How To Use The Zoom L-12 To Record Your Band

there are a lot of videos online about how to use the zoom l12 recorder and mixer but very few of those are geared towards bands especially louder bands that have drums use amplifiers and that are going to be miking their instruments so this video is about how to use the zoom l12 if you're in a band and you want to use it to practice play a live show or maybe record yourself practicing or playing a live show since you're here you're probably already aware that the l12 is a unique device in that it can be used as a mixer for live performance it can be used as a mixer in the studio while recording an album and you can also use it as a field recorder if you're out somewhere where you're not connected to a computer but you still want to record yourself and you do that using the sd card slot in the back it can do a ton of other things but those are our primary uses for it so to start out this is how we have the l12 setup in our space we practice here and we shoot our videos here so it's nice to keep the l12 close by so that if we need to make an adjustment we can do so while still being connected to our instruments also none of us are sound engineers we all know a little bit but it took a little bit of time to figure out exactly how to use this mixer for our purposes if you're new to using a mixer the best way to think about it is to visualize your instrument or microphone signal going into the input and then going straight down through the board we're a four piece band we have two guitarists a bassist and a drummer and three of us sing right now we have guitar one going into channel one guitar two into channel two all three of our vocal microphones going into three four and five kick drum and six snare drum and seven the drum overhead mic in eight bass guitar in nine and then sometimes we use audio samples from old movies which our drummer turns on with her cell phone and that is going into channel 10. let's walk through the signal path of channel 1 which starts with my guitar i plug my guitar into my pedal board with all of my effects and then i go into my amp which is a vox ac30 and i have that miced up with an sm57 that signal comes in here and passes through all of these knobs and settings so as far as inputs you have 10 inputs in total so basically 10 channels 1 through 8 are xlr inputs you can also plug in a quarter inch input to these as well inputs 9 and 10 are quarter inch only inputs you'll notice that there are two quarter inch inputs in both 9 and 10 because these are meant for instruments with stereo outputs like keyboards and synthesizers so it's not really a 12 input mixer it's a 10 input mixer you can plug in 10 mics or instruments but two of those can accept a right and left signal so that's why they say nine slash ten and eleven slash twelve but really it's ten in total one thing to keep in mind about channels 9 and 10 is since these are quarter inch only inputs and not xlr inputs they won't have as strong of a signal as the xlr inputs will plugging something in like a keyboard into 9 or 10 should be just fine because a keyboard should output what you'll need to get a good signal however if you plug in a vocal mic or an amplifier mic or a drum mic into channels 9 or 10 you'll notice that the signal is really quiet and you'll want to use a di box to amp up that signal i'll talk a little more about that later because we had to do that with our bass guitar which is plugged into channel 9. all of these inputs send your signal through the board and out to six different outputs all of those outputs are here along the top outputs are things you send your sound out to that allow someone else to hear it such as pa speakers computer monitor speakers in-ear monitors or even a set of headphones outputs and recordings are different things it'll be clear as we move forward why it's important to make that distinction so let's walk through the signal path to see all the different adjustments we can make before sending our sound to an output as i showed you my guitar goes into channel one the first thing my signal is going to hit is this 48 volt button this is needed when you're using a microphone that needs to be powered the sm57 i'm using on my amp does not need to be powered but as you can see this button doesn't just affect channel one it's for channels one through four that said none of the microphones we're using in channels one through four need to be powered so we leave that off that's an important thing to take note of if you're using a microphone that needs to be powered you have to turn on power for that whole section now if you're also using a microphone that can't be powered such as an old ribbon microphone you'll want to make sure it's placed in a different section on the mixer otherwise you can wind up damaging the ribbon microphone most microphones that don't require power like sm57s or sm58s can have 48 volts turned on and it'll be just fine it won't affect the sound or damage the microphone next is the high z button this works like a preamp if you're plugging a guitar or bass straight into the mixer without using an amplifier it raises the impedance so that you can get a stronger signal only channels 1 and 2 have the high z button all others have pad buttons pad buttons are often turned on on the channels where you have your drum microphones drums are really loud so turning on the pad button where you have the drums will actually cut a little bit of that signal so that you can get levels that aren't too loud back to channel one since i have an amplifier and i'm not plugging my guitar straight into the mixer i leave the hi-z button off next is gain this is the first thing you