How to set gain on a digital mixer!

hello and welcome to another video so today i'm going to start another little mini series of videos where i'm going to take you through how to set up a digital mixer i'm going to take you through a few of the settings that i would use and how i would put together all the settings that you will need to run a digital mixing desk so if that sounds good please give this video a thumbs up and consider subscribing to the channel and remember to hit the little bell icon as well and then you'll get notified about the future videos that come out in this series all the rest of the settings that you're going to need to know today we're going to start off by looking at the first setting that you're going to set in a mixing desk and that is your gain how do we set gain structure on a digital mixing console [Music] so the first question we're going to ask ourselves is why is it so important to set our gains why do we need to worry about gain structure well gain is the first thing that comes into your mixing desk as we connect all our instruments and microphones into the mixing desk the first thing that happens is all those things come through the microphone preamps in that mixing desk and that is the point where we're going to be adjusting our gain so it's the first point where we have any adjustment on the sound that's coming into our mixing desk and it means that all the rest of the signal chain everything from this point onwards is going to be affected by our gains and any settings that we make at this point is going to affect everything else down the line so it's really important that we get this right and we get it right from the beginning because everything else is going to be impacted by the settings that we adjust here our gain settings allow us to adjust our signal to noise ratio signal and noise are both two technical terms that we use in sound engineering and essentially what they mean is signal is the bit of sound that we want and noise is the bit of sound that we don't want and pretty much always in our audio we're gonna have sound that we want and sound that we don't want what i mean by the sound that we don't want is anything like hisses hums buzzes all that kind of stuff we categorize that as noise and it's stuff that we don't want but it's pretty much always going to be there the goal is that what we want to try to achieve is far more signal than what we have of noise if our signal is much much louder than our noise level then our noise becomes almost invisible we can't hear it it's completely drowned out by the amount of signal that we want and that is our signal to noise ratio so our goal at this point is to give ourselves as much signal as we can possibly have we want to boost that level as much as we can as we'll see in a minute there is an upper limit as to how far we can go with that but we want to give ourselves as much as we can before we hit that limit so that we get a good signal and as little noise as we can possibly achieve and that's what we're trying to aim for at this point in our processing so what actually is our gain settings then well as i said at the beginning it's the first adjustment that comes into your mixing desk as all your microphones guitars instruments whatever you've got plugged into your mixing desk because they all come in the first thing they hit is the mic preamp and our gain setting is an adjustment on that mic preamp now as gain sort of suggests we're adding something at this point we are gaining something at this point and our gain adjustment is actually boosting our signal the signal that comes out of a microphone or a di box is a relatively low level signal i find it quite helpful to think about this as a voltage because that's essentially what we're dealing with as our sounds hit a microphone that microphone converts the sound waves into an electrical signal and basically what we're dealing with from then on is a voltage and so what we have that comes into our mixing desk into our microphone preamps is a very small voltage now in order for the rest of the system to be able to deal with that voltage we need to increase it slightly we need to give it a bit of a boost to make that voltage a slightly bigger one so that the rest of the system can then start to do something with that signal with that voltage and that's where our mic preamps come in and that's where our gain stage starts to take effect so we are generally speaking going to talk about gains in terms of decibels how many db of gain have we added to our signal and it will almost always be a positive number it is possible to have a reduction at your gain stage you can pull levels down but it's fairly rare that that would happen most of the time you're going to be looking at a positive number we're going to be adding a certain number of db to our signal right there at the beginning and depending on what it is that you have plugged into the system different microphones different di boxes different instruments you're going to have a different amount of gain added but some of the typical values you might see might be plus 20 db plus 30 db plus 40 db even all of those values will be fairly typical fairly standard if i saw any of those on a mixing desk i wouldn't have any problems or concerns whatsoever but we'll look more at that as we go through the video so how then do we understand the gain readings in our mixing desk well the very first thing you need to do is you need to take a look at your mixing desk and you need to find your meters on your mixing desk now i have my mixing desk over here and i'm going to set some settings for you on here to show you how this works now in my case on this mixing desk my meters are here just to the right of the screen but on your mixing desk they could well be in a different position now once you've found your meters the next thing you need to do is you need to read the numbers that are indicated on that meter now to make this slightly clearer for you to see i'm going to put this on this screen here i have some software that is connected to my mixing desk so that you can see nice and clearly what is happening when i make adjustments on this mixing desk now if we look at the software here i've actually got a level indicator the main level indicator here to the right hand side and an individual indicator here for each of the channels now you'll see on my indicators here that i have a zero position with then some numbers going above that so below zero i have negative 10 negative 20 negative 30 negative 40. all of those going up to zero zero about two thirds of the way up and then above that plus 10 and then pk peak a peak position here at the top and we'll look at that again in a minute now that is one type of level indicator that you might find on your mixing desk and the key thing to look out for here is where is zero position