Behringer XR-12 Review and Getting Started!

[Music] alright ladies and gentlemen today we have a treat especial as a ve would say today we're gonna do a quick overview a little bit of review of the behringer X 12 this is a 12 channel digital mixer as you can see pretty small form-factor I mean here's my hand on top of it here it's not that big not that wide very easy to move it's very portable I am recording this audio through the unit so you'll be able to hear me work with it here in a bit but for right now we'll go over some of the features so the first thing that you notice about this mixer is there is no control surface to this this is a mixer that is completely controlled via a app either on a PC Mac Linux or it can also be controlled with an iPad app Android app as well to connect to this to be able to control it this has a three position three mode Wi-Fi router built into it with both a hard wired Ethernet jack a built-in Wi-Fi router or an access point the access point does contain a DHCP server so you can connect directly to this via the Wi-Fi Wi-Fi antenna is right here you can connect directly to it so it doesn't require an external external router to be able to use it for the sake of this demonstration today I am hooking it directly to my my network here so I can show you guys the screen capture here on my desktop if the desktop had a wireless card on it I just connect it via wireless but it doesn't so that's why I'm doing this it also has Wi-Fi client mode which is the third mode so you can take this unit and connect it to an existing Wi-Fi network via Wi-Fi so for example if I already a Wi-Fi network at a venue that I knew the password to and so forth like that I can set that up inside the mixer itself with the app now mind you you do have to connect to it via access point mode first to be able to configure that but for a venue or say you already have a wireless router in a rack or something like that at a at an event you can put it in Wi-Fi client mode it will then connect to your wireless router and then you can connect to it via that network along the front here does have MIDI in and out I've not used that myself personally but you can control each of the inputs volume levels things like that via MIDI that's something I will eventually get into haven't gotten into it yet but so I can't really speak for what I'll control you can get with the MIDI does have a USB style B port on the front of it we'll get into that here in a little bit as well this thing can record it's a two channel recorder so it can record either like the main out left right it can record two individual inputs as a left-right or you can you record like both aux outs if you want to as well does have a headphone jack on it with its own level this is assignable you can choose the pick off point you can monitor an individual channel or you can monitor the main out you can monitor it knocks out something like that the first four inputs these are TRS XLR combo jacks so you can use a TRS balanced input on these the first four have the midas preamps in them the midas priests are excellent little preamps they're full mic level pries they also have phantom power available in the first four as well five through ten those are the standard TRS balanced inputs for standard line in applications personally I use for my DJ set up channels five and six that is my standard DJ in that from my my controller my mixer I use XLR TRS adapters maintaining that they are balanced on both sides these are balanced inputs you can use with use a accelerator TRS adapter for these you can theoretically hook a microphone to these as well the only issue with that is the preamps and these are line preamps you can crank them up high enough to get audio out of a mic with them no problem but they're not gonna sound as good as these first for number one because the preamps are different and these do not have phantom power available on as well channels 11 and 12 these are line ends as well however these are high Z inputs so you can hook a for example you can hook an electric guitar directly to 11 or 12 here of course these are still balanced as well but they are high Z so you can hook into a like an electric guitar directly to this in a little bit we'll go through the effects that are in this the purpose of that is say you were at a venue and your pedal board died or whatever issue you had your amplifier died for example you can hook your electric guitar directly to this mixer here and with some of the effects you can process the guitar as well so if you need a distortion you can you can patch in a guitar amp simulator into one of these two and you can essentially use this as your guitar amp it will emulate a guitar amp and then you can just output you know either an ox or what the main output directly to of made a big soundboard and then boom you're you're back on main left and right out our XLR balanced which is very convenient in handy it also has two auxiliary outputs these are TRS balanced auxilary outputs these are very handle handy for running that may be a monitor mix something like that or in my case using this for wedding DJing I can run one of these aux outs and of course these are independent mixes so these are completely independent mix of all these inputs as the main output and of course between themselves as well you can stereo pair these aux outs if you want but that's just an option so what I typically do is if I have a an awkward room I will sometimes take one of these auxes and run that out to a separate powered speaker maybe in a different section of the room and because it's a whole separate mix I don't actually have to patch the my controller the music portion I don't have to patch that to that output I can just use like my mic or something like that so I had a wedding recently where I the room was kind of separated with some with some walls and some doorways and it was kind of awkward but the far section of the room was in a way that I couldn't place any speakers in the main section of the room and be able to carry completely throughout this this hall because of the walls and the doorways and stuff like that so what it is I put a speaker on an aux out now this is a section of the room where a lot of people during the dancing dancing portion of the night were wanting to just sit down and talk and stuff like that so what I did is I took my my microphone and just a tad bit of the music since it was his own separate makes tab of the music and I patched that to one of the aux outs and ran that out there so whenever I was talking on the mic the people in this section could hear me they could hear the introductions they could hear everything else but they were not being blasted out with music and stuff like that like the main section of the room was mind you not blast it out but they were not they did not hear the music near as loud which was good for them they really enjoyed that they liked that it was a good it was a good thing other than that it's got a standard IEC power cable on the side so you can just use any old computer power cord for it but that's pretty much it for the actual physical mixer itself so we'll take a look here in a second and we'll go through the software for it but yeah this is a very compact it