X32 Firmware V4 | 101 - Surface Overview

hey guys this is drew brashler with dbb audio i am here with the x32 today because behringer released version 4 firmware for this console which happened to include a lot more features that the previous versions of firmware did not now it also changed the look of certain things on the menu structure so i wanted to go ahead and put out a full new series on the x32 so make sure that you watch all the upcoming videos that i'm going to be releasing here shortly so today we're actually going to just be looking over an overview of the surface so let's dive in i have here the x32 full surface console which is broken up into 16 faders on the left hand side we have eight faders in the right hand side followed by our main left right bus let's go ahead and focus on the left bank of faders first we see that we have 16 faders here and we have these layer buttons on the left hand side now these layer buttons control these 16 faders and these are motorized faders so if i move them up and i then press the 17 through 32 it's going to flip these channels from instead of being 1 through 16 to now being 17 through 32. now we also have aux ins and effects returns and then bus masters now channels 1 through 16 and 17 through 32 give us the full processing of the board available to those channels now what does that mean that means that we have the full processing of the board for channels 1 through 32 which means that we can apply delay we can apply the gate the dynamics eq and use all the mix bus sends to do all the destinations of the board now the aux inputs are limited processing which means that they don't have that delay ability they do not have the gate or the dynamics but they do have the eq and mix bus as well now we then have the bus master level now this would give us all 16 mix buses that are available on the x32 let's go ahead and move over to the right hand side of the board now so we have our eight faders here followed by our four layer control buttons we have group dca one through eight bus one through eight bus nine through sixteen and matrix 136 followed by our mono or center channel let's go ahead and start out with dcas now dca stands for digitally controlled amplifier and i will be making another video to follow up on how to use these but we can think of these as a remote control to the faders that are assigned to it some people misinterpret a dca and think that it's an audio path that sums audio together but it is not that it is only a remote control to the faders that are assigned to it so there is no summation that happens in a dca so we can think of these eight dcas as different remote controls to the faders that are assigned to it and i'll go over that in a different video bus one through eight and bus nine through sixteen are happen to be the same bus masters that we see on the left hand side of the board just laid out in the right hand side faders so we can see if i move this fader up and down it's going to correspond to bus one on this side and also raise that up and down same thing with nine i would also see that there the benefit of having the mix buses on the right hand side and channels on the left hand side is i can use this very cool function called sends on fader which allows me to select a mix bus and then press sends on fader and i can now assign my different channels into this mixbus we'll also be following up with a different video on this in the future very last thing i have is matrix one through six matrix one through six is going to be a destination for my mains or any of my mix buses so this would be very helpful to have your main left right set on one and two that way you can have your master fader up at zero and then if you find that your pa is all too loud in that room once you install this board you can actually attenuate it here or if for instance if you had a cry room or a lobby that needed a pa feed but it was mono you could actually sum together your stereo left right mix into this matrix 3 and have a volume control over your lobby or cry room now that we have our right fader bank and our left radar bank set let's go ahead and take a look at the different functions that we have in the faders here so we can see that we have a select button as well as a meter now this meter has a compression light at the top followed by a clip a negative 6 negative 12 negative 18 negative 30 and a negative 60 led light which will show any activity if the channel has audio in it followed by a gate light down at the bottom the gate light will turn on whenever the gate is active or closed the compressor light will turn on whenever there is gain reduction happening in the dynamics section the next button that we have down here is solo now solo is going to be a very good function for you with the x32 in that if you're wanting to listen to a specific channel but not want to only have that coming through the main pa you can just go ahead and simply solo this and what that will do is that will bring it through the headphone jacks on the side or the control room outputs on the back of the board on the right hand side and allow you to listen to that channel independently of the rest of the mix the next thing that we have is our scribble strip now the scribble strip gives us visual information of what is happening on the board what channels are there what colors we have associated with that channel and basically just gives us a visual cue to what we're actually mixing to change this simply press and hold the select and then hit the utility button and then on the lcd screen we can actually change the color of this specific fader for instance i'm going to change it to green because that's what i always have for my electric guitar we can also invert which inverts the led screen and then we can also give it an icon for instance i can give it the rock guitar and i can also apply a name to it as well and then if i wanted to go to a different channel i can then press select on the next channel or i can scroll through them here on the lcd screen the next button that we have down here is the mute button now the mute button is going to be helpful if you have your mix preset but want to have those channels muted