Loop the Mixer :: Connect a Mixer to a Loop Pedal :: Mixer and Looper

what's up guys this is poppy i got a great video for you today i'm going to show you guys how to hook up a looper pedal to a mixer board in this video i'm going to show you two methods to hook it up the first method you can use with any stereo mixer you will need one more channel then you have inputs so if you have three instruments or four inputs or five inputs it doesn't matter you're going to need that many more channels you need one extra channel so if you have three instruments that you want to run you're going to need four channels available on the mixer if you want to run five instruments or five signals then you're going to need six because you need a channel for the loot pedal to come back into so i've got a simple setup going on here i am using a behringer xenix x1204 usb for this particular job so we'll go through the connections and the inputs very fast so i have the output of the mixer board have the left main output which is going to be your mono output going into my mains which i just have this little speaker hooked up here to check that out and just an xlr cable and then i have the right output the main output connected to my looper to the input my looper pedal is an rc1 it's a simple loop station so the issue i ran into is i wanted to loop more than just one instrument per loop pedal and i didn't want to buy two or three or four loop pedals as you know these are about 100 bucks so i wanted to be able to loop all of my channels and all to basically loop everything i was putting into the mixer board out to the loop station and then run that out to the mains so the way that i found to do it you can do this on any mixer is to run the right output into the input and from the output of the loop station we go from that into a clean channel any stereo channel so i'm running it off the left off the mono channel now every channel here is a stereo channel meaning it's running signals to left and to the right so this is the way we're going to distribute the signal so i've got two inputs coming in that i want to mix and i'm going to loop down this would be pretty typical of a solo performer i've got one mic input that's going to my microphone and i have my guitar input that's going into my guitar so i'll be looping both of these together from the mixer board onto the loop station okay so the main premise is this is that my input channels are coming down the board and i have them panned all the way to the right that is to say that i'm sending everything on my right signal on my main output right everything here is going out to the pedal and the pedal is sending it back into this channel which i'm then routing back and i'm sending this one all the way to the left the reason for this is i do not want the looper pedal to send signal back to itself because then you'd get double signal and feedback issues and that would be terrible so i'm restricting this output of this channel to be on the left if i had it turned to the right it would send it back into itself and that would be no good so i'm sending this only to the left which is going to be going to the main so my left slider is going to control my mains my right slider is sending how much signal is coming into the loop station so you could do this with any input as you can see i could input other inputs a synthesizer a bass guitar anything other microphones and i would do the same thing i would pan them all to the right to send that signal to the right channel and then send the right out into the loop station send that back into a fresh channel into the left side now the reason i want to send it into a channel here as opposed to using the stereo aux returns is because i want to have the controls of the eq and the mute functions if i just use the stereo aux i don't have nearly as much control over that channel all right so now i'm going to demonstrate how the looper actually works so on channel one we're going to unmute channel one and this is sending it out to the mains i also have my channel where my loop station is connected unmuted so it's also coming out to the mains notice that if i mute this channel it mutes everything because i'm sending this to the right this is coming into this channel so this channel controls all of the channels because it's what's going out to the mains it's the only channel coming out of the left if i mute each individual channel it will mute it out of the mains because it's not sending it to the loop pedal muting it off the right is going to not set it to the mute pedal so if you had one channel that you didn't want to send to the loop mixer anymore or the loop anymore you just mute that channel individually i want to mute the entire mix i mute the channel that's coming in from the loop station all right so we're going to mute we're going to loop a small loop i'm just going to put a vocal mix to show you that i can loop my my vocals into the loop station uh this is an rc1 so this is an entry level loop station it will take many just one input and loop it uh infinite loops on top of itself so as you see i'm just going to do something [Music] not bad now i'm gonna add a little bit of guitar into it all right so there you see the looper works just as expected i can loop anything from the mixer into the loop station and then run the loop station back into the mixer board this main slider is going to control the volume the master volume of the mix itself it's also going to control how much output you have on your instruments because your instruments are run through this channel [Music] so i turn the slider down that has the loop hooked up to it it's the entire volume is going to go down and i can run it back up [Music] and if we have the loop station going so maybe so maybe your loop volume is too much you can use the volume on the looper itself to adjust how much of your loot mix you want coming out to the mains this volume though will not affect how much of your input you have coming in as you can see [Music] turning the volume doesn't affect the volume of the instrument because that's controlled through the channels this is really excellent [Music] this also prevents you from getting two signals at the same time because we're throwing only our input signals to the right our output signals on the left so we're not getting double signal when we throw the loop station back into the mixer board this will prevent any feedback issues and this makes it really versatile you should be able to use this setup on