does come with rack ears I don't have them on this one because I keep this portable it does have wreckers that you can rack mount this since there is nothing on the back there's only the power cord on the side everything that you need is on the front so inputs and outputs are all in the front so it is pretty easily rack mountable and you don't have to worry about getting things having to reach in behind and then plug outputs in the back and stuff like it it's all I guess typically I'll set this on my table sometimes below my table I don't really actually need to touch any of this once I have it set up that's the great part about being new controlled via network with an iPad or a computer you almost always have a computer there with you at the gigs anyway so you pull up the software you can control it completely from there this thing can be wherever you want to in a room so I had a wedding one time where the the layout of the room was kind of awkward and I could have had this at the table where I was but because of the runs and the auxes that I had to run at that event it was easier for me to put this mixer back behind the head table with some of my other sound gear which is where my speakers were and stuff like that I put this back there I pulled up the Wi-Fi antenna I connected to the Wi-Fi on this with my computer I had my wireless mic ran in here and the wireless mic receiver was with this and then I ran my new main outs to my my speakers and I only had one set of cables running from my my my table with my mixer on it because my wireless receiver was up there with me well up there with this and then five and six ahead is my my mixer in so this can be anywhere as long as I had a Wi-Fi signal to it I can control it completely just like it was sitting in front of me and it made my table a little cleaner cuz I didn't have as much new clutter much as much things on the table so that was a that was a nice touch so let's take a look at the software here alright so here's the software you can see my microphone is running in on channel one just like you uh you saw before this this looks here just like a standard standard mixer you would see anywhere you have your volume controls along the bottom you have mute buttons I can mute unmute and so forth like that all 16 channels are here you also have an aux auxilary channel here as well this auxiliary Channel is specifically for the the playback from the usb on the front of the unit itself so if you have audio files stored on that USB that you plug into the front they will be they will come back through on this aux Channel here and on the far right here you see the four effects that we have here we'll go over this effects in a minute I'm using a de-esser on my mic here as you can tell I also have a reverb patched in there you can see a little bit of it showing up there when I talk loudly and then the fourth channel is the master buss compressor I have put on this the main out as you can tell this is a fully digital mixer so you have a lot of control with this you can take snapshots okay I had to change a couple things around here to to get this to look how I wanted it to you so you can see the other one does so it has you can take snapshots so that's the first thing we're going to talk about so once I've gotten to a venue and I've got everything set up one of the things that's really nice about this mixer is you can take a digital snapshot of everything on this so everything from the the levels of your mics to the EQ curves to compressor settings to effects everything can be snapshotted which is very handy so I can take care I can open up some snapshots here I'll pull the panel here so you can see it I have quite a few here some of the things DJ set up here is that my standard DJ setup I also have a setup for ceremonies now I'm not gonna load this because it's gonna mess up what your you're hearing me through right now but for ceremonies the first two channels I have as my lapel mics now those the pel mics are good mics however they do require a little bit of EQ insist amande stuff like that getting your lapel mic so they don't feedback and things like that is important for ceremony so the first two mic there first two channels I know exactly what my mics sound like and I use the exact same mics in the exact same channels every time so the first two of my lapel mics for the officiate and for the groom and of course there's a EQ sticker set up for that the compressor settings that you know all of that is set in that snapshot so whenever I get to a ceremony I can double click on that ceremony snapshot it'll loaded in and then I know everything has already set how I need to from then I go and I can set my levels and stuff like that cuz obviously levels are gonna be different replacement and stuff like that but the Mikey hues are pretty much gonna stay the same for the most part so those are kinds of things you can still with snapshot so it makes it very convenient of course when you do turn this turn this unit off all of the settings stay exactly how it was when you turned it off so if I just got done with a DJ gig and I turn this thing off my next DJ gig turn it back on and it'll be right back where it was so you have to worry about you're resetting everything every time so that's the snapshot so you can choose what all is stored in the snapshot as you can see here on the right hand side there is all kinds of different stuff that you can you can either exempt or store so say I didn't want to store any master outputs like my main left right or my effects I can deselect these and then it will only store the actual channel settings themselves and parameters and so forth like that through here so you can choose what you want to save every time so it makes it kind of nice so the mixer itself you'll see we have individual channels here this section right up here at the top is the input section this is my input gain will we'll go into this in more detail in a second when we go to the channels tab for right now this is just what it looks like in the mixer you can see my EQ curve is here the second one below here's my dynamics my compressor and you can see the compressor working right now if you look closely so the red coming down so it gives you a live feedback of what is actually happening paying control and then of course you can name all of your channels you can color code them as well you can change the colors around to work with whatever makes sense to you and then of course you can solo channels as well soloing can be used with the headphone jack so you can choose to plug headphones then you can hit this solo button it's not gonna affect the main output but then what's gonna do is gonna solo that into your headphone so you can you can hear that channel a little bit better auto mix settings are right here I don't use how to mix I won't go into that for this right now but they're there and then down at the bottom we have our mute groups and then the mute button itself so mute groups you can see on the right hand side here are assigned either in the channel settings itself or you can actually click on them down here and so what this will do is I can hit mute group no.1 and what its gonna do is it's gonna mute everything that is part of me group