Analog Mixer Basics (How to Use An Analog Mixer)

hi Jim here with proclaim AV and today we're gonna take a look at a mixer don't know not that kind of mixer an audio mixer specifically an analog one let's check it out [Music] so the mixer we're looking at today is the behringer xenyx qx2 4-4-2 and it's a mixtures that I happen to have and it has a lot of features that you're gonna find on most analog mixers now every analog mixer is kind of different in its own way depending on the manufacturer the era it was made in and how it's set up but I think you'll be able to catch the basics by watching this video and I hope that it's helpful let's dive right in okay so what we're gonna do is we're gonna take a look at this signal flow of this board now when I talk about signal flow we want to see how signal comes into the board and as it flows through the board and where it goes to different places and so we're gonna just walk through one channel strip and by the way when you look at a board like this it looks kind of intimidating look at all these different knobs and buttons and whatever but if you can figure out one channel strip and what that channel strip does then that channel strip just multiplies over and over again there it is again here it is again and so you have a set of controls for every single input for example this microphone here that we're gonna be walking through has its own set of controls all the way down to this fader and they're in a row called a channel strip okay so we're gonna start at the top here and just a quick warning if you haven't watched my videos on cables and connectors you might get a little confused about some of the terms we were using so it might not hurt to go back and watch that if you haven't already and that might help you out with this one okay so at the very top here is an XLR input which can be used for mic or line level right now we're using it for a mic level for the mic that I'm talking on right now the next thing down is a line in and so that's meant to take a line level input which is a not as strong which I'm sorry is a much stronger voltage than a mic level input and this particular unit will do a balanced or unbalanced as printed right here balanced or unbalanced quarter-inch connection in for the line in the third thing down is an insert it says insert IO or input/output and inserts you'll find on some mixers definitely more often analog mixers and what it does is it lets you insert something into the signal chain so the mic comes in the top here and then it comes down it comes to the insert point if you have something plug in then that signal goes out to the outboard piece of gear does whatever that gear does processing effects or whatever and then it comes out of that gear and comes back in here on the insert point and continues on down the signal chain so that's what inserts are used for now with digital mixers you don't see that real often but with analogs inserts were used a lot more often next we're gonna come down to the gain knob and the gain is also called trim on some mixers and basically it is the volume control for the incoming signal okay so we're gonna we're gonna look at something here real quick over here my meters we're gonna put will talk about the mode here in a second but we're gonna put this in and so gain when you instead of gain up you want it to kind of be hitting the zero and coming into your mixer pretty regularly there so here you can see my mic is hitting zero just about pretty consistently clipping into two a little bit okay now if I turn my gain up more then then I'm getting up into seven s and tens and then if I turn it up away too much I'm getting into the clipping which is bad see the clipping here and so the cane you want your gain to be very consistently when the person or instrument is is going on the microphone you want to be hitting zeros pretty consistently for that channel I will go over how to set that up here you're gonna come down here to your solo button and you're gonna press your solo button and what that does is it sends the input for this channel off to the meters or and off to the headphones okay well we're mostly concerned about the meters so it looks like I need to pull that game down just to hear more there we go we're doing a little better there is in the zeros and so that is what you can use these meters for for solo use the solo button to route that over to the meters and take a look at the incoming game okay now if it's like just barely lighten up over here you're not getting a very strong signal into your mixer so you want to balance that signal using the gain or the trim so that it comes the end of your mixer at a good level and then you can adjust it from there on out okay so that's the gain knob now right next to the gain knob is the low-cut so what is a low-cut used for well a low-cut is often used to remove lows that the source your miking doesn't need okay there's a lot of times when your mic into sorts that you just don't need that low frequency information does kind of muddies things up and makes things sound muffled and so by adding the low fat in there we go the low-cut in it kind of cleans things up and makes things sound a little more clean you don't get extra boom and and and and extra low frequencies that you don't need now for me I look almost everything gets a low-cut okay and the reason why is that lots and lots of things contain pretty much no or no low frequency information or detrimental low frequency information to what you're trying to do okay the things that include low