Mackie 402VLZ4 Talkthrough & Uses For DJs

hello it's phil here at digital DJ tips comm and next to this little DJ controller i have what i'm looking at today which is the little machi 402 voz for four channel mixer awesome little device for most DJ's I would say if you haven't got something like this in your gear then maybe you should be thinking about getting it let's have a little look at it to find out why now before I actually talk you through all the scenarios I could think of which there are loads as to why only one of these might be a good idea if you know about this kind of mixer you just want to get a quick lowdown on what's on it let's do that first I'll run through that very quickly and then we'll look at those advantages so it's a mains power powered device the mains plugs in the back there and the on/off switch is here and on the front we have our four advertised channels one two and three four here three and four just go through a main level here it's just a stereo input on these two TRS s on the main main channels if you like you've got XLR powered if you want there's a phantom power button instrument inputs here if you press these instrument buttons then you can plug instruments in there with no di box if your guitarist you'll know what I'm talking about there and you can also roll off the low frequencies there for just getting rid of microphone feedback and stuff the main gains here for these two channels they're the only two channels with a separate gain from the level then there's low and high and the main level here and there's a little light at the bottom to show you that you're not overloading the channel so I've told you about three and four but there's also a couple of hidden inputs the tape in and the tape out you can plug something else into the tape in if you wanted and the tape in volume is here and this button here decides whether it goes to the main output along with everything else or if we turn that button off it only goes to the headphones and so talking about puts the main outputs here is the control for it that's what's going to control the level meters the main output is mirrored on the tape output including the volume of it but there's also headphones output here that has its own separate volume control so that's about it for the functions and features of it I want to talk you through why as a DJ you might want to have one of these in your setup so here's the thing with us DJ's we tend to have minimal nice setups that we can move around from room to room that we can put away in a cupboard when we don't want them certainly us digital guys we do you know it's part of the benefit of having digital gear is it doesn't take up all the room that the old gear used to take up but all-in-one controller is especially when you get down to the smaller ones this is a Pioneer DDJ Wego 3 do cut corners and they cut corners on things like inputs and outputs so as soon as you turn up at a gig and you want to use your DJ controller somewhere where they haven't got their own mixer and then maybe not that used to having DJ's playing you're going to need a few more tools in your armory and that's where a mixer like this really does help you out stop by your DJ mixer between your DJ mix it and their sound system it can be an absolute godsend by DJ mixer I mean whatever you're using to DJ on in this case just a little Pioneer controller so let's say I was DJing this just go from the sublime to the ridiculous I was DJing on just my iPhone I say ridiculous it works absolutely brilliantly with this little controller and I have my iPhone plugged in there it's all ready to go I've got my music set up why would a mixer like this help me in a way that if I just plugged my DJ controller straight into their sound system I wouldn't get well that's what you're about to find out so you get to your gig I may hand you a couple of these to plug into your DJ gear you could plug them straight into your DJ gear if you're lucky enough to have rca's although if they hand you TRS sockets generally DJ gear the cheaper variety doesn't have that on the back so that's one reason for using something like this just to give you the right outputs to go to their PA but let's just say you've got these ones which could go straight into the back of there in this instance you can plug them into the tape out here because that gives you controlled volume from this volume control here just like the main outputs would so now we're plugged in there and then you'd use any suitable lead to plug your DJ controller into this thing so I could plug it in here and here which gives me two channels let just plug into the back of the DJ controller and then with everything turned on and hitting play turning the master mix up a little bit I have my music go in there it isn't about the music by the way I'm not going to be doing any demos on this for you but so now it's all set up this is how it would be and the advantages you've got here are you immediately have gains bass and treble controls and a master level here over this DJ controller that isn't affected by the master volume here or any of the gains lows mids and highs that are available to you here so if your DJ setup it's just to basically they've got a really basic PA system whatever and you can't do anything about it other than turn the bass down on your controller well now you've got a bass control here that you can turn it down on you can get it so it sounds just right so your DJ controls here are used more for creativity than just keeping everything sounding reasonable or acceptable in your venue so there's one really solid reason an extra set of EQ is that you can set and forget the second reason that I think one of these is an absolute no-brainer is that we have this input here this is a think of it as a backup input you could plug anything you want in here and if this lock goes bottoms up shall we say then you could just immediately switch over in onto something here hit play and then mix it in using the input level here press the button and it's banged into the mix so you you get rid of the risk of this failing this has got no inputs if something goes wrong on it as a lot of Cheaper DJ controllers haven't you know anything could happen batteries go flat power cut whatever you know the second flip of the power might just throw this out but this with the extra inputs here I'll cover your back now another way of using this would be to add an extra detail to so you have DJ's playing with