Tascam 12 and force.

Hi,

Am I right to say most of the tascam model 12 functionality will be useless once I hook it up to the force with usb? As I understand it will bypass all eq settings and so. Sorry for asking but all info I find about this is from 4 years ago.

I don't think that this is correct. Some things get bypassed, but it all depends upon how you intend to use it. Are you passing the audio elsewhere and using it as a submixer? Or what was the workflow that you had in mind?

Essentially I would like to use it as the main hub where I send my force channels over usb and have some outboard gear going in to the force but it seems that not possible. I wouldn’t mind recording te final result on to the tascam itself btw. I never did anything with audio over usb and am definitely a noob in that department.

What you want is a Behringer U-phoria UMC 1820.

It does everything that you just described, and does it well, with full Force compabitility - OK, except for the recording, but there are other solutions for that.

The Behringer UMC 1820 is great for a lot of things and costs almost nothing. But keep in mind that it does not have any internal signal processing at all. No effects, no EQ, no routing matrix to create monitor mixes, not really even a mixer where you could adjust channel balance, there's only input gain. All channels go directly to the Force's inputs, and your outputs from Force will go straight to the UMC 1820's outputs. The only volume adjustment you have on the UMC 1820 is master output volume and headphones/monitoring master volume. There is no per-channel OUTPUT VOLUME adjustment of any kind on the UMC 1820. For many use-cases this is actually exactly what you want anyway.

If you want to do compression/EQ/FX processing, per-channel mixing, aux buses or monitor mixes and routing, OUTSIDE and INDEPENDENTLY of your Force, then the UMC 1820 alone will not be an ideal solution. The Tascam model 12 might be better - I don't have one, so I can't tell. Your biggest problem right now is that you don't know what you want.

Buy both, figure out how they work and what you actually want to do, and then return the one you don't want?

You can use the UMC 1820 to do a lot of routing to other outboard gear. You can use the Force to direct the various signals at the various outputs, and then use the line outs to hit the outboard gear, so that seems to be compatible with the goal at hand.

No you can have USB multitrack going into m12 and use the whole channel strips including EQ. However if you record from USB multitrack to SD card individual tracks then yes the SD recording tap is before the EQ and fader. Way around this is to record master output.

More flexibility than I remembered. From Sound on Sound:

“Model 12: on each channel, you can choose via the Menu button and Multi Jog wheel to record the signal pre the compressor (ie. directly after the preamp, HPF and, on channels 1 and 2, the insert point), post the compressor but before the EQ, or post both the compressor and EQ. It’s a vast improvement, since the new routing options make possible so many different workflows.”