How to connect two mixers to together Double the effects, Double the inputs

hi the area around here from expert on and today we are going to talk about hooking up two mixers together there's a couple different ways of doing that and there's a lot of reasons why you would you know simple things are you bought a new mixer and you decide you wanted more input on that mixer or maybe you bought a mixer in your side you want to have a second alternative effects control and you have another mixer so you can go out and buy an effects processor or you can just use your other mixer if if it has effects on it so today we're going to talk about that and we're also going to talk about how do we take a mixer that we already have that has a whole bunch of mic inputs and line inputs on it and connect that to another mixer so we can expand how do we balance that out that's what we're gonna talk about in today's video so let's get right to it the idea is we're going to use a couple of features on the mixer so up here one plug this on this mixer we're gonna take advantage of the inserts so those are usually located right below the lines we have on top or XLR mic input then we have our line input then underneath that in this case we have an insert now different mixers will have a different number of inserts for how many channels across all that but the key word here is using for insert what insert is is the ability to take the signal out of this mixer through an unbalanced cable or stereo if you're looking around for adapters and what that's going to do it's gonna come out of this mixer go to whatever I plug it into and then it's gonna get processed through there come out the other end and go back up the cable and come out of here all that's gonna happen on that individual Channel now that's a good way if I want to take advantage and paint a scenario I need two different effects now this mixer only has one effects yes it works on all of them but once I dial it in I can't change what that effects gonna be it's the way it's gonna be for everybody who decides to turn it up if I use something else like an external effects processor or a second mixer with effects I can take these effects and make them unique to this one channel which is what we're going to do so for us to do that we're gonna need a cable like this now what are we looking at we're looking at a balanced cable and it's got two lines coming out of it what comes out the other end two unbalanced connections now notice this has a red and white so it is telling me that it's separating the actual signal now if this was mono or unbalanced it would just be a splitter but in this case it's actually giving me two output lines into one straight-up connection so this is what you're looking for it's called balanced two unbalanced connector this is stereo in this case this is stereo left-right neutral left-right that easy so how do we hook this up well we're going to this is the easy part in this case I didn't have an actual cable that had the proper quarter-inch jack on it so I'm using an adapter why because my cable happens to be one that we normally would use off of a tablet or yes there's a 3.5 at this end going up so think of it as just a way to hook up any equipment that has a 3.5 to my mixing board or to the back to the powered speaker so I'm using that cable and to make it work I'm using an adapter to go from my 3.5 to the proper size now if you're ordering a cable you can order just the right one or maybe you have a chance of making one yourself I'm gonna plug that into the insert Channel then I'm gonna take the other two ends alright so here we are so now all we have to do is take the left and right which in this case is the red-and-white connections and plug them into the actual mixer now I have experimented with this and you're gonna probably have to do that too I've learned that my white cable here is the actual signal coming out of the Mackie going into in this case the plows so that's gonna go into channel 4 now if you get this wrong it just won't work and you turn it around the second cable the red one that's the signal coming back to the Mackie so I'm gonna plug that into my control out so by plugging into the control room out or into my monitor out if I have to I can plug into my me meant that's gonna give me a signal that gets bounced back into here why am i doing that so now I can adjust in this case channel 4 for the effects just for that inputs only in effect that mic input so the effects are down on that unit so I'm not using the effects on here I'm gonna pick up the microphone I'm gonna do a sound check on it now I can adjust the actual level control on there in this particular case it is used on the actual headphone not so I'm gonna leave that at 12 I'm gonna bring up the gate so it's right at 0 everything's at 0 I'm now coming out of that speaker and now what I'm going to do is one last thing I am going to bring up the effects so if I turn this knob here doo-doo-doo for number 4 or so that is just the effects from this mixer going in here my mic is plugged in here that's how easy that is line 2 which is where we put our insert connection which is connect to here so now that microphone has this effect to it and this one has this effect so we've got the actual effects processor in the pile which we can adjust up a little bit