Setting Microphone Levels on a Mixer - Gain Staging with no PFL/Solo Buttons

welcome back i'm ray ortega today i want to show you two methods for setting up really any mixer to get the best audio quality out of it the lowest noise and to properly set up your microphones for getting in the right amount of game or gain staging a mixer now I'm using a behringer xenyx q80 to us beef is a cheap sub $100 mixer and this is a great one to show you on because it'll act like most mixers in that it doesn't have a pre fader listen or PFL switch which makes it easier to set up each channel but most mixers all mixers that I've come in contact with again these are my methods most mixers have at least a clip light on the microphone channels and as well you have the meters from the main mix on the side and we're going to use those two methods to set up really hopefully any mixer that you come in contact with to get the best gain the best sound out of the mixer so we've got everything turned down okay and we start at the top this is the most important we get the gain it's called gain staging and this is your gain knob sometimes referred to as trim and what we're going to do with all the other knobs turn down except for the EQ knobs are at their detent or the top right in the middle there's a little spot there where you can feel it click ok so those are left in the middle everything else is turn down the pan knob is Center but the volume knobs the channel faders and the main fader are down and the gain is down as well so what we'll do is we will just start to what will come up on our gain almost all the way because we need a lot of gain for this microphone it's an ATR 2100 and we have 60 DB of gain on this mic so I'm going to go all the way and I'm going back off a little bit now I'm going to say the typical what you hear on stage check one two check one two until that high-end the check is the loud part is making that little clip life come on check one two check check one two all right when we bring these up we are getting around zero on the LED meter here on the main meters and that's what we want to see so we've set up this channel properly if you're going to want to move over and set up another channel you're going to want to do the same exact process for each channel that you have a microphone on and then you will have a nice gain staged mixer the other way to go about this which is probably better is to go ahead and bring your channel level the microphone right up to zero and do the same for your main output there and then talk normal as loud as you're going to talk in the recording bring your gain knob right up to where you are seeing that your loudest parts of your normal speech are hitting in the zero okay so this mixer wants to be right at zero is a good place on an analog mixer and you can see we still have all this Headroom see I can get excited a Headroom into the six if I get really excited we have enough Headroom and the audio sounds really nice and clean so this is exactly where this mixer wants to be okay so we've got our gain adjusted to where our voice is hitting into the zero when our channel fader and our main mix knob is in its detent or zero position so that's looking really good so that's the two methods I use check the links in the description for all the gear that I use to create this video but you should be able to go to any mixer and set it up and have it sound great now again if your gain knob is all the way up and it's creating noise the mixer the preamps inside the mixer might not be that good but even on this very cheap bérenger mixer on some very cheap Mackie mixers they have cramps that work really well so you know you can compensate a little for that by coming down on the gain and maybe adjusting with the faders but ideally you'll set it properly from the top all the way through the entire mixer to get the best levels you can for the cleanest sound all right I will see you next time

Channel: Ray Ortega

Views: 480,115

Keywords: Audio, Mixing Console (Invention), Sound, podcast, podcasting, how to, mixer, setup, gain, microphone, solo, pfl, faders, recording, Q802, Behringer, peak, clip, meters, overload, Gain Stage, Demo, Pre Fader Listening

Id: dRa26Xxe1EM

Length: 4min 35sec (275 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 27 2015