Best way to connect my MPC X SE into my complex studio setup

Ok Guys so my studio is slowly growing. And every time I add a new piece of gear I get stuck trying to figure out what is the best way to connect things.

I've created an image showing all my gear and how it's currently hooked up.



As you will notice the 2 pieces of gear NOT hooked up are the Akai MPC X SE and the Mackie 802VLZ4 mixer.

What would be the easiest and best way to connect my MPC X SE into my current setup so that I can:

- Sample vinyl from my turntables / S11 Mixer into the MPC

- Sample audio from all 4 of my Synths into the MPC

- Send and receive MIDI from my synths to the MPC and basically control my synths via midi from the MPC

- Have the main audio output of my MPC connected to my studio monitors so that I can hear everything on the main speakers

Thanks in advance for any help or suggestions!

Without going into enormous detail, because I don't fully understand every piece of gear you've got, what you need is a better mixer, and then drive your speakers from the mixer. The mixer would take signals from everything and Route them as needed. Connect the inputs of the MPC to one of the sub mixes of your new mixer, and then you can control what you are sampling from the mixer. As far as your DJ setup goes, I don't know if you're using that only for sampling or not, but if you're just sampling from it, you should connect directly to the phono preamps on the mpc. It's also not clear what purpose the ADAT serves.

I had a setup like this in the past.

Your Apollo X4 seems to have the analog ins and outs totally unused. Connect the MPC to those. You'll drive yourself crazy trying to manage two mixers (UAD Console and your Mackie) so just ditch the mackie entirely.

You'll have to play around in UAD Console to get the routing to work. I expect you'll have to set up sends to route audio to the MPC. You could also investigate Virtual channel routing.

https://help.uaudio.com/hc/en-us/articl ... in-Console

To be honest though, I hated UAD Console.

For the midi side, this is easy depending on what your midi hub is. Just add in/outs to your MPC to your midi hub. If your hub has routing software (like Auracle for Mio hubs), make sure the MPC is routed to each synth. You could also connect your midi hub via usb directly to your MPC and everything will show up there, but you'll lose midi from ableton or a DAW if you want to use one.

For ease of use, on your synths set each to receive on a different midi channel. On the MPC I'd create a program for each synth with the midi channel already set and then save that program. When you want to use it, just load the program and you're good to go.

You can hook your dj mixer straight to the MPC.

ive got hardware just like you. its not complex.

if you want to keep the mixer you have, invest in a patchbay or thrice. run everything into the patch bays then patch what you need to the inputs that go into the mixer.

if you need more inputs to control. you will have to get a mixer with more inputs. ive got a presonus studio live 64s (64 channels) with a 32r (32 inputs) in stagebox mode to capture all my hardware inputs.

Basically the ASP ADAT PREAMP is just to give me more inputs for my Apollo X4. So that I can plug in all my synths, DJ gear, Mics, etc and have everything run into ableton.

Im thinking I might just use the MPC as a standalone, and just run cables from my DJ Mixer - MPC and from whatever Synth I wanna use direct into the MPC.

Might be a bit of a pain to have to unplug stuff from time to time. But just seems easiest.

With the MIO XL you can plug the UBS into the MPC and Ethernet into the computer and get the best of both worlds. Or even the other way around but I haven't tried that.

Here is what it looks like when plugged into the MPC:
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