Hi, I’m a street musician and I’m looking for a solution to mix my acoustic guitar and my vocals in real time with just a notebook and a 2-channel ASIO card (Steinberg UR22).
I want Waves plugins to run on both channels and on the master. Can this be done with Soundgrid? Or what do you recommend? Best wishes
1 Like
I can’t comment on Soundgrid, as I don’t have it… but you should be able to do this with no problem at all using just your laptop and audio interface, and any decent DAW.
For realtime use like this I would stick with plugins that have zero latency. Scheps Omni Channel is a particularly good one, and it offers all the basic processing you would need. (Filter/EQ/Expander-Gate/Compression… and more.)
To do this you would set up two tracks in your DAW, one for vocals and one for your guitar. Use Scheps Omni Channel to get the sound you’re going for.
You probably want to set up a couple of auxiliary sends with reverb & delay. Again, stick with zero latency plugins for this task. (Most reverbs and delays are zero latency, but not all! The Magma Springs and at least one of the Abbey Road reverbs adds a wee bit of latency.)
Lastly, you could use a compressor on your master bus to squeeze your vocals and guitar together, or to engage if there are any loud peaks.
If you use Scheps Omni Channel, it also includes a limiter. It’s not a limiter you want to hit super hard, but it will indeed prevent overages (and can be used in conjunction with the compressor to tame the initial transient of a sharp hit, but that’s a whole other conversation. Very powerful tool, SOC.)
Also, Scheps Omni Channel is pretty low in terms of CPU usage so you should be able to do all of this on your laptop. (I’ve easily run over a hundred instances before, for a larger project.)
1 Like