while the pastor's talking and then all of a sudden you want to unmute the rest of the band you can unmute all of them and now your pa is live with those instruments locate on the upper portion of the board is our channel strip the channel strip is going to be where we will apply all of our processing to our channel to access this all we need to do is select the channel that we are wanting to process and adjust once we have our selection of our channel in our home menu up here on the right hand side we can see all the things that are going to be happening to this channel if i use these page select buttons i can actually page through the different pages associated to this channel now one thing that you'll notice is this one and two here in the screen we can actually use the layer button to navigate between layers one and layer two using the layer buttons let's go ahead and start on the left hand side of the board up here this is going to be our config and preamp section or the configuration and preamp section of the board now you'll notice that there's a view button and by pressing this view button i can actually navigate to the configuration page on the lcd screen now the configuration and preamp section is going to be the main spot that you'll go to when you're first setting up your board because you have your preamp gain in the upper left hand corner followed by your phantom power and your polarity reversal button and we also have a low cut option here with the low-cut frequency that we can dial in one upgrade to the new firmware is that we can actually see a visual representation of where we are using this locate followed by any of the eq sections that we apply later if we navigate to the lcd screen we'll notice that we have a couple other options as well for instance linking one channel to another if we wanted to link an odd to an even channel what we would have to do is we'd select the odd channel that we want to link with the even channel and then we would just go ahead and press link and then we would need to confirm using the page select buttons either no for left side or the right for yes and now these two channels are linked together as a stereo channel now the benefit of the stereo channel is any parameters that you change the left side will also change on the right hand side except panning panning is the only thing that won't be linked on these and you can change the level of linking of your channels going into your setup and then tabbing over to config under link preferences now moving on back into our configuration and preamp tab we have our low cut which can be initiated and dialed in using the fourth rotary knob we also have the ability of changing our insert positions on this screen as well let's go ahead and move over to the gate section we can see that the gate section is right here on the board and we have a gate slash ducker button which when we press that it enables the gate if we press it again it disables the gate so we can see that anything that's orange is enabled and anything that is gray in these buttons is disabled now let's go ahead and press view on the gate section we can see in the lcd screen we have the gate section dialed in right here so we can enable the gate and we can see that gain reduction will be applied or attenuation will be applied to this channel we can also change the threshold by changing the threshold knob now the remainder of the functions are going to be adjusted in the lcd screen for instance attack hold release the range of your gate as well as the type of gate either expansion or gate or even decking now let's go ahead and move over the dynamics section next we can go ahead and press view on the dynamics as well as engage the compressor or activate it and we have a threshold that we can adjust using this knob here and then we also have our ratio attack hold release as well as key filters for both the gate and the dynamics now we can see that we have a meter here in between the gate and the dynamic section we have a compressor light which will turn on whenever the compressor is actually applying gain reduction followed by a gain reduction meter of 2 db 4 db 6 10 18 and 30 db the gate light will turn on whenever the gate is closed and attenuating the channel in the gate section both the dynamics and the gate section have key filters that you can use to dial in the gate and dynamics a little bit more fine-tuned which we can navigate to the layer two on each of the dynamics or the gate page let's go ahead and jump over in the eq section we can go ahead and press view on the eq section which will bring it up on the lcd screen as well as activate the equalizer by pressing equalizer now we have four bands of eq we have our high high mid low mid and low now if you do have a mix bus selected you'll actually have six bands of eq available to you which we would have high high two by pressing and holding the high and high mid which will give us our fifth band high mid low mid low 2 by pressing and holding low mid plus low and then low so we have low low 2 low mid high mid high 2 and high on all the channels the high and the low are going to give us a shelf option the rest of the options of your bands of eq are only going to be a bell curve let's go ahead and jump back over into the channel so i have my guitar selected here and i can start applying some eq to this maybe my guitar has a lot of low end build up because i placed that microphone a little bit too close into that guitar cab well let's go ahead and use a low shelf and we can cut that out so we can go ahead and press low for selecting the low band and we have these mode options here on the left hand side and this will cycle us through the different options that we have so we have low cut low shelf peq and v eq p e q is going to give us a very similar curve to v eq v eq is going to give us a more vintage sounding curve or basically a wider bandwidth eq adjustment so let's go ahead and dial into the low shelf and we can go find our frequency that we want to apply this to maybe it's starting out to be a little bit too much low end in the 300 range and below we can go ahead and activate the eq and we can start dialing a little bit less low