How To Setup Monitors On The X32 (or M32) Sound Console

all right welcome back everybody this is dave with alum house and today we're going to be talking about how to set up [Music] monitors all right so to set up monitors on this x32 console we've got a few things to prepare uh typically what we're going to do is use mix busses on the right hand side and so if we come over here and hit the second button down we see we've got a couple mix buses now you'll notice here that the first four are set up uh with the pre light lit up and and that means that they're set up as pre fader uh we'll talk in a minute what the difference between pre-fader and post-fader is but these four are set up as pre-fader and then we have uh these next four that are not lit up which could mean that they're post fader could mean that they are are set up as groups we're not quite sure yet then we if we look click 9 through 16 we have four more that that are just not being used they're not set up they don't have any color this is pretty much a blank scene this is how i start out my blank scenes but so these are also not set up as pre-fader but they're available to be used so we're going to come back up here and let's talk about what pre-fader does pre-fader uh allows us to have a mix go into the room if i turn up some of these faders you can see i've got some some information coming in here if i turn up some of those faders and i turn my main volume up now i have some sort of audio going into my room and these faders right now if i turn them down in a pre-fader monitor whatever i do in the house does not change what goes to the monitor because the information going to going to the monitor happens before this fader if it's a post-fader mix like my five through eights are over there then if i make small changes that would be impacted in what goes out to that monitor here's the example of the difference right now in my live stream i have a post fader mix going to my live stream and what that allows me to do is mix for the house i might turn this one up a little bit or this one down some and that change will be reflected at a certain ratio into my stream and that's what i want because i have one sound engineer but if i set up a monitor for a musician on stage let's say this is our drummer and the drummer is in the back row into the back behind the kit and and i make changes in the house well that being that would that would mean that their monitor would continue to change during during the worship set and that's just not ideal so what do we do we set it up as pre-fader uh in after this section i'm going to show you how to make the appropriate changes up here in the screen to determine which ones are pre-fader and which ones are post fader but for right now we have a little bit of a mix here that we've built we have no idea what it sounds like because i'm not listening to it but i'm just pushing some tracks from my laptop from a previous show back into the console so that we have stuff to work with here now what i can do and typical here channel one is kick so we'll start to use channel one as our example so to get started with setting up the monitors i do recommend pushing these uh these faders here to zero or as close to zero as you can get there we're going to hit the select button because we want to change or alter that mix bus and then we're going to hit the send zone fader button now notice that all of these faders from our front of house mix now have been zeroed out we can still see that the indicators are flashing meaning we have audio but all of the faders have zeroed out the reason for that is now these faders are no longer mixing for our main output they're now designed and designated to mix for this monitor or mixbus one so now if this is the drummer he probably doesn't need the kick drum he doesn't need the snare drum i just happen to know that these are overheads i usually give him a little overheads because that will give him a kind of a feel for the whole kit and and then maybe this is the base and he he needs bass maybe he needs some guitar in there and these are vocals all right so this could be the mix that's built for in this example this drummer mixbus one in-ear monitor or wedge it doesn't matter necessarily but you've now built a mix well if i hit sends on fader all of the faders flip back to our front of house mix okay and anything any change that i make here is not going to be reflected in this because it's set up as pre-fader now we can we can go and and if i hit sends on fader again because it's selected now i can select mixbus 2 and we'll see that now we could set this monitor up as something different this could be a different uh maybe maybe this does need some some drums and bass and it's a vocalist and maybe they want to hear a lot of themselves and then a little bit of something else these are my vocal channels and so now if you look we have two different meters going even though they're monitor mixes so this is setting up a a mono so not stereo left and right but a mono mix that's going to go to a monitor to be heard by a musician on stage or some somebody else somewhere else so this is the basics for setting up a a monitor mix that we're gonna send somewhere now how do we connect these well you've got a couple options so on the back of this console let's say the easiest way to do it these mix busses by default are designed to go out output one output two