once I'm going to unmute channel two here I hit this and you can see it muted and unmuted channels one and two because they were in the same group yeah me group number two is three four five and six here so I'll hit number two and then usually mute three four five and six so you can assign this up so if you're doing something you can put all very much the phones on one mute group you can hit one so I hit one button and then mute all of your microphones so that can be convenient same with if you have multiple DJ inputs and so like that you can hit number two it'll mute all of those believe the mics active it can make it kind of quick so let's the rest this information on here is it's kind of hard to tell what is what here this section here is for the auxilary busses I have a little bit patched into bus or aux - it's really hard to see from here this is this is kind of good if you want to keep like an overall watch of things but for the most part this is not super helpful and setting things up so we'll delve into a channel here and we'll we'll get into it so first channel I'm gonna go head and select this channel I click on the name of it here and it will select it as you can see it's highlighted so I'm going to click over here on the top tab to channel and here is a good description of the actual channel itself my channel input here I see 48 volts phantom is turned on on this one because I am using a condenser mic you can invert polarity so say you have like two microphones on the snare drum and need to invert the bottom one you can flip the polarity of its channel itself you can also stereo link from here so the stereo link will attach basically in this example it would attach channels 1 & 2 together it would pan channel 1 to the left hip and channel 2 to the right we'll see that in a minute when we go into the DJ input settings here after this you have a real basic setting on your noise gate you can turn it on and off here and you can also adjust the threshold that's really it and you can see what kind of gain reduction is doing that's really all you can see from here it doesn't give you a whole lot the second one you have the equalizer you can enable or disable the equalizer here I currently have a low-cut put on on this you can adjust that low-cut frequency from right here but that's pretty much it once again you can turn the low-cut on and off and then you can turn the equalizer itself on and off that's really all you can do here but gives you kind of a a rough idea of what's going on this window up here will show the the EQ curve you currently have on it so you can get an idea if you have like the highs roll-off or something like that next one is the compressor you can see it is active here I am using it I'll back the threshold off just a little bit it'll get a little bit louder you can turn the compressor on and off from here there's off and then to the compressor back on you can adjust your threshold so I can smash it or I just bring it back up here to a decent level I hope it's not too loud don't think I'm peaking yeah I think good next one is your auxilary buss sense so this is what I had mentioned before with the aux 1 & 2 this is how I can send audio to these auxilary busses so say auxiliary bus 1 I want to have just my mic so what I would do is I would go through all my other channels and make aux bus 1 down to 0 because I don't want to need that channel in that aux then I will take my main mic and I will just put a little bit of the volume in there so now my main mic will have some of that ersite my auxilary 1 will have some of that main mic in there the XR 18 which uses the same software I also own one of those we'll talk we can talk about that at another video has 6 auxiliary bus sense which is the reason for these other four right here which are disabled in this below that are your effects sense this is how you can send some of this channel into each of the effects I'm sending a little bit of it this channel right now into effect 2 which is our reverb which is dela major right here on that ya green down here and we'll talk about the effects a little bit more but this is how you can adjust how much of this channel specifically goes into that effect there's multiple ways to adjust a lot of this stuff including like the aux bus sends and the effects sends those can be adjusted in other places as well on this software whatever works best for you for your workflow is as good the last section here you have your assignment of your main out you can take a channel and you can actually take this channel and buss it into something and then take that something and then bus it back to the main out so you can actually deselect this channel from being in the main out I say you're using it as a gated reverb or something that you're running in manually is an insert there are reasons for that you can select that here you can also adjust your pan you want to pan it left to right you can also adjust your DCA groups what's what's part of the DCA groups I probably won't go into what DCA groups are and this that's one thing you can google you can look up you - but what DCA's are but in essence you can assign say if you had a drum kit on this mixer it's only a 16 channel but he had a drum kit unless mixer you could put all the drum kit on one DCA and then you can use that dc-8 to control the entire drum drum kits volume from one fader instead of having to adjust all the individual channels separately that's a real quick and dirty overview and then of course you can assign your mute groups here as well so staying on my main mic here of course all these tabs appear are going to be relevant to whatever channel I have selected for the most part so the next one we'll go to is the input tab which is actually going to correlate to what you see right here on the left hand side of the input here but it's a little more detailed so we'll click on that and here's the the details on the input side so here's where I'll adjust my input gain my mic gain so if I have a you know hafiz hotter mic it you just your input gain down Yelp's I don't want to peak the left hand side meter you see here is the input meter so if you see it peaking here it's good it's obviously peaking you'll adjust your input gain to where this is right where you want it to be you can flip your polarity adjuster turn it on or off your phantom power and of course stereo link it here above here you see the analog input this because it's digital I can actually have channel 1 on my mixer that you see on the on the screen here I can actually have that channel 1 be any input on the physical mixer itself so if I if I wanted the actual input number 12 on the on the physical mixer if I wanted it to be channel 1 on this this display here we're seeing I can do that I can just select it there and that'll be you input 12 normally you wouldn't mess with that but if you if you wanted to have a workflow where channel one was always one guy which you never knew where he was gonna be plugged in you could in theory go through and and make that change you can adjust your low-cut here this is just a solid low-cut you can adjust the low-cut in like four different places but this is for cutting off any low rumbles and things like that out of your Mike's um