P16 Trick for Your X32 or M32 Digital Mixing Console

all right you asked for it here is the p16 trick [Music] okay everybody welcome back this is dave with alum house sound today we're going to talk about the long awaited p16 trick now this is a tool that you can use when you are multi-track recording when you're live streaming if you want to use the console to the next level into a daw then you might find this information valuable and a nice addition to your tool set of how you can use this console in all aspects of audio so many of us are in the aspect where we are we're multi-track recording we use those maybe for virtual sound checks and those come right off the preamp on the console and this is not a bad thing but if you want to utilize the onboard channel strip then you you want to find a different way to capture the the things that come after the preamp like the eq or your compression maybe your gate even inserted effects are all lost unless you use the p16 trick so the p16 is a box that looks like this this is a kind of personal mixer that they offer it's a 16 channel mixer but it's all wrapped up and it's designed for in-ear monitoring and so you've got the ability to uh to pick a channel adjust its volume you've got some eq and compression even limiting capabilities right in this little box it's really a sweet deal the only thing that i really don't like about it honestly is that it's limited to 16 channels but we're not going to end up using that tool however what we're going to do is use the internal routing in the board to be able to customize our setup that we send to our daw now i get this question a lot what is a daw daw stands for digital audio workstation many of the common names out there pro tools logic studio one ableton these are computer programs that allow you to input audio or or drag in audio mp3s single track stereo tracks you can bring these in and it's a little mixer right in your computer you can plug some headphones in or some speakers and you've got the ability to listen to these tracks and then you can alter them you can splice them cut them you can make them whatever you want and that's a digital audio workstation as opposed to a physical workstation which is the console that we're usually using when we're mixing so in today's live streaming environment many people like myself are using just the console we build our mix for our house it's also our monitoring console and now it's a live streaming console as well and for me i run a post fader mix so that the faders that run my main house mix also impact my live stream if i pull a vocalist down it doesn't just do it in the house it also does it in the live stream but a lot of people want to take what's in the console and move it over to their daw and so we can use this p16 trick to get those signals with the eq and compression already built into it and then record those into our daw now again we're gonna we're gonna reiterate the fact that this is limited to 16 channels so if you've got 16 inputs or less you're good to go if you have more than 16 channels you might need to utilize some buses and we'll talk about how to route that in a minute but you can use some buses just like you would for anything else it could be a monobus or stereo bus and you could use those to group instruments together before you send them to your p16 mix so i want to take a quick look at uh just some information before we jump into the console but let's get jumping right away here we go all right so to get this started we need paper pen let's start learning so we have our console inputs going into the console outputs coming out of the console outputs could be mixed buses or matrix you take your pick could be your stereo mix it could be aux outs on the back of the console we have the x usb slot now this might be different depending on what you have you have the x live card if you've got the m32 card that has sd and usb you've got all kinds of options but the standard thing that you're going to get is the x usb which has a usb output now what we need to do is look at the tap points so the signal flow normally goes from an input to a preamp and then you've got your gate compressor and eq effects that are in the channel strip and then you've got a fader you also have a mute button in here that's kind of in between this gate compressor and the fader and the x usb usually hits the pre-amp and goes right to the x-usb now that's great for recording that's great for any of our sound checks that we're going to do our virtual sound checks but you're going to get raw tracks right off the preamp and right into your daw which is very useful but what we have the ability to do with the p16 trick is determine where we want this tap point to be do we want it to be after the preamp like normal do we want to have it after these uh channel strip effects do we want to have it after the mute button or do we want to like pre-fader or do we want to have it post fader over here so we have different options let's take a look in the console and see what all of this looks like all right so we've talked about in the past that in general on this console the left-hand side is our inputs and the right-hand side are going to be our outputs this top layer of dcas is a slightly different setup in terms of its control but if we start to go to our buses then these become outputs uh these are outputs and then we also have our matrix level outputs and uh these are mixes of buses if you want check the description i've got uh the getting started video which is like the 15 minute explanation of how this console is laid out how it works i've also got some explanations about the difference between buses and matrix so you can check that out as well so this becomes important understanding the buses that are over here and how those are outputs and how you can also use the matrix as outputs to group buses before you send them out and build a mix that way but what we're going to do with the p16 is we're going to zoom into this screen up here and let's take a look and see all the different options we have okay so here we are on a general channel strip and you can see how we have our input here and that's going to be your preamp with your gain you do have the low cut which comes next this tells you your whole channel strip organization and how it's going to be laid out so it's going to hit the gate next then our compressor then our eq and we've talked in the past about how you can switch your eq and compressor like this so now the eq is first and compressor second if you like it that way also if you have an insert in here the insert let's say you do another compressor maybe it's a de-esser maybe it's a nice multi-band eq then you have the insert down here you can also scoot that this way so it's before your channel strip uh effects so you got different options within that but so once we understand our workflow of how the channel is laid out then we can properly decide where we want to tap this channel in our p16 so what we're going to do is go to routing go over to the p16 tab yours might be called ultranet but p16 they're both going to be the same things now with the p16 you have to