Behringer WING Pros and Cons feat. James Attaway

here we have the behringer wing not at all a controversial mixing console in the audio world right guys uh jake from churchfront here we've got james attaway from adaway audio check his youtube channel out link in the description um i asked james to come here for a collaboration and that meant basically just a way for me to get a professional mix engineer to mix for us on a sunday morning for free where you're here who this guy mr miss mr ray ramon i mean uh attaway james attaway so um we had you come and mix on this console and this was the first time uh this morning so we mixed it for rehearsal and two services this is the first time you've mixed on a behringer wing so i wanted to ask you what do you love about the wing what do you hate about the wing would you recommend this to churches yeah those three questions so first let's start with number one what do you what do you love about the wing uh the thing i love about the wing is that the eq is easy to get to and the touch screen just makes it easy to reach for what you want to do find it and pull it down now you still have to get on a knob to adjust the q or the bandwidth for each eq band but that was super fast for me when i'm thinking about mixing i want to quickly identify what i want to do and i want to do it without a whole lot of thinking i'm a huge fan of analog consoles where one knob is one function you have to hunt through a bunch of layers and menus to select this channel and go over to here analog is awesome for that because it's so fast but this kind of reminded me of that and some you know much more expensive consoles that i've worked on in the past and that the eq is easy to get to the touch screen works it's sensitive enough and it wasn't finicky at all for me this morning so i was able to eq quickly what i wanted to get to and if i wanted to fine-tune it i've got knobs to reach for but the eq didn't make me think before i had to use it and that was really helpful the other thing that i really loved is a lot of times on consoles you'll have your standard compressor module that's got just the normal parameters that you're used to seeing on any other digital console and on most analog units especially the the ones that are you know they have threshold ratio attack release and makeup gain on the output and when you use a different plug-in compressor on consoles like over here i'll take a look at the red the red has those same parameters and so if you understand what they're doing and don't need to look at an input and output graph these give you all the same controls that you would have on any other compressor than you're used to now if we go to something that's fun like the the 76 limiter amp this is going to behave a little bit differently but you have to re-learn how it works and it can get you some awesome sounds and i absolutely love these types of compressors but when you're training new volunteers at church to get them to understand the gain structure of a compressor like this is a lot more challenging than something that's more standard like the red compressor or just the wing compressor right if all else fails you can go back to those standard ones that just work and they're going to do the job and they're going to do the job pretty well if you know how to dial in the parameters the right way the red compressor just seems to do it a little bit nicer and i can't really describe it any more than that other than it just feels good and does the job the way that i want it to anything else you love about this console before we talk about what you hate i'm trying to think of what else i love um i like how the user defines section over here lets you do what you want to i'm a big fan of tap tempo and have that here and lit up and blinking for me so that i can quickly tap it in without thinking about it or finding a layer or selecting a certain effects unit that's huge for me so the the flexibility over here of the tap tempo section and even the flexibility of all the user layers all the things that you can customize can be great now when it comes to the things that i didn't love so much about the console that flexibility can also get you into a jam it's really challenging when you're trying to set up one setup that works for a bunch of different people and one thing that i found out is that churches have a lot of volunteers and really to do the job well you need a team to do it so that you can be a regular congregant on a sunday and sit in the seats with your family and remember what it's like to be on the receiving end of somebody else mixing so in order to do that the customization it takes a little bit of work to figure out what's gonna work well for you but make it not so custom that it doesn't work or makes sense for other people as well so you love the customization of it but it also can be kind of a curse at the same time it's a double-edged sword yeah because i i've chatted with folks about what i love about this console is it's almost feels like a a daw with a hardware control surface attached to it and you can pretty much i mean like most digital mixers are but some reason there's even more freedom between hardware and software on this console especially compared to x32 wing or some of those other mixing consoles out there and for our situation here i love how there's two user faders pretty much on every bank over here and right now it's myself or adam kind of leading audio on a particular sunday and we kind of have our own ways of doing it but it's nice we're able to like set it up according to our liking but it is important we're trying to find a more unified way that everybody will be happy will be able to use yeah workflow and simplicity and training is the name of the game because in churches there's just turnover and volunteer teams and that's the nature of volunteering sometimes you have to recruit and train a bunch of people and it takes a lot of work to make something that's functional and simple and meets all your design requirements all at the same time so the work that goes into that even if you're a volunteer team leader which many of you are you know that work of customizing it the right way uh can be a daunting task and might not get done for the first several months or even year that you have the console unless if you sign up for worship ministry school and we will help you do it yes especially with this console adam's been you know we've been using it for like nine months and we got our show file pretty well dialed in but you're right there's a lot of the i o of getting your audio routed it's like it's not super intuitive when you first look at it but then once you do get used to this ecosystem you guys have heard me talk about a billion times on the channel i love it i think i think it's the future of where a lot of consoles will probably end up heading and you know you think about the x32 which is arguably the most popular console in churches in north america or even around the world that console got a lot of flack for being inflexible in the way that it could round but i think that's part of what made it popular with people with a you know lower level of training or didn't have as much experience in setting up audio consoles is that you plug it into channel one and it goes into channel one or maybe channel nine but they're at least in banks of eight yeah so i think that helped and i feel like the wing addressed a lot of those issues with making it super flexible but that could trip you up if you're not used to having a well thought through plan where you you know you plan it out in a spreadsheet you get everything dialed in before you start loading it into the console so that you don't trip yourself up or make things convoluted and confusing because patching digitally just can get confusing because it's not like you have one mic cable over here and another mic cable over here and you plug them together and they go like microphone to console it can be a lot more complex than that anything