end maybe i have a problem frequency at 900 hertz on this guitar so let's go ahead and use our low mid to add some reduction so we can go in dial in 900 hertz and we can bring some gain reduction down now one thing that i like to do is take out a lot and then use the q knob until i find the frequency that i'm wanting to remove by using my ears and then i'll lessen that reduction another method when i'm teaching someone that's new to eq is called the search and destroy method and that is by using the gain knob turning it up with a wide q and then searching around in the frequency band until you find that problem frequency and then adjusting the queue until you hear just that frequency that you're wanting to remove and then you can destroy it by removing it out the next section i have is our bus sends and we can go ahead and press view to pull it up on the screen we can see that we have four rotary knobs followed by four layer buttons now if we have one through four selected this knob is going to be one two three and four as far as the mix busses go when we have 5 through 8 this is going to be 5 6 7 8 9 through 12 9 10 11 12 and 13 through 16. so we can see that if i go and adjust and turn up this guitar in mixbus 2. if i then go to 5 through 8 that's going to turn down because it's now on 6. but if i jump back to 1 through 4 i'll see that i still have mixbus 2 turned up for this monitor send we can also see that there's some more functionality on the screen we can see that the first encoder knob is going to be our scroll which will actually take us through the different mix buses that we have available to us which then we can use these uh third through sixth rotary knobs to adjust our mixbus levels now if we go into layer two we can also change the tap or the type of mixbus that this is so for instance if i wanted to have mixbus one and two as a subgroup for this channel i can go ahead and change group mode 1 and 2 to group now we will notice that if i go to another channel that it is post vq again this can be set by a channel by channel basis so make sure that you apply this to all of the channels if you are desiring that mix bus to be a subgroup and by doing that we can actually go and select our mix bus on our right hand side go ahead and press select on mixbus 11. press home tab over one to config and we can change all of the channels to subgroup for this pair of buses if i assign this to subgroup it is going to tell me that it's going to re-reconfigure all the channels for this mixbus pair now this is a pair of mix buses so if you apply this to 12 it's going to also affect 11. if you apply it to 11 it's also going to affect 12. and so we can either confirm by pressing yes or decline by cancelling it by canceling pressing no let's jump back over to our guitar channel the next section that we have is our main bus now the main bus gives us two options if your board is set up in a lcr or left center right our stereo is going to be controlling our left and right and our mono is going to be controlling the center the other option is a left right plus mono or as version 4 calls it left right plus sub now the mono bus would be our sub but it is also considered our center or monobus as well so there's a lot of different names for this bus in the board so if you have your board set up in an lcr just think of left right being your stereo and your mono being your center if you have your board set up in left right plus sub you can have your left right b off the stereo and your subwoofer if you wanted to be off of the mono can be off of that as well or if you have a mono system only don't even worry about the stereo bus only use the mono bus and then you can use the mono bus master fader on our matrix one through six main center and there's our master fader for our mono or center cluster now in our main bus section of our channel strip we can enable a channel into the stereo bus or disable as well as in our mono bus same thing now we can see that we have this set up in a left right plus sub configuration so if i did have this as the bass guitar for instance i could decide that hey i want to put this in my subwoofer that is coming off of a different output as my left right and i can go ahead and dial in the amount of subwoofer that i want of this channel going to that sub another function of this screen is showing me where my fader is set to so if i go ahead and turn my fader up to 0 i'll notice that it's at plus 0.1 db so if i was very detailed and wanted this right at 0 i could then use this encoder knob until it gets to zero we can also solo via this page and as well mute on this page now the next section that we have here is to the left of the screen is our usb recorder section there is a usb port here and this is what we actually use for firmware updates as well as saving our show file or our scenes as this console calls it we can stick a usb into the board it does need to be a fat32 formatted usb stick and then once we have plugged this in you'll notice the access light will turn on if the usb drive is being accessed i can go ahead and press view and pull up a usb recorder now what's neat about this is the console can record a stereo wave to this usb stick right off the channels you can set this up to be your left right mix bus if you wanted to provide a mix down of your show to the band you could go ahead and simply press record and it's already set to the main left and right this will record a stereo wave which is going to be the sample rate of your console which is either 48 kilohertz or 44.1 kilohertz and it's going to be a bit rate of 24. now you can play audio directly from this if we wanted to we can actually record on a separate computer into a 48 kilohertz 24 bit wave stereo and place it back on to this usb drive stick it in the console and then just press play the channels will show up in our aux usb which is aux 7 and 8 and we can just turn it up if we wanted to play back some audio so this would be one option if you wanted to just have some background music playing before the show the next thing that we come to is our screen we have six rotary knobs on the bottom followed by our layer buttons plus our page select buttons and then we