output three okay and they're designed uh to go out those outputs through an xlr connection and that's the easiest thing to do is just plug your xlr cable uh out of out of mix bus one for this drummer's monitor that we we were using the example so you can plug the xlr cable out of mixbus one sorry out of output one on the back of the console right into their in-ear monitor setup put that transmitter really high get a good line of sight to the drummer and as long as they turn their in-ears on they should be good to go now let's say that you only have a quarter inch output well then we get into routing so uh routing what we would do is we would come up here to routing all right so we're zoomed in on the screen here now if i hit routing then i've got a couple different options here we've got inputs we've got card and and what we're going to do is we're going to scroll over here to xlr so our xlr outputs are preset so these are on the back of the console these are preset for output one through four five through eight nine through 12 13 through 16. and what that does is that takes all of these mix buses that we could route to output one two three and four by default and it sends them out the xlrs now if we if we keep scrolling we get to kind of the output section here of this console and what we've got is an is a list over here of all 16 outputs listed 1 through 16. now what we can do and or see is that output one on the of the xlr output the physical output on the back of the console is is set up to mix bus grouping and then mix bus one so that helps us determine if we needed to change it uh we we could make it any any anything else a matrix out or we could do direct out for the channel comes in and then goes directly out we've got a couple different options but again for this example for monitors we're going to stick with mix bus and mix west one if i go to output two you'll see that it automatically is set to mix bus two three four five as we go down these are typically preset for all of these monitor all of these mix buses until we get to 1516 on the full console the full console 1516 is set up for your main left and main right now if you've got the smaller platform the the compact the rack uh or the producer version of this console then you've got only eight outputs which means that seven and eight are designated for your main left and rights the good thing about that console the smaller platform is that you still have all of these outputs available to do some really unique things we're not going to dive into it in this co in this video but you do have the ability to do some really custom routing and get a huge bang out of that console even though it's a smaller platform so where do we want to tap this if i come back up here to monitor one you see we've got a tap option here and typically we're going to tap in this case it would be if we do pre-fader it me on on the tap it means that the actual fader from mixbus1 will not determine or change the volume output so what i like to do is do it as post fader like that which means that my my fader for mixbus one will adjust volume now this is important because when your drummer is sitting behind the drum set they can use their phone if you've got a router hooked up to the console they can use their phone and an app a free app to control their own monitor mix which really makes life so much easier you don't have to yell back and forth from stage to the console and and have the sound man set up your monitor so they can just connect wirelessly to uh to the sound board they can make their own changes and if they need more volume they could actually just push the fader up and you'll see it move which is kind of neat but that doing post fader on our tap is is going to be ideal for for the monitor setup so we've got a couple different options here if you want to check out uh what all the specifics of these uh plus m or post eq or pre-eq plus m what those are you can check those out just go on to behringer's website and they've got some really basic explanations in the manual of this console the user manual of what those are so let's talk about how we actually set these up as pre-fader post fader so from this section i'm going to hit the home button and i'm going to select channel 1 for a mix bus so in the top left corner we can see that it says mixbus one and what we've got the option to do is we can mouse over to the config tab and here now this is version four of this software which gives you some really nice unique features but what we want to do is select here we've got this selection over here where we can do pre-fader or post fader okay you see subgroup is an option at the bottom as well subgroup is a different scenario pre-fader it's selected and that means that again any changes you make to the faders for your front of house mix will not make changes to your monitor i'm going to go over to mixbus 2 here i'm going to change this one to be post fader so i can just select post fader it says do you really want to make this change i say yes and now i have a mix built on mixbus 2 but if i make changes to my main front of house mix it will change that monitor mix going to mix bus 2 because it's post fader okay now the benefits to doing post fader and pre fader mixes is that you've got the ability to do some dynamic control we could actually turn on a compressor here by hitting this and we could start to maybe do some