Help with large studio routing

    I might have posted this some time ago. But maybe you can help me come up with a better workflow. I KNOW other larger studios deal with this.


    My studio has 3 rooms, plus 2 iso booths with pre-miced 4x12s. Guys will bring heads in, we patch them to a cab. The mics are hardwired to preamps, and the preamps feed a Pro Tools HD rig.


    My dilemma is this: When we find a tone we dig, there's no good way to Profile the amp@ I don't use a console. Sometimes, a guitar player will play a DI signal in the control room, and we feed the amps/cabs with reamp boxes in the far rooms. If they have a ton of pedals, they stand in the far room near the iso booths and plug straight into the amps (I always tap somewhere though, for a DI feed).


    If I want to A/B the sound of the Profile being taken, vs the mic feed, its a bit of a nightmare. Much of the time, I have guitar player and Kemper in control room. The guitar player plugs into the Kemper. DI out feeds a preamp into Pro Tools track 1. Main Kemper out feeds track 2. Amp mic is track 3. I feed the Pro Tools DI track to the far room amp heads. I tap off the output of the track 3, amp mic and run it into the Kemper return. All this is running thru the Pro Tools mix engine, for better or worse. Don't know how else to practically do it. We Profile thru the Pro Tools mixer, not ideal.


    The only other way is to drag the Kemper into the far room and monitor in headphones, and do all the mic taps and such without going thru Pro Tools as much. BUT monitoring thru headphones does not help much. I need to hear how its coming thru the monitors.


    My goal is to get the sound clients hear and approve coming thru my monitors, to get that inside the Kemper so they don't need to bring their amps back for the same sound again. I know its possible. I'm just hoping for a simpler method that doesn't take as much time/routing to set up. Always seems like something doesn't quite work at the end of a session when everyone's tired.


    Am I making sense here? I imagine larger studios wish to/actually do Profile from the control room. And the amps are probably far away. So how do YOU/THEY do it?

    Well, to make your routing as flexible as possible you need a mixer and one or two patch bays. I still use my old Yamaha 01v96 mixer. The routing possiblities are nearly endless here.


    I have all amps in my control room, and my cabs and mics in the recording room. I also have a cab in my control room that i only use from time to time in order to crosscheck how the amp sounds in the room. All Amp speaker outs are connected to a patch bay. On the other side the patch bay is connected to the speaker cables that run into the recording room, feeding the cabs. So you can simply patch amps to different cabs on the patch bay. I also habe some DI boxes connected to it so you can take DI profiles if necessary.


    In the recording room all the mics run into a multicore that runs back into the control room, into the digital mixer inputs. Configuring the mixer with additional outputs as aux sends, you can create individual mixes for different outputs. Connecting one aux send with the KPA return you have an own mix for the profiling. Now you just need to monitor the KPA master out on your mixer to do the profiling.


    Of course there is a lot of other stuff connected, like the headphones amp in the recording room, that gets another two individual mixes or the whole audiointerface that is connected via ADAT cables. SPDIF is used for recording and reamping with the KPA.

    Thanks for the replies so far. As far as the mixer. I have thought about it. For me I'm just trying to keep the signal path as clean as possible. Right now I have cab mics running straight into an xlr bay which hard patches into API or focusrite pres. I can't afford a mega quality mixer and would like to use the pews I have as the profiling source.


    On a phone between sessions. Will study both your answers better in a little bit. M


    Interesting about the speaker patch bay. I kinda did this. My ISO booths contain 4X12s. Each cab has 4 diff speakers. Each speaker has a 57 and condenser. There is a bay outside the booths and a wall of amp heads. There are banana plugs you can patch any head into any combination of speakers depending impedance