A London music centre’s new PreSonus StudioLive SE 32 needed setting up as a control surface for Logic Pro, and the part that held us up was getting the Mac to recognise the desk as a network MIDI device over Ethernet.
The centre had bought a new digital mixer, a PreSonus StudioLive SE 32, and wanted to bring it into their recording setup. Until then they’d been running an interface, a controller, a keyboard and a Mac with no mixer at all. They asked if I could come to the studio and connect it, so this was an on-site job rather than a remote session.
Choosing how to use the desk
I explained they had a choice. They could use the StudioLive as a summing mixer, sending the individual tracks out of Logic over the USB cable into the desk’s channels and using its summing along with its hardware EQs, compression and effects. That would be an upgrade on summing in Logic, but not much of one, as both are algorithm-based ways of combining the tracks.
My recommendation was the other way, using the StudioLive in DAW control mode so it controls all the tracks in the Logic project. If the centre is recording a band, for example, the engineer can lay the instrument tracks out across the faders and adjust the mix by hand. Changes on the desk show on screen, and changes on screen move the desk’s motorised faders. The engineer at the centre agreed that was how they’d like to use it, so we set about doing it.
Getting the Mac to see the desk
This was quite a complicated and fiddly process. We went through all the steps in the various instruction manuals for setting up DAW control mode, and got stuck at the point where the Mac has to recognise the StudioLive as a MIDI network device. For that the desk has to be connected to the Mac over Ethernet, and the changes that made it work were setting the IP addresses by hand on both.
- Mac Ethernet port: IP address set manually to 192.168.1.50, subnet mask 255.255.255.0.
- StudioLive: IP address set to 192.168.1.51, with the same subnet mask.
Once both addresses were in, the Ethernet connection on the Mac went active with a green dot and the Mac did a proper handshake with the StudioLive.
I can’t say why it wouldn’t connect before that, only that setting the addresses manually is what got it working. The MIDI connection then showed up in PreSonus’s Universal Control software and we were able to activate it.
Setting it up in Logic
From there we could follow the rest of the instructions and create the control surface in Logic. It’s set up as a Mackie Control with three Mackie Control extenders, which is what gets all 32 channels of the desk working. Once that was done we also upgraded the firmware on the desk, then tested the connections with a few test projects to make sure everything was being controlled properly.
The last part of the visit was tidying the studio. We removed a monitoring device that was no longer needed after the speakers had been reconfigured, tidied the desk, took out some cables that weren’t needed and wound up others to neaten everything up.
At the end of the session the operator of the centre was delighted. They now had a working DAW control surface that made a fantastic centrepiece for the room, fully integrated into Logic, and it works with all their existing projects and older equipment without any cable changes. The engineers who use the centre can now control the transport, faders and panning by hand.
A few months later I went back to set the desk up on a new Mac, and needed a couple of extra steps that weren’t in my notes from this visit. The return visit is written up separately in the StudioLive fader bank case study.
If your Mac won’t see a StudioLive as a network MIDI device, try giving the Mac’s Ethernet port and the desk fixed IP addresses on the same subnet.
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