Setting up a Channel on a Behringer XR 18

all right so let's take a look at how to set up a channel now I've got the control program open here and I've got it attached to the sound board through a cable and so you can see that as I speak on channel 16 that the audio is being shown here on the right-hand side the first thing you need to do whenever you're setting up a channel is bring it up to zero on the slider to unity gain and you want to begin with all of your channels that way because that makes it common all the way across for the sliders and then you want to adjust the gain to be appropriate to zero on the slider so the slider is there to make fine artistic adjustments during the course of the service so generally you would start with the gain down at zero so but I can't really do that because then you won't hear me anymore so you start with the gain at zero bring the slider to zero or sorry not gain not to zero but to negative all the way to the bottom zero is unity gain which is the point at which no additional boost is being added or subtracted away from the sound and so you want for this to be at zero and this to be an absolute bottom then raise the gain until it's an appropriate level in the main speakers that's the way that you always want to start once of course you've set up your input so for this particular microphone it's a large diaphragm condenser mic and so it needs a phantom power so I didn't have phantom power selected you wouldn't be able to hear it but if I turn that back on suddenly you can hear me again I've got the polarity reversed and that is something that you can do to see if it makes any difference to the sound 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 so you can see it sounds much better with the polarity unrehearsed you can link two channels together in stereo you can adjust your gain I've got it set to plus 20 right now and then you can adjust - USB trim right now I've got the channel source set as the mic or line input but if I had the soundboard connected to the computer via USB and was modifying the sound via a da W a da or a digital audio workstation such as Presonus Studio One or Cubase or pro tools then you could have it be selecting the channel source as that USB signal so it would come into the soundboard go into the computer be modified by the computer then come to back to the soundboard and be sent to the main speakers but of course if I did that right now you wouldn't hear anything because I don't have the actual soundboard plugged in by a USB only by cat foot by cat 5 cable which means that can control it but it's not passing audio signals back and forth so now let's take a look at some of the things that we can do to adjust and modify the sound first of all I can pan and left and that way you get an audio signal that is sent in stereo to one side or to the other side so if you can hear the dip of headphones that's the difference that that makes now I'm going to come up to the top of my channel and work my way down so I'm going to start here with our noise gate and I'm going to right click to turn it on so now the noise gate is engaged you can see the little blue circle around it and it is on I'm going to click on it to go to the noise gate setting for that channel and I'm going to raise the threshold now you can see here the green line indicates what is happening with my audio signal and so if there are any low sounds if I stop talking and they're still sound coming through you can see there's a little bit of green line happening there even when I'm not talking at all so I'm gonna raise this threshold up to minus 70 and now you can see the green line still going on a little bit but the red line coming down and so what that represents is that there is some no is coming through the channel and so I'm gonna raise this up a little bit higher to about negative 65 and that is gonna mean that when I'm not talking but there is still auto signal coming through the channel automatic gain reduction is going to drown out that noise and make sure that it's not hurt so I'm gonna stop talking now and you can hear that as soon as I start talking again my mic is back on but while I'm not talking it suppresses what's happening there so little sounds still come through big sounds come through but background noise doesn't and so that's the point of a noise gate and the idea here is let's say you've got a kitchen in a dining room and you have a pet and so you put a little gate that is one foot high between the two rooms well if it's a wiener dog with very short legs there's no way he's gonna get over that one foot gate but let's say that you've got a black lab and he can easily get over that one foot gate well then you still need a two foot gate but let's say there's little kids that you don't want to get through and they can get over that 2 foot gate you put in a 3 foot gate so however high you raise the threshold the more you're gonna limit what can pass by and you want the adults to be able to get through no matter what but you may want to just limit wiener dogs you may want to limit black labs or you may want to limit little kids and so the more you raise the threshold the more it's going to limit what can get through there are other controls here but I'm going to leave it for other videos to explain that to you if you want more detail about what these means what these mean I'm really not in a position to speak with much authority on that let's move over to our equalization now equalization is a method