is it approximately two thirds of the way up with then further numbers registering above zero or some mixing desks will show zero as the highest possible position with nothing above zero and that's really important and you need to know that first of all before we can do anything else is zero two thirds of the way up your indicator with further positive numbers above that or is zero at the very top with nothing higher and all of your readings are a negative value now once you've found those numbers and you've understood whether your meters read up to zero or whether there are values above zero on your meters the next thing that we need to have a look at is the signal itself and there are various parts of our signal that we need to understand in order to understand what those meter readings mean now again in order to help us understand this i'm going to put some different software on the screen here where i can show you a signal and show you what is happening with that signal so here i have a audio recording i'm not going to play it to it doesn't matter what it is what we need to look at is our waveform here now as you can see on our waveform we have this blue section which is a varying signal going up and down loud parts and quiet parts and everything in between but there are a couple of things i'd like to point out to you first of all now on this particular indicator anything blue indicates some kind of a signal now i did make a whole video recently about 32-bit audio and looking at clip and what clip is so if you want to know in more detail i'll throw the link up here and you can go and have a look at that and that will help explain some of clip and what is doing but basically there are three parts of the signal here that i want you to be able to indicate i want you to indicate what part of our sound is signal what part of our sound is the bit that we want the good bit of audio and we can see that here this would be a good signal section of this audio recording the second thing that we need to understand is clip and clip is the maximum position that our signal will hit what is that upper limit there is a point where our audio can no longer be reproduced and at that point that's what we call clip or sometimes it's called peak and that is the point where we start to hear lots of distortion and it's just an unpleasant place to be and that's that's the upper limit of our sound now the third thing that i want you to understand here is the difference between those two things so how much space do we have from the top of our signal up to clip and that is what we call headroom so we've got our signal how loud is our signal we've got clip what's the upper limit where do we stop and we've got the difference between those two things and that's what we call headroom and before we can set our gain we need to understand all three of those things so let's head back over to our control software and here we can start to look at how are we going to set our gains now once you've found those meters and you've read those numbers and you've seen whether your indicator goes up to zero or whether it goes beyond zero there are two sets of numbers that i'm going to need you to learn to or to understand and to try and remember when you come to setting your game so first of all if your indicators are like mine and they go to zero and beyond you've got numbers above zero then the place that you're going to aim for when you come to setting gain is that 0 db point that's our goal that's where we want to go for and it doesn't matter if it goes above that and below that as long as it's averaging around 0 db in the middle our headroom at this point is the number of decibels you have between zero and peak and that will vary from mixer to mixers some will have a greater level of headroom up there and some will have lower levels of headroom so you do need to check whether your peak levels the loudest bits of sound are going to hit clip are they going to go all the way up to the top or are they going to stay just below that so do just keep an eye on that but we'll touch more on that in just a minute but your average sound the general average for whatever it is that's coming in whether that's a singer or a drummer or a guitarist whatever's coming in their average sound needs to average 0 db now if you have a level indicator that peaks at 0 db then it's no good you trying to average your sound at 0 db because anything that goes above that is going to be clipped so you need to use a different number if your levels max out at 0 db then actually for you thinking about a signal level isn't so helpful and you need to think about your headroom how much space do i have between the maximum level of my sound and my clip point now in that instance my recommendation is that you aim to average your sound at minus 12 db at -12 db that gives you 12 decibels of headroom before you hit clip now when you come to do a sound check there are two things that you can ask your singers and musicians to give you you want an average sound you want to try and work out where the average levels are going to hit but you also want a maximum sound what's the loudest they're going to be both of those two things are really important when it comes to setting game we want that average level if you've got indicators like this you're averaging at zero if you've got indicators that max at zero you're averaging at minus 12 that's your average level but we also want to check those peaks and what's the loudest it's going to be and as long as those peaks are not going into clip then you're fine if your maximum level is 0 db then i would probably aim for those peaks to hit about six maybe minus four but just remember the higher you go the more chance you have of getting into that clip just think about your headroom how much space have i got here before i hit my maximum level so how do we actually start adjusting our gain levels then well i've got a microphone down here and i'm going to use this microphone to demonstrate this for you on the screen here now you will notice on the screen that we've got two levels bouncing up and down here the first one is my shotgun mic which is this microphone up here that i'm using to do the recordings with i'm actually going to demonstrate setting the gain on this second microphone i don't want to be adjusting that level otherwise i'm going to disappear you're not going to have to hear me so that's going to stay as it is but we are going to adjust this level so you can see how this works now this microphone is coming into the channel here called mic and you can see there that we've got some level bouncing up and down for this microphone so if i click into this channel we can start taking a look at specifically what is happening on this channel and as i talk into this microphone you can see here that my levels are bouncing up and down