Exploring A Client's X32 Scene | Is This Clipping Bad?

[Music] hey everybody welcome back this is dave with alum house sound today we have another video for a client of mine so i've been working with this group for quite some time just to help them get uh some of their gear set up and and routed properly and they've added some s16s they started out with all local inputs they added an s16 they added a second s16 on stage to help get all of their routing streamlined up to their console but recently they reached out and they said hey we'd like to get you to kind of look at our mix refine our mix they did multi-track record and then they sent me the copy of their scene file and so i've got that i put it under my console i've got the tracks into studio one which is the daw that i use and so i've got that hooked up across usb and so i'm just going to send a loop of the tracks into the console and i'm going to look and see what i get i haven't looked at any of this yet so you'll be seeing it with me for the first time and so it'd be kind of exciting just to jump in see what someone else's scene looks like and see what kind of pointers and tips we can offer to this group and maybe you learn from it as well so let's jump into the console here we go all right so here we are we've got the daw set up and we are pushing tracks into the console now we've just loaded the scene from the customer so i'm going to hit routing and we can see that they've got a mix of aes 50 and local inputs but we're going to switch this to the play side down here push that now we've got our card feeding everything and you can see now we have all these uh meters lighting up and you can see their stream uh is here so i'm going to hit solo [Music] when i hit solo that's going to give me a meter up here and then their mains are here as well if i run this up to zero and let's say it there at zero we can see that we've got some uh some limiting or something that's pushing the stream up pretty hot i do see the red clip light is on pretty aggressively but we're going to just kind of look through this and see what we can find and maybe help them out and help you guys out as well so i'm going to start on just the top layer of everything i've got here a drum dca you're probably not going to be able to see these that well but the yellow one here is a drum dca and then we've got an instrument dca vocals vocal lead and vocal delay um on the left hand side we've got our vocals here and it looks like we've got a little bit of activity on a few microphones we've got a lead vox microphone uh there is a talkback mic which is for the band talking to the rest of the band in the in-ears and you can see we do have some activity on that as well acoustic guitar and electric guitar they don't have in this particular recording synth left and right and keys left and right we do have there's a choir left and right not being used on the next layer down this is where we've got our drums so kick drum looks like it's pounding away snare drum we've got a rack tom and a floor tom i don't have any information on hi-hat nothing from clicks and tracks and no bass either and then it looks like they do have some ambient room mics but i did not have those anything captured in those in the recordings that they sent to me and the last two here are pc if i flip down to the auxiliary inputs don't have any auxiliary inputs that are are being utilized in this recording we do have their effects returns here for the house and then these effects returns that are read here for the stream that's a reverb and a delay so this setup is very similar to the setup that i talk about in this video i'll put up here in the top corner and that's about using a post fader mix to build your your house mix as well as your live stream and you can do to you can mix with one sound engineer instead of having to have a dedicated sound engineer i do want to look at their busses real quick which is down here on the left this is the quickest way to get to it and what i see here from left to right we do have six in-ear monitors then we have p16 drum which is probably just sending to their p16s we've got p16 vox we have any iem verb as a pair and then we also have uh the live stream here left and right and then we have their reverb and delay send for the house reverb and delay send for the stream so the board's set up pretty standard it's it's kind of a straight almost a straight copy of what i've got there on that recording that we posted a second ago but i do see a lot of these the stream is clipping a lot the p16 drum is clipping iem4 is clipping and so i want to take a look at this and just kind of see what we can find out first thing i'm going to do is just take a look at the live stream here because i see it's clipping a lot so i'm going to come down here on the right side i'm going to select the stream and i'm going to hit effect so i'm going to see if they've got a limiter on this oh yeah i don't know if you can see that so this limiter is being pegged it's taking out 15 db of of audio sound which means it's really being squashed it's being just drained of all of the life now their input gain is plus 9.5 db and their output is minus one i'm going to leave the minus 1 the other settings are fine but i'm going to turn this down to 0 and see what that gets us so even at 0 it's taking out upwards of 5 and 6 db which tells me that their levels going into this bus are just a little hot maybe they've got some compression on the other side of this and so next thing i'm going to do is i'm going to hit the home button because