frequency information are gonna be instruments that actually reach down into that frequency range those are things you don't want a low-cut those are things that you want that to flow through also recorded music is another thing you don't want a low-cut your recorded music because that's a full range signal and you want all that to flow through and not sound tinny or odd because you've chopped off all the low information now the last thing I want to talk about in low-cut is that manufacturers can't seem to agree what to call this so there I know of four different names low-cut which means it cuts off the low frequencies high-pass which means that lets the high frequencies pass in the low ones not pass okay bass roll-off which means it rolls off low frequencies and one of the companies calls it a rumble filter what you think is a way for them to try to describe what it does without actually telling you what it does if people are walking around on your platform and you may have heard this before you'll get a lot of like bumping and rumbling and that kind of thing because walking will transmit all the way up the mic stand the thumping of somebody walking will transmit up all the way up to mic stand and shake the microphone and you'll get low frequency information that you don't need now this particular mixture has a compressor right here a one nob compressor and uh it's not it's beyond the purview of this video to get into what compressors do okay well I'll turn that one up there and what that does is it automatically figures out when I've passed a certain threshold and pulls my volume down so that it doesn't get super loud so now if I get really loud it reduces the gain a certain amount so you're not over driving your channel okay compressors are great for dynamic sources one of the most dynamic sources you're going to run into if you're a church sound tech is gonna be preachers because they do everything from whisper to shout and running a compressor on the on your speakers channel is a really good idea if you've got it set up properly it can really save you from blowing people away when that speaker decides to let it rip so the compressor one knob you'll see on some of these newer analog mixers okay so let's talk about EQ in this whole section here is dedicated to EQ and on the analog mixers like this most often you're going to see a fixed frequency EQ which means you can't adjust the frequency on it so the high here is fixed for example and if we cut the highs you can see that all behind frequencies go away if we boost up the highs then you can see we've added a bunch of highs here at 12 kilohertz is the frequency where highs get added on on this EQ here below the same thing if we cut out you'll see we've lost some low-frequency information or if we boosted back up we can add low-frequency information now on this EQ there's also what's called a sweepable mid and so to demonstrate how that works the this knob here actually lets you pick the frequency of the mid EQ which is really nice on an analog board like this to be able to pick what frequency you want to boost your cap so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna boost that frequency up and then we're just gonna sweep around so it starts at 100 goes the 250 comes on around here and actually goes all the way up to 3 so you can see that that's quite a wide range for this sweepable EQ and so it lets you pick a frequency that is really helpful for whatever you need to do with it ok so let's talk about EQ for a second I have two rules for EQ they are less is more and cut before you boost ok I've walked into locations where people have their EQ is cranked like all the way up or all the way down and for me if you can let a signal flow through your board without having to touch it with EQ that's good you want that signal to be as unting curd with as possible I know that's not really a word but uh you want the signal to flow through without having to mess with it if you can however sometimes maybe you have a particular microphone that needs a little tweaking or you have a feedback problem on a particular frequency then make some cuts ok don't boost a bunch of stuff make some cuts the problem with boosting is that you are turning up the volume on a particular frequency and so really you can create feedback if you go around and boost a bunch of things by just making a sharp spike in the volume on that particular frequency you actually create a feedback problem so that's accused now we're gonna go on here to the auxiliary section well technically we're gonna skip it we'll go we'll talk about it in a minute but this is the exact mix section and we'll talk about that in a second now we're gonna talk about the pan which is down here and that's really basic that's a left and that's a right okay so as you pan left and right you can tell which one is on or off and most of the time pans gonna be set straight up and down unless you're using it to assign subgroups and we'll talk about that in a second as well now you have a mute button and you'll notice that I have the mute buttons down on all these other channels and you can tell that the mute button is on because there's a little yellow light here that indicates hey I'm muted and so um that's that's a handy feature to see you know you can look right at the board and tell oh look channel wants that muted oh dear or I can tell which channels are unmuted even if my faders were up you know I'm like I don't I don't know I don't know the light comes on and lets you know what's going on when you mute a