you can adjust the frequency there as well and then the channel insert will go over inserts and effects in a minute but for now the channel insert here this is inserted on if affects one side a each effect is a stereo effect so this is on side a for my dual de-esser so the de-esser will take off the the high sibilance there so DB b audio drew Brasher with DB v audio he has some really good youtube videos on all of the effects that are built into the XA or series and the x32 series the x32 series from behringer is the same uses this exact same effects as the XA or series the x32 just has eight effects slots as opposed to the four effects slots we have on these but for the u.s. price of 250 bucks this is a heck of a mixer and it's pretty powerful so that's the dual d ester so we'll go up here to the gate tab here this is our noise gate it does have some presets in here which is kind of nice if you don't know where to start off and you have this attached to a specific channel you can use the presets I'll go ahead and click on load the vocal preset here so what it's done is now it's turned the noise gate on has created a threshold adjusted the range I'm gonna turn that down a little bit a little grabby and then of course adjust the the ratio of what it is is doing so I'm gonna turn on to a full gate here so obviously I'm not going to go into the details of exactly what a noise gate is that's something you can look up on your own when you have time if somebody really wants the video about it I can do a video about them but for the most part you have presets here you can adjust these settings your range here as well you can adjust your full gain and below up here your attack hold and release and of course you can sidechain it side-chaining you can either key it off of itself based on a frequency or you can actually key it off of another channel so I'm trying to think of an excellent way to describe this but you can key this gate off of another chain I'll say you have another microphone that's picking up background stuff or you have like something that you only want to come through when a kick drum happens you can key it off of a kick drums when the kick drum happens it will open this gate it's not gonna be keyed off of itself it's only gonna open when the kick drum hits you can do some cool stuff with that but sidechaining is a whole another whole nother thing I feel like I keep saying that a lot next time is our EQ 4-band parametric EQ with a low-cut here as well this is all drag and drop a bull turn a low-cut on and off from here as well adjust the frequency one of the cool things about the EQs on the accessories is it does come with a full RTA so I just turned the RTA on here and now you can see the full spectrum analysis of this mic that I'm using to the fundamentals of my my voice here you can see everything that's going on one of the things that can be really handy with this these RTA's are for controlling feedback so if you had feedback you would see a specific frequency here shoot way up and that would be the frequency of your hearing so you can actually take that you can take that and you can notch it out a little bit you know reduce the amount that that frequencies coming through or you can you can take your take each one here I'm gonna take number two I don't do quality noise that should be pretty I'm fine hit the right button here make it nice and sharp and I could cut you know specific frequency out if I wanted to as well so of course standard EQ parametric EQ do whatever you want to with it you can enable or disable bands as you please move things around you can hear it probably making a difference there as I sweep across boost cut whatever you need it also has so right now if I if I make a change here the RTA that we're seeing here is gonna reflect exactly what the EQ is already done to it so this is this is a post RTA right here right now so this is not what's coming into the channel this is actually what's coming out of that channel we can hit the pre button over here and that will change it to a pre pree RT so as you can see before like right now I'm gonna notch somewhere right in here so what this is the pre this is actually what's coming into the mixer itself so if I take this off and get a post you'll see there's a little bit of a notch now here right where I put this big dip in the EQ so this is showing it as reflecting and reflecting directly what what the EQ is doing of course you can't go to a spectrograph as well I don't find this very useful it's easier to see with the standard RTA but you have the spectrograph fog option the next tab is the compression tab so this is a standard compressor you can do a lot of things with these of course it does have basic presets as well you have your your threshold adjustment here you'll see your actual amount of gain reduction here ratio mix it how much of this compressor is actually mixed in you don't I mean if you want to run just a little bit of compression in the background you can you can bring the mix down and it won't be fully in there your makeup gain of course you have your your gain envelope with your attack holding release here as well yeah things like kick drums and stuff like that you want to attack about 50 60 somewhere in there to get that snap hold it for just a second and then this pretty slow release to control that real deep low frequencies once again you can sidechain these compressors as well I've done this with bass guitars and kick drums and stuff like that I have had it so where it'll compress a bass guitar when a kick drum hits to let the kick drum coming through a little bit harder things like that you can key it off itself or you can key it off another channel of course of course linear in logarithmic gain structures peak and RMS how the compressor works all in there you can adjust your knee can ever pretty pretty soft knee or pretty hard knee I'm not gonna do that one which I talked but you just turn it into expander as well broadcasting stuff like that where expanders come into play really well so you can turn off the compressor right here as well turn it off enable disable of course what's coming in then what's going out so if you compress a lot you'll see your output here oh no one on the right hand side go down yeah next time was the sends tab so this is how we set up our effects sends our auxiliary sends so as you can see here I have this channel because I am still selected on the main leg here bus one and two here I have a little bit packed into bus one so a little bit of this audio that's coming in this mic is going to is going right now to the aux one out this mixer only has two auxes which is why you only see bus one and two here you can adjust here as well how much of this effect goes to the effects reverb as long channel 2 if X 2 here so that's what you see in there and then of course how each of these channels are routed to the auxes so these auxes you can actually take the input of a mic I'm going to directly to an aux via the pickoff point here or you can have it be pre EQ which would be after your gain staging and low-cut post EQ which will be you know obviously after the EQ pre fader which is after EQ dynamics or post fader pre fader so post EQ dynamics but irrelevant of the fader