Not linux or Ardour queastion but you guys have been so great I thought you could help.
I am currently have a regular jam with some mates. I have a m-audio 2626 linked to a Linux box running Ardour. I getting the settings correct on the machine for recording the mix but the guys sometimes change there instrument volume for what they are hereing through there headphones. this cause a lot of clipping in the recordings.
I was looking at the JamHub and other devices. I would be interested to know what solutions you have come up with?
LeatusPenguin’s example is the perfectionist’s way to do it - then everybody has their own independent headphone mix with its own EQ and reverb (and latency :-/ ) if they want it. It’s also a nice feature of Ardour that you can simply create as many monitor sends as you like.
Shouldn’t the monitor sends be pre-fader, though? That’s certainly the convention with live sound.
In practice you can often get away with a simple mix of the master bus + player’s own channel - usually they are interested in “own instrument” vs. “rest of band”, while the relative balance of the other instruments won’t matter too much.
Apart from the technical aspects, though, this is partly a psychology / training issue - you have to teach your players to ask YOU to fix their monitor mix, not try to do it themselves. Either that or you let them play for a while until the levels have settled down before hitting the record button and starting again…
I’ve also worked (as a player, not an engineer) in a studio that had a little headphone mixer in front of me, with separate controls for stereo mix, my own instrument and overall level. I could adjust those as much as I liked as it only affected my headphone mix. That’s a purely hardware solution, and a bit expensive if you have lots of them and all the attendant cabling, but it’s pretty foolproof.