of shaping the sound to make it more pleasant and so the first thing we're going to do is we're going to turn on our low-cut filter and you can see this shape come here that represents the sound so the higher the louder the lower the quieter the more to the right the higher end pitch the more to the left the lower in pitch so really low sounds are going to be down here really high sounds are going to be up here really loud is up here and really quiet is down here so you've got a four way grid that shows you how you can shape the sound with EQ to modify it in a way that's appropriate and I'm going to turn on the real-time analyzer which means that as I talk you're actually going to see a representation of what's happening here and I can also put on the spectrum analyzer which can show you this information in a different way and so now you can see anywhere that there's red is an area where there is a lot of signal anywhere that there's green is some signal anywhere that there's blue is a very little amount of signal and anywhere it's black no signal at all and so you can see that as I'm talking there is a pattern here to where the sounds are most where the sounds are loudest and so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take my low-cut filter and I'm gonna raise it up until it starts to make a difference in the sound now you can hear that there's something different happening with the sound where's if I draw it down now it my voice has a little bit more bass bottom end and you can see a little bit of bass happening here but there's not a whole lot of signal there and so if I just bleed off a little bit of that it's gonna clean up the sound a little bit and some of the noise that's going on that doesn't really communicate well that doesn't serve to allow my singing voice or my speaking voice to be clearly understood we're going to clean some of that up and so that there's more room for someone else to step into that space so if the bass is playing now there's more frequency that is unimpeded by anything else and you can hear the bass more clearly and so what we're going to do is both look for ways to improve sounds that are particularly good limit sounds that are particularly bad and then artistically shape the the sound in such a way that it produces a result we want so now I'm gonna take my first channel here that's a bell curve and I'm gonna raise this right up to the top and I'm gonna sweep along and look for a place where the sound is unusual so you see right here where all of that audio signal is there you can really hear the difference when I start to move in there whereas over here it doesn't make much of a difference at all but in here you can begin to hear it and if I bring it over here you're gonna be able to hear it even more and we're going to get to the place where that makes a difference it is going to make a difference as soon as soon as I turn the EQ on and do that same thing again now you can make now you can actually hear the difference that I was talking about just a minute ago so I come over here and you can hear how different the sound is over here so you you see the the red little bits in here and then over here again I've really boosted a signal that there's a lot of signal there that's the question that we first need to ask is where are the points in this spectrum where the sound sounds really good and clear and where are the points where the sound sounds really bad and muddled and mucky and some of the points in here where its hottest if I raise that up too high it sounds brittle or tinny or boo me or something like that one there are a number of words that we use to describe particular frequencies and where they fall in the voice so this doesn't sound very good but it's far too much to the right for the first channel so I'm going to bring the first band back down here and instead I'm going to raise up the second channel and find the place where the sound is worst so that is very clear but unpleasant that that's not a good sound furthermore I'm going to adjust the quality a little bit so you see I made it wider there the the cone that was there I changed it from a 2 to a 1 now I'm trying to go back to a 2 and so I'm finding a way to narrow the amount of bandwidth that's affected by what I'm what I'm doing here so I'm tightening it up and so I can find the very spot where there's a problem and probably right there you can see there's a lot of signal in there and it's not all that pleasant so what I'm going to do is I'm going to bring it down a little bit and that cleans up the sound some of that really loud and not necessarily pleasant audio has now been wiped out some of this audio down here that adds a little bit of bass boom I'm going to raise that up just a little bit and change the quality to one so that it's a bit of a wider amount that it's taking so you can see now it's a very wide bell curve and I'm gonna raise it up just a little bit to give a little bit of bass boost because that kind of works for my voice now I'm going to come up here to three and I'm gonna find a place where the audio sounds particularly good or particularly bad and right there that really enhances the clarity of my voice so I'm going to raise that up just a little bit and then with the fourth channel this is sent to a set to a shelf and so these are bell curves and so they're even on either side and that they come to a point in the middle with the shelf the the closer I get to the right-hand side the less difference it makes