Zoom L20 Multitrack Recorder Advanced Review and Guide

hi guys and welcome back to the channel today we're going to be looking at the zoom l20 digital multi-track recorder and one of the fantastic and interesting features about the zoom l20 is that you can actually set up independent auxiliary sends for each channel so what I thought we'd do today is record a vocal directly into the l20 as well as set up an independent auxiliary send directly out to a rack compressor so we're going to send that exact same Vocal Track out to this dbx 166xs rack compressor and then we're going to send it back to the l20 and record it that's going to give us the ability to compare and analyze the audio in the digital workstation later [Music] and another bonus with the zoom l20 is that every channel has its own independent compressor built in that's going to enable us to compare three separate tracks the first the direct recorded audio into the l20 multi-tracker the second track will be the auxiliary send and return from the compressor back into the l20 and finally the third is the directly recorded vocal but utilizing the channel compressor turned on so we can compare that against the other two okay so let's do a walkthrough of the zoom l20 well first of all you've got your power supply which goes in the back here in the slot next to it you've got your USB memory stick and the reason you need that is to import audio into the zoom l20 we'll come on to exactly how to do that in a little moment on the top panel you can see there's the inputs and you've got 16 XLR and Jack insert Points each XLR input has its own independent channel so you've got 20 of those because on track 17 18 and 19 and 20 you've got stereo inputs and then you've also got rcas and these double up as USB audio send and returns so you can actually use this as a door controller as well you've also got phantom power which is provided by engaging the red switches that basically applies four channels at a time to each one of these red switches you've also got a pad button on each channel so you've got a real live Sound Source you can actually add a pad in there just to soften the signal strength every channel has its own preamp built into it and you can control that by the gain dial just there preamping the zoom l20 are the best preamps they've ever made they say I've got to say they really do sound fantastic each Channel also has a compressor built into it and you can have it completely off or you can start to apply however much of it you want using this dial and you can also set that internally to either record pre-compressor so straight to the recorder before you go to the compressor or you can set that so it records afterwards you can actually what they call bake it in or print the compression if you're happy with the sound of it obviously you can never take that off if you do print with it you've got your master out xlrs well here you've got six monitor outs which obviously can be sent to speakers or to headphones and there's actually a switch to engage either headphones or speakers and whether you're hearing the master mix or whether you're hearing an independent submix auxiliary mix which we'll talk about a little bit later too you also have a select button which is just for selecting whichever Channel you're working on so then you can route it to the EQ if you wish so it's a long blue strip goes to the eqa and you've got all your classic EQ controls really useful as well as a bunch of effects that you can choose as well and the inbuilt effects are really good there's a whole list of them and you can assign them independently then in this dark strip you've got your record and play button which is basically just how your arm or set your particular channel to play obviously you can use your failures to attenuate the volume of any channel but if you don't need that Channel or you can just leave it disengaged every channel has its own mute button and every channel has its own solo button so a really useful mix of features there there's a very efficient device and it's slimmed down to all the things you do need and none other things that you don't and this little section down here this little cluster of buttons is how you Monitor and set independent Monitor and Ox feeds and sends effectively what you can do is you can use the master to create a master mix then you can click over to submix a and then set a completely different mix and B and C so you've got all these different options of making unique mixers and then sending whichever makes you want up to the monitor out section here so you can actually send it to speakers if you wish or you can send it to headphones that means that the drummer the bass is the guitarist and the singer they can all have their own unique independent Channel setup so they can monitor just the instruments that they want to hear and at the particular volumes they want to hear them we're going to look at this management section today and I'll show you some Advanced features on how to get the best out of this machine these two blue sliders the effects sending returns you've got two channels of those and then you've got your master output it's actually Master phone so you can be listening to a completely separate mix to any of these guys so effectively you've got seven headphone or line outs and then of course you've got your main control section with your menu your toggle switch which you press to actually select and I'll show you some really cool features to do with these little very Slimline buttons here and everything works perfect feels solid no rattles doesn't feel cheap very high quality really really good stuff [Music] oh another lovely feature is that when you hit the power button and turn it on you met with the screen Illuminating and a lovely Cascade of LED lights there across the board to show you that everything's working and it only takes a second just to boot up and then it's ready to roll there we go looking good so all these lights indicate the session that I was last working on it remembers his last session