Behringer XR18 - Virtual Sound Check!

[Music] hey guys what's up so today we're gonna delve into something a little bit different this is not going to be a full-fledged review of the x.18 as you saw from the title but this is going to be a practical put in use application for your XR 18 so let me make sure I got everything going here on my screen capture stuff like that and what we'll do is we're gonna go through a virtual soundcheck with an X 18 so I have the output of the mixer being recorded onto another machine but what we're gonna do is go through each channel just like I would in a live sound environment so this audio is actually coming from my computer multitrack but instead of yeah you having live inputs into the XM mixer they're just virtual but it's the same workflow process it still comes into the mixer at a certain point I can still process it all just like I would live the only thing I don't have is live mics to worry about like feedback and stuff like that so we're not gonna talk about any kind of aux ends or like monitor mixes and stuff I get we're just gonna go through and do a generic soundcheck and get ready for say like you were doing this live a rock band in this case to go through and and get get this thing around and get get them sounding good so I'll try to go through each of the pieces of it I'll try to go through the input gain staging any kind of gates if we need some gates on some mics which I know we will for some of the kick there some of the drums EQ compression and then any kind of effects we're gonna add to it will we'll put into here as well and I'll show you guys how I do that all for a show for me so yeah this is of course just my workflow this is not like eating on a grass to do it this way but this is just how I do it is it right or wrong yeah we'll see but this is how I do it I've had pretty good luck with it so let's get started I'll show you real quick how how well we're set up in here so the camera here spinning around so right here is the X 18 I have network connected up there in the top which is connected to my hope network here audio the main left right out comes out of there and up to this guy which this guy is recording what you're hearing so just another set okay because I have to keep everything separate and then the USB right here the USB type B comes out of here and over to this computer which has a river to it here there's the which has my doll my multitrack doll here so this is what is playing the music and each of these tracks are being output to individual tracks down here on the X air and then of course you'll see I'll pop this the screen capture here so you can see that better but this is the X air control software that I'm going to be using to go through each of these things so so that's taking over here so that's pretty much what we're gonna be doing we're gonna walk through each of these tracks and uh well we'll get this sounding good so I'm gonna be listening on headphones so take the camera off won't go to the screen chair here and I'll come back talk to you guys as I as I work through this stuff so catch you guys here in just a second when we go to the screen okay all right here we are with the XR edit here and you can see here I have my my desk mic here that I'm talking into on channel 16 I'll go over there right now I'm actually captain there's no heat down just a little bit so I removed the mic there so I mean it yeah this is uh this is my mic so this is actually coming in on the mixer itself that way I have some way to talk to you guys where you can hear everything that I'm doing through the XM mixer so this is uh this is what we're doing here I do have a little bit of a low-cut on this this guy just because it's a it's a condenser mic and it can get real Bumi if you're not careful so but so you can see that's live I can take here and I can notch this out and run it up down through here so you know that it is actually live so alright so the first thing we're gonna do is in any any soundcheck I like to get the basis of my band first so in this case in this case what we're gonna do is I'm going to start with the kick drum it's usually where I start no matter what but the kick drum is a good basis and it kind of gives you an idea of the kind of impact that you're gonna have for the band and so forth like that's starting with the kick so I'm gonna get the cat or the doll started here and we should see some signal start coming in here in just a second alright there we go you got signal coming in yep so the first thing I'm gonna do is we're gonna bring up the kick here and let's see how it sounds that's pretty it boom me pretty muffled so we're gonna need to do some EQ work on this for sure okay so let's start off here let's get that get some look at it here cuz it's it's pretty blooming there so actually believe it or not in my headphones that made it sound deeper by doing that because I'm getting rid of all that real real low stuff that my speaker's came and reproduce so that was the first thing we're gonna do second we need to get some of this mud out of here so there we go can I cut a little bit that that you know low-mids out of there it's some that junk and how we're gonna looks good and get some of that the snap of the beater head want to get some of that sounds mmm get some extra stuff with that one so let's change that to a thank you so what I'm doing is I'm just sweeping back and forth try to find exactly what I'm looking for and then I can make adjustments based off that snare that up just a little bit