if I come back here it's going to take a really wide swath out of the audio or add that really wide swath in so this is moving left and right is the point at which that difference starts to be made and I can make that difference very close to the edge or I can make that difference very far from the edge do you hear the difference there and so when I add a lot of high-end in what essentially you're going to feel is that I'm closer to the mic it feels like I'm really close to the mic and now it feels as if I'm walking away from the mic now I'm far away from the mic way in the background it's muggy and indistinct but now it's I'm coming closer I'm getting right up to to the mic and Here I am do you hear how much more hasn't it sounds and it's very bright and crisp that's what we hear when somebody is right next to us these are the frequencies that as somebody walks away and gets distant from us is using they are the first to be muffled by the room and to fade out with the distance and so naturally we hear someone with a boost to their high EQ as being closer and more present more intimate and so what you want to do is when you're doing vocals you want for the lead vocals to be boosted significantly in the high end which gives the impression of them being close and present and what you're going to pay attention to whoever is singing background vocals you want to drop their high EQ so it's like they've taken a step back leaving room for whoever is at the forefront to speak most clearly now the majority of what they sing is still going to come through but it's not going to be quite as bright and present as the lead vocalist and so it's going to by shaping the sound in this way artificially emphasize the person who is doing the leading and that's really what we want we want to carve out space in the spectrum for the person who we want people to pay attention to to be the person who people naturally pay attention to you so the background singer's voice may sound better if they're bright and lively and all the rest of that but they may also be drawing attention away from the person that we actually want to be in the mix most strongly and so we're not looking just to make people's voices as good as they can be we're looking to specifically shape the sound in such a way that it makes sense for who is doing the leading and who is doing the supporting you want your supporting people to be more in the background and less apparent not very much you don't want to do huge drop here you don't want to do a massive change here you know if you're actually if you've actually got somebody up this much it's gonna sound riddle and tinny and you're gonna risk feedback that's not the point here you want to make a subtle change that just gives a slight impression of a particular person being more present so these middle ones you want to do slight boosts and slight dips finding places where it makes sense to do that down here you want to cut out signal that isn't being used so that the ear is less confused and can pay attention to the instruments that have that nice low bass the drums and the bass and up here you want to brighten it in such a way that the lead vocals can come through and so four instruments depending on the instrument your lead guitar an electric guitar you might want to have nice and bright so that it can cut through and have nice high end an acoustic guitar you might want to drop the high end a little bit in order to have it be a bit more in the background with the other vocalists and that way it's not interfering with the ability of the lead vocals to cut through so it's both both an attempt to limit bad sounds and an attempt to shape creatively and so you want to be thinking about both things at the same time now we're going to come over to the compression and we are going to turn on the compressor and right away you can hear that the sound is a little bit more present and bright and then I'm going to set the vocal presets and so I'm going to click OK and now we have our vocal compression on and so you can hear that my sound is a little bit beefier a little bit more move to the mid and a little stronger it's easier to understand me when I've got the compressor turned on and that is going to be more pronounced if I'm singing so now we've got our mic set up fairly well and we've got again threshold to work with here but the threshold here doesn't work in the same way as the threshold of the door for the gate we're not putting something at the bottom we're putting it something at the top so that somebody asked a duck this time let's say we're hanging mistletoe from the doorway and someone who is normal height can walk right under the mistletoe no problem maybe they find somebody to kiss on the way by but they can get through somebody who is tall needs to duck to get under that mistletoe and so with the the compressor what we're doing is we're causing that the loudest sounds to duck to get in through the door and so if I have a really loud sound what's going to happen is that the compressor is going to limit that loud sound I've turned the compressor up I'm going to turn it down and now when I talk really loudly you're gonna see that red bar start to come down from the top and that's the gain reduction that is the amount that the audio that is coming through is reduced sort of pushing down its head to make sure that it doesn't get too loud now if I bring that down even further you're gonna see a lot of gain and reduction happen even just when I'm talking