position post fader which would be actually relevant of the fader position that you see on the main mix and then of course the subgroup if you're just if you're using them as using that bus as a subgroup to be patched back into the main for essentially like a DCA but a little bit different you can process it separately and of course how the effects are processed as well whether or not they're pre fader post fader for reverbs and stuff like that we definitely want them to be post fader we don't want to set them on a reverb depending on even if our faders all the way down or up cuz you don't want reverb coming through if your faders all the way down so that's why it's said as it is effects one in four right now you're not gonna see anything on because those are actually set up as inserts and we'll talk about those when we get over to the to the effects stuff the right-hand button here you say changes made or changes affect all channels so if I change how bus one is is set up here whether on its pre acute post-acute pre fader that will affect all channels if I don't want it to affect all channels I'll just deselect this each channel can be done individually but a lot of times when you're setting these kind of stuff it's gonna be globally so that's why it gives you the global option there the next tab is the main output tab this is where you can assign your groups for DCA's your mute groups auto mix assignments and weights for gaming automix if you're using this in a panel situation we have like four mics and four people are sitting at a table in a panel the auto mix basically will apply gain reduction to everybody but the person speaking and so if the next person speaks up then it'll it'll duck everybody else and let him go through and it helps control noise a little bit better but that's what it's for you can adjust your pay and left/right and of course if it is assigned to the main stereo out so before I go into the effects and meters and stuff like that I am gonna click on my DJ input channels here so I'm gonna go back to the channel settings here and I mentioned the stereo link earlier so 5 & 6 are set for stereo link so all it does is just help you it makes it a little bit easier on you so with this stereo linked it automatically pans channel 5 to the left fully and channel 6 to the right fully we can see that showing up here and we can actually go to the main output see a little bigger here basically it pans them for you and then it links everything together so as you can see my my faders here are linked so whatever I do on one channel it's gonna do on the other because it knows it is a it is one input source is just a stereo source you can unlink that and do this stuff manually if you want but this just keeps it consistent and even it makes it nice if you have a stereo input it pans it for you it takes care of everything for you in that aspect the equalizer compressor noise gate all of that stuff is jointly moved as well so if I if I make a eq change on one channel it will make that eq change on the other channel for me so it keeps everything everything together as a stereo input if you're using a mixer that doesn't have a stereo input like an older-style mix it just has four inputs using DJ left and right on 3 & 4 in theory you could have something different on channel 3 than you would on channel 4 that's not always something you want typically it's not something you want so this just keeps things tight and clean so that was really it for the channels themselves so we'll bump over here to the meter channel on so we'll keep this are we not getting too confused to keep things on an order so here's our meter meter panel this essentially shows all of the individual meters for everything so here you see all the analog inputs you know 1 through 18 there this is the only a toll channel mixer this screen is meant for the larger X 18 which is why you see the full 18 channels there but you know for example this is only this would only show up to 12 which is which is your twelfth input they're just giving you a general idea of all of your inputs so you can see if one specifically input is peaking you can kind of keep an eye on everything just standard meter bridge effects sends effects returns you bus outputs you can see everything here as well USB returns this is only X 512 this does not have a full 18 USB returns so obviously they would be all blank here except for probably what believe it's used on 1 & 2 from the USB flash drive that's on this thing but if you were doing this with an X 18 you'd see all 18 on the USB returns if you're returning P 16 AlterNet this does not have AlterNet this model does not the x18 does so you can't you can't use an alternate system with this because it does not have the connectors for it and then of course your main outputs and of course your monitor or solo outputs here as well my monitor so output is on the same is is linked to the main so that's why it's exactly the same alright so let's take a look at the effects that's the next tab over here so here are 4 effects and you see I have channels 1 & 4 effects has effects 1 & 4 as inserts so if you're not familiar with inserts and we're going to go too much in depth that but basically I can take this effect it insert it directly into a channel and I don't have to worry about getting levels right it's it's part of that channel then the first one I have here is my de-esser and you can see it is patched in you'll see it working on the right-hand side here this will take off some of the sibilance that we have as you see my say sibilance really ramps up there I use the patch a de-esser onto my mic inputs if I have that option helps control sibilance makes things not quite as harsh and so forth but for the most part as a general overview I'm not going to go through the individual effects themselves because that's takes way too much time you have all I have a de-esser patched into one which I have inserted under channels 1 & 2 I have a vented reverb this reverb is not inserted so that I can I can run a specific amounts of each channel to that reverb and whatever ratios I want effects 3 I have a compressor and now FX 3 I don't typically use I can put like a mic delay unit in there something like that like a three tap delay output in there and I can then adjust how much of my mics go to the dela if I wanted some delay all my mic and channel 4 I have inserted on my main left right out I'm using this as a stereo buss compressor each of the each of these effects are stereo effects so as you see this first one here I say stereo there to channel so the first effect here I can have an independent two independent sources coming in and out of this compressor or this de-esser sorry right now my mic is on what looks like it's on the right-hand side here I could have another Michael on this other side and of course everything is independent so that's how this works now because they are two channel I can select a effect that is a stereo effect where it only has one set of controls for example my stereo Combinator here or my reverb here where it has one set of controls and if it's a set as an insert it will insert it on to left and right of for example here the main left/right output so everything would be linked you won't