there we go and just mute my mic here for a second so the noise wasn't part of that there we go yeah I guess Nick said this isn't a very good kick drum Mike on this one so I mean a lot of times your mics do make a gigantic difference in the recording of a song and stuff like that so don't be afraid to use a decent light this one is not a sure mic or something like that this is probably just a dynamic vocal mic used for the kick it's just not got what we're looking for so yeah it's alright it's gonna do okay we can we can make it sound good we'll make it sound a little bit better here in a little bit as well we're gonna add some that's better it's wise in there we're gonna add some effects to this kick drum and the snare drum as well that are gonna help us get a bit of a better attack a little bit better release with some of the effects so let's this is a good start though so bring up the level just a little bit of it okay so let's move on to our next foundation piece which is gonna be our bass guitar so let's take a listen to what it sounds like here [Music] so the distortion is in the base track itself they used some sort of pedal and to give the the grungy distortion so that's not anything in my system [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] all right so take a couple things out of there your trig it's about booming this axis really really boomy high-end it was very harsh so we definitely took some of that out of there so with the kick [Music] that cake is just a it's not a good mic at all [Music] we can get a little bit better sound with a kick here by going and then doing a little bit of gating into compression so let's go ahead and do that get that out of the way I wasn't gonna do it yet but we'll get it because it's it's really throwing me off here alright see the excerpt has some presets in it we're gonna go ahead and just start off with one we're gonna use the kick preset ok so just as an explanation i justed through the threshold down a little bit I still made it to come down he's got some real easy kicks in there too and we want to get through but this is gonna mute out the other jump of the drumset it's not gonna get all of it anytime there's a good snare hit they can see it gets past this threshold that the kick mic picks up that'll that'll cause a gossiped to open so we're gonna do a couple things to help prevent that so number one the range obviously want it clear up at 60 because we want it to really pull down and get out of the junk out of there the attack that's just how quick it acts on that I want to get it pretty fast you can get down to zero milliseconds so it's a real quick attack if you if you delay your attack here you're gonna start to lose a little bit of that smack of the beater head so as I bring this up see you start losing that smack so that's that's because the that initial attack off the beat your head is pretty quick so we want to get that attack pretty quick to hold that's how long we want to hold open at least so use the other two do 50 to 60 milliseconds because that lets that full train see it come through and you get the little bit of the thump and then release is just how fast it pulls back up you don't want it to be too awful quick the quicker you make it the more and then we'll pump together kind of sound to it I can speed this up and help get rid of that symbol in the background your hand but the more that I do that the less of the actual thump of the kick I'm going to get through so as you can see it's kind of cut off so with a kick drum that yet I don't want that I want that full something so another thing we can do to kind of help us out on on this not triggering open for like a snare hit is gonna be the sidechain filter over here so it's enabled right now so basically what this is saying is that kind of key off of itself and it's only gonna key with a 67 Hertz or below I mean based off of this kind of curve here signal so like if I had a triangle and held it right up to the mic it would not open the gate because the triangles frequencies are not gonna be within this this filter range so being a kick drum I can keep it real low and so that only those real low stumps are gonna open up the filter the gate on this thing so it's not perfect because this kick drum is just not recorded very well but it's what I have for an example where I did not record this just in disclaimer all right so the bass guitar we're gonna compress a little bit here too we get some of the EQ set already so let's take a look at the compressor we're not going to use a gate on the bass guitar because we don't really need to because it's a direct in so there's no reason there's no other outside noise we got to filter out so let's go and underneath this and do some compression on it here it's actually pretty squashed the way it is I mean you can see right there it's just it just kind of sits once it's in there so we'll only compress it a little bit once again the X here has presets for these and they're a good studying place so I'll hit the bass preset here wow it's quiet yeah it's already really compressed so I don't really need to do much listen now normally I would especially if you have a direct in bass guitar on a live situation definitely get some compression on it help control it that's gonna keep any it is slaps from just blowing you out of the water and then if he's playing a light kind of bring up make sure you don't lose it in the mix he's playing light so compressional help EPA keep it pretty level but this is already really compressed