Tascam Model 12 All-in-One 12-track Digital Multitrack Mixing and Recording Studio, Mixer, USB Audio Interface and DAW Controller

Needs reading the manual, a few times.If you want to make multi-track recordings then this will do it. If you want an interface for a DAW, it does that too, and if you prefer Bluetooth, it does that also.An excellent machine, the 12 channel is the little brother of the 16, and 24 channel.Common sense applied to manual directions is all that is necessary to operate what appears to be quite complex at first. There are some complaints about USB hookup. Well they tell us not to use a long cable! In fact in the box there is a short one, 1 meter long, in fact. If that is not a hint, I do not know what is. Whichever, in my case hooking up directly to the Motherboard USB 2.0 sockets worked as the manual describes. However I will add, I tried to connect to a USB 3.0 upgrade card. That did not work.So yes! read the manual.The clean sound, silence if you prefer, of the powered device over headphone, or monitor, deserves the most marks. Well done Tascam. The Midi In and Out, a great asset! The Sub Out, alternative route to hookup monitors with 1/4 inch TRS cables, very handy, and useful for a host of other configurations.Love the dual inputs 1 - 10, either XLR, or 1/4 inch TRS.All in all, it leaves my old device, Fostex - X26 in the dust! Super value added with the PC hookup options, even if, at this time, I have no need of it.Only thing I would change is the Phantom Power option, currently global on this model, it might work better if managed by S/W to each channel. IOW turn it off for regular hookups.Before you power a new unit make sure the Phantom Power, top rhs of the board, is off! Else you may fry an expensive Mic which does not need the 48 Volts.Tips, gotten from the Tascam Forum, 1. on each channel the Sub Button arms the Headphones bus, IOW you can barely hear stuff without doing that, and do turn the volume, gain, down before tweaking their controls, middle rhs. 2 you do not need to press the Play button as well as the Record button when making a track. Yes in the old days of Tape it was necessary to, but on the Digital unit, it is not!To make a new track, create a song - RTM for more. Hookup your input - Mic or whatever. Use the Meter to set the level/s. Punch both record buttons, first the track one, then the main. When done punch the stop button. To hear what you did, move the Mode from Live to MTR, and press Play. To dub another track alongside, simply arm the next channel with an input, Mode live, set its levels. Then press it's record button, and when ready press the main record button. It is NOT necessary to press the record on the previous channel! Because if you do with no input it will erase track 1. Just leave it on play, make sure the volume slider is up so you can hear the Mode MTR replay as you dub the new track alongside.Effects work ONLY if you disarm all the Solo buttons, and the wee red light LHS of the screen is off. If it is on the Effects do not work. Need increasing the Aux 2 orange button on your chosen channel. Needs pressing the Select button in the control panel - mid rhs . This brings up the FX menu on the main screen. In it be sure to turn on the effect by rotating the Jog wheel to on - Manual Pages 33 / 34. Now press the Main buttons. I found it was necessary to do that both on my channels and on the FX slider. Too, that simply controls how much effect is sent to your Main bus, i.e. the one we chose to carry it. IOW the volume of the effect is still controlled by the Main slider, so maxing up the FX one does not increase the output.A bit sloppy but will save some searching.My headphone first click-less encounter with the Model 12 is now remedied with a full clicking replacement. Thanks Amazon!

This is not only a solid mixer with physical EQ controls on every channel and nice sliders, but a digital multi-track recorder, a multi-channel USB audio interface, a remote DAW controller to keep the physical mixing feel if/when audio moves into the computer, and it has MIDI in/out. The MIDI ports can act as a USB to MIDI interface from the computer, but they can also be used to send clock and transport signals to MIDI gear.I work a lot with groove boxes and other sequencer-heavy units, from Volcas to Elektron boxes. Many of the smaller / less expensive groove boxes only have stereo output. Using the MIDI feature on the Model 12 (which is not present on the slightly older/larger Model 16 and 24), I can have my device(s) start playing immediately when I hit the record button. This makes it easy, using track-muting features on the groove boxes, to separately record synth, drums, and kick sequences into separate tracks on the Model 12. I don't have to try to manually hit 'play' at just the right time, or try to fix the timing later in a DAW.The MIDI sync alone was a deciding factor in choosing the Model 12 over the similarly spec'd Zoom Livetrak 12. I also chose this over the Zoom for the larger presence of dedicated EQ buttons on each channel, which comes at the cost of size - the Model 12 takes up some valuable real-estate in my home studio. Much bigger than the Behringer 1202 very-basic mixer I was replacing. The size is also worth it for the ability to use the Model 12 as a remote DAW controller for Logic. Although I must admit - I often find myself doing my mixing right within the Model 12's multi-track recorder itself.I still feel more comfortable recording to tape or to simple stereo programs on my computer, to later integrate into Logic X. The Model 12 suits me nicely here with that built-in multi-track recorder. It makes it easy to capture multi-track recordings of my electronic gear without having to set things up in Logic on my aging Mac mini. I can just record, and pull it together later. The Model 12 provides many options for that 'later'. It is easy to produce stereo mixes inside the Model 12 and just load those files on the computer, and the separate track recordings are there too. There are multiple options for how to record onto those tracks. The default being to record the raw post-gain / pre-compressor sound, allowing you to shape sound later. But there are options to record post-compressor and even post-eq on individual tracks if desired. You can do in-mixer bounces and move audio between tracks. Overall, really solid.I've been using it for about a month now. The build quality is really solid. I like that it's a mixer first - it's probably the best mixer I've had in 20 years. After years of low-cost Behringers (which were fine, they just suited a different need for me than what I need now), it feels good to have a really solid mixer again with good EQs, etc, all immediately usable. It has two mono AUX busses and a submix bus, with separate outputs.The fact that this mixer can also pull duties for multi-track recording, multi-channel USB audio, DAW control, and MIDI clock/transport master, just make it a very very solid add to a small home studio - especially as those latter two options are not available on the larger Model-16 and 24.For downsides - for me, I don't really need 8 channels of XLR inputs with phantom power. I would prefer maybe only two such inputs/channels, and have the rest be stereo-pair capable inputs. In the same space, that would turn this box into a 14 channel mixer and would be perfect for my collection of instruments. I am surprised that with the popularity of electronic music hardware over the past decade that there aren't more mixers geared to this market. The MIDI ports on the Model 12 are a nice feature for such users - I love that synchronized 'hit record, and all the machines start running' feature. But more stereo tracks and less XLR/mono tracks would be even better.

I’m using this to record my drums to Logic Pro on an iPad.This mixer is so ugly, with it’s fake wood side panels, it’s retro chick. But you don’t buy this for the looks but for the functionality.After a year, I still haven’t figured out everything this mixer can do. There are multitudes of routing options, there a few effects, recording to an SD card, and more.Here are the 2 key capabilities I bought this for:1. Class compliant multi-channel USB-C input and output. Every analog input can be routed to its own USB channel. And you can route USB channels to every channel strip2. Bluetooth. If you need to mix in some backing tracks from a phone, you can easily route that to a stereo channel. It can then be added into the mix - or routed to a USB audio channel. (You will quickly learn why this is invaluable)This mixer can do more, but I couldn’t find any other one that could do this. And that’s why I love it.