Setup help

[Max Arwood]

I have a friend that is sending me tracks to mix. There is a considerable amount of hiss and noise on his tracks. He did one song with 5 background vocals. This is where I really noticed it. After input some compression on tracks,  the noise level was loud.  I have rx so I can fix this, but I know it would be way better to fix in the recording, not after the fact. He has a Rhodes NT mic, Scarlett 18i20., and a mackie 1402 vlz4. He is recording straight into the Scarlett pres.  and using the Mackie to listen for mixing. He is also having trouble hearing the voice and balancing the music in the headphones. Should he split the mic out and monitor with the Mackie? What would be a good way to split the signal? Should he use the Mackie pres? Or is the Scarlett better?
 

What should the gain faders and volume faders be set to on his startup template. I read something the other day that recommended all gain set to -5 or -6 for headroom.  
 

What do you recommend for the recording levels on the Scarlett and cakewalk for main vocals

Thanks!

[Lord Tim]

What kind of noise is it?

I know that the 18i20 is pretty damn quiet, and the NT is a good mic, so it's unlikely coming from those parts of the chain (environmentally, getting noisy audio into the mic is definitely a thing if the gain structure is set up badly, or there's heaps of noise in the room with the mic). 

Sorry, slight side story for context. I was originally tracking on a Mackie 1620 with a Firewire card onboard, and it was pretty decent. The preamps were quiet and did the job until it died and wasn't worth fixing. I replaced that with a TASCAM 16x08 and bought a cheapie Behringer mixer to act as a bit of a front-end to it all, so I could do headphone routing, do monitoring effects, etc. What I ended up doing is basically using the mic preamps of the Behringer and splitting the signal off at the track insert point to go into the TASCAM, so basically not really using any EQ or faders or anything to actually record with but the mic pre was still in the path. Worked fine, but I've since upgraded the TASCAM to a 18i20, which also works great (and better latency too).

The reason I wandered down that side street is to say that nothing in this chain was really giving me much noise at all, and I'd suggest the preamps in my old 1620 are pretty similar to your friend's 1402.

I wonder if he has the gain structure set up in a way where he has the input of the 1402 down super quiet (which is corroborated by him saying he's finding it hard to hear himself) and then compensating by having the 18i20 cranked? That way you'd be also boosting up the small amount of preamp noise in the 1402 so it starts to become a real problem.

The cleanest path would be directly into the 18i20 but that will prevent you from using any onboard routing and headphone sends, etc. on the 1402. But if he wanted to use the 1402, get the gain exactly right at the input gain knob first, and then I'd run a send from one of the Aux channels out to an input on the 18i20. But at every step, watch the gain. You'll ideally want to have the gain as high as possible without clipping from the input gain in, to the Aux send going out, and the gain lower on the 18i20.

You can also do the split input insert thing like I've done with the Behringer but that is quite a bit of screwing around and needs special cables made - I don't recommend it unless it's crucial for how you want to work.

[Max Arwood]

This kind - I mostly hear the hiss. The lows are easy to roll off. This is a single mic source.

[Lord Tim]

Yeah that looks like fairly uniform preamp noise.  I'd almost certainly point to bad gain structure like I mentioned earlier.