i've got this stream selected and i can go over to the compressor all right so we've got kind of the mastering compressor here of four four to one ratio we've got 40 millisecond attack no hold no quick sorry no hold and a very fast release now they are pushing this with a plus 5 db now they're they're removing 6 db but typically i'm looking to only add in about half of whatever you're removing but in this case because they're clipping i'm going to turn this output gain all the way down now i'm going to go back to our effects and see where we're at now okay so now we're not hitting this clip which is good i'm gonna bring this back up maybe to plus three all right so when i turned it up to plus three now we're back to removing three db so if i turn this limiter back down say to plus one plus one it's just barely hitting the limiter some of the bigger hits it's hitting so that right there is going to clean up their live stream just in general i haven't i haven't listened to anything i don't know what the mix sounds like but just the fact that trying to keep this thing off of clipping off of the limiter that heart and actually now i can look at it even at plus one we hit a loud part of the song it was going back up to like pulling out 5 db sometimes so we've got some other things to address i'm going to leave the limiter down and we are going to come back over to the compressor for this stream and that's being hit pretty hard so the next thing for me to do is look at what is actually clipping all right so i'm going to come back over here and first i'm looking at the synth channel the synth channel seems to be pushed pretty hot so i'm going to kind of run through a basic uh sound check almost even without without the the audio playing so i'm going to come in here i'm going to turn the compressor the eq and the low cut off and i want to see what our gain is set at and if i look up here in the top left my gain right now is coming in at -3 which is a little aggressive for me i want to bring this back down and kind of tame this a little bit back down to say minus minus 9. you can maybe see it better up here in this screen so i'm going to turn this down some there we go so we're kind of in this minus 12 between minus 12 and minus 6 range is where i'm headed now so now i can turn the eq and the low cut back on and now i'm going to look at their compressor so the compressor is pulling out 6 db and they have no makeup gain on it not knowing what it sounds like i automatically like the fact that it's just not getting hit quite as hard i might turn i might lessen the compression and only take out about 3 db this is a synth so the synth is usually a pretty controlled instrument already on its own all right let's take a look at what we see here here's the keys and i'm going to go back over to the config screen turn off the eq the compressor and the low cut and let's see what we get for keys here so the keys are pretty steady here and they could probably stand to actually come up some so if i turn that gain up a little bit there we are now we're close to that minus 12 range when they're when they're playing so again when i'm setting gain i'm setting gain by what i see here on the input channel not by what i hear anywhere else and i'm going to turn their mains down because i just don't need to see the mains up all right so here now i'm going to turn the eq the low cut back on and let's take a look at the compressor again this compressor also is getting pegged pretty hard at uh it's it's taken out upwards of six and eight db so i'm going to lighten that up some they don't have any makeup gains so that's fine now i did see on these other buses on the dca sorry that the drums were just kind of pegging everything so i'm going to see if we can find out what's going on here with the drums all right so our kick is over here it's way over to the far left sorry it's not in the shot that well but we're going to look at the screen as much as we can anyway so i'm going to come back over here to the config tab i'll turn off the eq the compressor and the low cut we're going to rinse and repeat this thing now this thing is hitting pretty aggressively up at like -2 so i'm going to turn this thing down let's see if we can control this some more down here all right that is a consistent level there it's below -6 it's above minus 12. let's turn on the eq and the low cut and let's see what this compressor looks like now now they have a 10 db makeup gain on the compressor so let's turn that all the way down and the ratio is 2.5 the attack is 30. they've got a standard hold and release here i'm going to turn the hold all the way down and i'm going to leave i'm just going to leave the attack there we're going to go back and listen to this in a minute but i am going to turn this ratio up to four to one and let's see what we get here if i bring this down now okay so now i'm taking out i'm taking out about six db on that and so for comfort i could bring this back up plus three okay now they've also got a gate that they were using so let's look at the gate i think the gate is just closing off whatever whatever is at the bottom there um maybe when they're not playing all right let's take a look at snare drum then all right so snare drum we'll go back over to the config tab eq compressor i'm going to turn off the gate too because i got a gate on this alright so we see this jumping up here when he hits it's going up to -2 there's a bunch of noise in there that that mic is picking up but we're just watching it bounce here we want to get this below minus six