regularly so the point of the compression is both to shape the sound in a pleasant way and to limit the sounds ability to get up to inappropriate levels which is going to help for feedback so if you've got your compression appropriately set it's less likely that you're gonna see feedback excuse me I'm just taking a drink of water and now I'm going to just hit vocal and okay and that's gonna reset it back to the standard settings for compression so it's also got presets for a kick drum for snare and for bass other instruments you can probably like an acoustic guitar you could probably use something fairly close to the vocal or the bass and it wouldn't make too much of a difference but then you can fine-tune it and decide exactly how you want it so now we're going to come to sins and this is where we assign monitors and so the first thing I'm going to do is bring up monitor number one and that is going to send to the stage and now you can see that we've got signal coming through the monitor and let's say bus number four is our hearing uh system so I'm going to bring some of that up and then the third is our recording so now independent of what's happening with the main left right excuse me the main left right we've got additional signal going to other places so I'm mixed in this much in the monitor this much in the hearing assist system and this much in the recording and I can do that for every single channel so I come over here and I select bus one and you can see how much I've got bus one here and so I can put some of this in bus one and some of this in bus one and some of this in bus one and now I've gotten my mix for the monitor and if I want more of myself in the monitor I turned myself up if I want less of myself in the monitor I turned myself down furthermore I can select where in the channel signal that is coming from so I can say that I want it to come straight from the input so not passing through the equalization not affected by the fader but straight from the input I want the raw signal that I can get going through the monitor that hasn't been modified in any way for the main speakers I don't want those modifications to appear in my mix and so by selecting input for buss one I'm getting a very raw sound or I can say that I want the equalization settings that I put in place on that channel to also apply to the monitor so the EQ settings that we just went through and did should these EQ settings apply both to the main mix and the monitor mix or only to the main mix that's what we're selecting when we change what's happening here with the sends now I can come over here to effects and I can look at the effect here which is a vintage room reverb and so now I can say on each of these channels how much of that vintage room reverb I want so here I want lots of the wheeler or not very much at all of the reverb maybe just a little bit so now you can hear that reverb happening in the back let's take a look at what our other effects are here we've got a hall reverb a modulation delay in a dimensional chorus so let's find out what happens when we play around with each of those so I'm just going to come up here to this and I'm gonna see here is that first reverb here is sort of the thing here is is a delay delay so when I talk talk you can hear the end of the echo the delay the delay is the active the active the delay the delay is the active the end and I'm going to turn that off and it goes away now I'm gonna bring up the chorus and you're gonna hear it's sort of a little bit more metallic sounding a little bit more stronger in the mids and so that's an interesting sound to put on the guitar to give it a more bright presence but probably isn't very effective when we're talking about our spoken voice here so I'm going to turn that right down I'm gonna give it a little bit of reverb and I'm gonna give it a little bit of delay and now it feels like I'm talking in a big boomy room you can hear that echo bouncing around and so the reverb together with the delay makes sort of a natural Hey I'm in a canyon sort of a feel to it and just a little bit of that might be a good thing for what's going on in your mix so now what's happening but you notice that this is post fader so it's being affected right here oh sorry I'm getting confused I'm forgetting which set of dials I'm looking at so I've clicked on main left right and now I'm back left right and I can affect the overall amount of signal but if I click on FX 1 then what this changes is the amount of effect in in the in the signal path not the overall volume level and I just forgot that as I was going to go make changes and I thought oh look how low my level is but that wasn't my level that was the amount of effects in it so over here you've got bus one bus to bus three bus four so you can see there's bus for that I put some in and bus five there's some in and so you can use these to mix but don't forget that when you want to go back and do the main mix again you have to select main left right it's very easy to forget that as I just proved so now we're going to come back over here to Myint meter and you're gonna see a number of things here first of all you're gonna see in the analog inputs channel 16 which is the channel that I'm talking into you're gonna see that going up and down you're gonna see it here in the monitor solo mix and you're gonna hear it in the main mix so this is what it's going to my headphones that I'm listening to this is going to the main speakers over here the ultra net is a special