How to ring out mains and monitors - A&H QU series WARNING High Volume

hi this is rob mclaughlin welcome to sound advice today we're going to take a look at ringing out my mains and monitors we can use the same process for both and specifically on the q16 here we go all right so one of the first things we want to do is make sure that you understand that uh when we're doing this uh ring out process to wring out our speakers you want to do it in a controlled environment don't try to do this when you've got an audience at a venue because you'll get a lot of very upset people at you you want to make sure that it's a controlled environment if loud volumes bother you your ears or whatever make sure you wear some ear protection i'll try my best as we're going through this video to try and keep the extra noise to a minimum but essentially what we are going to do is we are going to try and push a microphone into uh into feedback we're going to force it in feedback so we can pick out the individual frequencies where it's feeding back notch those frequencies out using the graphic equalizer and that's how we're essentially going to wring out our uh our speaker so in this case i'm going to do i'm going to do it for the left and right so i'm here at my q 16 and first thing i'm going to do is i've set up my microphone on channel 1 i've set the channel gain to unity on the uh gain let me just change this here you can see that for the channel selecting this channel i've set the gain to roughly about what that gain might be uh for you know normal speaking this is a standard sm58 uh it's it's not a bad setting i've also made sure that on this channel that i have turned off high pass and i have turned off the parametric eq again that's for this microphone so this microphone is essentially as flat as i want it to be next i'm going to go over to my left and right maze i select my left and right mains then i can select the graphic eq tab on the window and when i do that i can then come over to the graphic flip now this is a great great function and feature of the q series boards i know lots of other boards have them too but i really like the way this is set up on the q series so by hitting the later the fader flip oh boy hitting the fader flip essentially what we're going to do is we're going to turn our faders into our controls for our graphic eq and you can see that the graphic eq is lit up now because i've got a 30 band eq but i only have a 16 channel set of sliders it has to do it in two sets so when i hit the flip again it moves to the second half with a bit of overlap in the middle which is quite handy hit it a third time my faders go back to normal control all right so here's what we're going to do i've got my microphone set up i'm selecting left and right and i am going to flip the faders so that i can see the first set and then i'm going to very very slowly and i can't stress this enough very slowly and very controlled i'm going to start bringing up the main left and right again if i can show you the back of the board here all i have hooked up is that single microphone connection and a single speaker connection and all i'm doing is i'm going to ring out left and right so here we go turn off the mains i've got my fader flip so i can see my first half of my faders and very very slowly and very controlled i'm going to start bringing up that fader until and what you're going to find is that when you get a frequency that starts to to ring uh of course it's going to be kind of loud maybe in this room but you're going to see it peak across the meters all right so what i'm watching for is for frequency is going to peak in the peak meters here again very slowly bringing up left and right because i want to bring it back down very quickly when i need to oh there we go now it didn't light up here which tells me is probably on a higher frequency and again as soon as i hear that bring it back down but you can see there's my peak let's try that one more time there's the peak again very slowly with left and right and there's the peak so what i'm going to do is bring that frequency down a bit and we'll bring it down there all right so i'm going to go through and repeat this and maybe on the video i'll try and speed this up a little bit again very slowly bringing up left and right listening and watching for peaks that one's kind of low it's not there so it's right there bring that down a little bit a little bit more left and right pushing it sounds like it's going to be higher it is higher they're same frequency but i'm bringing it down it peaked here i'm bringing it down a little bit more okay and a little bit more and i'm approaching unity which is good okay there it is right there all right it comes again right there it's going to turn it down a little bit at a time until i get more and more now again you you'll notice of course that i've exaggerated uh the proximity of that microphone to the speaker there's the top one but there's a low one so go down here yeah there's the low one again notch that till the peak goes out and back up now you see where my left and right is i'm getting if you can see that i'm getting just above unity here so this is fairly loud and i'm still getting even when i talk in this room i can make that microphone you know pick up a little bit more on that same oops again pulling it down always keeping always keeping my finger on that left and right so i don't want this to run away that could somebody could get there we go there's a peak right there again somebody would you do not want to do this in a room with people in it or where you might have a crowd this is something you got to do ahead of time there we go i'm going to pull that peak out i have a low one there so let me try and catch that one where is that low peak there it is right there i'm going to pull it down you might pull either side of that down just a little bit too and i see this one still this is right in the vocal range right there that's the 400 notch so that's a pretty hot frequency actually for a typical 58 anyway all right a little bit further that one's kind of high there it is right there pull that down a little bit all right and i am almost up to plus five which is pretty good i'm going to notch that there okay and a little bit more there we go again down here see i'm getting to plus five now plus five is pretty hot uh two two one two even if i shout in this room uh that microphone is now so hot it's it's gonna pick up a lot of me just talking in the room okay i'm at plus five on masters and even uh that one's kind of low oops it's on the low side so where's that frequency on the low one and there's