are going to set on each channel you'll want to set it so that you're loud enough to get a strong signal but not so loud that you're clipping so you mostly want to see green and you never want to see red because red means it's too loud keep in mind that if you use guitar pedals you'll want to set this level with your loudest and highest gain pedal turned on so that you don't start clipping your sound when you reach the heavier parts of your songs like i said about the pad button when you're setting the gain for the channels where you have drums you may notice that even with the gain knob all the way down your drums might still be clipping the pad button will fix that now we usually record our live videos with no one else in the room monitoring our sound so we usually set our levels and then play our entire set for that reason we'll typically set our levels a little lower just so that if we really get into it and start playing harder we don't run the risk of clipping our sound next up is the compression knob we typically only use compression on vocals so for all of our instruments compression is turned all the way off be aware that compression will add a little bit of gain so if you have set your gain right where you want it but then you add compression you could start clipping so you'll need to find a balance between the gain and compression knobs if you want to add compression here's another important part that takes some getting used to it's at this point in your signal flow right after the compression knob that your audio gets recorded so whether you have an sd card in the back or you're plugged into a computer and you have your daw software open it's going to record the signal at this point nothing you do from here down will affect your recording everything from here down is all about adjusting for your outputs that's why i say it's good to think about your outputs and your recordings differently next up is the select button where you can turn on effects and eq each channel if you want to so if you choose to add an effect you click this button you'll follow the blue section over to where you can add those effects and make adjustments our band doesn't use these effects we mostly add our effects in post but it's nice to know that we can if we need to again none of these effects are applied to your recording so if you really love the sound of one of these effects on your vocals for example you'll need to find another effect that you can add in post to hopefully get that same sound next is the record play button you will need to push this button and make sure the light turns red if you want to record that channel so when we are about to record since we are using all 10 of our inputs we have to arm every channel before we record people have complained about this but i like that when i'm by myself if i want to practice i can just record my guitar and my vocal mic i can leave all other channels off so i don't wind up with eight empty tracks that recorded nothing once you arm each channel for recording they do turn red but you're not recording yet you have to come down here hit record and then hit play again you hit record and then play once you see the numbers moving you're recording any channel that you have in red next up is the mute button again this will only mute the sound of that channel in your outputs you will not mute it in the recording the other important thing is that the mute button is how you check your recording levels so notice that if i want to see what my guitar record level is i can hit mute notice that those green lights go a little dimmer this is the level i'm recording at so before you start recording you'll want to hit the mute button to check your record levels on each channel if you need to make an adjustment you do so with the gain and compression knobs not the faders down below finally we're down to the faders these faders adjust your output volumes on all six of your outputs over here you decide which output you want to adjust by clicking one of these buttons you have a master output and a b c d and e outputs let's first look at the master output it sends a right and left signal out via xlr cables which we use to go to our right and left pa speakers this is probably how most bands will use the master output on the a b c d and e outputs you have quarter inch connections the a output can send a right and left signal if you want to plug into something like right and left studio monitor speakers or some kind of interface that has a right and a left input or you can just send a mono signal the a output is the only one that gives you that option between a mono out or a right and a left out and currently we are not using our a output b c d and e are all mono outputs that we use for our in-ear monitors each letter is a different person in the band and each person has their own in-ear mix which i will show you how to create in a moment let's look at the fader settings for our outputs i'll select the master output now since we have our master out going to our pa speakers and because our practice space is pretty small we usually only send vocals and audio samples to our pa speakers because our amps and drums are loud enough that we don't need those coming through the pa as well but if we were playing an outdoor show or some place that didn't have a sound system like a backyard show we could use this mixer and rpa speakers and we could turn up our amps and our drums in the master output if we needed so that's how we're using the master output since nothing is plugged into the a output if i adjust when selected on a nothing happens now just to show you how the faders work i did move these faders while selected on a but that