SQ-6 Master Mute of Bypass for Effects Inserted via I/O

[ChrisAParticipant]

Hello!

I’m a production director for a house of worship. We’ve been running our A&H SQ-6 for several years and love the desk. We are currently upgrading our FX processing to be done via Waves SuperRack. We are using the “Insert” button/function on each channel to have it send and return to the same channel via the I/O card. In the back of my mind I have a worry that if something happened to the PC during a service it would essentially mute all of my channels (if the PC froze, shutdown, or a setting was bumped by a volunteer). With the send and return function setup that way, while easy, if SuperRack is not on and working we get no return signal and therefore no signal for each channel.

With this setup is there a way that I can setup a Mute to effectively bypass all those inserts at once? The manual makes it clear that FX Mute is an allowable soft key assignment, however, it specifically says this is for the 8 FX racks onboard. Can I use it to mute all the inserts like I would an onboard FX rack? I’d appreciate any help!

[mfusaParticipant]

I run in similar setup and can understand your concern.

I am not aware of a way to bypass all inserts at once. I believe you would need to set up a scene where the inserts are “in” and a scene where they are “not in” and then you would make the change via scene recall. You should be able to use a recall filter to minimize what settings are recalled with the scene so you can get it as close as possible to being only an insert toggle.

With all that said, I’ve been running SuperRack sound grid (and its predecessor) for years and never had an issue with a crash causing audio disruption. If you are using external soundgrid servers then the program can tolerate a number of (but not all) crash scenarios without loosing audio processing.

In our setup the sound grid computer is isolated from the internet. I don’t do auto updates and I don’t browse the web with it. It’s only job is SuperRack and reaper recording. A few times a year I will connect it to the internet and do all updates and make sure I have at least once practice night in between the updates and the following Sunday.

[ChrisAParticipant]

That’s reassuring!

And it’s a great idea to utilize a scene change as the emergency play!

[BrianParticipant]

The scene manager is the correct way to handle this. Keep in mind that when you save a scene, it stores all applicable aspects of the current console status. Therefore you’ll need to turn on a scene recall filter to ensure that when the scene is recalled, only the inset bypass setting for your desired channels is changed. I would start out by “blocking all” settings and then unblocking the insert setting on each channel that you use Waves on. You should create two scenes like this – one to turn “on” the inserts, and one to turn “off” the inserts.

Once these scenes are set up and working properly, I would take the extra step to “lock” them. Unless you decide to add or remove channels from the Waves system in the future, there is no need to change these scenes and by locking them you remove the possibility of inadvertently overwriting them.

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