Mixing Station layout tutorial

hi this is Luke Koli I wanted to do a quick tutorial of how I created my layout and mixing station this is the kind of my everyday layout that I like to use it allows me to stay on one screen for most functions that I would need during a soundcheck or any kind of small gig so here we go this is what it looks like I think I've done a something similar to this in another video so I'll link to that if if yeah if it happens if you haven't seen that anyway so what I'm gonna do is blank this out and start again and show you how I built it so let's go ahead and edit here alright and here we are back at the top this is a completely blank layout so I'm gonna go ahead and build it from here so we're gonna start with our mixer and spread that out about where I had it I usually do buttons about 4 squares wide so we'll go about there and then stretch it out in order to resize you're using these little squares on the side actually I just picked it up to move it you're using these little squares on the side to resize so I'm going to resize to four squares from that side I'm gonna move it a little to four squares from that side there now it's even there's one right in the middle here didn't quite grab it see if I can there we go stretch it up to about maybe there let's go ahead and add a meter bridge so I clicked the plus button for add I'm gonna click meter bridge and then spread that guy out there we go and let's make it a little longer than that so I'm gonna shorten my mixer a little cuz I like to have a lot of meter space and I'll remove these one or I'll move these around again whenever I start adding my knobs so I just like to have my main functions of any channel that I need quickly just to sound check and get sound happening so the first thing I would do is I'd select a channel and then I'd go to my gain so I'm gonna go add a knob there it is in the upper left-hand corner and I'm gonna stretch that to be four by four looks normal to me so I'm gonna tap it once it's gonna bring up this menu I'm gonna hit edit I'm gonna label that gain because that's what it's gonna say all the time and that will never change I don't need it to say anything else I like the margin to be zero because it eats up all the space I don't need any kind of shadowing or effect I just want a simple button and then I'm gonna click add action and I'm going to use the current channel so whatever channel I select this knob will control that function and then I'm going to select head amp and that has gain so there it is I'll click in the upper left hand corner to go back and back again and there it is it says gain and you can see that it's currently set for whatever channel is selected so let's move down after that I would see if I need phantom power so I had a button and I like to do the buttons a good square like that so it's for wide and I think about three squares tall so we'll tap that and I'm gonna click Edit again and this time I know this is phantom power so you can label it phantom or whatever I like to label it what it's named here in mixing station which I believe is plus 48 volts there we go no margin and I like this to be red in color so I can change the color under theme to red and then the behavior I like this to not be a single press function I want this to be a long press so I'll go long press and then we have to hold it down for a second for it to actually turn on and off that way I won't bump the phantom power accidentally and have it turn on and make a lot of noise so I'll click add action and we will select current channel and I will go to head amp plus 48 volts there we go and we can see it's kind of a dark red it'll light up more red if the Phantom powers on next up I will use the polarity button so I can keep going and click add button and then resize I find it faster to click this previous button and click clone and then there will be another one lay it on top of it so I'm going to change its function so I'll go in and edit and this time it's gonna be polarity or the phase button it's a polarity flip but I'm gonna label it phase because that's what every other console is labeled we're gonna make that a single press so it's quick so I can listen to the difference and then instead of clicking add action I'm going to click on the action that's already here and edit it so if I click into it I'm now editing it current channel and I'm gonna go I believe its config nope hey damn it was under head out phase invert there we are and I'll make that yellow I think that's what color I had previously okay so there's my three functions of my mic free and then I will add a high-pass filter so we'll go knob same kind of thing so in this case I don't want to resize it I want it to be the exact same size so I'll click that knob and click clone and then there's another one here currently it's there doubled-up is gain so if I edit that and I'll make this say it's called low-cut on the Barrett the X and m32 in this case I'm gonna label it high-pass filter just because of I've been using Yamaha a lot lately and that way I can read it quickly it doesn't say low-cut or anything like that it's just real quick and I recognize it so we will go to current channel and then I think was config so low-cut frequency there we are and so that has a knob for that and then we need a button to turn it on and off so again I will clone the phase button clone drag that one down tap it once and then edit and that will be let's do high-pass filter on great and we'll make that regular change its function head amp that that was from phase invert so let's go config low-cut on great so now that's controlling that function as a single press and currently it's off if I tap it it'll turn on what other functions did I have down there in the lower left I have to refer back oh I remember the compressor gate and EQ so those are my quick functions so I'm gonna shrink this down a little because I think I didn't get myself enough room I need three more buttons down here so I'm gonna Cologne this one I'll click clone I think that's just enough right now clone that again and clone that again not quite so I'll set that aside for now let's shrink up something else this phantom looks a little big phase we can probably shrink a little let's give the high-pass filter some space that's pretty good OOP didn't do that so let's grab this guy great there in place so I know that one I want to keep so I'm gonna edit the next one down I will edit that and I will make it say gate view so that way when I click on it I want a single press it will open up so I'm going to