have our menu function buttons on the right hand side followed by home which is going to be the home base for really everything on the board so get in the habit of pressing select on a channel and then pressing home on the lcd screen controls the next thing that we have down is our meters button the meters gives us different meters for all of the different channels and destinations of the x32 we can see we have all 32 channels here and if i started applying a mix we would actually see those faders changing up and down followed by mutes will show as well the next thing that it shows is our mix busses so to get over to the mix bus we would page select over to our mix buses and here's our mix buses matrix and main bus we then have our aux and effects page meters which would show us our aux outputs which is gonna be our aux sends those are gonna be our outputs on one through six on the back of the board we have our aux returns which is actually gonna be our auxiliary inputs on the back of the board which would be the trs we also have our effects returns which are going to be the effects channels that return from the effects rack right here the next one is going to be our inputs and outputs this is going to be all inputs and all outputs of the x32 this will show you all 32 inputs aux outputs aux inputs are 16 xlr outputs on the back of the board followed by our p16 ultranet outputs that you can use with the p16 monitoring system from behringer we also have an rta which can be either the selected channel monitor or you can actually go and select a specific channel if you had for instance an rta mic set up in front of front of house and you had that say in channel 32 you could go ahead and press channel 32 and it would be the source for most people either the selected channel or the monitor is going to be the best function for this we also have auto mix which i'm going to be covering in a different video the next button that we have is our routing now the routing is going to be the center of the board of where you're bringing all of your audio in from sources and sending audio out to your destinations so we can see that it has these blocks here in the left hand side now if you are used to version three or earlier firmware versions you will notice that this does look different so we are going to be making a video on this specifically showing you the differences of this but the input blocks are the same as the old firmware and aes a is going to be our aes a port of the aes50 aes b is going to be the aes50b port card is going to be our expansion card which is on the back of the board i currently have the x live connected into my board and we also have xlr which is going to be the local xlr outputs on the back of the x32 now if we continue to page over we'll actually get into our patch section this is going to be where we will actually select what sources we want to send where for our outputs so we can see that we have outputs 1 through 16 here and then if we tab over one more we have our aux outs 1 through 6 followed by our aes ebu output we also have our p16 and then we have this new thing called user routing the user routing allows us to do one-to-one patching previous versions of the firmware would have us routing in blocks of eight so if i had 32 inputs up on stage but i was only using 30 of them and then i had two wireless microphones sitting here at front of house i would actually have to run an xlr line from here all the way up to the stage to get them into the xlrs of the stage rack now we can do what's called user routing and do one-to-one patching which means that i can access all 30 inputs up on stage followed by two local xlr inputs here on the local board i will be doing another video diving into this specifically so keep an eye out for that the next button that we have down is our setup we can see that we have all of our different pages in our setup we have global config remote network naming and icons preamps and our card any of the options that you need to adjust can be adjusted by the rotary knobs on the bottom of the screen so for instance if i was wanting to set my sample rate to 44.1 instead of 48 kilohertz all i would do is go ahead and rotate this until i highlight 44.1 and i would press set and now my console is set to 44.1 kilohertz of sample rate if i was wanting to change that back to 48 now i'm back to 48. i can also change my clock source change time of date and do a lot of different configuration presets on the board using my setup menu the next thing that i have is my library now the library allows me to go and save a preset that i want for the channels my effects routing or the aes50 the next button that i have is my effects this is going to be on my effects rack the behringer x32 has eight effects racks which are very very awesome effects racks one through four are going to be for our time-based effects for instance reverb delays chorus flanger things like that effects are acts 5 through 8 are going to be my insert effects now i can go and apply an insert effect on one through four if i wanted to apply that to a specific channel or i could use effects five through eight to do that as well but i would not be able to go and place a time-based effect on five through eight for instance i'm not able to place a reverb on any of the effects racks five through eight but what effects racks five through eight have is some insertable effects for instance graphic eqs or even they have emulations of analog gear for instance the leisure comp which is going to be the la-2a or the ultimo compressor which is the 1176 and some very cool effects emulations now i do have a full series of effects tutorials on all of these different effects that are available to us in the effects rack of the x32 so make sure you go search for those on youtube my next button that i have down here is my mute groups now my mute group allows me to assign channels to a mute group now i can go ahead and press mute group and then press and hold the mute group that i'm wanting to assign channels to and go assign those channels to it once i un select that i can then press mute group again and then the next time i press this button i will actually mute all the