channel you mute it for all the mixes you need it for the main mix and you mute it for the axillary mix it's just off for everything okay so if you've got everything set up and you're wondering why am I not getting any sound check your mute button it might be engaged let's take a look here we have a a light below that called a clip okay and the clip light lets you know that you're over driving the channel we did that earlier so let's let's do it again here so if I put in too much signal into the channel first of all you can hear that it's clipping and second of all you can see that the clip light lights up when I am over driving the channel oh that sounds pretty nasty there but that's important to see if you're if you have a source up and you're looking across your board notices you see in clip lights starting to light up on something I need to go back and check your gain levels maybe something happened I might got moved all of a sudden that source is hotter than it was when you set it up so check your clip light and go okay this is way too hot go back and listen to it oh yeah we need to pull that that gain down a little bit so we're not clipping now this clip light also functions it's a solar lightness so I had that on four and it just stays on solid when it's a solo light now what is solo do well will you talked about a little bit when we were sitting apart game but solo routes our channel off to the meters and at all and you see when we hit it the main solar light comes on over here see that okay and then it also routes it out to your headphones you can listen to just that channel and you don't have to listen to all the other channels and that helps you like listen if you think you have a problem with the channel it's nice to be able to solo it and see what's going on with this channel oh yeah that's clipping or oh I can't hear anything on that channel at all and so that helps you troubleshoot it's a good feature to have here the solo button now this button has subgroup assignments and so we're gonna go into that now if this kind of twists your head around that's okay give it a give it a a second listen through or watch through and see if it works for you but some mixers have this and some don't okay this one does alright so here we have assignment buttons first of all let's start with the main now if I'm not assigned it to the main then if I understand myself into main then my se goes away okay so let's say that you have your channel up and your cane is up and your mute is off and you're going why am I not in the main mix come down here to your assignment buttons and make sure that you're signed into the main mix okay now why do I need to be assigned into the main mix well so that you call out the main fader but why is there even a button that does that well let's explain that by looking at the subgroup routing now this board has four subgroups okay one two three and four and there are faders for each subgroup alright so let's say I have three microphones and I want to assign them all into subgroup one okay so we're gonna do this one runner sign this my gonna say we're one this my gonna subgroup one in this make into subgroup one now there's a problem because this button says one two but I don't want them in two so what do I do well the thing that I do is that I pan them all left left left now I've got a problem because now I'm only coming out one side of your headset okay so what I need to do is unassign myself out of main and assign this subgroup fader one into the right and left okay now I'm back in two had two sides of your headphones okay and now this is my volume control for this now since I'm on assigned out of main I can go in here and like these other channels here are also assigned into that subgroup so what have I done well let's assign them out of main so they're not in main there only in subgroup one because they're panned left and there one two assignment button is down now you've taken all three of those sources and you put them on a single fader so if all those horses are on a single fader I'll let you control them all together well that's kind of a nice thing especially if you have a very large board you can assign them into a subgroup and you could assign that subgroup into main and now you have a volume control so let's say you had like four choir mics but you wanna just sort of float them all up and down at the same time without messing with this there you go now here's something to remember your fader here is also a volume control for here so just by signing into this subgroup doesn't mean you can pull the faders down for those channels okay they nice tone to be up where you had them and then you've routed them into this fader and made it the main fader for something okay now let's unassigned all that so we're gonna take this back out again and put our mic back into main and pin it back to right left now you see that I have four different subgroups here so I can assign a bunch of different things into the subgroup now the cool thing is these can be assigned into main and they can be assigned into a subgroup at the same time now the negative about that on these analog boards is you can't assign just a subgroup one and pan left if you were running a stereo output you would run into some problems unless you sign assign that back in but on some boards there's a there's a separate subgroup output so you can use a subgroup as a maybe a group of channels that you wanted to go out to a particular mix for example oh these need to go out to a hearing assistance and they basically are