Behringer USB 2442fx

Hello all.

As I promised in a previous blog I will continue to look at the equipment I use for recording and editing my drum covers.

Today ill be looking at the Behringer USB 2442fx sound mixer. This is the heart and soul of my setup as without this the Mic’s, PC and even the drum kit its self is pretty much useless for recording.

I will at some point be doing a drum tour of my kit and recording setup. Until then pictures of the unit will have to do.

Ive owned this unit for a little over 8 months now. And Ive go to say it’s a good steardy piece of kit. It’s got a decent weight to it and nice and bulky. Ive had only 1 problem and annoyance with it since Ive had it, and that is Channel 3 has stopped working when using the XLR input. Unfortunately I do not have any other equipment to test the other types of inputs on the channel (really should get around to doing that)

The Mixer has 10 channels with XLR inputs (16 in total) which is excellent for recording drums. At any 1 time I utilise 8 of them for recording, but only using around 3-4 for live situations.

The drums that are mic’d up are Base, Snare Tom1, Tom2, Tom3 and Tom4 ( I don’t use floor toms.)

With 2 overheads for cymbals and kit sound. I also have a extra condenser that I can either use for Hi-hats or as a “room mic”. With this in tow I make use of all the available recording channels as previously mentioned line 3 doesn’t accept an input.

I am able to record to the PC by utilising the USB interface that comes with the mixer. This is a brilliant plug and play system with the only thing you may have to do is download the Behringer driver from there website to allow your computer software to interpret the signals correctly.

The only 2 downsides to this is the inability to do single track recording as the USB only allows stereo sound as an export from the main Mix. This means that the Drums need to be EQ’d correctly through the channels on the mixer. I will go into settings and Drum EQ’s on a separate blog as it’s a whole article in itself. (im hoping to get a firewire interface at some point to do single track recordings through the mixer)

The second been the lack of options left open to you when creating the final mix using whatever software you use due to the fact you can’t affect single drums with things like noise gates.

But the mixer does have a built in FX processor with 1000 pre set effects. Like “big hall” or “reverb”. The levels of these effects can be changed for each channel and each sub grouping can have a separate effect on it. These effects in the majority are very good. Very handy to have both in a live and recording situation.

Over all im very happy with the mixer and still getting to grip with all the functions available to use. It has both great qualities for Live and Recording purposes.

I will post a Drums only audio clip on here so you can here the raw sound is like.

Ive added a link to the Mixers spec page so you can take a look for yourself. There is lots of info on the page so should help some of you who are looking for equipment to help you record.

Thanks for reading.