effectively so let's dive into this particular session I'm going to show you how to record on one channel send that signal out from one of the independent sub mixers to a rack compressor and then back in on a different Channel and record that as well and as a third element we're going to record the exact same dry signal with the inbuilt compressor and we're going to be able to compare all three of course you can use any of these channels to record on at any time but for our purposes and for our project today we're going to be using these channels just here just because it's close to the rest of the controls rather than working on the far end so you want to keep things quite Central so what we want to do is we want to take our XLR cable from our microphone and plug it into the first channel so this is going to be Channel 16. I'm going to engage phantom power and that's because this microphone is a condenser microphone it's the rode NT if your microphone's got a really really hot preamp built into it you might want to pad it to attenuate the signal strength but in this case we're fine as it is so next we're going to move down to the gain knob and again I know just from experience and using this device and this microphone that about 12 o'clock is plenty gain really effectively all you're doing is you're trying to bring up your meter to zero DB one of the things you can look out for is that when it goes above zero DB the LED segments next to it actually turn orange and then they go red if you start to clip but I've run plenty of stuff into the orange and there's no clip in audible whatsoever so there's a nice bit of Headroom in those preamps now because this is going to be the direct dry vocal I'm recording I'm going to leave the compressor off so effectively even though it is engaged internally I'm not going to use it on this channel I'm just going to record the dry signal straight through now if you wanted to use the EQ you would hit the select button here and that then sends this particular Channel and any other channels that you highlight to the EQ and you can independently tweak the EQ and then go to the next one and it will remember and record all exactly where you set your EQ I'm not going to mess about the EQ I'm just going to record the dry flat signal next we're going to arm our track so it's now ready to be recorded on I'm not going to obviously mute it or solo it and then I'd listen to the audio coming through by pushing up the fader to zero DB the Masters are already at zero DB so now we need to understand how we're going to root that signal and how we're going to hear what's been played effectively what I've got it set to at the minute is the master mix so if we look down here at the submix section you can see I've got it set to master that means that everything I set here will be fed through to the master phones here or the master signal selected up here but we're going to do something a bit tricky and a bit more advanced here even though I've got that set to 0 DB anything I sing into the microphone is going to come through this channel I've got the full track mixed and inserted onto Channel 17 and 18. now what I want to do is I want to be able to send this audio signal so the incoming vocal to an outgoing auxiliary send so now what I do is I select in the monitoring section a and now we're in submix a so that effectively means that I can turn back in music off completely so the only thing being output is this vocal and you can see the two lights here indicate that that's where this fader was previously set so you just push the fader up until it disengages those settings and then back down so it's not engaged in any way so now we've got sub mix a setup what I want to do is revert back to master and then I want to push up my audio so I can hear it so now we know that channel 16 direct vocal has been sent to Channel A independently I can now connect a TRS or a tip ring sleeve Jack hook it directly into a that is sending the direct vocal out to the rack compressor I've found that having the output set to about 10 or 11 o'clock is absolutely ample amplitude anything much more than that and you're going to cause feedback and you can choose whether or not you have the master mix or depressed it is mix a so now we've got submix a going through there when you press this button you engage in the line level signal out through your cable to your rack compressor which is the kind of signal strength that any rack compressor is expecting to see so to get the compressed vocal coming back in from the rack compressor you take the output from it which in this case is an XLR cable and you plug that in the channel next to it and now I'm going to set this to record as well and because I want to hear or monitor the audio coming back in from the compressor I only really want to hear the vocal from that compressor so I'm going to move that up to zero DB so now we've got a dry signal recording and we've got a compressed version too now this is a big word of warning whatever you do don't increase the volume of the dry recorded vocal at the same time as the actual compressed vocal and that's because you'll create a feedback loop where the vocals going in and round and it's basically creating feedback it'll blow up your speakers or your headphones and it's really really unpleasant and it's certainly not good for the device so if you have that happen to you it's usually because you're monitoring both audio signals and you only really need to listen to the compressed version or if you wanted to listen to the dry version you could also listen to that if your call completely is your preference but that now is remembered this mix master so that is what you're monitoring as the master through your headphones so when you insert your headphones you're now going to be able to hear the master mix coming through into those headphones controlled by this dial here and again about 10 o'clock seems to be ample loud enough to be able to get a really good signal so the other cool thing you can do with the zoom l20 is to use