gonna mirror exactly what's going out on the main mix but I just wanted an extra volume control in here for you could do that or you can do what we're gonna talk about in a minute all right so now that we've talked about assignments for all these subgroups and how the assignment buttons work let's talk about the main mix so this is our main mix all our faders here are working on the main mix and that comes over here to the main mix fader all right that is one mix that lets us adjust how much of everything we want to put into the main output or the main speakers okay however we have auxiliary mixes up here so you'll see that there's a whole row of red knobs two rows of red knobs two rows of orange knobs and so these are axillary mixes so I can go into the axillary mix and I can create an additional mix for let's say a stage monitor or a recording or something like that I can create an additional mix that and with whatever I want to put it into it or whatever I want to leave out of it and send that off to that mixes main output volume control which is here so now not only we have all this that goes to the main volume control we can make for additional mixes with their own voice control that goes somewhere else okay so we've just moved up from one mix to 5 total mixes on this board and you're gonna have to keep track of those and manage them they can get complicated now let's talk about this pre post fader button because there are different kinds of axillary mixes and you'll see this on all types of boards you have a pre fader mix which means that basically this is its own mix and nothing I do down here on the faders changes what how this mix works okay what a post fader mix if I had to take this out and make it a post fader mix these volumes also affect the volumes of the post fader mix okay so if they're all the way down even if I have levels set for the post-fader makes I'm not gonna get anything on it because my faders are down so there are some advantages sometimes you want an axillary mix to kind of mirror the main mix so when the faders are up for the house you want them up for the axillary and when faders are down on the house you for the main mix you want them down for the axillary mix so that's the advantage of having a post fader axillary mix okay now remember before I said with the mute button that when you're muted you're muted for everything that means you're muted for the main mix and you're muted from all the axillary mixes that are on this board so if you want to kill a mic on everything use your mute button now up here we have the axillary mixes here okay and so let's mess with this let's put myself put my mic into a an aux mix and then a ox1 and then we're gonna turn up the volume for ox1 and then we're gonna solo ox1 ooh man I'm really loud knocks one so the cool thing about having the solo button here on the output for aux 1 as now I can look at the output of auxiliary 1 and and see what's going on that also means that I can listen on my headphones about what's going on in the axillary 1 output now what's the advantage of that well it lets me know that I'm not driving this mix too hard or whatever it lets me monitor the output of the axillary mix the solo button for exhibiting mixes well there's a lot of other routing here that we're not going to get into it there are some serial returns that's and that's important if you were using the mix for effects or that kind of thing now I will note it on this board you'll notice that number three is an effects mix and it says effects near everything effects hear effects here and then it goes off to this effects processor which is internal to the Union and then you can route it back into the main mix on with the effects knob and lets you put in reverb or echo or all kinds of different effects ok so this doesn't have to be an effects mix and you'll look at a lot of these boards where there's one of the auxes is dedicated to effects but it doesn't have to be because on the back you can actually plug monitors into the output of that before it ever goes to the effects processor let letting you bypass the effects processor if you need a fourth axillary mix so that's very handy to have on a board like this to have another axillary mix let's say I just need one more mix for faders and really I'm not using the effects well there you go that gives you a fourth one okay wow that's a lot to go over but I think we've really kind of hit all the highlights of how this analog mixer works so I hope this is a helpful video and I hope that as you watch through it you've learned something now it's one of those videos where it's kind of like drinking from a firehose but if you want to go through it again go through it again and watch it a couple of times you might pick up something different each time I encourage you to watch this and watch it while you're in front of your board and try out some of these things and see oh that's how my board does it every board is slightly different so this won't be a catch-all for every board this is just one analog mixer but it works like a lot of other analog mixers anyway thanks for watching hi Tim from proclaim a V here and today we're taking a look at an analog audio something thingy gonna do a very specific thing and

Channel: Proclaim AV

Views: 227,289

Keywords: Analog, Mixer, console, mixing desk, PA system, podcasting, broadcasting, recording, recording studio, church sound, Behringer QX2442, Sennheiser e835

Id: T1y8cjigI4Y

Length: 24min 25sec (1465 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 10 2019