Behringer X32 Effects Tutorial – Combinator Multi-Band Compressor Part 1

hey guys is Drew brash there with DBB audio today I am going to be bringing you a tutorial on the behringer x32 Combinator which is an effect that's built into the behringer x32 now this was originally modeled after the behringer MDX 8000 which is a to high rack multiband compressor which is pretty impressive it had eight DCA circuits and 16 rms level detector so a lot of circuitry in this thing now the Combinator that's built into the expert 2 here is dual channel or stereo and it's a multiband compressor with 5 different bands of adjustment so let's go ahead and jump in and see how this thing works ok so let's go ahead and get this thing routed in the x32 so first thing that we're gonna do is reno ahead and press the effects button here now the Combinator lives on effects racks 1 through 4 but it's not able to live on 5 through 8 so if you're wanting to use the Combinator you have to use effects 1 2 3 or 4 on in the effects rack so we're gonna go ahead and insert this on effects 1 so I have effects 1 selected just like that and we're going to take the type and change this all the way down it's actually pretty far through this and it's right there Combinator and dual Combinator now there's two different ones there's the Combinator which is a stereo setup and then the dual Combinator which is 2 separate combinators so what we're going to be doing today is the Combinator 2 which is the dual Combinator so we're going to go ahead and press select with that and then we're going to insert this on one of my vocal channels so my source I'm going to rotate to insert and just like that and my source here I'm also going to rotate to insert now you can select the inserts by going and pressing view on a channel so I'm going to go ahead and select my channel 17 here and we can set the insert by going to our config tab and looking at our insert here so we can rotate this if it's not inserted it will read off but we're going to go ahead and insert this on effects 1 left which is the first channel of the Combinator so go ahead and do that press select and it is now routed from channel 17 into the Combinator and then it comes back and then puts the audio out from the channel 17 so we can change our insert position here by changing it to pre or post which you can see here but let's go ahead and get back into the common ear and see a little bit more about it so now that we're here we're in effects 1 we can notice that we're in the dual Combinator and down here we can see 1 2 3 & 4 now these are the different layers of my cake so we can change between these by the layer button here so layer 1 & 2 is on channel a or on channel 17 right up here so a and then 3 & 4 are the different layers they're an exact replica of 1 & 2 except they're independent and these are going to be controlling channel beep which is currently inserted on channel 18 so let's go ahead and start over on the left hand side here now the mix allows us to control the wetness of the signal so we can control this from 0 all the way to 100 basically giving us a parallel compression now one thing to note if this is at 100 or if this is all the way at 0 the insert delay of this effect is still the same now when you do insert this effect you end up having a point 7 one millisecond delay now if this is not active so if you press that it actually changes the insert delay down a little bit to 0.67 milliseconds so if you're trying to do some time aligning and this is a insert that's on something that's really important then just keep that in mind now also one other thing note if this is active changing the crossover type over here will also change the delay so on 48 DB per octave you're at 0.7 1 milliseconds of delay if you change it to the 12 DB per octave you're at point 6 9 milliseconds so let's go ahead and make sure that our mix knob is up at a hundred percent attack is going to be how fast the compressor will attack on a signal once it reaches a threshold so we have attack adjustment from zero all the way up to 19 in increments of 1 now the attack here is is interesting it's a it's actually a dual step attack so the initial attack is um changed by the number here and you can check out my blog post and I actually ran some different waves through here to show what the attack is now with the attack set to 19 the initial attack clamps down really fast it's actually half a millisecond and then a slower attack is zero with the initial attack being about 1.5 milliseconds now once that initial attack happens a little bit of time goes on about 5 milliseconds and then there's a little transition period of about 3 milliseconds after that so altogether no matter what your attack is set to the compressor will be in full compression within about 8 milliseconds of the signal being hit on the threshold so with the attack not here we're just changing the initial attack so our release is adjustable there's also an auto release but we have a release adjustment from 20 all the way up to 3 seconds so 20 milliseconds all the way up to 3 seconds SBC stands for automatic spectrum balance control now this is something that's pretty interesting it acts like a make up gain on the compressor however the spectrum balance control does this independently on all the Bands so when this is on and we can see that SVC on is here we can turn it off by clicking when this is on it will automatically apply up to 10 DB of makeup gain to adjust the the makeup gain on each band here