X32 / M32 Overview | The Basics of This Sound Console

[Music] hey welcome back everybody this is dave with alum house sound and today we're going to be going over the intro to the x32 a lot of my videos have covered how you're you're kind of trying to get your stream set up you're trying to refine your mix but today i want to take a couple minutes step back some slow down and just look at how the console is laid out uh this is pretty much the five minute overview that i give anybody that i teach this console and so hopefully it'll be helpful to you so let's dive right in here we go all right let's take a couple minutes and give you an overview of this x32 console this is the basics of how i start explaining the functionality on this console to a new user so after we've gone through and and touch the console and maybe help them to build a mix the next step is to learn more about the functionality so let's take a look at that this console is a 32-channel console it does have 16 outputs and the way it's split up is kind of a left side and a right side and so the left side is all of our inputs and the right side is mostly our outputs they throw us for a loop on the first layer here which are called dcas but we'll explain that in just a minute let's look at the left side here so channels 1 through 16 you can see visible here on these faders we also have little layer knobs here so our buttons if we push the second layer now we'll see channels 17 to 32 we also have additional inputs here which are auxiliary inputs one through six these correlate to inputs additional inputs on the back of the console some of them are quarter inch some are quarter inch or rca we also have the usb input which we can use the usb slot up here at the top of the console and we could push a wav file or or recording back through this so that becomes an input of that source and then we have some effects returns here which we'll explain more in a minute and then the last uh the last layer down here is our mix buses and and that becomes important if you get into some later routing using matrices we're not going to talk about matrix or matrices in this video so we're just going to deal with the top three layers so let's go back to layer one so inputs the inputs here could be um let's say this is your kick drum okay you could bring this up and you could uh you could use some of these controls for that maybe these are you know just different vocal mics or or guitars or you can set these however you need to according to what's plugged into the console if we go to layer two you'll see that these faders move so now we can have separate settings for all of these additional channels that we have down here and whatever we need for our mix we go back and now we have channels 1 through 17 and then 17 to 32. so i'm going to push these down just bring these all back down to zero here so that we can keep our discussions moving and what i want to do next is talk about all the controls that we have up at the top here the way i explain this to all of my new people is it's kind of like if you're going to write an email you can start to type your email and you could maybe make some words bold and then you pause on that email and you go to type a different email and maybe this one you change the font or you highlight something so all of the controls are in the same location but you're you're addressing each email individually well that's the same for all of these controls up here at the top we start out we have a preamp um or our gain knob we've also got a 48 volt button which is used if you have certain microphones plugged in we have a phase button which might be used on on drums mostly maybe some guitars but mostly on drums we have a low cut which is going to kind of work in combination with our equalizer here but the low cut knob we have a gate here which is a great tool to use on some things we've got a compressor it says dynamics but this is a compressor or expander and then our whole eq section here is how we can use to address problems within our our signal we also have some bus sends i really rarely use this whole batch of of knobs here but they are here and available we'll explain those in a minute and then finally we have our main bus option we have a mono bus button and panning left and right and more importantly here we have our stereo bus button now when i want to use these features i would select an instrument okay and then these are functional for this one selected instrument if i make changes i'm just going to push these buttons here and they'll light up orange if i go to another instrument that was channel 10. if i jump over here to channel 9 12 you'll see that these are not orange and that's because that setting was for channel 9 not channel 12. so we have the ability to treat each channel or input source individually now again each input could be a microphone it could be a guitar amplifier it could be a drum microphone it could be a keyboard anything that you're going to get to come signal that you're going to come into the board you've got these features here to use if they're on channels 1 through 32. so the next thing we want to do is look at the right side of the board and on the right side of the board we start out on our first layer with what we call dcas these are digitally controlled amplifiers and what it lets you do is let's say you have all of these um faders here let's say that these are for your drums and you have a bunch of mics on your drums and they look like this well if if you're trying to mix and you need to turn these all down you have to try and get all of them to come down evenly and that's it's just not practical so what a dca lets you do is control any selected channels at the same time so we can push and hold this and then we can select the channels that we want to have impacted when we let go now this becomes one volume knob for all of these faders so i'm going gonna have to use move one and it'll control all of that volume the ratio will stay the same this mix would stay the same it's literally just turning it down or up so that's a quick easy way we've got eight faders that we can use and how do we use this practically well in my service a lot of times i have a computer hooked up to come in way over here on this input five and six and i have to be able to quickly turn that uh that volume up or down on the computer and i have to be able to address it before or after my band plays so what i can do is select this one channel i can turn these on and then that way when i'm mixing up here with my band just before i need to i have one fader that's going to work now my my computer volume and i don't have to do this stuff and then flip over here and then try and find it and then have to try and flip back and do that stuff i just have one fader to make the the workflow a lot easier so again earlier in the example this was for our drum you know all of these faders but we've changed it now to be over on these so i'm going to deselect this will keep moving because the rest of the right side of the console deals with outputs so right now our mix goes over here to our