oh hey Mackie 1202-VLZ PRO is a very nice mixer, even though it's been more than a decade. I've seen it being used in professional studios.
haha don't be too worried about appearing as a "noob" . lifelong learning is the norm.
1. MIDI/Audio setup
so for example , if you arm the midi track, record your "PLAYING" (midi notes / velocity / sustain). that's just data. but on your keyboard you're playing the "piano sound module" , but you don't like the piano sound and the playing is off. you could quantize , fix the playing, add more notes subtract, increase sustain, increase velocity (hardness of the note) etc. then ultimately have a perfect "PLAYING" track then decide that you don't want a piano sound , you want a... violin instead. and take note , the nature of sound is that some violin-sound modules's ATTACK comes in late, unlike the sound of a piano (hammer on a string) , so it would all sound "late" but all that needs to be done is pull the entire perfect quantized track back by a notch.
where this "sound" is going to come from, is your MIDI TRACK > MIDI OUT INTO > YOUR KORG LE MIDI IN , PLAY the track, and your Korg LE (hardware sound module) will play the "perfect playing" and you're going to record it from its audio output.
if you don't want to utilize the hardware sound module (Korg LE) , then what people (arrangers) usually do is software sound module, a.k.a VST Instruments/VSTi. and trigger within the DAW software.
2. Technology has improved since my DIY recording FAQ . we used to be all mostly analog and the whole PCI (like a computer chip to install on your computer mainboard) audio interface came in, then USB and Firewire / standalone multitrack recorders was the new thing (I used to use a Korg D888, PC-less, mobile recording) I almost would agree with you on not having a need for an analog mixer, but there're times a sub-mixer would be handy. especially a mackie 1202vlz with nice high quality preamps. if it were something lower end then yeah you could ditch it. otherwise we've advanced to a convenient age of recording where I'd use my favourite audio interface as an example Zoom R16, is simply powered by a USB cable. 8 inputs, 2 with phantom power, onboard stereo mics, audio interface when plugged in via USB , standalone recorder , possible to run on batteries.
3.
a.Phantom Power - this is usually used for Condenser Microphones and DI Boxes. XLR carries phantom power.
Why Condenser ? it's like if you used a DYNAMIC Shure SM58 to record , it's still clear etc. but that high crisp/clarity would not be as sensitively captured as using a CONDENSER Rode NT2. actually all the info can be mainly found from google.
http://homerecording.about.com/od/microphones101/a/mic_types.htm
DI Boxes, mainly used for live sound so your guitar > 1/4" > DI box > travel 100 metres with little or no signal loss > mixer.lesser noise etc. there's more "impedance/geek talk" about it which I myself I'm not sure, I just listen and go with what sounds better. in recording production situation, I use DI box mainly because I want to record the clean dry signal for reprocessing. that's another can of worms..
b. guitar > 1/4" (unbalanced) > audio interface. vs guitar > 1/4" (unbalanced) > DI Box (balanced) > XLR + phantompower > audio interface
c. latency is a lot of marketing talk haha. everyone tries to achieve the true zero. I personally work with 2ms,5ms , 8ms, even at times 13ms. anymore than that becomes a little distracting. you do know what ms stands for right. it's just like clapping in a big living room. I've heard all that hoohah about kids talking about "oh I can't work with latencies more than 1ms" and ironically their mixes are filled with glitches , poor punch-ins and misses. (personally my speed of hearing is about 2 ms. what that means is I can hear any mistakes in a mix if it's slower than that.) but hey what's most important is as long as the consumer can't hear it.
to get low latency, you need a good audio interface like RME UFX which costs like $3000 i think ? and a super high end computer that costs another 4 digits.. and so on . does almost no contribution to your sound. as long as you're within the 13ms (in my opinion) limit. where I get the 13ms from is when I used to work my audio mixes at my day job office with no audio interface, just onboard soundcard and using
www.asio4all.com drivers.
d. samplerate, the higher the resolution (16/24/32bit) and samplerate (44.1/48/88.2/96/192/DSD recorder level) , the more power and storage it takes. your basic requirement is 16bit 44.1khz (known as 16/44 , cd quality) the sample rate isn't too big of a difference, it's the resolution , 16bit / 24bit that does. but then again, I've worked with mixes by other studios purposely tampered downsampled to 16bit/44.1khz and passed me the audio tracks (when it was originally recorded at 24bit/48khz or 24bit/96khz) but end up my mixing and re-recordings for vocals at 16bit/44.1khz sounded superior than the original studio's 24/48khz. it's just that small bit more of quality. I'd just keep it 16bit/44.1khz. or at most go 24bit/44.1khz for convenience. if you don't believe me you can go and try, but don't blame me when you have to spend more cash on hard disk storage.
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Steinberg UR 44 is not bad too. whatever works man. most important thing in an audio interface function is STABILITY. Drivers! (i think you know better by now). I've heard people tell me Zoom R16 preamps are crap, it is kind of, but my mixing makes up for it. what's important is it doesn't screw me over when I'm recording the band. crashing and all since I earn $ with it. I've sold my Zoom R16 since and upgraded to a Focusrite LiquidSaffire56 for $100 hehe.