have individual controls for each side but you can break this out to where everything can be independent left and right sides so the like I said I could put two dual dealers up in here and then I could in theory have all four mic inputs on a de-esser if I wanted to work it that way I would just insert the effects - I would insert that on channels 3 & 4 and then my first four channels would have a de-esser patched into it like I said I'm not gonna go into the details of these these effects themselves but this is a stereo Combinator it's a multiband compressor I'm using that on my main bus out helps give me a nice tight sound how's me control a room things like that it's a pretty good multiband compressor I recommend it but there's tons of effects here I mean there's all kinds of graphic EQ you can patch in chorus flanger delays all kinds of different ones all kinds of different compressors guitar amp emulators tube emulators pitch shifters tons of stuff you can look at Beck's 32 defects on youtube and you'll find tons of tutorials and all kinds of information on these effects but this is this is the for effects that I have set right now on the right hand side here we have a lot of stuff we have our setup tab this is where we can set up our network what mixer we're connected to with this software let's see I am connected currently now you can adjust your sync grid directions you can because in theory you can get your software out of sync of your your mixer if for some reason you would get disconnected and you make a change they would be out of sync because the mixer wouldn't have gotten the instructions from your software but a software doesn't know whether or not your connector or not it does but it you can still make changes when it's not connected because the reason you can do that is so you can actually make up a mix ahead of time without being connect to the mixer save it as a snapshot on a flash drive and you can take it to a venue and load it in so you can do that you can manual IP it if you want but it does auto search so you can have it scan the network and it will find any XM mixers on the network really handy you can also of course initialize the mixer take it back to full T faults I've heard a reason for whatever reason you want to do that second tab is the access point settings so this is for the actual access Wi-Fi access point on the mixer itself so mine SSID right now is just the default I do have a password on it you can only choose to have WEP security but some security is better than no security one of the disadvantages to these is it only has an 802 11 G router in it so if you have multiple people connected actually may be be it doesn't need to be high-speed for what it's doing but it will you can you can connect more than one device at a time but if you start getting like five six devices connected to it it will slow down you'll notice some some good bit of slowness using the built-in or outer so in the insta case because I know you know some phones will automatically connect to Wi-Fi open Wi-Fi networks and stuff like that at weddings and things like that so I always set a password on mine my past was one two three four five but I always recommend setting a password on these to help avoid any anybody accidentally connecting to it or something like that and of course you can set your actual wireless channel here alright excuse channel one it's not the most common Channel miss come channels channel six I'd avoid channel six but you can look up they make scanners on phone stuff like that you can you can scan a venue to see what the what Wi-Fi channels are being used around the venue and then you can select your channel whichever one's not being used so that exists so the WLAN settings is for the actual Wi-Fi client portion of the the built-in router into this X here setting so in this case here the SSID is my home network here you set up your password in here you set up what kind of encryption it is and so then when you turn the mixer on this will then connect to the Wi-Fi that's your venue at your house that you're with whatever you have in your network you have locally of course the switch has to be in the corresponding position on the mixer itself third is your LAN settings this is for the actual network jack on it or so what I'm using right now it does get an IP address just directly from the the DHCP server on your network simple easy this actually can be a DHCP server itself so say you just want to use a network switch and you don't want to have a router with you you can put this thing as a DHCP server and then you can have people connect directly to the switch if you have like a hardware network and you're doing it that way people can connect directly to that switch and this will assign them a DHCP IP address and then you can use system obviously without an IP address things won't talk the fourth tab one two three four five fifth tub is our MIDI settings here you can just your clock rates here there's some other audio settings in here as well you can have it mute the outputs of power cycles so I typically have that selected I don't have it selected right now so what that means is whenever you turn this thing off it actually happens you turn on but as soon as you turn this thing on what it's gonna do is it's gonna mute all of the outputs what's that only that'll save you in an instance where you had you were using this last and you didn't turn down the output so the inputs it didn't mute anything so you get to have any you plug everything in your speakers are already on you turn the mixer on and then you have a microphone that's lying right in front of speaker it would cause feedback immediately you could damage your equipment you know something like that what this does is this mutes all those out all the outputs on the mixer itself whenever it powers on or off and so you kick your mixer on then it makes you get into the software and turn things down first before you unmute them that keeps you from damaging your stuff I also have how the mutes work whether or not they work with DCA buttons you can change it from being individual mutes to channel on buttons so if you want default everything to be muted you can turn it to channel on buttons and then you have to manually turn each channel on it's kind of a personal preference however you are used to working and then of course how the MIDI works on the system sixth tab here is our monitor settings so what this is for is for the actual headphone jack on the front of the unit itself and you can choose what you want to monitor so right now I want to monitor the left-right post-fader so that's what you see here is left-right AFL which is after fader listen you can set up to be PFL for pre fader listen so no matter where your left-right volume slider is you would still hear everything that's good being bused to the main out so it's just your preference of what you want to listen to monitor to you you can change how the channel solos work of course bustling as well and of course if you want to enable dimming which will turn turn the things down whenever you everything else down whenever you select the channel to solo or something like that last one is your GUI proofs however you want to set your settings on here's