main output fader if we had audio going through and we pushed this up we would start to see some lights light up and we would see things come up up here on the screen and that's where our main mix is going out to this main fader which goes to our main in-house speakers the next layer down we have 16 buses so we have here bus one through eight and then here is bus nine through sixteen and this is kind of a default setup here uh the way the console is laid out right now uh the best way i explain what a bus does is a bus it's just like a school bus it's going to carry a large group of people or instruments in this case to one single destination so we can do some things that i'll show you in a second and we can put people or instruments on that bus and then wherever we tell that bus to go that's that's where it'll be heard um this is useful for monitors so i've got a recent video that talks about setting up monitors and so we use some buses for that sometimes we'll use buses for a live stream environment where we'll create a a mix that doesn't go out our mains to our house but it's a different mix that will go out to a live stream or maybe a cry room or a nursery maybe you send some music to your foyer so people can hear when they're coming in they can hear what's going on in the room and they have their own little mix but these are outputs and they are linked to by default to the outputs on the back of the board so we have 16 outputs on the back of the board this would be linked to one through eight and then nine through sixteen however gets a little tricky when you get to these purple ones because these are set for effects and what we would do is use this to build a little mix of things that we want to go into a specific effect we'll come back to that in a minute but these are here as outputs and then the last thing we have down here which we said we weren't going to talk about but i'll push the button anyway this is the opportunity of six matrix sends and we also have a a mid or center channel that we have the ability to to work with as well so as we come back to our our little example here we are not using any dca's right now i've turned those off and we have a little miniature mix that we're building that's going out to our main house speakers so this little mix is going out to our main house speakers well let's say we have a monitor and we want to set up a monitor we can select the monitor that we want to work with and then there's this fabulous button in the middle right here it says sends on fader when i push it we now have all of these faders to build a mix to go to this one monitor so maybe they need some of these drum mics and then maybe they need some of these other mics over here and maybe they even need stuff from these other layers i'm not going to do it right now for the example but maybe they do you have the ability to even go over here and add in the pc channel that you know your your computer channel you could add in some of these effects returns if you wanted to and they could go into this mix for a monitor all right so if this is our mix and that's going to monitor one we could then come over to monitor two and you'll see now how it's zeroed out and we could do a similar thing we could repeat the process and build a mix for this other bus so what we're doing is we have built we have put all of these people or instruments on this bus and then this one would be sent in this example to a monitor if i deselect sends on fader which likes to blink red um to to warn you that you're on sends on fader uh when you go back here keep in mind this is what's being sent to our room right now our main mix but the monitor is hearing something completely different so you really have a lot of flexibility that you can custom build some specific mixes that go to specific places using these mix buses now i've also talked about setting up uh this is a mono mix because it just has one fader that's working for this right now we do have the ability if i hit sends on fader up in this screen up here we could go to the config tab and we could hit the link button and it's going to link one and two now they move together and what that gives us the ability to do is have a stereo send so this is a great example of what we might do on a live stream where now we have the ability to pan hard left and and hard right coming into the stream to really give us a lot of width in this mix that we're doing but i'm going to go back to unlinking that this is now disconnected and we just have this mix here going to that one monitor all right we'll turn sends on fader off at this point all you need to do if you're learning how to run a mix in the house is select a channel we can come in and use these controls right here to set our gain set maybe our our eq and our compression and that should be a great start right there now here's one thing to note each of these button each of these controls has a little view button on it this becomes a great thing because we can quickly hit the view button and the screen changes to view our eq or if i hit on the compressor and i hit view now we have our compressor window up if i if i go to gate it's going to look very similar but it's now the gate but you can also see that we have some it's really just flipping between tabs up here in the screen so we're on the gate tab right now the compressor or dynamics is the next one we can use these arrow buttons to go over there eq is the next one so i can page over or mouse to the right to the next tab so we can see those things there also if i look at sends which is the next tab over you'll see that one and two because we had built a little mini mix one and two have some send in there so if i select one and i hit sends on fader we can see that uh this was channel six channel six has has been put into this mix from mixbus one if i deselect it all right now we're back on channel six and we can see up here that it's in there also these little bus send encoders which i said i rarely ever use also show us that we can turn it up or down they're just volume knobs that you have the ability to to turn up for bus one and you'll see that it it correlates here on the screen if i turn it down okay and you've got little layers over here as well because remember we have 16 16 outputs or sends on the right and so we have 1 through 4 5 through 8 all the way up to 16 and they're displayed here and you can just do them in groups of four but that's that's the basics of the console here the next thing i want to show you is how to save your scene over on the right side of the screen here we have a scene area and a view button and when we hit the view button we come up here to this window now yours probably defaults to the tab that says cues and you can change it in your setup window to have it select uh the scenes instead but here i can come down and this is my this was my blank scene and so i could select one of these and hit i could just twist to go to different ones here the various ones in here so i could hit the save encoder then i can name it whatever i want to name it then i would hit save on the right now i'm not going