Behringer X32 - Basic Mixing 101-2 - Preamp & Gain

hi guys i'm drew brashler uh audio tech northridge community church today we are going to be looking at the configuration and preamp section of the board um and so this is where we are going to be setting our gain uh and our uh if a microphone needs phantom power or 48 volts uh we also have our polarity reverse switch which behringer incorrectly calls phase and our low cut section which is a high pass filter so uh when we have our audio coming in off of an instrument it's usually a microphone or a direct signal like our keyboards go through our direct box and so when we are when we're setting this up we have our gain and so with the gain we want to have a good amount of gain the correct amount of gain which is called unity gain now if we have not enough gain if we have a signal that's too low we will have to compensate with the fader down here by putting it all the way up at the top and it kind of limits yourself at positive 10 on that fader but now if we have too much gain on the preamp then we're going to be all the way down here in the lower part of the board and down here if you make a very small movement it's making a very giant amplitude change so in the top of the fader like i was talking about in the previous video from here to here is five decibels but in if we were to make that same travel down in the lower part we'd be moving about 15 decibels which is a very drastic change in volume so let's go ahead and start talking about channel gain now um when we have a condenser microphone some type of microphone that requires phantom power we would want to go ahead and press plus 48 volts and because i'm connected to my computer it's not going to turn on uh right now but basically that gives the microphone the power to be able to uh produce sound and so check your microphone specifications we have our google drive document here has all of the microphones that we have here at northridge has the pdfs on all of them and that will say if that requires phantom power or not so check that out if you're using a new mic that you haven't used before polarity reverse basically just flips the polarity of the channel it's like taking two speaker wires at home and putting the black against the red and the red against the black so positive to negative and negative to positive usually you don't do that this is this is good if you are taking two microphones uh one on top of the snare one on bot on the bottom of the snare and when when you do that one of the mics is going to be out of polarity with the other um i can go into another video all about that but behringer calls this phase phase is time dependent not um absolute like polarity is so this is incorrectly called phase by behringer which it should be called polarity our low cut is the next thing this is going to be something that you want to engage on anything that does not require the subwoofer and here at northridge our subwoofers start at 100 hertz and about 90 to 100 hertz is where the the crossover point is so if you don't want something going through the uh through the subwoofer you want to engage this just by pressing that button and you can turn this up or down to correspond that and you can see a little bit more detail by going in on the uh on the eq screen so we can press view here with this button i'll show you guys this so we have our view buttons on each of the bottom right hand sections of all these different things so now we can go click view and then over here on the screen we can see a little bit more detail of where the different things are happening so i can take my low-cut knob and turn it up or down and you can see that little white line moving across the screen and you can see that there is 40 and 60 and 80 and 100 is right there so if you're wanting something not be in the subwoofers you'll want to have that line above 100 hertz and so that's how we can take things out of the subwoofers or not things that you would want to keep in the subwoofers uh is bass guitar keyboards because keyboards can go pretty low floor tom and also the kick drum so those are the different things that you would want to have on uh in inside the subwoofer still so back over to the preamp section here i'm going to go ahead and play some audio from my computer so we can go ahead and start showing you guys how to set up the correct amount of gain and there we go so now one thing i'm jumping ahead of myself here each channel has a select button a solo button and a mute let me zoom in on that real quick so our electric guitar here has our select button our solo button and our mute and the top part of the board is going to be all our channel strips so this is all the different things that we can adjust on each of these channels and to select a channel basically we just have to press the select button so if i was wanting to select guitar 1 to the right i would just press the select button and now the whole top of the board is going to be dedicated to adjusting this channel and then if we were wanting to adjust the electric guitar we press select now if you wanted to listen to an instrument without any other instruments instead of pressing all the mute buttons there's a cool button that we call solo and so this allows us to solo that instrument and listen to that instrument alone another benefit of doing solo is over here it will show you the gain on this meter which is much greater you you have a lot more adjustment being able to be seen rather than the little adjustments rather than a little level meter right here and then the last thing that we have is our mute button this is if you're wanting to mute a channel and not have it go through anything so if you had this fader up and you were wanting to mute it you can press mute so that's good all right so back up to the uh preamp section here we'll talk about setting levels to unity gain all right so let's go ahead and get some music going here all right so we can see that we have some level here now our gain is going to be adjusting how much we're going to be um amplifying that signal so we can either amplify it a whole lot uh or very little um so this would be way too much gain so we have our clip light which is up there and then we have negative three negative six negative nine basically our clip is at zero um and that is where our instrument is going to be distorting that's bad we don't want that we don't want distortion it sounds really bad um negative three is going to be three decibels lower than clipping so that's gonna be negative three negative six is six decibels lower than clipping and so on and so forth down to negative 30 is the bottom uh scale that you have here if you solo an instrument uh when you look over on the right meter it goes down to negative 57 so you have a lot more that you can see on the levels now um let's see here so when we are setting our levels we're really wanting to have the levels at the loudest points going to be at negative 12 to negative 18. and the reason behind this is when it's set around in that area it gives us about 12 decibels of headroom and so when he's playing his loudest notes he still has 12 decibels of headroom above what he's currently playing before he starts distorting now this this headroom is really important because it gives us enough uh area in case he turns up you know we can not go into distortion but then the other reason that we want to have the right amount of headroom is because if we have the right amount of volume then we can keep this at negative zero which is going to be our unity gain and like i was saying in the previous video it has more adjustment finite adjustments that we can make right here rather than down in the lower part of the fader so um now that we have our gains set we can go ahead and turn this up and listen to it there we go and so each instrument that you're wanting to um that is going to be going into the sound board you're going to want to check the preamp and make sure that it is not clipping and also down here in the lower part of the faders you can see uh that there is a meter and when we are playing music you can see if that is clipping so i'm going to turn this down and go ahead and put this up to clipping and so you can notice that there is a little red clip light and so we don't want it to go into the clipping area so we'll go ahead and turn that back down to where it needs to be at which is about negative 12 in the negative 18 and that is perfect now i'm going to go ahead and show you guys over here on the left side of the board our vocal and so there is a uh the top light is compressor that means that's a dynamic section so that means that the board is uh compressing the channel just a little bit um to keep track of the levels uh this is adjusted by yourself so it's not automatically applied um and so watch my other videos that i'll have about the dynamic section and everything like that the next light down is giving me our clip negative 6 negative 12 negative 18 negative 30 negative 60 and then we also have a little thing called gate a gate is an automatic mute you can see it going over here this is basically he is not singing on his microphone and so we have set up the board to mute that channel once it goes over a certain uh once it goes under a certain amount so on the next video we're going to be chatting about just getting a basic mix on the board making making an instrument sound right and just kind of adjusting levels to make them sound correct in the music so thank you

Channel: Drew Brashler

Views: 425,021

Keywords: Behringer, Behringer X32, Behringer X32 Intro, Preamp, Unity Gain, X32, X32 Basic Mixing, X32 Channel Gain, X32 Correct Gain Level, audio engineering basics, behringer mixer, behringer x 32, behringer x32 compact, behringer x32 compact tutorial, behringer x32 producer, behringer x32 rack, behringer x32 tutorial, drew brashler, drew brashler x32, gain staging, gain structure, x32 behringer, x32 behringer tutorial, x32 compact, x32 producer, x32 tutorial

Id: IQt8IcDNFIg

Length: 10min 49sec (649 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 27 2014