you when you've got two whole sets of inputs here you've got these linings here and you've got your tapings there so in that instance you can switch between each other without ever having to unplug or plug anything else at else in without all those bangs and pops that happen when you're pulling leads about out and because the tape here and if you were to put the other DJ onto this tape in here because that's got on monitor that you can monitor in the headphone socket here then you can make sure everything's right with with his or her gear the levels are right so on before moving them into the main mix by turning the tape knob up here you can record your whole DJ set on one of these now the tape out is a bit strange on this you would think a tape out would be where you record it but actually it's affected by the main volume so if you turn the volume up or down here to get your venue just right then your tape volume will change but there's a way around that the headphone socket here which really we probably won't use as DJ's because we're probably using our headphone socket here the headphone socket here will be affected by only its volume control here so you can basically set the headphone socket where you want it for the hole unit and the main makes won't affect what's going on there so you plug that into your laptop or into your recorder you've now got a level record out to record not only your set but your other DJ sets and anything else you're doing I'll get onto other things you might want to do in a minute so you might want to plug-in musical instruments there's these sockets here say we would say we were freeing these sockets here up and we had our DJ controller on numbers 3 & 4 here so we're not our DJ controller here potentially someone else is here we've now got these two free you can plug musical instruments into these and you can also plug microphones in here so if you want to mark up a bongo player you want to plug in a saxophonist or guitarist or an emcee to talk over the top of your stuff you've got two full channels here with all the stuff that no DJ controller has got on it all or no cheaper DJ controller has on it like the e cueing like the rolling off the bass like being able to plug a musical instrument in directly like phantom power phantom power powers condenser studio type microphones that you might have plugged in here so a whole lot of flexibility there on those channels and you could even and this is a really good use so let's just put this imaginary back here now with our main input you could even plug a professional effects unit and that let's just say that output wasn't there so we're using a different output so these are plugged in here or something with different a different type of lead here this tape in and tape out can be used to plug in a professional effects unit like the Pioneer rmx 500 or rmx-1000 or a korg effects unit you can plug that in there and then you can use push lead to the main push push it to the main output and then use this volume here as effectively as an effects mixer from dry to wet so you can have what you can't do plugging the similar kind of effects you directly into a small DJ controller like this because you haven't got that flexibility of mixing the clean and the effective sound together which this immediately gives you and finally just on my very quick kind of 10 minute think about how I use things like this finally you can use it to give yourself a booth output so you've got your master main mix output here you could use either the tape out all the phones out with the correct lead to go to a booth speaker if you use a tape out then you're tied to the same volume that you've got set on them makes volume but if you use the headphones out then effectively the headphones level here becomes the output level for your booth monitor speaker so if you DJ somewhere where there's no booth monitor and there's no way of adding one because there isn't a booth monitor output on your controller again a little mixer like this it's got your back now if you're thinking about buying one of these then there's a couple of things to consider you want to consider whether there's enough on there for you if you genuinely need kind of EQ and microphones plugged in at the same time EQ on your DJ controller or controllers and microphones you need a bigger model you need a model with more features on it if you want EQ on all the channels and not just the main channels again you need to look at the features and on this particular model I'm just not sure why the tape out isn't fixed or why it doesn't out like a record out it's just the design it's the way that they've thought it through but for me that would be slightly more useful for DJ's but as I say you've got the phone so that you can kind of get around that problem on with things like this if you're DJing anywhere where there isn't a full decent Pro Club mixer something like this is awesome so your other question might be why don't I just buy a mixer you know buy a DJ star mixer as well to have alongside my DJ controller now that could work well for you you've got the added advantage there that you can plug-in like see DJs and so on and you use that mixer as a proper performance mixer there's nothing you can't kind of DJ the normal way on one of these for instance this is purely kind of an interface between your DJ gear and your PA gear but the - point of those is that your prices are getting high if you want a DJ style mixer that's got proper powered and eq'd mic input and all those kind of like you record or line out kind of pseudo booth outs muster out and all that kind of thing and you start pricing it up and for the same prices at $99 85 pound little box like this you ain't going to find anything anywhere near the quality or the features that you get on one of these so there you go the Mac Mackie 402 vlz 4 and why I think any DJ who wants to gig out and uses the DJ controller should really consider getting one or something similar we've got a full review of this over a digital DJ tips comm so check it out and if you've enjoyed this video please subscribe to the channel by clicking the subscribe button and also join digital DJ tips it's free and you get loads of goodies thank you for watching

Channel: Digital DJ Tips

Views: 121,989

Rating: 4.8214717 out of 5

Keywords: Mackie Mixer, Mackie 402VLZ4, DJ mixer, PA mixer

Id: lhb-YIH1NQI

Length: 11min 10sec (670 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 12 2015