Analog Mixer Basics Part 2 (How to Use An Analog Mixer)

tim here from proclaim av and today we're gonna finish what we started let's check it out [Music] so a lot of you have enjoyed the analog mixer video and so we're going to do an additional video to kind of finish that up as there were parts of the mixer that we didn't really cover and so hopefully today you'll learn some additional information that'll help you as you work with your analog mixer so let's get started okay so we're over here we're looking at the kind of output section of the mixer i think we already talked about aux sends which are right here and those are the volume controls for each of your aux mixes as they come across so the aux 1 mix this is the send volume control um and here we go aux 2 3 etc and they each have a main volume control for that and the nice thing is that you can solo those which means you can send them off to your headphones and listen to them over your headphones you notice when i press that the solo light comes on and um that will send it off to my headphones so i can listen to whatever is in that aux mix so if i want to listen hey what am i sending to my person on the monitors then i can solo that send it to my headphones and take a listen to what's going into that aux mix and go oh wow you know that that piano is way too loud in that aux mix i need to turn that down or something so that's a good way to check that um then down here as we're kind of going down there are several things that you can assign to your headphones and your control room mix and we'll show you the control room outputs in the back the headphone outputs are just up here on the top but you can assign the main mix you can assign subgroup three and four one and two and the usb2 track output can be assigned in there so you can put them all in or you can take some of them out and just listen to one it's up to you however you want to do that okay so that's kind of a nice option to have and then of course this is your headphone volume control you can turn it up and down as needed as you're listening your headphones or your control room monitors so let's bop around back here and look at the control room spot where we can patch into the control room monitors so that's a really good point if you want to plug in let's say studio monitors now whatever you send to headphones will also come out on the control room out so keep that in mind now as we go down here there is a mode button right here for your um monitoring or your soloing options and so let's solo something here um just to make a point so we'll solo my mic that i'm talking in now you see here it's on main solo but we can change the mode to pre-fader level set and so pre-fader level set notice when we do that we're only getting one channel because this is a mic and it's a mono so it only has one channel and that's a good spot when you're trying to set your gain to move up into pre-fader level set and then you can set your gain using that if you go over to solo mode you'll notice now that we're in stereo and um the thing that that does is in the monitoring solo mode shows the panning so as we pan the channel which i'm gonna do enough camera you can see on the meters there we can listen to where the channel is panned in the mix so let's say you had a channel that was panned over a little harder to the right the solo mode will show that on the stereo meters there whereas if you went over to the pfl mode it's not going to show you things like panning so that is the plus is that it's pulling that signal off after the pan control and letting you see what is the panning look like on that signal okay so that is the solo mode button or the pfl switch back and forth so very cool next is the usb 2 track to main input button and what that does is it routes the usb return audio if you're playing something back on your usb connection it routes it into the main mix or it routes the two-track input to your main mix now there's no volume control for that so to change the volume you'll have to use the device that you've got plugged in to turn that volume up and down or you'll have to use the main fader to turn the volume up and down which of course will affect everything else in your mix now here's something weird let me show you the rca inputs on the top here now you've got to track in and out and they're ganged together with the usb so i have before tinkered with this and if i'm sending something out to usb it's also coming out to track out and then if i play something back on the usb input i can also plug something on the input of this and play both of them back at the same time so behringer has sort of ganged those together it's a little odd but that's how they have it set up so it's good to be aware of that if you had things plugged in via usb and on the two-track input and you accidentally played something on the two-track input while you're playing something usb you're gonna get both of them so mess around and see how yours is set up and um so you don't get any weird surprises like i did with this mixer now next over here we have stereo aux returns now let me tell you stereo aux returns were the thing that twisted my head around when i was new to analog mixers i just couldn't get it so the thing about stereo aux returns is that these are stereo inputs and the volume when you turn them up goes straight to the main bus okay well what are they used for well they're used for effects processors so let's show you how to patch an effects processor into a stereo aux return and then we'll tinker with it and see what we get okay so we're looking at the back of the mixer and we want to patch into aux send one now remember aux send is all the things that we have mixed on the aux 1 mix and so we can patch into it so we're coming all our aux stuff is coming out on the yellow cable now over here on our lexicon effects processor we want to take the output from the aux send and we would attach it into the mono input since we only have one channel the mono input on the lexicon effects processor now that we've done that we're going to patch back out the analog output of the effects processor and we'll send that back over to the mixer so let's patch the output stereo so we can come out stereo because our aux return is stereo so let's go back over there now over here you can see the aux returns okay and we're gonna patch back into aux return one so now that we've passed in our effects processor it is taking the aux send from aux 1. so this whole mix whatever we set whatever we pick here in aux one row it's going to go off to the effects processor so here i'm on i'm on mic number four okay i'm on channel four and so let me turn up aux for channel 4 right there okay now i'm sending it to the effects processor but not yet i have to go over here to aux sends volume for number one and turn that up now that's going to send to the effects processor but i still can't hear it because i need to turn up the aux stereo return so that it comes back into the main bus so as i turn this guy on then you can hear there's my effects processor coming in okay now if i go back over here to number four and i say that's not enough reverb i want more reverb then i turn it up and i get more reverb now i want less reverb so i turn it down here so that's gonna dictate on your effects processor how little for each mic and how much for each mic as you turn this aux up and down um because you're feeding the effects processor with your aux 1 mix out to the effects processor and then back into the mixer output now this also has and let me turn this down because it's going to make me crazy and you don't want to hear me i'm the dj guy the whole time okay so here's what's going on this mixer also has a weird aux to ox sand one and this is odd i don't know if this is just a behringer thing or what so i'm going to actually scoot the mixer back over so you're kind of looking down at that a little better so to aux send one what is that for okay here is the craziness that is this particular analog mixer okay um if i want to use this i can actually send a stereo return mix to