here and actually at the minute i'm probably averaging at minus 10 db which actually is a little bit quiet and i could easily take this level up and so i'm going to do that now the numbers to look out for here is the gain level and you as you can see here we have this set to plus 42 db now 42 db is a reasonable amount of gain to be adding now this is a dynamic microphone which does mean that it is going to be a little bit on the quiet side anyway and as i'm talking into this microphone rather than singing if you were singing your voice would probably be if you were singing into this microphone your voice would probably be a bit louder than if you were just talking so i'm talking here into a relatively quiet dynamic microphone which does mean that i might need a bit more gain so i'm going to start bringing up my gain control or sometimes it's labeled preamp here it's called preamp on my actual console i'm going to pull this up and you'll see as i do this you will see that the level on my meter starts to go up and as i continue to take this up i'm now going up above 0 db and as i talk this now is probably averaging closer to around zero db so when i talk quieter it's dropping down to about -10 and as i speak louder it jumps right up to plus 10. so we're averaging between -10 and plus 10 bouncing around that zero db point you will notice however at no point does this signal go into clip at no point is it going all the way up to the red it's going into the orange which is fine but it's not going into the red and that is what we're aiming for so as long as you've got a good healthy signal and there's plenty of headroom you're not going into clip all of those things if you've checked all of that along the way then you're going to be doing great that really is how we're going to set our gain settings but before we go i'm just going to leave you with three things just to think about extra things just to remember when it comes to setting these levels first of all during your sound check before the service starts remember that everybody is going to be a little bit quieter than they will be when it gets to the service if during your sound check you are hitting -4 db when the congregation get in the room and the holy spirit is moving and adrenaline levels jump up people will give it an extra little 10 more on top of what they've been doing previously so if if at the sound check point you are hitting -4 db very nearly going into clip there's very little headroom left then you can probably be fairly certain that come the service when everything steps up a gear they will go into clip so always give yourself a little bit more headroom in your practice than what you might need during the service because it's it's gonna go up from there the second thing to be aware of is any bleed on the stage if you've got a singer who's stood right next to a drum kit and they sound check on their own and you say hey yeah that's looking great we've got some good levels coming in here and then the drummer kicks in suddenly what you get through on that microphone might well jump up and again if you are very close to your clip point you're very close on your head room at that point just be careful when other instruments all kick in that any bleed doesn't push you over that edge you might need to look at repositioning singers or using a drum screen or something like that if that's an issue for you if you find that every time the drummer hits the snare drum the vocal mic goes into peak um then you might just need to look at repositioning those because you're getting too much bleed from other things on the stage that's causing your levels to clip and the final thing is to just look at typical levels that you find when using certain instruments and certain singers with certain microphones because any drastic changes in your game from one week to a next can suggest to you that there might be a problem somewhere so for example if i am a singer and this is my microphone and most weeks i have about plus 35 to 40 db of gain but this morning you've come along and we now need 54 db of gain to get the right level coming through this microphone that should start to ring alarm bells in your head because at that point you're saying well something has changed here normally we can do 35 to 40 db that's the kind of average range that we normally use today we're on 54. we've had to boost this significantly have we got a faulty cable has somebody gone and stood on the cable during the week while nobody was here and now this morning we've come in and that cable is now damaged or is there some other problem somewhere else maybe the cable hasn't quite been plugged in properly let's go back and check those things before we go any further so a significant change in a gain setting can indicate a problem for you also just know that typical values of gain could be anything from about 20 db up to around 50 55 this is probably the upper limit of where i would really want to see gain going if you have gain values into 60 plus db that again is an indication that you could have a problem somewhere either you've got the wrong type of microphone for that job and it's not doing the job properly or that person isn't using that microphone properly or the microphone isn't in the correct position or you've got a faulty microphone or a faulty cable or something along the way is not quite right if you're getting gain levels of 60 db or more then i would have a look at that and just see if there is something not quite right somewhere there because that's a very very high gain level 20 30 40 even up to 50 dbs i'm happy there's no problems in any of that but much more than that and you're starting to get a point where you'd say let's change something here because this doesn't quite look right to me so that is gain structure that's how you're going to set your gains those are things to look out for hopefully that's been helpful for you as always please give this video a thumbs up if you found this helpful and leave any comments that you have down below i'd love to hear what you guys think how you guys set your gains whether you find anything different that would be really interesting so please do put those things below and i'll see you in the next video thank you guys [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Plugged-in AV

Views: 35,733

Keywords: Church tech, Church, tech, technology, AV, PA, Church Sound, Church AV, Media, Church Media, UK Church, Sound, Video, Lighting, live sound, gain staging, how to, mixing console, how to set gain on mixer, vocal gain, how to set gain, sound mixer, gain staging vocals, gain structure, live sound setup, church sound setup, church audio, live sound mixing, gain staging drums, live sound engineering, live sound check

Id: tJOMYOhjeWw

Length: 23min 33sec (1413 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 11 2022