pick out 16 channels that you're going to use by default these are the direct outputs so you're picking outputs that you're going to use and you've got all kinds of outputs here that you can that you can choose whether it's your your main left and right maybe it's a mix bus maybe it's a matrix and maybe it's a direct out you could also send monitor and talk back if you wanted to do that as well so right now we have our kick set up and let's say we want kick to go out channel one that's where it is on our console then we can just make sure that we have direct out and we have direct out channel one and then you have your tap point so let's look at these you have in and low cut in low cut plus mute you have pre-eq pre-eq plus mute and that's going to be eq and compressor it groups the eq and the compressor together in the scenario uh post eq post eq and mute you have pre-fader pre fader plus mute and you have post fader so you have a lot of different options about how you can send these signals to go out the p16 keep in mind the whole goal of this is to get a custom is to get a custom setup that you're using your onboard channel strip effects before it gets into your daw so let's focus on the last two here post fader or pre-fader let's take pre-fader as our tap point so what that's going to do if we go back to our channel strip is it's going to allow the input gain the low cut the gate the compressor and the eq are all going to be taken into account and it's going to go out pre-fader this is just like any other monitor that you might use where you're going to you're going to build this effects chain and then you're going to send it out pre-fader that would also get any insert effects as well again if you have a de-esser or another compressor or some other effect you can have that all included in the board and sent out through the p16 output so how do we use this well let's say we want to get our our input channels and we're going to go pre-fader on all of them i'll speed this up for you but i'm going to go kick on channel 1 then i have my snare top and i'm going to make that pre-fader and then tom pre fader floor tom preface [Music] male vocal pre-fader and then we're going to do a third vocal pre-fader so it's not common that i have a third vocal on stage so i'm going to skip down and i'm going to go to my pad left signal i'm going to do that pre-fader i can get away with that coming in mono into my daw and then i can i can duplicate it in the daw if i want to the next thing i'm going to do is i'm going to take my keys left this is another scenario where we're actually just doubling the keyboard and doing that that stereo trick so i only need the original the original signal for that and then the last thing i'm going to do is i'm going to come down and grab one of my crowd mics channel 21 and i'm going to grab that pre-fader so now we have a setup of 16 inputs that give us our drums our bass our guitars our vocals uh keys some pads and our uh we've even got the pastor pastor the two speaking microphones and to wrap up we've got one crowd mic so all of these are going to get all of the onboard effects and they're going to be sent out usb in just a second after we finish the routing now one of the things that i do want you to note is let's say you want to group all of your instruments together and just send them as a left and right bus well you might want to come up and let's say we're going to do it up here in in channel 7 let's do channel 8. we want to group our guitars together then i could come up select mixbus and then i could find the appropriate mix bus that is our band wherever i've got that listed here so we could choose mix buss 9 in my case which is the band left signal and then i could come down and i could choose mixbus right which is the right right band channel and so that's going to keep my stereo panning going out into my daw and then keep in mind that that takes up two channels but that's going to have a mixture that's a mix bus so it's going to have a mix of electric guitar acoustic guitar and all of those all of those band instruments so that's a way that you can save on some channels and fit it all into 16 channels all right so the last thing we need to do is get this routed to go out our usb so what we're going to do we're still in routing we're going to page back over and we're going to go to our card tab and here what we can do is let's say we want to send this out 1 through 16 instead of taking our stage inputs or our inputs like normal we can scroll down here and we'll find p16 one through eight and you'll see how that shows up now what we just set up and then we can come down on this one p 16 9 through 16 and now we have those set up so what's going to happen is the inputs will come into the board the inputs will hit our channel strips those inputs might go to some mixed buses like the case of the band and then they're going to be routed internally pre-fader into the p16 input and then those will be picked up pre-fader and go out the usb cable and into your daw okay so we've talked about going pre-fader which means that everything going into the daw is set and ideally you would have somebody mixing in that daw to to refine your mix before it goes out to your live stream well what if you're like me and you've got one sound engineer and right now i'm running a post-fader mix on my board i might be able to use this p-16 trick and take the post fader option let's take a look at what that setup would look like okay so to do this setup we would just flip from pre fader to post fader so again we can come down here into p16 and we would set this back up to where i would have bass guitar all of these would come down and be post fader so kick snare top tom floor tom ride snare bottom bass we would go through and we would set these all as post fader and then that way when you move the fader on the board to mix your house you will also have the same change that goes into your daw all right so that can be a really useful tool now keep in mind that when you send less signal because it's post fader into your daw any compressors or effects that you have in your daw you're going to be hitting those less with less signal so they're not going to interact the same it's going to take some fine tuning and see how we can make that work but that could be a really really cool tool if you've just got one engineer and one computer and you can still get a dom mix that's custom to your live stream so i hope you found this video helpful if you've got questions leave those in the comment section below i'm always answering questions you never know what might be posted on one of my ask dave q a sessions that we post pretty frequently as well and if you want to like and subscribe then you'll get more information the next time it comes out feel free to share this video with any friends that you think might find benefit from it and as always keep making great music we'll catch you guys in the next one peace [Music]

Channel: AllamHouse

Views: 4,535

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Id: 6JLZwd0JRi8

Length: 16min 47sec (1007 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 15 2021