashed line highlighted, use your jog wheel to bring up M/L 1-8. It will be flashing. Now hit ENTER next to the jog wheel. Now do the exact same thing for Channels 9-16.
So now we have M/L1-16 assigned to 1-16 INPs. But, while we are here, lets assign your FW card returns to the same channels, but to the RTNs. To do that, select CH 1-CH8 again in the large box but this time, go to the bottom dashed line, next to RTN and highlight that. Now turn POD 4 until you have SLOT1 highlighted. With the bottom dashed line still highlighted, turn your jog wheel until you see "SLOT1 1-8" flashing. Now hit ENTER. Do the same for CH 9-CH 16.
So now all of your INPs and RTNs for CHs 1-16 are assigned. Now lets send them out of the board.
Here we will use the OUTPUT SLOT Tab and the INPUT BYPASS method mentioned earlier.
So hit button 3 to bring up the OUPUT SLOT page on your display. (we are still in the routing page BTW). If you are familiar with Capt'n Dan's famous Routing Zen post on this forum, here is where you will apply it.
Start at the right side of the screen. Use POD 4 to move the curser to M/L under INPUT BYPASS. Now use POD3 to select SLOT1 Trk 1-8 (Your FW Card). Using your arrow keys, move the curser down to BATCH SETUP. Turn your Jog Wheel until you see M/L1 - M/L8 flashing here. Now hit enter. Do the same for 9-16.
So now you have M/L 1-6 assigned to your FW Card outputs, using INPUT BYPASS. For SLOT1 17-32, you can assign anything you want, like Digital ins 1 and 2 or the effects returns, or your ADAT/TDIF inputs etc. Anything coming into the board can go out of your SLOT1 FW Card. But, you still can't hear anything coming out of your speakers. Let's change that.
On the the board at channel 1, above the fader, there are three buttons. SEL, SOLO, and MUTE. Press SEL. You now have channel 1 selected, to do some stuff with. We want to assign it to the STEREO Buss, so we can hear it. With the SEL lit up green, look for the STEREO Button near the top left of your display, just to the right of the grey area full of buttons. Press STEREO until that lights up. That assigns the selected channel to the STEREO buss. Make sure you do this for all of your input channels. But now we have to assign the STEREO buss to go out into your CR and headphone outputs. On the far right of the board, is the main output meter. Just to the right of that are four buttons...STEREO, SEL 1 (AUX1-2), SEL 2 (D-IN 1), and SEL 3 (2TR IN). Select STEREO. Now the stereo buss is being sent out the CR monitors and your headphone outputs. The best way to use this is to set your main STEREO fader to Unity (0), Ch1 to unity, and adjust the gain knob at the top of channel 1 until you have a good level. Now bring up the volume on your CR and you should hear your mic or line level device coming out of your monitors.
After all this is done, lets assign one more thing. Lets assign SLOT1 CH1 and SLOT1 CH2 to DM Ch33 and 34 on your board. I realize that it is already assigned to DM Chs 1 and 2, but we would use that for individual track mixing from Cusbase, not everyday computer output listening. you can have multiple things assigned to different channels, so this works well. I wanted to do this because you will often want to hear whatever is coming from your windows computer as well as the Cubase stereo buss, all of which will normally be assigned to SLOT1-1 and SLOT1-2. This way, you wont have to keep swapping INP and RTN on the first 2 channels. Just leave these two channels at unity all the time when you want to use them.
All for now. Effects assignments over AUX busses coming next.