channels that are assigned to this mute group to unassign them i can go ahead and press mute group again i can press and hold one and go unassign those channels from this mute group and then the next time i press the mute group it won't mute these channels the next button that we have is our utility the utility is going to bring up some hidden menus in the x32 that we wouldn't have access to unless we hit that for instance it's going to give us the ability to name channels by pressing and selecting a channel and then pressing utility it'll bring us to our name and icon screen we can also go to our home tab and press utility and we can actually copy and paste a channel from one channel to another so the utility is going to be one place that you can look if you're looking for a specific function like copying a channel and pasting a channel the next section that we have over here is our monitors our monitor level is going to be right here which will adjust the output of the board coming out of the left right control room outputs we have a phone volume which is going to be for our headphones the headphone jacks are on either side of the board on the right and the left the next thing that we can do is we can hit the mono button now by pressing the mono button that will take our stereo image and collapse it to mono it's a quick way of seeing how your mix is translating in a stereo or a mono environment we also have a dim button which actually attenuates the output of our control room monitors or the headphones by just pressing dim to adjust these we can go ahead and press the view and it brings up our monitor section on the lcd screen we can set our dim attenuation right here we can adjust it from negative 40 all the way up to zero the next section that we have is our talkback and we can press view and pull up the talk back we have a lamp in the upper right hand corner and we can adjust this by paging over to the lamp section and adjusting our lamp brightness here the next thing that we have is our talkback now there is an internal mic built into the x32 however i have found that it has a lot of pickup of an omnidirectional sense so if you are sitting at front of house it will be picking up all the ambient noise around you so i do find that using a microphone plugging it into the external mic is going to be the best solution the external mic preamp is set by our talk level right here this is going to be our preamp level for our external mic input and our internal mic input as well the external mic does have phantom power applied so do not plug in a microphone that cannot accept phantom power an instance for this would be a ribbon microphone if you were to plug in an old ribbon microphone directly into the external mic that had phantom power applied to it you could damage the diaphragm of your ribbon mic we then have our talk a and talk b which by default these are set to a momentary press and a latching press you can change this by going to the talkback a and pressing latching or having it non-latching and momentary we can also select our destinations of the talkback mic into all of our mix buses as well as our main left right or mono center we also have an oscillator section which allows us to create a sine wave or a pink noise and send it to a specific destination for doing various testing to generate audio from the oscillator section all we would need to do is press generate and we can select between our sine wave pink noise white noise and then we can also select different sections of where we would want this to go to so if i wanted to have it on my main left right we can now see that it's there the next section that i have is my scenes and i can go ahead and press view scenes are going to be where i save all of my show files to so if i have a scene for my youth band and then a scene for my adult band for different portions of my sunday then i would save those in two different scenes now the scenes are going to be an instant recall so immediately when you press go and confirm it is going to snap the console and change all of the inputs and faders and anything that you have applied into that scene immediately there is no crossfade time so if you were for instance having two songs one and then another and you saved one song in one scene and saved another song in the other scene and recalled your faders would snap immediately once you pressed go the next section down here is my assigned section i kind of like to call this the user defined section because i choose what i want on these different knobs and buttons and we can see that there is different layers or sets of these buttons and so i can go and change this to be a tap or i could go and have this be a mute function for another channel or i could even have the one of the rotary knobs be the volume of another channel i usually like to do this with my ipod so let's go ahead and do that real quick so my ipod i usually have on aux 5 and 6 and so i can go ahead and link these two real quick so let's go ahead and press select on aux 5 we'll go and link five and six so this is gonna be my ipod and if i go and press layer set c and then view i can now tab over to layer set c and i can have encoder 4 be a fader for my aux 5 and because these two channels are linked when i'm turning up layer fader 5 it's also affecting fader six so i can easily use this to be my volume for my ipod while i'm mixing the band okay band just finished and now i can bring in some house music [Applause] so that is a general overview of the x32 surface make sure to like or subscribe to my channel as well as check out my blog for more information and tutorials on the x32 and i am very excited to release the rest of these videos here very soon for teaching you the rest of the new version 4 of the x32 so keep an eye out for those thank you so much

Channel: Drew Brashler

Views: 55,329

Keywords: X32, X32 version 4, Behringer X32 Version 4 Firmware, Behringer X32 V4 Firmware, X32 V4 Firmware, M32 V4 Firmware, X32 Firmware Update, X32 User Routing, X32 New Firmware, New Firmware X32, Behringer, M32, Midas M32 Version 4 Firmware

Id: FOoo9XExoQ4

Length: 34min 45sec (2085 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 30 2020