We expanded our studio with the Teenage Engineering TX-6 field mixer and audio interface. Fitting in the palm of your hand, and with heaps of features, the TX-6 is impressive.
If you don’t know Teenage Engineering you’ve heard or seen them. Their instruments are featured on records by Childish Gambino, Radiohead, Bon Iver, Tame Impala and their toy-like, lego-style designs look fantastic and are often seen across studios around the world. We even built their Modular 400 Synth that comes in a flat pack.
The TX-6 is their latest product that acts primarily as a mixer and audio interface. As usual with Teenage Engineering, there’s more than meets the eye. There are 6 stereo inputs, lots of in-built FX, a basic drum machine, synthesizer, compressor, a tuner, and many more assignable functions in the menu — which we found really useful.
Using the TX-6 as a mixer, we plugged into every available input — and a few important adapters — to make the TX-6 the hub of our studio. We plugged in a drum beat from Ableton, a Teenage Engineering Pocket Operator (Street Fighter Edition), a Moog iPhone Animoog Synth, a Sequential Prophet Rev 2 synthesizer, a Teenage Engineering Modular 400 Synth, and a Heritage electric guitar.
Each of the 6 stereo inputs comes with 3 knobs — referred to as pots — and a slider fader. Setting up the top pot as a compressor, the middle pot as send to FX 1 and the bottom pot as a pan, I started playing the sounds from each instrument and tweaked the TX-6 on each.
Starting with the drum beat I gave it a good level and some compression, moving onto the Prophet Rev 2 synth and the Moog iPhone synth I played something in, pressed hold, added some TX-6 FX and panned each of them left and right.
It was at this point that I realised that the size of the TX-6 was not holding me back — I was creating music and not being help back from technology. I was able to easily add compression and FX, pan instruments and set individual volumes all within this tiny package.
Continuing on with the Teenage Engineering Modular 400 — which we made an Engineering the Sound video previously — I added a low drone bass note from it’s sine oscillator, then I grabbed the Street Fighter edition Pocket Operator, gave it some reverb and played in some ‘Haaaaduuuuckens’.
I finally played some electric guitar — which I tuned earlier with the TX-6 — added some in-built compression and reverb and that completed my 6 instruments all being mixed into the TX-6 and recorded here in the video below.
There’s so much more I could have done with the TX-6, for example, my next stop would be using it as an audio interface. However, my issue there would be figuring out how to input a microphone.
For more on the Teenage Engineering TX-6 head over to their website.