to do it because i don't want these changes to be saved but then i can hit the save button and then it would ask me if i really want to save and i would hit the right arrow key to actually save that change let's go to a different a different scene just to show you an example here i'm just going to hit the back button and then back over to scenes so what i'm going to do is go down one of my most more recent ones i had a training scene in here so i'm going to select it i'm going to push go it says do you really want to go and i'll hit yes and so now everything is changed to what i had stored in that scene and then i could go back to my blank one by coming up here i can hit go and now i'm back to my blank scene so scenes become great because if you have different services that use all of your same gear you can have all of the settings saved for each individual performance you could also save things for a you know worship night versus a sunday morning versus a wednesday night service all kinds of flexibility there all right let me show you one last feature that i get a lot of questions about let's say you uh have a click track all right a lot of people are using click tracks right now they just want them to go to in-ear monitors how would i set that up to be in a monitor but not be heard in my main room so let's say that the click track is coming in on input 16. so i'm going to select input 16. the click track i'm going to bring up to zero okay on my unity that is what we call it in the middle here there's a zero mark and so we bring it up to zero or unity and then the magic button is the stereo bus right here we're going to deselect that so now the the audio would come in the click track would come in it would be turned up but it will not go to our stereo buss so we won't hear that all the way over here in our room mix now we have the ability the option of coming into any of these buses or monitors in this case we can hit sends on fader and then if this monitor needs click track we can just bring that up okay we can turn it up turn it down now you would want to label if i go back out here if if you want to label channel 16 to be click track how would you do that we would go over here to the setup button we can mouse over to the different tabs and there's one that says name and icon and this is where we can change colors maybe we find a red because we don't want them to touch it because you wouldn't want to move this fader while you're mixing so we'll make it red and then we can hit the edit button here and then we have the ability to to use this little feature to type letters so c and i'll just type in click here all right so it says click and then at the end close is under the first encoder so i do that and now it says click and it's bright red so that might help you then when you're going through and building a mix for this mixbus number three you can see it that's the red one we know we want to bring that up put click into their monitor and then we move on so that's important that stereo bus button is important if you wanted to put something in the in the mid channel if you happen to be running a a left right and center channel and you only want things specific levels in the center channel that's what this top area here is for you would select monobus on a channel that's selected so we can use our click track as an example we've deselected stereo but let's say we want to put the click right in the middle of our center channel we would select this button and then we've got a volume knob that we can use to turn up or down in that center channel once you set a certain amount it does follow your fader it would also typically follow your master or your main left and right fader as well it would turn that up and down within the percentage that you have it turned up with this encoder all right so at this point we've talked about the left side is inputs the right side is is outputs with effects let's talk about effects real quick in this board you've got if we go to effects home in this board you have eight different effects racks that you can use on the left side you've got your your insert effects they could also be effects returns but the right side is insert only so the effects returns if we look at this first one it is set up as a reverb by default and that correlates you see it says bus 13 there that correlates to our buses down here remember we had one through eight and now we get to bus 13 and it's purple well they labeled these all because 13 14 15 16 correlate to these effects so we have a reverb we can build we have to now send an instrument or microphone into that reverb so what we're going to do is just like a monitor we're going to hit select you'll see how it makes that window bigger for us which is great we hit sends on fader and now we have all of these inputs to be able to send into this effect now this is nice because if we wanted some reverb on our click we could push the click up and it would go into that reverb we probably don't want that maybe we want some vocal mics to go into that reverb let's say we have four vocal mics we can send those into the reverb and then it's going to go internally out of the board and into this effect and then it comes back well where does it come back i'm going to hit sends on fader well those vocal mics that go through the reverb from bus 13 are going to return over here on the far left on this third layer and this is bus 13's return so it goes out mono and the reverb is a stereo reverb it returns with a stereo channel left and right right here so this says effects one then you've got two three and four so if you if you've ever worked with old analog gear you had to plug a cable in and then you would have two cables left and right that would come return into the board these are the returns right here and so you're you're sending this mix out to a reverb just like a monitor but the reverb is sending it back into the console here and now you can add these in if we go back up to this other monitor mix that we were building mixbus 3 we hit sends on fader if that monitor wants this reverb in their monitor you have the ability to add this because it's considered an input into that mix bus so we have click track going in nothing on the second layer and then we have some reverb so they're getting some form of reverb and a click track it doesn't sound like the greatest sounding monitor but that's what we've done in this example all right so what a powerful console we've got this thing is amazing we covered a bunch of ground in this video but you can go back and check it out re-watch it if you need to to review anything hopefully you found something helpful in this video and if you did give it a thumbs up give it a like and if you're not already subscribed to the channel go and hit that subscribe button too because i'm putting out new videos every week so thanks for watching this one we'll catch you in the next one peace

Channel: AllamHouse

Views: 30,714

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Id: Ua8RaR6ZwIY

Length: 27min 34sec (1654 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 24 2020