so we're not gonna do much of this so all right this is just a quick one - let's go to the snare real quick and take a listen to it and see how we how we sound yeah once again pretty pretty badly tuned snare they're so tight we have to give it a ring to it so we'll work on this let's get just low sort of in low-cut it looks like already but a lot cut it again here just in and sure we don't get any junk [Music] let's find that huh let's do find that good but it hum in there and let's get that out of there it's narrow this up a little bit [Music] which when I get that ring out of there without losing the sound of the snare [Music] pretty hard don't control some of that without compressor that's not too bad so bad that's how prepping like everything tuned snare so let's uh let's get this a little bit already is a snare preset [Music] [Music] [Music] a little bitter sound on that probably all we're gonna be able to do for right now let's compress it a little bit does that was an air preset we'll start there see how it sounds it's got a place very dynamically so it's kind of hard to get him dialed in with this but the compression should keep him he starts playing harder keep him right in that range there so we'll bring up to make up here since we're killing that was a little loud sorry alright so that's not too bad of a place to start with us so let's take a listen to kick snare [Music] [Music] and it'll sound a little better once we get everything mixed in there but yeah that's a pretty crappy kick-drum line [Music] so one little one little trick we're gonna do here we're gonna actually the sidechain the compressor for the bass guitar to the kick drum input what that's gonna do is that basically it's gonna bring bring down the bass guitar a little bit as the kick is happening and that's gonna allow us to let that kick come through with a saturated bass saturated mix so so we so say we you have your basic tone your kick drum and you're basically running your subs about all you can get out of them one little thing is gonna help you is if you if you can duck that bass guitar down quickly while your kick comes through it'll help give that kick a little more impact one more punch so let's let's do that here a little bit so on our basic ATAR here we're gonna take our slide chain filter enable it and then we're going to heat it off of channel one [Music] I got pumping in there a little bit [Music] gives a little extra impact on the low end alright let's get a little bit of overheads in here we get some hasson here too let's bring in the hats first [Music] never go check my spots good to [Music] penetrate the sparkle out of it without getting much other junk in that well I'm gonna add a little bit of this overhead they're gonna get a lot of that there's some at Tegel some over his here [Music] there's just the over his manager Club [Music] all right so the other heads we're gonna filter some of this stuff out because we don't need anything low out of these because we've already got them in the kick and snare normally this would be stereo I'm only doing mono here I have stereo but just in the interest of saving time and channels I'm just using a mono this is gonna be one that we can compress we just got to be careful cuz usually have convinced our mics on stage with these the tub control it a little bit it's gonna be all over the place but this is gonna be like an overall kick our overall drum kit like here if you have a good condenser mic up top you got a pretty good pretty good start there for you or your drunk kids then you can just bring things up as you need them start with that and then bring these in [Music] help fill it in [Music] Pam the hats a little bit here just has a little bit of a help of stereo picture [Music] all right let's get sweet arse in here [Music] it is needlework [Music] definitely sm57 off of a mic cab of some sort so we're gonna brighten it up a little bit you can see the frequency response it's pretty narrow here so we don't really need to look at any because there's no low-end in the first place but AO as I always say high-pass everything and then we'll brighten it up a little bit what can I get some of these muddy mids out [Music] [Music] it's not bad it'll make a little better sense with this [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] there we go just make this I can meet the whole things at once one of the things that's nice about the XA is the mute group seconds did a mute group and then I can I can meet everything any to one of the things we also doing with these guitars is we're gonna carve out a little bit of space here in the middle for the vocals that are gonna be here in a few minutes you would think you know having having heavy guitars like that you can really there and there's a lot of the same frequency ranges as your vocal as your voice so we look here on my voice here a lot of this is right around here in the middle and then the guitar it's the same thing so we're gonna carve a little bit of space here so we have some room for the book was to kind of punch back through alright let's take a look let's take a listen to this other set of guitars here these I think a dry [Music] it's pretty dry not too bad I mean not much going on here just kind of an effect for the background we might we might add some effects to that here that's my thigh here in just a few and the problem is is we add a little bit of this we're gonna have to have to deal with that with all the guitars but [Music] yeah well this guy keep this in the background [Music] yes I've got off on those little off on these are not the same time frame yeah we're better than that all right [Music] all right let's take a look take a look at our Tom's here let's get it pretty high here really fast attack hold very long especially my bad side I'm tom compared to the rest the kid little smack there we go pretty good I listen the second time [Music] it's kind of a hard one to gate a lot of boom in this one soft eggs my little [Music] myself to bed I mean it doesn't have a huge impact but a lot of that's gonna be mic placement you know tuning other drums themselves little damping [Music] let's hear a little Lube again [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] where the book was here we'll take a listen to we don't need to vote we won't need to gate these because these were not these are recorded in the studio so you see it's done in the background so we'll jump around a little bit here in the eq is not bad it's been low-cut already once again these are supposed to be wrong tracks what you're getting here [Music] [Music] [Music] she did pretty better all the time actually was pretty decent we free to use the presets and the audio stuff I mean if it works it works it doesn't really matter how if it's correct or not correct in someone's eyes if it sounds good dude subscribe [Music] [Music] [Music] somebody's background vehicle [Music] [Music] so there's got some synths in here we'll pull in here this needle would be a little bit compresses or come out all over the place I can trace you up on these this is their direct ends [Music] add a little reverb into this guy here I have a reverb Peston two effects one over here so let's meet them out here and take a listen to the main goal right here sim selected effects one bringing it in there a little bit believers a delay on effects three and another River but maybe I want effects too this is a pretty good reroute though believe this is a vintage Reaper yeah I've entered room reverb here [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] all right so we're gonna do something now with this kick and snare to help bring them out a little bit using the wave designer plugin here hopefully you can see it there so right now this just basically has an attack sustain and gain options on it but they sound really good so it's go ahead and patch this into we're gonna run it as an insert on channels 1 and channel 2 you'll see them coming in now kick and snare will just do the final insert from the channel so now the channel is running to 9 X through there so take a look at the cues into the kick first what's a kick gonna be on channel a let's bring up the attack whoa really brought it up there you can hear really brought that smack out into it [Music] pull down the sustain you hear what changes it to gonna keep some of it in there so we'll a little bit we definitely don't need to bring the gain up because we're already peaking that the way it is really just really gives that that pop to it that snap [Music] [Music] alright let's add a little to the snare now this is really gonna this the snares are already got a lot of snap to it so we probably won't increase the attack that much on this one action bring it down we need it to and perhaps sustain up is a little bigger feel definitely jump out now [Music] [Music] all right so one more thing we're gonna do here is uh we'll do a little bit of uh you can see it's already working here add a little a multiband compression to the main output on an effect here I never really covered doing some of this stuff so we're gonna do it here so on effects three slot I have added the stereo Combinator except easing all my effects here at this point the vocals are gonna be around through the vintage room kicking snare to the wave designer I'd help give that extra smack and punched it effects for I got that guitar yet plug-in which in reality since I didn't really bring it that guitar too it's not gonna really be doing much but uh so it's still ran on it so stereo Combinator is a multiband compressor you can see it here this is gonna be pipette what I've done is I've inserted this into the main left-right bus so any think it's coming out of the main left-right it will be affected by this so let's go ahead and insert it here and you can probably hear it made a little bit of a difference there but what this allows us to do is to compress bands of audio independently so like say the your low-end band here which we'll hear in just a second I can compress it independently from the high stuff so what that's gonna do is if I have a real big you know low note it's not gonna compress the entire frequency range just for that one low note to bring it down it's gonna bring just that low note down instead of bringing everything down and so this gives an independence between you and helps to give a lot more natural feel to compressing a bus or I'll get me an output where you've got a lot of different things coming through so let's uh let's fire this up just fire it up but let's take a look here you can see my we've already got some audio running through it there's no lows cuz of course my mics low-cut but this is the individual frequency bands that you're seeing here so you hear when my ass is that are all in the high here my main vocal itself is in the middle so what we can do is we can compress things independently of each other and we'll solo some of them here to take a listen to it so that's unmute source f ridiculous [Music] so right now with the ratio it's at it's not actually