3 Ways To Connect A Compressor To A Mixing Board (Without a Send/Return or Insert)

so today in this video I'm gonna show you guys three different ways to connect a compressor to a mixer that doesn't have send in return or an answer Jack Studios is in your ears hey guys what is up I'm wizna and as always we're here my studio true sound studios and today I found three different ways of how to hook your compressor up to your mixer that doesn't have those send and return jacks or an insert Jack so with some of these setups you are gonna need a little bit extra gear potentially a mic preamp but I did come up with three really good ways of how to do this so hopefully one of them will work out for you now just a quick note I did use some like really small little jumper cables to hook everything up in this video those cables are not balanced I would definitely recommend using balanced cables so balanced quarter-inch cables also known as TRS cables and the only reason I use these short little cables was just to show you guys a little easier just to make it visually easier to see how everything was connected okay so let's get into this video okay so here we go this is going to be option 1 in an option 1 we are going to use an external mic pram so we're going to use a totally separate mic preamp so this is how the connection would go we would plug our microphone into the microphone input on the mic preamp then we would run the output of the mic preamp to the input of our compressor then we would run the compressor output to the line input on the mixer so from here you can adjust the gain on the mixer to get an appropriate level into the mixer and then from here you can use any other setting that is on that particular mixer channel that you connected this to so obviously the negative with this setup is you have to have an external mic preamp now if you don't have an external mic preamp maybe you have an extra interface an extra audio interface so what you can actually do is use that extra audio interface as a mic preamp obviously as long as it has a mic preamp built into the interface so using this personas audio box USB what I can do is use a USB power supply from my tablet and I can use a USB cable to run and actually power this audio interface so this USB cable is not going to connect to our computer it is simply going to connect to the power supply the tablet power supply and I'm going to plug the other end of the cable into the back of the personas audio box then from here we can just use it like a normal mic preamp and I can very simply go ahead and use the phantom power turn up the gain on the mic preamp and on this particular interface I have to set the mixer setting to input and then I simply use the main output knob to adjust the amount of signal that I send to the compressor so from here it is the exact same setup we plug the microphone into the input of our interface or our mic preamp and then the output of the audio interface then runs to the input of the compressor and then the output of the compressor runs into the line input of our mixer okay so now let's take a look at option two so with option two we are going to use two channels on our mixer so one channel is going to be our mic preamp and then we're actually going to send that signal through an aux or an aux send into our compressor and then back into a second Channel this is how it is connected so on channel one of our mixer we're gonna plug our microphone into the mic input then we can go ahead and turn up the gain on channel one do we get at an appropriate level and make sure it's not clipping so this option will only work if your mixer has an aux send now in this particular mixer we have an aux one and an aux two but if we look carefully we can see that aux one is pre fader now pre fader means that we can turn down the actual overall output volume of the channel and still send a signal through aux one so aux two is post fader meaning we have to actually have the channel fader up in order to send signal through aux two now in this particular situation channel one we actually need to have our volume for that channel all way to zero instead we are going to send signal through the aux one so with that being said we can only use an aux that is pre fader so we are going to use aux one so now we can go ahead and turn our aux knob all the way over to aux one so now our microphone signal from channel one on our mixer is going to be coming out of the aux one send here on the mixer so now I can plug a cable into the aux one send and plug the other end into the input of our compressor and then a second cable will run from the output of the compressor and run into the line input on channel two of our mixer so now we can turn up the gain on channel two to get an appropriate level into the mixer and from here we can go ahead and at the very bottom we can now turn up our channel level fader or our channel level knob in this case and this is how much signal now can be heard through our mixer so obviously the negative of this setup is for one microphone you do have to use two channels on your mixer but if you're only recording one signal at a time this really shouldn't be an issue so finally we get to set up number three and in my opinion this is probably the easiest way to connect your compressor to your mixer so in the case that you're gonna connect this mixer and compressor to an interface this is how you can set it up now if you have a two channel compressor like this dbx 266 XL compressor you can connect the left main output of your mixer into the input on channel 1 on your compressor then the right main output on your mixer would run into channel 2 input on your compressor then the output of channel 1 on your compressor then would run to the input on channel 1 of your audio interface then channel 2 output on your compressor would run into the input on channel 2 on your audio interface so with this setup unfortunately you don't have control of the compression on each one of the channels so I would definitely recommend that you only use this setup if you're going to record one instrument at a time for example just a vocal or just a guitar this way you have the most control over what this compressor is going to do so if you guys are using this setup setup number 3 to run to a PA system so you're going from the mixer to the compressor to the PA system just know that when you go ahead and turn up any level on the mixer you're gonna be sending more signal to the compressor which is obviously going to just give you that more compressed sound you just want to really make sure that you watch the compressor as you start turning things up so if you did want to increase the overall volume coming out of the mixer and out of the compressor you definitely want to use the output gain or the makeup gain on the compressor to send more volume to the PA system so guys I hope you enjoyed this video I hope you can use one of these three methods to hook up your compressor to your mixer you neither have a better sounding recording or a better sounding PA system so if you guys are looking for more material on recording mixing mastering or producing go ahead and check out the over 140 videos currently on the true Sound Studios YouTube channel so thank you for watching this video if you guys enjoyed this video click that like button and consider subscribing for more content so not only do I make youtube videos but I also produce tracks and I can mix and master your music so once again thank you for watching this video I'm Lisa and true Sound Studios is in your ears

Channel: True Sound Studios

Views: 622,643

Keywords: Weezna, True, Sound, Studios, True Sound Studios, How To, hooking up a mixer to a compressor, hooking up a compressor, connecting a compressor, to a mixer, to a mixing board, to a mixing console, mixer compressor, DBX Compressor connections, mixer send return, Mixing Board Inserts, Mixing Console Inserts, Mixing Console Send & Return, Analog, 3 Ways To Connect A Compressor To A Mixing Board, mixer without insert, mixer without send and return, without send return, without insert

Id: 7QeC6tuJ6tM

Length: 9min 8sec (548 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 26 2017