system you can buy to add to the XR 18 sound board systems which allows people to mix their own monitors onstage so that's an additional piece of equipment that we don't have here but it shows you what would be going to that if you had it over here we've got our effects ends you can see that there's a little bit of effect number one and a little bit of effect number three happening and then here's the effects returns seeing what's coming back into the mix and here are my bus outputs so on all these different channels you can see exactly what's happening all the time if you come over to the analog input you can see exactly where your audio is coming in so if you're confused as to which channel is currently coming through the main speakers just come over to the meters and you'll be able to see really quickly so that is how we set up a channel and we're going to come back over here to the mixer view and I'm using the mouse to scroll wheel down each of these because we really don't need them there that was just for interest sake and again I can adjust any of these using the scroll wheel and hovering over the thing that I want to adjust so there's our six mix buses there's our four effect buses there is our noise gate there is our Equalization and there is our compression so here's limiting at the bottom here's shaping the sound here's limiting at the top so everything is available right there in one view and anything you click on in right in here is going to take you to do some adjustments to it anything you mouse over and use the scroll wheel on here is going to make changes anything you click on here it's going to take you to the place where you can make some changes there and then anywhere that I click here is going to change the channel that I'm currently adjusting I can solo the channel which means that nothing else is going to come through I can mute the channel which means that no signal gets to at all all of that is available right there now I'm going to add this channel to mute group three and watch what happens when I click the button you won't be able to hear me because that is mute group three so I've got mute group one which is those first three channels which are all vocalists and I've got mute group 2 which is all of the instruments that I've got set up over here and so by using mute groups you can very quickly say who is live and who is not live just with those four buttons finally we can add a DCA group so I'm going to select DCA group 3 the same as the mute group that I've got here and I'm going to click right here and now that is on DCA 3 I'm going to select DCA 1 and I'm going to add each of these to DCA 1 and I'm going to add each of these to DCA 2 now if I go to DCA 3 and I draw this down you notice that my audio goes away when I draw this down and that's going to happen for every channel that I've got selected for DC 3 a so if I go to DCA 1 which is all the vocals and draw it down a little bit all of the vocals are gonna change together as I'm making that adjustment if I move it up and the effects are really starting to drive me nuts a little bit so I'm going to get rid of them so DCA one I'm boosting or dipping the level of all three vocals at the same time DCA two I'm boosting or dropping all of the instruments at the same time DCA three I'm bringing up the sound or dropping the sound of the the only thing that's running through that DCA channel which is the mic that I'm currently using so by grouping together your DCA groups and your mute groups here's all my instruments are sir all my vocals all my vocals so I can mute unmute or adjust all my vocals together I can adjust or mute all my instruments together and then whatever else I want I want to be muting or adjusting I can do that here and I'm just hitting zero enter to override that back to zero so that it makes no difference so that is how we set up a channel and then once we've done that we can save the channel preset that I've just created so now I'm coming in to here and I'm gonna say as long as I don't bump my microphone out of the way I'm gonna say I'm gonna say that's my condenser mic preset and I'm gonna save that and now if I want to load in I simply go to channel 15 and I say load channel preset I select my condenser mic preset and instantly everything that I had over here is duplicated over here so I can also do that by copying and then coming over to another channel and pasting I'm gonna select all so that everything trained check it goes over but I can say maybe my configuration and input I don't want to be but my gate EQ compressor sends out I want all of that to paste over so now you can see it didn't go to the 48 so and actually on this one to the inputs weren't affected by that only all of these settings down here so I'd still need to turn on phantom power and bring up the gain but it's a good thing that those things aren't automatically put in because if you use them inappropriately can actually do damage to equipment so that's a good thing but by either saving and then loading the channel preset or copying the channel preset all of that stuff can be adjusted automatically in a moment so that's how we set up a channel save a channel and copy a channel

Channel: Andrew Bellous

Views: 230,257

Keywords: Baptist, church, x air, Behringer, XR18, XR 18, XR16, XR 16, XR12, XR 12, Mixer, Sound, Sound Reinforcement, EQ, Setup, Compression, Noise Gate

Id: Ymx-udidEcw

Length: 31min 55sec (1915 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 27 2017