compressing anything this is the gain reduction for each two bands and we'll adjust the overall ratio and then the the overall trim threshold would thresholds at zero right now so I'd have to be really cranking this tickets to start compressing so we'll bring the threshold down let it start doing some stuff and see what it sounds like [Music] it's it's definitely compressing the the kick in that as well [Music] [Music] all right so what I just sold so load that there for a second I just so load what was being compressed here what was going through this lobe and here and see he kind of hear it Rumble it and see how much it's compressing it so I can't talk on my mic while I'm doing at the same time so I'll just do it here [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] all right well that's pretty much it I think that'll be an okay sound like I said I would go in a life situation I would make adjustments based on how things how things sounded you know as I as I worked through and the conditions outside in the room I was in and the PA I was on obviously I would make PE adjustments from the left right bus here any kind of EQ I do to the PA I would do from here and you know I'd make it sound good I don't like things being super harsh these kick and snares are pretty harsh but a lot of it's the mic that we use on this demo it's not the best this isn't the best demo to do this on but it's what I had so that's what we're gonna go with so anyway that's that's a little example of what's uh what's going on here so yeah that's a that's a good example of what we had going on here um this is uh like I said this was quick and dirty I just did this to kind of give an example of how to use some of this stuff if I was doing monitor mixes on the 618 since I'm sure I'm gonna ask about that you can do those from right here on the right side here these busses so these are the individual outputs on the front of the X here itself one through six and so each of these outputs can have their own mix so say I was the drummer back there and I wanted just some just wow I've wanted my own kick for whatever reason I just wanted some bass drum and just some a little bit of guitar and then vocals but I didn't want to hear any of this other stuff or even the second set of guitars or something you know you could give him a mix of that and say bus 2 you had was the main vocalist well he's definitely gonna need you know his mic a lot you know so he can hear himself he's probably gonna want a little bit of guitar but not too much he didn't want to go over his vocal he can hear the drum kick since it's right behind him and then maybe a little bit of bass if it's not too powerful already and then that can be his mix the next guy you have down there he doesn't want any of the vocals he just wants guitar and because that's what he works with and he needs to hear that kick a little louder so he wants a little bit of kick and then you know a little bit of this little bit of that you can go through and just make the mix for what you want each individual output has its own own mix on it so you got six of them so you can get pretty pretty intricate with it this can get a little tough if you're in a live environment with like a festival environment where you're you have different bands and it's not somebody you're used to in that case you know they end up doing a lot of the monitors on the front are on a single mix or even just half-and-half something like that you don't have to go individual with each monitor because it could get a little overwhelming with each individual bein coming and having to make a ton of adjustments for what they want obviously get them their levels they want but sometimes it can be easier to to run a single mix across the front make sure I can hear their vocals real well you can hear what's going on and they can be pretty happy with that but if you want to get more intricate you can do it a little bit different the drummer usually needs a little bit different mix because of his situation and where he's at so certain things have to be a little more prominent there so other than that I think I've talked on here long enough probably really long it's almost an hour probably so that's a quick quick 30 overview of the XR 18 and a little bit of a virtual soundcheck there I could save this snap shot off and if I of course Pro for whatever reason have those same inputs I could load that into the XR 18 and go to a show and use it but obviously mics are gonna be different the placements are gonna be different so you can't always rely on things like that but if you do the same thing every time at every show save you a snapshot you record you multitrack in go back to the house work on that multitrack you know get your EQ set where you want to save a new snapshot and then you can try that new snapshot out at your next show and boom Bob's your uncle so alright I think it'll be it thanks for watching guys appreciate it if you liked it please leave your comments and questions and so forth and I'll do my best to answer catch you guys later

Channel: Code

Views: 108,664

Keywords: dj, CODE, codemov, mobile, djing, pa, EV, plus, dmx, lighting, technical, mic, pioneer, odyssey, stands, dbx, driverack, pa2, beginner, tips, how, to, mc, setup, teardown, active, club, style, mixing, gig log, giglog, blue pit, parkersburg, wv, Parkersburg wv, DJ mixing, behringer, xr12, xair, xair 12, XR18, x air 18, 18, xr-18

Id: igtsZxUOaGU

Length: 52min 11sec (3131 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 18 2018