is uh this is all personal preferences house always work how your faders move the update rate if you have us really slow network connection you can actually change the update rate to be half of what it is now so it's a little bit less in the network you can also change things to always be on top window wise of course you can have the bus that's set to show bus names I used to have it selected I didn't right now next is the Internet this is our routing settings so of course you can change routing in a lot of different places but this right here will show you exactly what channel is routed to what analog or what site I split that backwards what analog input is routed to what channel obviously basics defaults you know channel one is input 1 is right onto channel 1 2 to 3 or 3 etc all the way down through here for all 12 inputs obviously this is only a 12 channel mixer so 13 through 16 is disabled they are off but there's 13 through 16 those channels exist in the mixer so in theory I can take channel 13 and I can make that analog input 1 as well so now analog input 1 is actually being routed to both channel 1 and channel 13 channel 13 is down so I'll move my window up here and you can see it so now why input here on one is also on channel 13 this could be handy for a lot of different reasons but for the most part the nicest thing about that is if you want to take a signal and have it go multiple places in your mixer for processing reasons or whatever you can do that but don't we're out to deselect this I'd look at it later I'll just leave it on like that else oh sorry ooh brain fart so now let's see throw down the bottom 13 you don't see any signal coming into it anymore so you can adjust that auxiliary outputs here's where you can uh you can change how each of these auxiliary outputs work and of course how the auxes are set up right now I have buses one and two set for auxiliary outputs one and two that makes sense to me that's how I operate it I know you know bus one is the Sox one on the unit itself I can change that around I can actually take auxes one and two in make them the main left/right outputs if I wanted to you just have the ability with this and of course you can change how each of these buses or your oxalis how they how they work whether or not they're just an analog off the inputs or whether not their post fader or whatever you with this I could actually take auxilary one and make it a direct loop through the input one here directly to the aux out one why I would do that I'm not a how-to percent sure you would essentially have a DI at that point you'd be taking a mic level and taking it to a line level but you can do it if you want to last one is the main out you can adjust here once again how your headphones or your main out are set up this is much larger on the bigger mixers like the XR 18 next time is the utility here's where you can actually pull up RTA's busses DCA's and then of course user use your creative all groups and these are I can walk the RTA here and it's literally gonna be the RTA for whatever I have selected here so Channel Five's left I'm going to select channel one hey look there's my RTA I can also change it to x' spectrograph pre EQ pushed EQ however it's done peak pre post P car mats whatever you can adjust all this stuff in through here next one you have save load copy and paste these are for the global settings so I can actually save save this whole everything here as a scene or a channel preset I can use select I can create channel presets for each of these channels and of course save them off as well I can load them in as well I can copy I can paste them etc the next tab is snapshot Tabish there's already you can save snapshots these snapshots are saved within the mix of themselves you instant sorry within the mixer itself I believe you can have up to 64 snapshots that's pretty hefty I typically only use like one or two snapshots that are under a normal basis I'll overwrite some and sometimes we'll do custom events that I may come back to later in the year or something like that I'll save a snapshot that we want to get there I don't have to recreate the wheel yet with this mixer the next type is the recorder tab so right now I don't have any flash drive inserted into it do I have one handy I do so this is the USB recorder this is what you see on the front USB port so if I plug a USB Drive in here which I'll do right now you see it populated everything on this flash drive just as a precaution with this the flash drives have to be formatted in a fat32 format you can't use an NTFS format flash drive with this it will only work with fat32 and then what you can do is right now I can hit the record I can select how I want to record this first of all right now I have it set from main left right so it's are going to record my main output and it's recording it pre feeder so say I'm at a venue that has where I or I might need to ride the main output control I don't want to record what I'm where my volume level isn't the main output that doesn't make sense to me because if I'm at a venue I need to turn things down I'll just turn the main output down everybody's gonna be little bit differently and I don't want my lyrical I don't want my recording to be relevant of where my main output is so I always have it set for pre fader but look I can't the record button and it's gonna start recording you see right here it has crepe operated a file name that's what the file names gonna be on then on the mixer itself and of course I can close this close this window out and it's gonna sit here and it's gonna record you can see it recording up here on the right-hand side as well you have some basic track controls here for that so if you stop the recording you just hit stop when you playback I'm actually gonna turn the channel down here before I do this so doesn't come through I'll leave a little bit so you can when you play back from the the flash drive it will come back through our aux Channel here now this aux has of course EQ settings that you can adjust but it does not have compressor gate or any kind of other settings it's literally just a rich as all it is so I will select that I guess you can't do some EQ on it that's kind of nice and I can select my whatever one is you can see I have a lot I record a lot on this thing so I could hit the play button and it will play back what I recorded through that aux Channel as I'm sure you heard and so that's that's you're a hunter stereo recorded that the recorder is really nice so I've actually done this at a lot of wedding ceremonies with the business lebretia the officiant in the groom or on the first two channels I can actually record them independently if I want to and my recorder here I can take this and I can set my recorder to record you know channel 1 and channel 2 so the first two channels now will be routed to each side of this recorder as you can see right now only the left sides working cuz I'm only on channel one with my mic so if I want to record each person individually and then you process it later I can do that but if I want to grab like a computer audio or a background audio stuff like that I'll usually do either a bus record or a main excuse me main record as well may not record so you have that ability