- Hi, I'm Jordan from Kettner
Creative and in this video, I wanna show you how to set up
a small, basic sound system. A lot of the things that we
go through in this video, hopefully its short, are also applicable into
large events as well. So, when you first arrive at the venue, you wanna take a look around and come up with your strategy right away. You might be meeting an event planner or some other contact at the venue and you need to understand
what's happening and get the lay of the land,
where they want the podium, where the main area is
and where the speakers may or may not go. As a general rule of thumb, you want the speakers to be
in front of all microphones, that's like best case scenario. You can't always make that work but you're setting yourself up for failure if you put your speaker
right behind the podium mic or something similar. You always wanna get
the main amplification, away from the microphones
as much as possible, in a practical scenario
you can't always do that. So when I walk in the
the room is generally go, meet the client or meet the
event planner and find out, make sure we have the right equipment and make sure we have the, we know what the event is
and confirm all the details, like start time and all that and then the first thing I will do, is I will connect the mixer to power. The reason that I connect
the mixer to power, is because when I start at an event, I wanna start with what
I call big problems and work your way down to
little problems, right? So if you plug your mixer into
power and there's no power, you know you have a bigger
issue that you need to sort out, before you start running any other cable. You need to figure out one, if it's the mixer that has the issue or two if it's the venue
power that has the issue, in which case you need to start, you know, finding whoever is in charge
of maintenance at the venue and go from there. So, here's like a small Yamaha
MG10, 10 channel mixer. So we'll plug in the power. Power cable here and then turn the mixer on. So you can see that
there's a power light here, so the mixer is on. While you're doing that, while
you're plugging things in and screening the power in the back, you wanna be looking at the mixer itself, you never wanna be zoning out. You wanna just, take a look
while you're working on it, make sure the master volumes down, make sure all the
channel volumes are down. Make sure that the last guy
that finished with the board, set all the EQ flat, make sure
that all your gains are down. You wanna do that before
you turn the mixer on, to make sure that what
comes out of the mixer, when we connected to the speakers, is what you expect it to be. So you need to start from zero, always, especially with an analog
mixer, with a digital mixer, if you're walking in with a saved show, then that's a different story. So the same thing, we wanna make sure that
the speaker has power now. So the speaker might be
somewhere else in the room. So we'll find out where we wanna put it, so it's away from the microphone and then we will plug in. As we're plugging it in, before you connect it to the outlet, you wanna make sure that
the speaker's turned off, that all the gains are set to zero. In this case, we'll be
feeding at line level. So you wanna check all the switches, you wanna turn the DSP off and
the high pass frequency off. You always wanna be starting from zero. So we checked all that,
now we can plug it in. Now, some people don't like
plugging the speakers into power until you have all these signal cable run. Well, sometimes we're in a
situation where we're doing eight of these sound systems in a day, right? So like I said, in my
mind, I'll sacrifice, what some people call best practice because of the practicality of, you're probably in a room
that has a dead outlet and you need to know that, before you start running other cable. So I'll usually plug it in, turn it on, you see that there's power,
then turn it back off. You don't want the
speaker to be turned on, when you connect it to the mixer. So as a general rule, you run the speaker before
you run any of the inputs. Some guys like to run everything, all the inputs and all the speaker things, before powering anything on again, I think the practicality
of that is pretty terrible because you can run it all and then you go to turn it on and figure out that you have
a power issue and you know, soundchecks' in half an hour so I think it's more wise, go through the process
of confirming everything, as you do it. So here we have, speakers now connected to the
stereo output of the mixer and then I'm gonna turn it on. So the speaker is now
connected to the mixer and it's on at zero. So the first thing I do before
I check any microphones, cause usually with microphones, you have like a bunch of wireless, a bunch of wired microphones but I like to test what I know and what I know is music
from a iPhone or my phone. So let's quickly find a, track, so I plug it into
one of the channels, at the end of the board. So I can see that it's
playing on my phone. I set the volume on my phone to 75%, make sure it's working there and then I start by bringing
up the master on the mixer, up to about 50, 60% and then
I'll bring up the channel, of the phone that I just plugged in. So that's pretty much it. So you're just making
sure that there's sound, coming out of the speaker. Now, if this was real, I'd let it go and then I'd start wiring
up the microphones, while the music's playing and while that's happening, while you're wiring up the microphones, it's good to just be
listening to the room. How echo-y is it? How present is the base? Like how does the room sound? Is it really echo-y or
dead or is it, what is, what's the room doing? You wanna be thinking about this, while you're running cable. So now we start on the first channel. On the mixer, everything
works, on an analog mixer everything works in channel
strips, so vertical lines. So everything to do with the
microphone that I plug in here, is directly below it. So again, before I plug
anything into the mixer, I'm making sure that
everything is zeroed out. The gain is down, the compressor is off, the EQ is flat and all
the auxiliaries are down. The pan is flat and the volume is down. Once I've confirmed all
that, I will plug it in. Here we just have a wired Shure 58. So, the Yamaha MG10, has kind of like a, an indicator
here on the gain switch, of were a good starting place is, so while I'm talking, I'll
just bring it up to that. Now it won't make sound
until you bring up the volume to match it. Check, check, check, check one, two and there we have it. So 99% of events, you
just leave the EQ flat, unless you actually
know what you're doing. So all the green knobs
should be pointed up. If it sounds a little muddy to you, which sometimes like a
wired microphone will or a vocal mic will, just
bring the low down a touch and on this particular mixer, there's a high pass filter on it, so you can just engage
that and turn that on but generally you can
tweak the mids a bit, but I mean, we get people
calling us and texting us and all the EQ is turned
down and the volumes up and that didn't actually do anything. If you know anything about EQ, if you make the same
adjustment on all your EQs, it's just bringing the whole volume down. Generally speaking, if it's talking head or just vocal only just leave the EQ flat. If you're getting feedback, it's because of bad speaker placement. So you either need more
speakers spread around the room, in a lower volume or you need to move the speaker
from behind the microphone, 'cause that's what's causing your problem. Once the first microphone is done, then you can pretty much
follow the same process, for all the other microphones as well. When people rent sound systems from us, we put a piece of tape here, so you can label it on the
tape, which is best practice and that's how you set
up a small sound system and that's my approach to
setting up a small sound system. If you have any questions, just email us, events@I kettnercreative.com or give us a call (604) 427-1629. Thanks.
