- Hi, I'm Jordan from Kettner Creative. In this video, I wanna show you how to set up your wireless microphone. (upbeat music) We film videos like this all the time. So if you wanna see more
videos on sound system setup, or microphones or any event technology, please like and subscribe. So how do you set up your
wireless microphone system? In this video we're gonna be using the Shure ULX wireless microphone. We're gonna be using it with a
wireless handheld microphone, but the same steps go for
almost any wireless manufacturer or any microphone type. So it could be a lapel mic. It could be a wireless guitar system. It could be a wireless boom
mic, anything like that. We're gonna use it with this kit here from Shure ULX just to
show you the basic process. So first things first we're gonna go through all the different
types of equipment that we have here in front of us. We have the wireless receiver. This is the radio receiver. And this is the microphone and transmitter for the wireless
handheld, it's two-in-one. If you have a wireless lapel mic, the lapel mic is the
microphone and then it goes to a body pack which is the transmitter. But in the handheld microphones, the microphone is up
here and the transmitter is in the bottom half. We have two full size
antennas for this microphone and we have an XLR cable to
connect this to our mixer. We also have the power
supply for the receiver. So first things first,
we're gonna get the antennas on the receiver and we're
gonna get the power plugged in. So on the back you can see here we have
these two BNC connectors. We're gonna slide this on and then give it a little
quarter turn until it locks. Same for the next one. Slide it on, give it a
quarter turn until it locks. Now when you read the manual
for the Shure ULX system and many other systems, it's recommended that you put the antennas at 45 degrees, just like bunny ears on a old TV. Now, some people on
our team, they've found that they've got better results
doing one up and one out, because the idea is that
there's a doughnut-sized array coming out of this antenna so
kinda starts as a small cone and gets bigger and bigger. I've never had any
problems with either one. It's kind of like a comical
debate with our team. But I'll just go with what the manual says keep those at 45 degrees. Next, we're gonna plug in the power. You can see here on the Shure ULX system, there's a locking connector,
this is really great when you're looking for reliability. You just screw it in here
and the connector locks. Next, we're gonna plug in the XLR cable. When you plug in the XLR
cable to connect this receiver to your audio mixer, it's a good time to be
thinking whether or not you want this to be
line level or mic level. So we'll connect this. And then let's assume
we're going to a mixer. So I just make this
one little switch here. That goes from line level to mic level. I want that set to be mic level because it's gonna be coming
into a preamp on a mixer. Get these antennas back
up where they need to be. Okay, so before you turn on microphones, you need to find out what
the wireless is doing in your area. It's very, very, very common
at big convention centers, that there will be tons of
other units exactly like this operating at other conferences. Even if you're in a downtown hotel venue, you'll get radio interference
from other hotels that are across the street from you. These things do have a
300 foot line of sight. So it's a pretty impressive
distance that these will cover. But obviously, they do
go farther than that, they're just less reliable. So keep that in mind when
you're setting this up, you need to find out what
other microphones are operating in your area. But the good news is that
this will do that for you. In the Shure ULX system there are two sections, there's groups and there's channels, okay? So you need to find a clean
group and all your microphones for your conference or
your event need to be in the same group. There's about 20 channels per group. So first of all, we're gonna
search for a clean group. Most of the time you'll walk
in, you'll just go one one, and you'll see if that
there's any interference, but I'm gonna show you how
to do it the right way. So you hold MODE and SET until it blinks. And then you hit the jog knob. Now you'll see it scanning,
it'll go through channel or group one and it'll
count to channel 20. And it'll go group two
and count to channel 20. It'll keep going and going and going, chances are, it's gonna
go all the way back to group one, channel one, because it likes keeping the numbers low when it has the option to do that. Okay, just as I guessed, it
landed on channel one one, there's not a lot of
wireless interference here. That's extremely common,
but it's a good move to do, just to set yourself up. So now we're gonna pair our
microphone with our receiver. That's the next step, we
want these two to talk. If you have multiple
receivers, what you wanna do at this point, is you wanna
stack them on top of each other. You can use an antenna combination system to get all the antennas together, or you can use all the
antennas separately, it's totally fine. And then you'll do the same process. So before you fire up any microphones, you need to go find your channels. So it'll probably be group
one, one, group one, two, group one, three and so on,
it'll just keep counting up and you can go all the
way up to 20 microphones in one system, as long as
they fit in same group. You don't want your
microphones in the same room on different groups. That's just a recommendation from Shure. Chances are you probably don't
have 20 wireless microphones. If you do, you'll probably
be a little more versed in this type of stuff. So we'll turn on the microphone. It's important once you turn
on the microphone for the rest of your event, if you
can afford the batteries, which is sometimes an issue, just leave them on, all the time. One reason is, when you
have this microphone on, it will protect that frequency. And what that means is, if
another AV tech in another room starts up his wireless receiver, they will see that you have
microphones on that channel. But what you don't want is to leave all your microphones off. He goes and sets his channels and then turns his microphones off. And when you turn your microphone on, you will start coming out
of both sound systems. This is a very primitive
radio system, right? If all the receivers are
listening to the same frequency, you will turn on your microphone, that's a transmitter and it will transmit to all those receiving stations. So that's something to keep in mind. So we'll turn this off. We'll turn the microphone on. As you can see here, it
loaded up with group one, channel eight, that was
from the previous system that we had set up, so we'll hit MODE. And then you can hit SET
to change the group number. We don't wanna do that, we
just wanna use it on group one. So we'll hit MODE again to lock it in. And then we can set the
channel, again you can hit SET, go all the way up to 20 and
eventually it will loop around and come back to channel one and then you have MODE to lock it in. When you hit MODE to lock it in, you will see the RF climb
here from zero to five bars. You want five healthy
bars, but also before that you want zero bars. If you have zero bars when
your microphone is off that means that there's
nothing else competing for that channel. When you turn your microphone
on, it should come up to five bars. And when you talk, you should get this nice little green beep there. Okay? It means you're getting signal. Now there is gain on
the microphone itself. So you can use a small screwdriver
in this little gain spot to adjust the gain to
bring it up to the level that you want. It's really hard sometimes
to set gain accurately without proper soundcheck
with your presenter. We set it quite conservatively. That's why you just see
one little beep there because sometimes you'll
get an emcee or auctioneer or somebody that really
knows what they're doing, and they will be projecting
way loud into the capsule. It's always easier to
add gain from the console than it is to make a peaking
microphone sound good. So most of ours is set
pretty conservatively. Again, hopefully you get
a chance to soundcheck and you can set the game in a area where you don't have to add too much gain from your console or deal
with a peaking microphone. The peaking microphone
is the worst scenario. So you definitely wanna
protect against that. It's always easier to
add gain at the console than to deal with a peaking receiver. But that's how you set up a
wireless microphone system. We have the Shure ULX system here, but most other microphone
systems work the same. Sennheiser is very, very similar, just a couple little syntax things and what buttons to hit when. But the same process you
wanna get your receiver into that clean frequency range, and then you wanna add your microphone. After that you wanna do
all your receivers first, then add all your microphones. If you wanna buy this
unit, we have some links to some partners that we
have where you can buy this, or a microphone that like it. But if you're coming to Vancouver, you can also rent this from us. We're a full scale AV
and production company and we have a warehouse
full of this type of stuff. So we'd love to work
with you on your event. Please email us at
events@kettnercreative.com. For everything else,
please leave a comment in the comment section below
and don't forget to like and subscribe to see more
videos like this in the future. Thank you so much for watching.
