Toward the beginning of the pandemic, a friend asked me how she could use an external vocal mic and a guitar with a pickup on Zoom calls. Sounds easy, right?
But to have the amount of control a musician really wants, it turned out to be a bit more involved. Plus, when working from home for a microphone company, it’s pretty common to use a decent mic in meetings.
This post explains the setup I’ve been using for my calls.
(Don’t let the speakers fool you. Use headphones or it’ll feed back when echo cancellation is turned off!)
Ingredients:
The goals are:
Mix the mic or other inputs going into the USB interface in the DAW Be able to hear/monitor the mix Route the output of the DAW to a Zoom call Be able to hear the far end of the call through the same headphones as monitoring the mix
Get Blackhole
The key ingredient here is BlackHole, a virtual audio driver that acts as a passthrough from each input to the corresponding output . This actually needs two instances of BlackHole because Zoom can only send and receive from the first two channels of any audio interface. Fortunately, they offer direct downloads (email required) of each (and have nice instructions for building from source). I have one called BlackHole 16ch and one called BlackHole 2ch, which — surprise — have 16 channels and 2 channels, respectively.
The 16-channel BlackHole device will function as the Zoom speaker; the 2-channel BlackHole will be the Zoom “microphone”.
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