all right eq is back on low cuts on let's take a look at the compressor all right again they've got 2.5 on their ratio 30 millisecond they've got a pretty i'm going to turn the hold all the way down and a standard release but they've got plus 7 db on the output gain so i'm going to turn that down and let's turn the gain sorry turn the compressor back on we're going to pull this down so that when he's hitting i don't see him hitting yet all right now he's wailing on the snare drum there we go so we'll go minus six and just see what that sounds like we'll bring it back up three there we go we'll take a look at this gate and we'll turn the gate on because they like those settings next one rack tom so i'm going to finish up the rest of the sound check i'm just doing the same thing and then we will we'll come back and readdress what these mixes sound like all right i do want to take a look at this this is the lead vocal here so the lead vocal uh when i looked at this the input was kind of uh peaking as well and so i'm going to wait for this lead this uh patch to start back up again all right here we go so now we're going to watch this level up here and we'll see what we get on this lead vocal all right so that part right there that just came in was a little loud that's above minus six i'm going to turn it down a little bit the background that the fluctuations right now are when they're not singing but there's a loud section coming up here in just a second and i want to see where this gets us and and adjust accordingly because we're looking for the loudest part so here we go all right so that's almost clipping now we're going to use the compressor to hold that in we're looking for kind of averages being here in this minus 12 range all right we'll add the eq on we'll add the low cut on and then we will take a look at the compressor so the compressor is a 7 to 1 ratio we've got some hold times some longer release time 60 millisecond attack and uh and then a three db makeup gain so i'm going to get this back to starting again here and let's see what they're what they're doing because having this 3db makeup gain right now when the person's not singing is is just going to be raising your your noise floor of whatever else is happening on stage but now they're singing all right so they're pulling out 6 db 7 db i might lighten up this ratio a little bit go to 4 to 1 and just moving to 4 to 1 let's see we got this loud section coming up here going to four to one instead of taking out 6 db it took out you know 3 db all right so that's pretty aggressive there on that compression but that's what we want the compressor to do so i'm going to back this makeup gain down to 1.5 and i think we're ready to actually start listening to the mix now please take a second and visit the like button and the subscribe button all right so i have not changed their faders all i've done is adjust some of the gain structure and what i'm going to do is bring up this i have my studio monitors kind of right over here and i've got a lapel on me which is back here and so you're going to just hear whatever they hear through that and i'm mostly just going to be talking through what i'm hearing it's not going to sound high quality audio coming through this mic uh into you but we'll use it for right now this is their house mix [Music] [Music] all right so what i hear just automatically is a very thin mix but this is a standard front of house mix you have drums turned down or barely at all in the front of house and then you've got vocals turned up all right uh so with that i'm going to listen now to the stream and we'll see what the stream sounds like it's going to be probably louder so i'm going to hit the dim let's see what the dim is set at here all right first we want to i want to make sure when i come in here that my exclusive last uh sorry i hit on the monitor section i hit the view button and that brings me into these settings and i'm going to make sure exclusive last is uh is set up there i'm going to turn off solo follows select so that if i move an instrument i don't want to solo that i want it to just continue soloing what i'm listening to and then i want mixbus solo afl so that it's after fader level all right let's go back over here and we're going to go to we have the dim attenuation here which is -20 and if you remember we uh we turned our our limiter is set to to push the volume but we kind of have that turned off right now so i'm only going to turn it down by 5 db with the dim on all right let's go back and listen now now i'm going to solo the stream [Music] all right so what i see automatically is we're not pegging this output right now we're getting up to minus two which is fine but with no compression with with some compression but no makeup gain and the limiter with no input gain uh we're not clipping which is great so that's where we want to start we want to build the mix we want to get the mix nice and strong and built well but now because we've turned the drums down with the gain and some of the other instruments down with the gain we've kind of wrecked their mix so i'm going to go through and kind of recraft this mix really quick and we'll do that together here which would be kind of fun so first thing i'm going to do is i'm going to select the stream and then i'm going to hit sends on fader and i'm going to pull all the vocals down i'm going to pull all of these instruments down i'm going to go to the drums i'm going to pull the drums down they've got tracks and bass but again we don't have those in the mix so what i'm going to do is i'm