How to set gain on the mixing console

hi there everyone Dona Lucia and today I'm going to show you how to set gain on our sound craft live for two mixer the gain is probably the single most important knob on the entire channel strip if it is set wrong it will compromise the sound from the outset and you will not be able to fix it later on in the signal chain so it's really quite important that this knob is set correctly now the first thing that you should know about gain is that it has a variety of different names depending on the manufacturer of the equipment gain is referred to as trim input trim input sensitivity as well as gain sensitivity on our mixer it is called input sensitivity the second thing that you need to know is that gain is not the same as volume with volume you can both increase as well as decrease the level of the incoming signal with gain you are only interested in increasing the level of the incoming signal up to a point where the circuitry in the mixer can deal with it the reason for this is that most mixers operate at what is called line level which is electrically around one volt microphones output a signal which is an order of magnitude lower than this in the case of some microphones it's even lower than that so you need to increase the level of this signal up to a point where the circuitry in the mixer can deal with it otherwise you're just trying to process a whole bunch of noise and that's where your gain control comes in the last thing about gain that you need to know is that it is not a set to take sort of thing there is a correct method which is called the gain setting procedure which I will show you which needs to be followed for every input channel if it is not followed you will either have distortion if your gain is set too high or you will have a lot of noise and insufficient level if your gain is set too low so follow along and I'll show you the correct way to set gain on our mixer the gain is this topmost knob here which as you can see on this mixer is labeled input sense which stands for input sensitivity now the first thing that you have to do is you have to depress the PFL button the PFL button is located at the very bottom of the channel strip when you do this the light next to it will turn on and the PFL AFL on button will illuminate in the master section at that point you are ready to set your gain now when you set your gain you have to keep one eye on the input sensitivity knob and the other eye on the rightmost set of meters now for the purposes of this demonstration I'm going to be talking into the mic that is plugged into channel 4 as you can see there the unmarked XLR connector and at the same time you'll be hearing me through the on-camera mic so with a vocal mic you simply say check one two and slowly begin to turn the gain up now as you do this observe the meters in the master section with the microphone you probably won't see much until you hit 12 o'clock and then after that as you can see the meters will start to read higher and higher the idea is for the loudest sections to be in the yellow all right you don't want the loudest sections to be in the red if your gain is set to high like this as you can see you will get Distortion on the other hand if your gain is set too low you will get either nothing or you will get an extremely weak signal now I'm going to repeat this this time with you listening to the output of the mixer so that you can hear what the signal sounds like Mic Check 1 2 check 1 2 3 4 Mic Check 1 2 3 4 Mic Check one two check check 1 2 check 1 2 3 4 Mic Check 1 2 3 4 not normally this is where you would stop I'll keep going past that point so that you can hear what will happen right check 1 2 2 2 2 2 and there as you can hear the signal is extremely distorted that's not good so back off check 1 2 check 1 2 2 2 2 and that's where it should be set well that's the tutorial on how to set gain on the Soundcraft live for two I hope that this was useful to you if you have any questions or comments please contact me either at my youtube channel or an email and I will be more than happy to answer them so until next time this is Bruno Luce saying take care and I'll see you in church

Channel: GLB Productions

Views: 805,474

Keywords: PA, system, sound, reinforcement, training, lessons, microphone, Pre-Fade, Listen, audio, mixer, mixing, console, desk, channel, gain, trim, input, sensitivity, meters

Id: KcUgggdxLPM

Length: 6min 17sec (377 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 01 2012