there we go and this is the effects coming off the Mackie mixer so they're purposely two different effects because that's the purpose we're hooking it up this way for so this could have been an effects box if you want to or again the idea of this video is what can I do with my spare mixer so in this case I'm using it so two mics can have two different effects on it so let's say we want to go from here but instead of using this for effects I want to use this mixer over here as an expansion mixer I want I want to take advantage of what's on it now this happens when you're in a band or something like that and you know the drummer now has his own mixer and he's got all these mics and need to come up and you've got something like this and that's not gonna carry me at all at the same time you can't just plug it into the quarter and stretch because the mics won't work so what do you need to do you need to plug their mixer into your mixer or maybe you just want to add more into yours now you can do this with two types of cables you can get balanced cables which look like stereo cables like this and if you've got like you know 100 feet worth of cable already then you're probably better off to get those but if you're just working with a quick connections stuff like that as long as you get no background noise because sometimes brands don't like other brands and that happens and that's okay you can use unbalanced cave's a balanced cable is just gonna cancel out any noise that's get picked up from one system to another via the wire anything picked up in the wire is gonna get cancelled out so in this case we're using six-foot cables so I'm not too worried about that so what are we gonna go from here this is my add-on mixer so the add-on mixer we are gonna find ourselves some outputs you know what I'm gonna do in this case is I have the option to have a to monitor outs so I'm going to take my monitor outs from here so in that case that I play them to the right one first I'm gonna come over today there we go make that a little easier to look at so now we're gonna come into this mixer well I'm gonna make it as easy as possible when you go to the last two connections that actually are paired together in this case that's seven eight and again I'm just double checking I went right so I'm gonna go right here keep some consistency grab my second cable and do the same thing I'm gonna plug in to the left monitor out and then I'm gonna come over here and plug into the lab now again I could have taken the main output I mean that's you know this particular at least this big sir has three options for output on it so I just chose one now what I want to do I grab a microphone from here let's just grab that mic from here so here we are so we now have them both connected together I am gonna connect the microphone at this point and remember monitor out so in this case I'm gonna bring up the dial up my monitor out and the other one is going to be my mic input so the line and put at the bottom everything else again at 12 o'clock here my monitors at basically 12 o'clock and we can adjust that a little bit and bring that up to here now I'm not gonna do the fine-tune here because of course they are going to sound different right now so if I grab the other mic here's the other mic so they're not exactly the same volume level we listen to that guy we listen to this guy I even though they're about right on the mixer will balance them both out unity unity and unity there we go right across everything is the same but they're just a little bit different so we want to make sure I mean we can live with this we can adjust it ourselves it'll be our own personal opinion on it so again adjust that back right down to unity across that way here is the alesis mixer plugged in to the Mackie and this is the maximum and so if we want to balance these two off you can't get finicky with this and you can use the feature if you have Spotify if not you can go to youtube but Spotify probably better for this is to actually use a test tone all you do is if you're on spotlight search test tone and you'll fly one that goes through the whole frequency range you can start about 800 Hertz it's gonna be minus 10 DB so it says on their unit on the playlist and it goes through each one for about 15-20 seconds by the time it goes up the scale on the mixer that's going to come up just if I'm at unity it's going to come up at basically minus 30 so we can plug that in and give that a try I'm gonna find the other end of my cable that we were using and how did I come up with that number well I know up Kim's up at minus 30 simply for the fact that the mixers at basically - Tim when it's straight up and that means that take another 10 off for the audio track and that should be off us down to about just 30 so it's 1 in line so we'll plug that in we'll come on this mixer first and what we'll do is we'll come on seven and eat on the alesis and again on seven eight we're going to put everything okay straight up so I don't want to have any extra bass or treble of course in there I don't want to have any of that I don't want to have any filters on which this one doesn't have but I don't want to have any of those I want to make sure my fix are off and make sure my balance is set to neutral right up at 12 o'clock there's our 800 Hertz tone test I know a big fan of