going to start with this worship leader turn the volume up so we can hear oh yeah so this is their reverb and delay too but i'm going to turn that down all right reverb in the layer down now as well all right so we've got this is their worship leader vocal [Music] now what i'm going to do is i'm going to hit the mono button because this mono button up here is going to i mean the mono button up here is going to help us build our mix in uh by stacking instead of hearing the width of things we can stack the worship leader on top then you know other instruments supporting vocals drums all that stuff in here so we'll get this lead vocal on all right synths [Music] there's that keyboard sound [Music] synth kick drum [Music] toms what do they sound like so that's kind of our this is our band that we've got turn this demo [Music] all right so we're back at the top of the track here so here's the worship leader vocal and bring up these background vocals [Music] so i've got an alto a soprano [Music] all right now let's add some effects [Music] reverb [Music] all right now i'm going to take it off mono and hear this spread out you're not going to hear it but [Music] all right now the next thing that i would want to do is look at uh if we want to spread the vocals wide and keep the vocal the worship leader in the middle then we would come in we would select the channel we can go to sends and then we would kind of page over here if you will or mouse over so that we have our uh our stream here which is 11 and 12. and we could choose follow left and right pan which it's currently pinned a little to the right that vocal is in the house and we could follow that in the stream or we could make it you know different so in this case if i go to the right sum the next one looks like it's in the center in the house but i'm going to push it a little bit to uh to the right there and then this one is in the center in the house i'm going to put it six this way and then the last one i'll go 10 to the left and then now we would be able to listen to that hear a spread of vocals along with their reverb and go from [Music] there so again i built the mix in mono but then when i um when i go back to stereo we would hear this uh widen out so the background vocals seem a little heavy in the reverb so what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna hit the reverb here so they're all the same amount in the uh the reverb [Music] sorry about that camera battery died back to it all right so we were looking at reverb [Music] so this has now the background vocals are muted in the reverb i'm going to look at the delay and they are in the delay just as much as the lead vocal i like to reserve the vocal delay for my lead vocal so i'm going to pull these down like minus eight uh maybe even minus ten let's go minus ten just because it's they were so reverb heavy i want them to be in the reverb but not in the delay let's see what that sounds like [Music] all right now i'm gonna go back to the reverb unmute them [Music] [Music] [Music] all right so with just a few minutes of time we have adjusted the the input gain so that we're not digitally clipping which is great we've also kind of altered the mix for the stream now we haven't changed the mix for the house over here outside of just adjusting some of the gain structure which is again keeping things out of clipping they might need to make some minor adjustments to uh to the house mix to get it to fit right in the house and then secondarily would be alterations to the live stream because any change you make in the house up or down is going to affect the live stream but we've cleaned it up we're not clipping which is great the stream is a lot more controlled it still has some breadth now and some depth and and we'll go back and adjust eq settings for them but for this video i think we're going to stop this here all right well hey i hope that was helpful for you i hope you got the opportunity to dive in and look at someone else's setup someone else has seen someone else's tracks someone else's uh worship service that might help you make some changes in your setup as well obviously we addressed some key situations that we saw in there over limiting maybe over compression but we were able to kind of dial things back and it's a good point that i like to make of why i i'm not a fan of buying a template now this group didn't buy a template they used my video i've got that video linked right down below you can check that out if you're looking to build two mixes with one engineer it's a glorified post fader mix i'm not gonna cloud that that's all it is but the video walks you through step by step which is what this group followed now they they might have watched my playlist that i have for my team and might have copied some of the settings that i have for my vocals or for my band like to the to the nth degree which is only set up for my group in my setting and not necessarily yours so be cautious use your ears pick up some tips and tricks along the way here that i hope you found helpful and and just craft your mix and keep refining it keep it keep making it better well if you're not subscribed to the channel hit the subscribe button below and if you like this video give it a thumbs up feel free to share it with some other folks that you think might benefit from it and we'll catch you guys in the next video peace [Music]

Channel: AllamHouse

Views: 907

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Id: NHRV32eyoic

Length: 28min 57sec (1737 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 05 2021