doesn't change my settings in the master output because these are not analog faders so if i go back to the master you can see by these lights that my levels are still the same b c d and e are our in-ear mixes my in-ear mix is the d output so if i hit d you can see by the lights where my mix is set i typically have my guitar turned up pretty loud my vocals are in channel three and they're turned up the loudest everything else is lower so that i can hear them but they're in the background now if i wanted to hear more snare drum for example snare is in input seven i can turn it up past where i currently have it you'll see the light showing the previous setting turn off then i can adjust it for louder or quieter whatever i want that said you won't see the light indicating your new level until you've gone to a different output and come back so sometimes i'll go to the a output where we have nothing and then i'll go back and i can see my new setting you'll always want to make sure you've selected the right output so that you don't crank up the snare in someone else's mix one bit of advice if you're all playing in the same room you're probably going to get microphone bleed in your recordings which means that the sounds from your drums and the sound from your amplifiers are gonna bleed into your vocal microphones it's normal that said one thing you can do to help decrease that is go easy on that compression knob adding more and more compression will drastically increase the amount of mic bleed you let in over here is the master volume fader that you can adjust to increase the overall volume going through the master output we usually keep our set pretty low because if our gain knob is set correctly and our faders are set correctly then we don't usually need to increase much with the master fader as well it usually hangs out around the third light at the bottom at this point we know our record levels are good and we know that our master output levels are good the last thing is to adjust any of our other outputs that we're using for example are in ears so if i'm the one making those adjustments i'll go one by one making sure i'm selected on the right in your mix and each person can tell me what they want to hear more of or less of and i'll make those adjustments using the faders singers typically want to hear their voice the loudest followed by their own instrument but everybody likes different things over here are the overall volume knobs for each in-ear mix which will turn up everything in that person's in ears most of us are set around 12 o'clock before i wrap this up i want to talk about one challenge we encountered when we first got this mixer we didn't know beforehand that channels 9 and 10 were going to have lower signal levels because their quarter inch inputs and are essentially made for instruments with stereo outputs we needed to have our base going into channel 9 and our bassist has a similar setup to me her base goes into her pedal board then into her amp which is an orange terror base we usually mic it up with an sm57 and we wanted to send that signal into channel 9 with an xlr to quarter inch cable but we weren't getting a loud enough signal in the mixer and if we cranked the base up louder it would eventually overpower everything else and probably wind up bleeding into all of our other microphones i did a little research and found out that i needed to buy a di box to amp up that base signal so that we could get a usable level lucky for us our drummer is married to a bassist and he happened to have an effects pedal that had a di volume so our base signal now goes from her base into her pedals into her amp out from her di out on her bass amp and into this pedal where we have the di volume turned up and then into the l12 and her levels come in great so that's something to keep in mind we were pretty naive when we first bought this mixer and didn't understand that we couldn't use channels 9 and 10 in the same way that we were using channels 1 through 8 without some kind of work around so if you're needing to put a non-stereo out instrument into channels 9 or 10 know that most quality di boxes or effect pedals that have a di volume control run anywhere from 100 to 400 dollars if you're looking at dropping that kind of money know that zoom actually makes a larger version of this recorder and mixer the zoom l20 which has 16 xlr inputs and runs about 400 dollars more than the zoom l12 we've been using this mixer for a few months now and honestly it's been great for everything that we've needed it for we have already had some conversations about upgrading to the zoom l20 which will allow us to mic our base amplifier and also give us more space for more drum microphones but for everything we've needed so far the l12 has been amazing i'll wrap up by letting you hear some of our live music that we have recorded using this mixer none of this has been professionally mixed it's 100 percent done by us hopefully this video helps your band understand how to use the zoom l12 mixer and recorder if you want to hear more of our music or watch more live performances that we have done using this mixer then check out the videos from our album live stream i'll put some links below [Music] so [Music] so fill in our bodies

Channel: No Shooting Friends, Joseph

Views: 145,889

Keywords: zoom, zoom l-12, L-12, Zoom Mixer, Livestream, Emo band, posthardcore, post hardcore band, how to, how to use zoom L-12, Tutorial, L-12 recorder, L-12 mixer, record my band, mixer and recorder, utah band, l12, L12, Zoom L12, Record your band, Zoom Corp, 10 channel mixer

Id: TvTL5cjJKHE

Length: 18min 49sec (1129 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 22 2021