Re: looking for a small and affordable mixer
If you have a ipad already ( big if i know ) i would recommend getting an audio interface that meets all your i/o cabling requirements and hooking it up to the ipad for your cable in/outs and then using the AUM app on the ipad to do all your mixing / routing / and , if you like , effects processing and recording
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/aum-audio-mixer/id1055636344someone on this board recommend it to me and it's really great. it costs 20 USD, which is a steal for what it does. it doesn't need an especially powerful ipad im using an 4 year old 32GB ipad and it works just fine.
it sounds really complicated perhaps with all the things that it can do . but it's not. it's very easy to use. they did a very good job of keeping the interface simple.
i use a UAD volt4 interface which is great, but you can use anything that is compatible with an ipad. the steinberg interface mentioned in this thread might be a good one, but i'd spring the extra 20 bucks and use AUM instead of the steinberg ipad interface
in addition to the screen interface, you can control AUM in a myriad of ways via a foot controller ( e.g. an irig blueboard if you want to keep the cost down )