Performance mixers

I’ve been doing live PA electronic music sets for a while now. It seems like I pull together a pretty random collection of gear every time. One thing that you always need is a mixer though.

Requirements vary. Sometimes I need a mic input, sometimes phantom power. Sometimes a bunch of mono inputs from synths. Sometimes effects. Sometimes sends.

I even performed with a Mackie 1604 in the past. What a fun time. It sucks to lug something like that around but it has 6 aux sends and you can have a lot of stereo FX patched in. I used to have 2 Line 6 multi-fx units patched in with one dedicated for delay. The Line 6 boxes have the patches from the amazing delay modeler DL4.

Anyway I used to have this idea for a tiny digital mixing console that had 16 or even 24 inputs via 3.5mm trs connectors. I bought some USB interfaces that supported 24 channels using TDM (https://www.minidsp.com/products/usb-audio-interface/usbstreamer)

Once we have all of these inputs what do we do? We need a way to assign them in any configuration of inputs/outputs/aux sends.

Well Teenage Engineering beat me to the punch on this concept with the TX-6 https://teenage.engineering/store/tx-6

I’m also seeing some other interesting products like the 1010 BlueBox https://1010music.com/product/bluebox

I think I might start prototyping again. I think there needs to be a worthy successor to the Octatrack that is more of a digital mixer format with more inputs. Maybe some company will do this before I can, but at least I’m going to be developing the idea.