the volume so I'll turn that down a little bit so what I'm looking for is this mixer to at least be on the first line and it's not so that means I do have to gain it up a bit here so there we are so that basically means in this case on this mixer the monitor was on 100% so no extra no less no more and that brings us here now if we unplug that from here so again we'll just give it a little box here just to leave it talking about we're going to unplug that from here and we want to repeat that pattern just to confirm that's what we're getting over here all right so now we're gonna plug in to the actual Mackie mixer so what we're gonna do is we're going to temporarily unplug channel seven and eight and plug in plug in the iPad in the seven eight leaving this one the gain set to unity everything else is also saying haven't touched a thing I want to hit play here I want to see how this comes out so now we're at the exact same spot the exact same test tone we are solid in the minus 30 DB which basically now means that this input and this output is exactly the same so that means there's not one mix are gonna be louder than the other when it comes to putting anything in so I do need to make that mixer louder I'm not gonna do it from here anymore I can do it all from this mixer I can use the gain control on that 78 so now we're going to plug this guy which we use for testing purposes and take that away we're gonna go back take our at least mixer plug that back in and there we go so now these two mixers are hooked up and they are abouts the important thing here is to adjust the gain levels on here mostly just II mean output once you get to Union once you have that dialed in it's just gonna be the main output from here in this case the monitor to here if we notice I've never moved the game level still at unity here my slider is still at unity my output onto the main is still at unity that's always important set this at unity set whatever challenge gonna use that unity set the game level at unity once you've done that now you're ready to do proper comparisons proper setup between the two mixers when it's all done your you know go ahead and enjoy it I mean now you have two mixers hooked up exactly the same that one is coming off of this mixer right here and that one is coming off of the actual alesis the only different way now are the microphones themselves most the time if you're playing around with a mixer you're going to want to get a cable like this which is basically a stereo quarter-inch to two mono just like this which allows you to occupy the actual last channel and control out and if you want to do this you just basically need to get yourself and you might already have some balance cables or someone down skis go from the monitor out maybe it's mean out because of options again it's not as much as a brand but those are the magic words you're looking for on the mixers so well I hope this helped every time I think I'm ran low on ideas people like yourself viewers are leaving me questions and comments down below that are gonna help me decide on what the next video should be if it's a good general question that is really you know any piece of information to know I certainly worked a video around it that's kind of like this I've got a lot of customers in the actual showroom ask me how to do this I've had a lot of people on YouTube ask me the same question so I thought you know I would do this if I come up with more ways of how to do this which by the way this is the only way so you can try and describe another way down below but I mean there's so much fun you can have hooking up two mixers together and coming up with new different combinations and new ways of making sound by all means play around with it it's really you can't break it keep your levels gains down practice a little bit once you understand how things are plugged in and out of mixers you can do an awful lot with them but I didn't want to say thank you very much to all my subscribers come see all right any watches most probably I would have been over 5,000 which is a huge milestone with YouTube and and I do really appreciate it subscribing definitely helps when it comes to a channel it shows that you know we can make some content that people want to watch so for everybody's watched all my videos or have seen videos that help them out again I want to say thank you for taking the time and watching those videos and for everybody else if you've watched them and you haven't subscribed now's a good time please subscribe this way you get to find out if you have any questions your comments subscribing and hitting that little bell is gonna let you know when I've actually answered your question so that's a big thing again and once they thank you for watching we'll see on the next video and bye for now

Channel: expert island

Views: 78,394

Keywords: pa system, how to connect two mixers together, connecting 2 analog mixers, Mixing Console (Invention), Sound, sound reinforcement, PA system, sound system, Audio, mixer, analog, alto professional, mackie mixer 8 channel, alesis mixer 8 usb, profx8v2, 2 mixers together, what is insert on a mixer, live sound, effects, effects processor, reverb, delay, chorus, mixing console, PA, effects unit

Id: 8BbmI_g9Lb0

Length: 16min 29sec (989 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 15 2019