else you did not like about this console um i did not experiment with this but one thing that i love to do is i love to route my delay return back into my reverb and with the amount of time that i had today i didn't check to see if i could send this bus back into this bus and i would have loved to do that because wet delay just feels better than dry delay but i still was able to get a good mix my delays still felt good and musical and i didn't have any problems yeah and you can do that there's a lot of flexibility with the buses on this console it's kind of i think it's the first eight buses here so let's go let's pretend we're talking about going you want to send delay into this one i think on this one you can because if it's within the first eight so yeah see i can send um we have this delay bus selected and then i can go ahead and i can turn it to i can bring it back into the plate right delay right yeah um so that is possible but it only does that for the first uh eight buses it appears because then it just gives us matrixes right buses to bus sends that makes a lot of sense even though yeah even though we have a lot of um a lot more than eight buses we have like so i actually don't even know how many total buses we got like 16 looks like 16 stereo buses so the first eight seem to be more flexible with routing from a bus to a bus or a matrix yeah so that's one of the things you have to think about especially if you're getting started you know maybe you made all your you know set up your console to have all of your monitor sends on the first eight uh buses that can be stereo and then you find out with where your effects are now they can't route back into one another then you have to redo it all but it's it's helpful to have all those little details in mind and planning it on paper or a spreadsheet nobody really plans on paper anymore but having that plan you know planned out first before you start implementing it on the console is is huge all right so what's your what's your final verdict right i mean i i know you've only had six hours or so on the console but like is this something that you want to would this would you want to mix on this more get this get to know this a little bit more are you like now this is this is just a horrible piece of gear churches shouldn't be using it like where where are you right now i think if you've got experience in setting stuff up and you know how to run aes digital routing and maybe even if you already have some of the behringer products in your ecosystem with your stage boxes i feel like that's kind of a no-brainer to go to this console if you really want something that's very plug and play and simple this might not be the board for you and knowing your own limitations is going to be wisdom in that situation i'll have to say one other thing that i didn't love or didn't blow me away about the console is the pitch correction that's on board now i would rather have it than not have it but i did hear some artifacts you know along with the vibrato on the singers and the tracking of the different pitches it wouldn't jump out to somebody that isn't tuning vocals a whole lot but i did hear the results of it more than it being seamless and kind of in the background that's one thing that i think they could upgrade but i realized that that's a big challenge to take on uh with pitch correction built into a live console yeah i bet i bet we'll see more and more improvements with it over time just since this console's been out for a year and a half almost two years now it's about two years exactly when they first started shipping it um lots of improvements with software updates so far so yeah and i mean once you buy it the software updates come and you know all of a sudden you've got more functionality you've got an increased flexibility you know they're often listening to customers and figuring out what it is that they want and implementing those in future firmware updates my two cents that you know now we're making a video about we love and hate about this console i haven't said this in other videos i really love mostly everything this up here i bet did you not use this at all i didn't really touch that to me this this feels like a lot of wasted real estate um i still don't quite fully understand what this is other than like i think they wanted someone else to be able to work on something while you're here like it i don't know if someone is using this and loves this in a way that i just am not aware of let us know because i almost i wish we had like another bunch of faders here like because now that i'm mixing a lot more regularly i'm just like i want to have i just don't want to be going through fader banks and stuff as little as possible right and i'd rather have more faders to control control some different things yeah like i know on the the larger midas uh digital consoles uh i can't remember the names at the moment the pro x right or the pro 6. they have a whole separate section where over here this uh these several faders can be controlled by a totally separate section so that you can have an a engineer and a b engineer and that could be helpful if you're running say either a festival or if you've got a bunch of speaking mics and a band that you're having to mix at the same time and there's a lot of different people speaking while the band is playing uh that could be super helpful to separate those responsibilities with the b section but i don't think that when you select this here the controls aren't any different here than here if those were separated somehow that could be cool or it could again be something that makes it more complex and trips people up yep i think it's ultra creative how they emulated other uh analog gear and came up with their own names for it yeah that was uh that was clever good on you behringer yep so you so your verdict was if you're if you're already in the behringer ecosystem it is kind of a no-brainer yeah if you're looking to upgrade from an x32 or even an m32 to this board yeah and i would strongly agree if you're in a my my recommendation if you're looking for a brand new console or brand new system i would still consider this setup because i actually do like it not just as an upgrade from an existing system or behringer system the sq5 uh from allen and heath that's probably my next favorite recommendation if you're building a system from scratch uh anything you would add to that um the presonus studiolive stuff is super helpful for training specifically if you looked at our other video that we made about some of the mixed changes that i made here the ability to bypass individual bands on the eq or have an a b function between compressor settings can be really helpful for teaching and helping people understand what it is that they're doing with each eq band so the the functionality there of the presonus definitely stands out to me that's all we have for you in this youtube video definitely check out james channel down below i'll link that as well as a free guide that you have yeah i've guide called how to lead your church sound team and it walks you through how to define what winning is so that it's not ambiguous on what settings and what uh results are going to mean that you're doing your job well with sound at church you can't make everybody happy but if your leadership team has defined what winning is you can aim for that mark and hit it on sunday if you found this video helpful especially if you're in the market to buy a new mixing console like the wing hit the like button because we just shared a ton of insight for you on what we love what we hate about the console and uh don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss out on any other videos to help you grow yourself and grow your worship ministry [Music]

Channel: Churchfront

Views: 15,607

Keywords: churchfront, worship leader training, worship ministry school, jake gosselin, worship tech training

Id: Rrx0HmDattI

Length: 16min 1sec (961 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 02 2021