so the next tab here is there our main output so our main output has of course an equalizer compressor as well we can hit the EQ button here on around all our main outputs so of course I may now or our monitor our aux outs they have a 6 band parametric EQ you get a little more control with that or you have the option on these channels to switch over to graphic EQ I'm gonna reset this cuz that might sound like ok so here's our full 31 band graphic EQ you can overlay the RTA with it as well so of course good for finding feedback things like that so if you don't want a parametric EQ on the master out if you're used to having your graphic EQ again your rack like that here you go you have your graphic graphic EQ you can sit here and change what you need to of course it also has the true EQ frequency listed on the bottom as expected I prefer the parametric EQ it depends on what I'm doing if I want to make subtle room changes and stuff like that I can make room changes here on the parametric pretty easy or I can do it with the graphic you know it depends on what you used to what you like you also have compression you can and compress your main back bus out so you if you want to tighten up your sound you want to make things a little more controlled you can compress your master buss can I things together keeps a little bit tighter I'm already using a compressor on the main output while I have it enabled to just set at zero and I'm basically with the hundred cent ratios essentially this would just prevent my main output bus from distorting so that's what I main out I have the gain envelope set to auto on this you can gain envelopes on these to auto time and it will automatically adjust your attack hold and releases for you it works it works pretty well but if you like your control of course you can just deselect that so now we'll take a look at some of the other controls we have here on the right hand lower side so as you see here I have selected main left right so all these meters through here as I adjust these these are going to correspond directly to the main output level so if I take my mic here up or down that would be how much of that is in the main output so say you want to adjust your MA so you want to just want the auxiliary outputs I have my name monitor wanted to monitor - you can name them yourself I'll click over here to monitor one so what this basically has allowed right here is the premise of sends on fader if you're familiar with some of the x32 consoles or any of the major digital consoles you typically have a sends on fader so you could hit this button and this right here that you see in yellow is the mix of what is going out of auxilary - this is not what's going out of the main output this is this has nothing to do with the main output I could save I move this all day and it wouldn't have anything to do with the main output and for example I'll go ahead and take my mic here I'll bring it up bring it down as you can see it had no effect on the main output my audio is still being recorded so you can adjust adjust exactly what's happening on that monitor output from right here the monitor outputs themselves of course have EQ as well full graphic EQ or six band parametric EQ so each output itself has controls and I'm actually compressing the output as well you can compress your auxiliary output so say you have monitors on this thing a set of monitors for your DJ setup you could you can you can add compression to those monitors and it won't affect anything on the main output this is completely independent of the main and only that output will be then be compressed just like your main buss compressor and of course do you can set your EQ settings as well so you're having feedback on your monitors you can you can flip over to grass we can notch out frequency and you can control it all same goes with the second bus here you see all this stuff down here will actually color code these different make a little easier to see here I'll take this one light blue so now we'll monitor want to monitor two or two different colors here so I can know exactly where I'm out my main left-right is gonna be great automatically I can select this if I see you on this yellow I know I'm in the monitor one mix so I consider to make adjustments and this is what this is gonna make adjustments to the monitor one makes and not the main outs the may that's a separate of course your total volume for that monitor mix is set right here so same with the monitor to bring up now you would have that second aux out you know working with my mic here so there's there's that a bus three four five and six we're not used on this machine I you can take these buses and then you can pass these buses back to the main out which is what they are right now their bus to the main output so if I would add something here that's gonna confuse anybody that I can bust something in here and then it will loop back to the main output you can compress it do whatever you want to with it that way and then down below here are your effects now these are now going to be your sends on fader for your FX so right here I have Effect 2 which is my reverb I don't have it named I can name it if I want right here I can color it if I want I'll keep track of everything and now the I have just a little bit of this and in here so my I'm returning effects to is now return to the main so that's how it's coming back through I can bring this back down you can just how much of these each channel goes into the reverb same with the delay channels 1 & 3 you can make all changes in here you want but it's not going to make a difference because these are set up for insert which is what's selected here so won't make any difference of what I select that here so other than that that's a that's a pretty rough overview of the the X air mixer like I said I use this for weddings I use this for all kinds of different events it's small to compact it's very handy it's cheap I mean you get all this power all these effects all this control weak impression on each channel EQ on each channel and not just like a high end low EQ you get a full parametric EQ adjustable q of different of each band you know you get all this control which I guess some people don't want you know some people don't want all that complexity and and junk with it but for me being an audio guy and being in this stuff for so long I like having all this control I like having all this stuff it allows me to take my events and make them just that much better you know for for everything so I hope this was informative if you guys have any questions about this I'd be happy to answer him this I mean this can do a lot it's very convenient and I hope you guys will will elevate your events and and dive into one of these as well so I hope you guys enjoy and as always like and subscribe

Channel: Code

Views: 101,749

Keywords: Behringer, XR12, XR-12, Review, Behringer XR12 Review, gopro, X Air, X Air 12, Behringer X Air Mixer, Mixer, Digital Mixer, Behringer XR12 Mixer, Features, Getting Started, Code, Codemov, WV, XLR, TRS, ipad, android, Control, MIDI, wifi, Digital, Audio Mixer, Digital Audio Mixer, gig, gig log

Id: bRKxTC4NJUU

Length: 59min 41sec (3581 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 21 2018