any mixer board that has stereo capabilities as long as you have a left channel and a right channel out you can do the same thing and handle as many channels as your mixer board will mix down into one signal so this is the first way to set it up this would work pretty much like i said on any mixer that has a stereo channel stereo outputs i'm going to also show you a different way to hook it up the way i'm going to be using it on this particular board because of its particular functions it's a little bit more complex but it's going to work a little bit better for what i want so for this case what i'm going to do is disconnect the right output from the board because we're not going to be using that anymore and instead i'm going to use the aux outputs if your mixer board has this capability you can also do this any kind of aux output so i'm going to come out of the alternate m outputs 4. you can also use the control room if you want but this is going to work better for me because i have modes on this particular board and from here i'm going to go into the input of my loop pedal so i'm coming out of alt 4 or alt 3 my alternate aux output into our sub output if you will this is called alt on this one into my loop station input and the output is the same the output is still going into one of these clean channels okay so on this board now the way that this works on this particular board and this is a 1204 xenix this button is not an actual mute button this button differentiates between whether it's sending the signal out to the main mix or whether it's sending it to the alt mix so if it's down it's going to be sending me the mix to the alt channels and if it's up it'll be sending the mix to the main mix now this board also has an issue that i'll show you here in just a second and this is why i'm going to run it this way i just think this was a design flaw from behringer itself and if not it's just i just don't agree with the way they have this set up but this is the issue so let's see here so for this i am going to run all the pans level back to square because that's not necessary anymore i'm going to run my loop pedal to the mains i only have one main this time because it's only coming out of the left so i'm going to unmute that one these channels i'm going to have down because i want to send these to the alt 3 4. i do not want these channels to go to the main so i'm going to leave them muted that means it's going to be sending the signal to my alt 3 and 4. but i only have the signal coming out of alt 3 so i'm going to push it up almost to unity and i'm trying to get the same volume that i would normally without having to run the loot pedal in between so you notice if i unmute this channel check we get sound out of the speaker so i've unmuted this channel this is the way it would you would work it normally um this is just your standard hookup you unmute it and it's coming out of the mains if i turn it down it turns it down and if i turn it up it turns it up now i want it not to come out that way i want it to come out of the other channel so i'm going to run it also through seven and eight as you notice this is a lit not nearly as loud as the other one was so we need to make it a little bit louder so that it's the same volume as the other one now that's a pretty pretty pretty close right there so that means we're getting maximum signal out of the output back into here and then we can adjust how much of this comes out we can adjust our mains here so now we have the channels coming in from this to the output it's going into the alt 3 4 section and from alt 3 4 it's coming out into the looper pedal and from the looper pedal it's going in to here and in from here then it's coming out to the mains so we're collecting the signal after it's micked from the alt channel including effects sending it to the looper and then from the looper we're sending it back into the mixer board so we can take it out to the mains and so that's why this one is not muted so now i have all of my channels coming through here now this is really good because i can also send the effects through there now i was going to show you why the mixer board is not working the way that i wanted it to if you see this is my effects knob so i'm going to turn on some effects so you can hear it effects effects effects this is the way it would normally work i turn on some effects and i've got some delay and reverb going on there uh i like the effects on this board nevertheless usually when you hit the mute button it's going to mute the entire channel but as you'll notice when i hit the mute button the effects don't mute you see now i'm talking and the effects are coming out the dry signal is not but the effects is not muted on this channel this is true on every channel so somehow it was wired this way in engineering i don't really like this because when i mute the button it doesn't really mute the effects and if i want to use effects that becomes a pain because then when i want to mute the channels and take a break and i've got to turn down my main effects from my mains over here and that's just kind of unnecessary garbage so um what i'm gonna do because i'm running it through the alt outputs i have this function on this board where i can run the effects through the alt 3 4 if i mash this down so if i push this down now the effects are going to route through the alt 3 4 section meaning and this is great because that means i have all of my channels going to the alt 3 4 so they're running with the effects through the alt 3 4 and then after its effect and process it's sending the signal to the looper pedal so the looper pedal will be grabbing the effects from each channel and i can individually adjust the effects on these channels now i may do a different video later on how to actually utilize the board in more detail what your what your goals are and what you're attempting to do this is just a specific video about how to hook up a looper pedal to maximize what you can do with your board and the looper pedal all right so i'm going to demonstrate by running a small loop so you can see this in action [Music] and if i wanted to play on top of it save the solo i can do that also [Music] so this is how i run my setup if you guys have any comments just please leave them below any questions i'll answer those also if i know until next time peace

Channel: El Papi

Views: 9,255

Keywords: loop pedal, xenyx, Loop mixer

Id: vRDO69S-jSM

Length: 15min 5sec (905 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 08 2021