so that the EQ output is even so say that you are compressing a whole lot on the low-end and nothing on the upper four bands then the SVC will actually go in and apply 10 DB of gain to bring the low-end back to being equal now the benefit of the SBC is that you can dial in the compression on each of those individual bands without having to worry about changing the overall tone of the of the instrument or channel and making sure that the EQ is flat all the way across now this only does up to 10 DB of addition if you are happening to do 11 DB of compression it's only going to bring it up to 1-under so that's that that SP C speed is how fast the spectrum balance control is going to act so one is actually slower and 10 is much faster so with a setting of 1 the SBC speed seems to be about two and a half to three seconds when it's all the way up to ten it's much faster at about half a second the crossover is going to be adjustable on this each Lea is changing where the different bands are adjusting in the overall spectrum so check out my blog post is I have smart measurements showing where those actually cross over the difference on this with the 48 and 12 is how steep of a slope is this crossover going to be applying so if you're wanting to have a lot more fine-tune adjustments you're going to want to have it at 48 if you're wanting to have this be a little bit less impactful on the channel then you're going to want to have it at 12 as it's going to be a lot more broadband of a mix ratio is going to be compression ratio that's applied by the compressor and so this can go all the way from one point one all the way up to limiting giving you a lot of options here so the SBC's meter is one thing i skipped over this if we click down this will show the gain or reduction of the SVC as it's applying it so let's go ahead and jump over to the second layer here now the threshold allows us to set a point for the processor to actually process the signal so once the audio level rises above this threshold the compressor would start attenuating the signal by the value set by the ratio and so with the threshold we have adjustment from zero dB all the way down to negative forty so we can set that to give ourselves the compression that we want gain is going to be a global gain so this is going to give the overall compressor again up or down peak meter is going to be showing the peak of the different bands of the channel so that way we can kind of set our threshold from here so when I'm initially applying this to a channel I'll go ahead and press peak meter and watch the signal as is happening up here that way I can kind of dial in my threshold to where I want it and then I'll undo that and see the actual reduction that's happening this is going to be our band select knob so we have five different bands we have low low mid mid high mid and high as we can see low low mid mid high mid and high so we can go through the different bands to select the threshold independently and the band gain independently now the band solo I need to caution you guys on this this is a destructive solo and by destructive I mean that if you have this inserted on a on a PA system on the left/right channels and you hit this it is going to solo this effect on the mid through the PA so if you're going to be using the band solo make sure that it during a practice on where it's not something that you know people are going to be looking you given you strange looks and whatnot so the band select knob that controls this so the band threshold and band gain are set on which band select we are on so the band threshold will give me an independent band adjustment comparative to the overall threshold so if this is set at negative 10 globally and my mid is now set at negative 5 that means that the threshold on the mid band is actually at negative 15 now if this is at positive 5 now my threshold on the mid is set at negative 5 band gain is going to be the gain for that independent band now likewise gain on the global and the independent side will work together or against each other so if this is up at 5 and the band gain down here is that at negative 5 on the overall gain of this mid band is at 0 whereas all the rest of them are up at 5 band lock allows us to bypass the compression and the automatic spectrum balance on individual bands so you can go ahead and go and lock on this individual band and then go here and you can lock this then we can notice that it will put a slash through the ones that are locked here now this is independent so I can lock the mid and lock the low but not have locks on the low mid high mid and high band reset allows us to reset our band gain and threshold on individual bands just by pressing nuts oh that's pretty cool and then our ratio is the same on layer 1 and layer 2 ok so now that I've taught you guys all the different controls of the Combinator I'm going to go ahead and insert this on a vocalist and do a little bit of fun with this and kind of show you guys how it would implement this

Channel: Drew Brashler

Views: 82,313

Keywords: behringer x32, Behringer X32, Behringer X32 Effects, Behringer X32 FX, X32 Effects, X32 FX, x32 fx, X32 Effects Rack, X32 FX Rack, x32 fx rack, Behringer X32 Effects Rack, Behringer X32 Effect Rack, Effects Rack, Effect Rack, FX Rack, Combinator, MDX-8000, X32 Combinator, Combinator Effect, Multiband compressor, multi-band compressor, multi band compressor

Id: UGcXYMQjdA8

Length: 12min 25sec (745 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 23 2016