edit that function instead of add action I'm going to click what it was and change it to open view and we'll go to channel gate there we are so now when I press that that will bring up the gate view now the other thing I like to have on top of that was a way to turn the gate on and off so what I'll do is clone this again clone and you can see there's actually two here so I'm going to edit this one over here so you can see what I'm doing edit and then I'm going to just type gate we'll just leave it a gate and I normally make that blue and I'll make that a long press so in this case if I long press it the gate will turn on and off because we're gonna change that function right now I'll show you what I did click open view or put the function that was there and now I'm going to change it to what was I doing oh yes gate or current channel gate on great and so this is just showing you all the actions that that will button will do so if there's multiple things here it will perform multiple actions in this case I'm just doing the first the only action there so you can see it's blue it says gate great I'm going to drag that on top of the one that says gate view I'll show you that again this is gonna go right on top of here so now if I quickly tap it it will open up the gate for the channel if I hold it down it'll turn it on and off so I can listen to the difference next thing down I normally put an EQ here so we're gonna tap that to edit it and I will make this one say EQ because I know that's the only thing I need to read to know where I'm going that one's normally green for me single press as well and in this case we're going to change the action so I'm clicking that one action and I'm gonna make it open view because I want it to open the EQ window so open the channel parametric EQ great so there we go you can see it says EQ I don't need to turn that on and off I like to have it on and listen to it and I generally don't engage my EQ on and off to hear the difference that's just part of my workflow so here we are in the last one we're gonna do the same thing with the compressor so actually faster way to do it is I'm going to delete this button here and we're gonna clone the gate view one clone move it down here and then we'll edit that one first and this will just say comp view and then we'll change it to from open view here overview gate to open view dynamics which is the compressor single press that's great now it says confused so this is the now I'll clone this one again we'll go click the clone the one that goes on top the gate I'll put this one back to the gate and we'll change this one to edit and now this will say comp and we'll make that a short press no I want that a long press that's what we already had like I would remember so anyway here we are to there and I'm gonna make that one yellow we're gonna change the function from gate on to dynamics on great and that's the long press and there it is I'm going to drag that over here and let's just go ahead and test it where we're at so I'm going to back out of this layout here it is if I select the channel I should be able to grab its gain let's see that moved if I move away yep moves hold down phantom power if they're turned on yep remembers great same thing with polarity works fine high-pass filter is on same thing that tracks the gate if I tap it brings up the gate if I hold it down turns it on and off that's a nice little highlight to tell me it's on if I want to open the EQ window there it is I'll move the high pass filter to around 100 turn it on when I go back you can see it's on around 100 great the same function just right on top and then the same thing with the compressor if I tap it there the compressor is if I hold it down and is on go back into that you can see it's on I'll turn it off that's off great everything works great so and the only other function I normally need quickly is to be able to have a custom layer of faders and my monitor mixes so let's go ahead and finish that up so I'll go into the gear layouts mixer all right now we're editing this layout again so we're gonna make some more buttons I'm gonna add a button and this is gonna be for the let's hold there okay here we are so that is the button for my sin so I added a button let's click that and click edit and I'm gonna make that say this is a nifty way to do it is to say s Oh F sends on fader name I think was the command and there we go and I will change that to no margin and single press regular is fine I'm going to add an action type will be sends on fader and I'll make that bus one in this case so let's see if it renamed properly it sure did so now it says bus one so the neat thing is if I go in here there's plus one if I go to my scribble strips and name bus one you know what will we name it let's call it center wedge I think I'm probably gonna run out of space but let's see what happens and there it says center wedge that's pretty handy too when you rename it in the comment in the console it follows with your show file and then transfers to this I will also track color so right now plus one is white if I change that again going back into scribble strip I'm tapping the three dots up here scribble strip and then there it is named I'll change it from white to let's make it obvious red so when I tap that now flashes red so I know where that is so you can color code all your stuff to line up with these also with your show file should you desire anyway let's go ahead and create the rest of our sends on fader x' on the right so we're going back into setup layouts and tap the mixer to edit it so in this case that's bus one so I'm going to clone this drop Oh drag one on down right there and we're gonna edit it same thing I'm gonna leave that alone and instead of sends on fader wand I'm go that sends on fader two very simple and there it is bus two same thing we'll just go keep ret that process so clone drag change to bus three I'm just changing the action and then going back let's clone that again and there's bus for clone that again that's bus five and I'm only gonna do six because that's generally how much I need for most little stages that I might be working oh I did that wrong so that's gonna be six let's clone that back and did I have another one on top of there no okay good so let's change that to five you can see I screwed that up but now I mean now that I can see what I'm doing I know what I did wrong so there's my six mixes that's generally all I need for most things I'm doing the only other thing I like to have is another button that would open a view so I'll click plus maybe button