light compression on the monitor just in case things get out of hand we don't hurt anybody's eardrums we also have the ability to do some eq'ing on this on this monitor mix which is really nice so you can see in this mix got a lot of low end but you know we know that there's some pretty standard things here that are going to be maybe a little overbearing in this this four to five hundred range is usually uh pretty dicey we've also got the ability to come way down here and most monitors are not going to do this low low sub bass very well so we can do that and then if we needed to do anything for adding some clarity up here maybe on the vocal diction um you know just to get some more clarity in the ears we could do something like that so it's really nice pre-fader and fader mixes you've got the ability to do some eq and compression all right so we're back out here at the full console one of the last things i want to talk about is setting up a reverb specific to your in-ear monitor mix now everyone knows what a dry vocal sounds like and it doesn't get any better when you shove headphones directly in your ears and listen to a dry vocal it's even worse coming from a worship leader myself it's even worse when it's your own vocal that's dry direct in your head it's just hard to take and listen to so a little reverb can go a long way for your musicians on stage to help them get a really good sound now some people have room mics and room mics will obviously do the trick for you a quick easy and free way to do it is by using a reverb so if we come down here to bus 9 through 16 what i've done is set up a reverb here this is just by default a hall reverb that's in the effects here we would find that by coming up to the screen hitting effects and looking what the effect number one is so again this is a hall reverb you could go through and change it to be the vintage reverb which i really love you could be a plate verb whatever you want but effect number one comes in here on 13. so what we do is we tell what to send out so just like our monitor mix we're going to send a certain mix into this reverb so when i hit sends on fader i have built a little mix over here and this is just a general mix of instruments that i need in reverb so maybe i've got some drums in there i've got some acoustic guitar i've got the vocals in there going into one reverb so what we want to do is we want to set up this basic mix that's going to go into this stream into this uh bus number 13 bus 13 sends it out into this reverb it makes a stereo return which comes back in the board on this left side now we're going to hit sends on fader after we've built our mix now we're back to our house mix and we come in on this third one all the way over here the third one third layer and these are our effects returns now this is crucial don't miss this you don't want this reverb coming into your front of house mix so to what we have to do is select this return and then deselect the stereo bus for it okay when stereo bus is selected it can go into your room mix we want it only to be for the in-ear so we turn that off now you have this this whole little uh effect that's that's happening here we've got a mix going into a reverb send goes into the reverb comes back in here it's turned up where does it go so what we're going to do is we want to add this reverb into the in-ear mix so we're going to come back to our mix in this example we were using the stereo mix it'll work with stereo or mono and then so then we hit sends on fader and now what we can do is turn this up in their ears they can turn it up in their ears and they get just enough reverb to to broaden the spectrum in their head so if you have room mics you're you're gonna have room mics that are pointed on either side of your stage and it's gonna be getting left and right stuff and they can pan it left and right in their head and that's that's all good and well but again the the free way to do it set one reverb designated for your in-ear mix your monitor mix and then you can add that reverb in into their heads this does work on a mono mix obviously not quite the same because you're not going to have the stereo width and a mono mix it's going to add depth okay but you know listen to it in headphones solo it in headphones and see what it sounds like but this will really make your musicians sing better play better which is going to make your job as a as a mix engineer so much easier all right so that was a quick run through on monitor setups uh obviously we went through a mono monitor we went through a stereo monitor uh we added some reverb we've built some mixes that go to them we've talked about pre-fader and post fader and uh and that you can also use these sends these mix bus sends for other rooms whether it be a live stream or a cry room or a nursery something like that even even your foyer you could send a mix to you know another area in your building if you needed to so i hope this has been helpful if you've got questions leave them in the comments below i respond to all the questions and comments that i get and i would love to help you take your next steps so give it a thumbs up give it a like and we will catch you guys in the next one peace [Music] you

Channel: AllamHouse

Views: 43,649

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Id: zwYcNieISF4

Length: 19min 19sec (1159 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 08 2020