aux 1. so that people can hear for example reverb in their monitors but how do i do that well i can't use the aux 1 mix for my effects what i have to do is use the aux 2 mix to mix the effects level okay stay with me here and then i send aux 2 off to the effects processor and then i go over then i patch the effects processor back into stereo aux return 1 and then i use this volume level monitor here to send that back to aux 1. is your head turned around yet okay it's pretty wild you can totally do this but um it takes some patching and if you're confused about it go look at behringer's um manual uh that'll really help you kind of you know kind of walk through it so it's it's kind of a work around it's interesting but you can you you can actually send effects to both aux 1 and 2 monitor mixes or aux mixes if you patch into their return but you use a different bus let's say 3 use 3 and 4 to mix effects and then you return them into one and two for monitors pretty wild huh and by the way when you're doing that you can also send it that effect to the main bus at the same time okay does your head hurt yet yeah that's kind of a weird one i haven't seen that on a lot of other units so now there are a couple of things here that are interesting on this mixer because it has built-in effects okay and so let's go over here to four we're gonna add four here because this is a built-in effects we're gonna bring it up here and then we're gonna put it up here okay so that's an effects processor that's built in here and you can actually see the level meter going a little bit on this concert hall effect okay now this is sent to main mix you see this button so we're hearing it but we can also send it to the sub mix and then we can pick which submixes it's on one two three or four by press in in pairs just one two or three four that's the only options we have by pressing this button up and down we can send this effect off to sub mix okay so if i take it off again it's back in the main mix and you guys can hear it again now this is the onboard effects processor so all of these things up here are parameters for what i want to do so i can pick different rooms if i pick digi verb and i press down on the knob there it will change my effect okay let's try something else gated two okay that's kind of weird okay um so there are all these on-board effects that you can try okay some of them better than others let's try that one ah now you can change parameters in the effects by pressing the button and you can change parameter one and change how it is what whatever it changes here different parameters okay and i'm not really gonna spend too much time tinkering with these um but you know you you can pick different things different parameters within the preset that's already in there okay so have fun playing with that it's not my that's not the scoop of this video to show you all the different possible combinations but we're just going to show you how to route it in which we have already done all right the next thing we're going to look at is the solo returns button and you can see that here that lets you solo the stair or the the stereo returns here um and you can turn them up and down if they're already up let's say this one's up okay or this one's up and if i solo it now i just hear the reverb you notice that there's no direct voice in that i'm just listening to the effect let's try the other one okay now you can hear the reverb and my direct voice or on the return solo you can just hear what the reverb sounds like and the final thing we have here is the control room phone's control room only and what that does is it sends your stereo aux you can only do this on four you could send that off just to the control room and the headphones but it wouldn't go to any of your other mixes i can't really demonstrate this to you because i'm not plugged into the control room output or the headphones output for recording this so you're just going to have to tinker with it and see how it works now we have one thing left to talk about and that is inserts and we kind of touched on it but we're going to demonstrate it here so here we're on channel 4 and at the top here you see there's an insert i o so let's go over and show you how we're going to patch our insert cable into a compressor okay so here's the back of our compressor and i have an insert cable so my insert cable is xlr to trs trs side is going to go into the insert point and the xlr will go to the input and output now a properly wired cable will not be confused with xlr because you're gonna get male and female to match up properly however if you buy the quarter inch at a quarter inch then you have to be more careful with it to make sure that you get the inputs and the outputs plugged into the right ports on the back of your compressor now that we've got that patched in we're going to take the trs end and go ahead and plug it into the insert you could hear that do you hear where it kind of interrupted the signal a little bit there as we put it in because now we're sending this signal off to the compressor and it's coming back from the compressor into the channel now let's tinker with some compressor settings now we've got our compressor inserted and you can probably tell that when i get really loud that the compressor is closing down my loud spots and so you know it's nice to be able to insert things compression is something that often gets inserted here this board does have on-board compressors but for older boards that may not have that it's a handy way you can add a compressor for channels where you might need one and we'll do a separate video and talk about compression in the future okay so we want to talk about uh inserts that are available for your main inputs output so let's look at that so we can actually insert something into the mains left and right and that will insert let's say a compressor into our main mix if we had one which was stereo so notice that that's available as well for an insert point also you have a separate effects out right there um that is a handy option and then there's a foot switch plug down here so what would you use a foot switch plug for well you can use that to turn the onboard effects unit on and off while you're using the mixer so if you have a foot switch that is a handy option you notice that there's a second pair of main outs over here so if you need more than just the xlr because this of course offers the xlr main outs but if you need more than that you can do additional outputs that would be a left right main output now you don't see this very often but this board has direct outputs for channels one through eight so that means you can take a direct feed now what's this handy for well if you wanted to multi-track and you needed to patch this into a multi-track recorder you could do that using the direct outputs and put each channel into its own multi-track input if you had a multi-track capture device this board also has subgroup outputs and you'll notice that they are stereo subgroup outputs um one five two and six three and seven four and eight and so that really lets you uh gives you some flexibility not all boards have subgroup outputs and finally this board has the good old usb output which is actually what i'm using to record this right now what's hooked up to my old laptop which i use for audio recording and it is only a stereo output so you only get the mains stereo output on the usb interface for this mixer well i hope that was helpful to you and as always you can go back and watch the video again if you're not sure what's happening or go back as i suggested previously and watch it with your mixer in front of you so you can try these things on your own mixer and see how they work for you your mixer might be slightly different but a lot of these principles are very much the same anyway thanks for watching [Music] [Applause] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Proclaim AV

Views: 26,784

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Id: ZCvBgN3OzbA

Length: 21min 31sec (1291 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 30 2021