there it is in the upper left and we'll make a nice big button down here I'm going to edit that and it's going to say sends view so this way I can quickly get to a single channel and where it's being sent so I'll set that to zero margin single Press regulars fine add the action of open view and then I will go channel sends great that's a nice little sentence view and then I like to have my custom fader there let's nudge that down one give me a little more space so I'm gonna Angie's all down one and then we're gonna add a layer list in the upper right here so I'll click plus add a layer list there it is right now we only have one layer so I'm gonna shrink this up I leave one for safety so I still get a bottom line if I scoot it right up to it it cuts off the bottom line it looks weird so that's why I leave this space so that's my custom layer it's already named custom in this layout so that way you can change it again I'll show you how to do that so there's the whole layout it's done let's go back and test it so right now this goes through each mix let's go ahead and test it with the scribble strip so we will go red white well let's go in order let's go red green yellow blue magenta so I am great so now these are all red green yellow blue magenta cyan and those are all color coded that's handy and then you can name them whatever you want on that scribble strip it will change here fantastic now the other thing is I can get around the console quickly with just using the top layers or the top layers of eight and the meter bridge so if I see something jumping on the meter I can tap it and it brings it right up to the eight and then I like to have a custom layer to have whatever faders I want on top at all times and then when you use a layer list like this you can hold down that button and open up what's actually in the custom layer so I can see here it is if I want to change it I'll hit plus channel and then I can erase all of them and pick which ones I want so I'll go one two three four five six let's let's say that's a small band or something this is a gig I did recently so there was a small jazz trio I maybe used 6 inputs then maybe I had two or three wireless mics oh excuse me two or three wireless mics on channel 31 and 32 great I also had some music playback in aux 1 and 2 and that should be all the inputs I need great they're all lined out but the nice thing is you can then add a little blank element so I hit plus blank and spaced that out in between what you're working with so I have the band over here maybe I have a couple wireless mics here and this is my music playback and then the nice thing is in this layer there I can see all the channels I might need and nothing else in the way I can fly through my soundcheck get that done and then during the show or soundcheck if there's more detailed mix I can tap a channels to select it just like on any digital mixer and then go to the function do I want to go to EQ there's the EQ do I want to go to the gate there's the gate it's all one menu press away and then you can come right back to this top layer and stay focused on what you're doing and then so the nice thing is with these if you have stereo channels you can drop one side assuming you have it set up the way you want so if I go into aux 1 & 2 that's here's the overview screen and I click link it'll link aux 1 & 2 as left and right now if a console were connected it would get data back that these would track together because they are linked so when I go to my custom layer I can actually drop that second aux and just use this as one fader which gives me a little more screen real estate to see everything so there we go I can play music let's say my MC or whoever is going to come up to the stage while I'm fading music I can bring that up and we can even have this muted out oh I have it so that when I touch the channel it opens the EQ I currently don't like that so I'm going to change that I'm gonna go setup app I think it's under channel strip here we go hmm fader touches channels like ah here we go channel click so I here it is I found it this is after I edited out me fumbling so here's the channel click I want that it's currently set to a parametric EQ I want that to be a channel select I want all these things along long click to be channel select everything to be channel select because I don't want something to open up while I'm working on it I just want to stay on that screen so here we are and I've removed that function so when I tap it it won't take me away from here it just selects the channel great so as we were we had music playback all right someone's going to make an announcement on the mic here it is pull that down I can get these and somewhat dad go on it let's go back to that that's a little slightly annoying function of all these swiping from the bottom so it's best to slow down or maybe have these up and a position where I'm actually using them so that way I have the my person speaking I can sit here and open up the band while they're speaking and fade their mic down all this feels very natural and not I don't feel slow on it at all I just have to think about my moves versus having two hands on the console you can't grab with two hands which is nice and but a lot of this kind of stuff starts happening because there's a lot of gestures and stuff on the iPad anyway so the nice thing is about having these up and having some real estate is you can't nudge from the bottom when you grab a fader and just kind of nudge it up and down like that so you can kind of see where the fader position is and then ride it up and down no matter where in the channel strip you are another nice little feature that's why I like to give the faders plenty of real estate on the screen so there's how I built my entire everyday quick functioning layout this is just when you just need to like show up cold and there's an X 32 on the gig you can get a band set up in really no time and dial in their monitors and just go go go so unlike some small festival stage or something I think this is really speedy so this is one I use every day that's how you build it I know some people have asked me about it so rather than post it I want to show how to do these things so that you can adapt it to whatever you're actually doing so if you do something take it further I'd love to hear about it all right that's enough blabbering thanks for watching

Channel: Big Note Audio

Views: 3,843

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Id: W_edF64JzD4

Length: 24min 33sec (1473 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 05 2019