a high one in there too looks like there again as soon as i hear it i'm pulling that master down i'm never letting go of this master over here with my thumb and i'm pulling that down as soon as i hear it just so that i don't damage anybody's hearing i again if this bothers you while you're doing it i recommend some hearing protection grab yourself some uh ear plugs and so that you can do it now i'm way over plus five and i hope you can see that on there i'm way over plus five and and um that's that's way above where i would way above oops that's my microphone again you gotta watch that third flip is is uh back to regular faders so i do thought it was pulling down frequency but i was pulling down the microphone so two two two two two two two two i'm sort of shouting in the room here a little bit hey and that microphone's picking it up two two two even now here's the thing i've got this slider all the way down and it's still peaking two two two we'll deal with that one in a minute all right so uh let's just see what else we can do again my slide sorry again my slider is way way above plus five and i would never ever operate with that much at plus five there we go at plus five there we go so i'm watching for those peaks and grabbing them to pull them out there and i can get this almost to the point where you know i can get this right up to to full maximum and i would never ever run that left and right up there but now there we go we've got a pretty good uh mix it's got a lot of a lot of stuff pulled out of it but let's deal with the next part of that okay so our next step then is to deal with some of the exaggerated uh frequencies that we've got so i'm going to bring my mains back to unity i can even shut them off for this moment just so that we don't have anything jumping out at us and if i go back and look at my uh my my graph now you can see i've got one two three i'm going to pick out say the one to the three most offending frequencies so in my case if i look closely that would be 400 and 5k uh for 400 4k and 5k and those are quite honestly very typical and also fairly typical for the um sm58 that we're using for this test now i also said that if we go back and look at for instance that where's the slider uh for that 4k if i look at there's the the slider for the 4k that's this one right here i've got it down as far as i could going through that process a moment ago i brought it down as far as i could bring i couldn't bring it down anymore but i was still getting a peak light so how we're going to deal with that well we're going to go back to uh again back to the actual turn off the flip here back to channel one that microphone so i not only do i have uh control over the uh eq for left and right i have control over each individual microphone so i know i've got you know an extra frequency at 400 uh 4k and 5k so i'm going to take those three free frequencies pardon me and i'm going to use the parametric eq on this microphone so again i'm looking at channel one hopefully you can see her channel one i'm looking at channel one and i'm going to use my parametric eq um doesn't you've got four bands doesn't matter which one you use but i will take the first band and i will deal that dial that to 5k all right roughly 5k and then what i'm going to do is i'm going to notch that as narrow as i can i want this to be a very uh a very short peak so i'm going to notch that which means turn it all the way up to actually says 1 9. and then i'm going to go down the bottom and i'm going to reduce that by oh well you know let's go to about 5 db that should be pretty good to start 5 or 6 db i'm going to go to 60v just for fun so to 6db now again let me go back here again i'm i'm using the the touch screen because i'm just i'm just comfortable doing that but you can do exactly the same thing using the controls here those are the three controls that match up with those three those three configurations so let me do the second one again i'm going to turn the parametric eq on and the second one i'm going to roll this up to 1 9 that means it's the narrowest possible frequency i don't want a great big wide frequency i just want a little notch i'm going to set the frequency to 4k uh where's 4k i do find i get a finer adjustment so if i can kind of in the neighborhood and i can't get it here this usually gets a finer adjustment and then again the bottom let's take it down to uh minus 6 db somewhere in there 5.9 yes that's close enough okay so there's 4k and 5k and you'll see of course 4k and 5k very very close together so uh the fourth one we said was 400 so again i'll go back here i'll set this to 400. you know i'm going close again crank this all the way up i want a tiny little notch there and then i'm going to cut by 6 db so that gives me a starting point for a basic sm58 now if i really wanted i could come back to my graphic eq on my main left and right and now that forward again i can do this on the screen too that fork there's the 400 i could probably bring that up a little bit as well as i don't really want to scoop out too much of the mix so i can bring that back up all right so now i think you'll find that you've got a a good starting point and again let me stress that's this is a starting point this is not carved in stone uh but it is a good starting point uh you could actually take this if you're using similar speakers for monitors you know some bands are using exactly the same speakers for front of house as they use for monitors and you could simply use the copy and paste so you could hit the copy copy that eq go over to your mix and then paste that same setting and that's to save repeating the process again it's a place to start uh it's uh it just gets you in the ballpark notice again what i did was one of the things is i pushed this much much higher than i normally ever would have my masters loud i always start my masters at minus five i know you know people like the idea of unity but in in this case for overall uh masters i like about minus five that gives me all the way up to unity uh for uh you know when i when i need a boost uh if i've if i've got everything comfortable minus five and i've also now in this process of wringing it out i know that i really could if i wanted to i could actually push things out to plus five and i still don't not going to get anything to ring because i have notched everything out now again it's all um a place to start okay so hopefully that helps you

Channel: Sound Advice with Rob

Views: 31,391

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Id: Xg7GU6fBzQs

Length: 16min 26sec (986 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 22 2020