the drive vocal that's coming in on channel 16 or whichever Channel you choose and send it again out to a different mix bus so if we then flick our monitoring section to mix B now I want to send Channel 16. only just the drive vocal out through b so I'm going to replicate that setting [Music] and send into [Music] channel here what you want to do to set the l20 up is to press the menu button and then you can go to Project new project or select a project whatever you want to do you can select which folder the track might be in record and play have a look at those settings now the recording format's important I always want to record in 24 bit but you can choose to decrease that to 16 if you wish once you've selected whichever one you want you just press this push button just here to select it record source is an interesting one and that's how we allocate the pre-compressor or the post compressor recording so if you choose pre that means that the signal is recorded direct after it's hit the preamp straight to the hard disk but if you wanted to record with the internal compressor engage then you'd select post compression and that'll record the direct signal in through the preamp into the compressor and straight to the SD card and to come back out of any layer you just press menu and it takes you back a layer back into the main menu you can select a turn on your metronome and you can select what kind of sound you have and the pattern and the volume and all the rest of it system basically just gives you access to the time and date you can set the contrast you can actually have an external controller and you can check your firmware version slate is referring to this microphone just here normally in the old Studios that have What's called the Slate mic and they would use that to talk to the band on the other side of the glass you can mess about the controls for that if somebody's in a different library and you can use that as a microphone and it works perfectly well and I've used it and it sounds really good and clear so no issues you don't need a separate microphone to be able to do that that's really handy to have that it's a nice little professional touch and of course you're back to the beginning of the menu now indicated by the scroll bar on the side other key controls that you're going to be using all the time are the stop play or pause button and of course the record button now if you plan on doing overdubs like I am it's absolutely vital you press this overdub button every time you turn on your l20 that will be by default set to off so every time you press record you'll be starting a whole new project every single time so it's really important that you turn on the overdub button if you're planning to overdo multiple tracks onto some backing Source or just on any of the other tracks if you're over dubbing that'll stay on for the whole project time until you power it off again so you don't need to keep turning it on and off every time and of course you've got your jogger shuttle buttons that go forward and back so when you press play on a project at any time when your track is playing you can just push the button and it'll set a marker so now it's added mark one if I press stop if I click back it'll go to mark one or if I press forward it'll go to mark 2 which I've already pre-programmed and one final thing here is that this push button is also a shuttle button so you can turn it forward or backwards and it will jog you through your track so you can pinpoint exactly where you want to be press enter and it'll insert a mark and if you want to get rid of one of your marks you just click whichever one it is so go back to mark one and then press it again and it just undoes it so super super simple super easy go so we're here in the door and we're going to use this software to be able to compare the quality of the vocal that we recorded direct to the zoom l20 and we're going to compare that to the version we sent out to the rack compressor and we're also going to compare that to the internal compressor that we used on the third Channel and through our analysis hopefully we'll be able to see and hear which of them sounds the best now with the zoom l20 is entirely possible to go completely doors but for our purposes today I've removed the SD card from the l20 and I've put it into the computer so we can actually have a look so this is the SD card and as you can see the l20 is auto-generated 10 folders and within each folder there's different projects now the project that we've been working on is within folder one and it's called new one and there are audio tracks we don't need to transfer track 17 and 18 because that's the original stereo audio file but what we need a track 16 back to 10 and they're all the separate vocals so what I'm going to do now is rename them so when I import them into my actual folder on the computer I don't get the confused for anything else okay so I've just flown through these tracks and I've renamed them something meaningful so we've got direct vocal one two and three and each one of those was sent out to the rack compressor so basically that corresponds to one two and three and the reason that these vocals are split across three separate channels is that when I'm tracking vocals what I like to do is have a verse on one channel then maybe a bridge and then a chorus on a separate channel so it just makes life easier when I'm trying to drop in and out myself so these files are all going into the midnight Silver Moon files so now let's import those vocal tracks into the project okay so we zoomed down on the vocal tracks only what we've got here is verse one followed by the bridge followed by the chorus there's an interlude and then verse two that's what we've got so far but I think today we're just going to listen to verse one bridge and the chorus so let's start off by listening to the dry vocal only okay here we go [Music] if you are real then we must be with everything unless you're scared [Music] how come you don't know how come you don't know [Music] okay so everything sounded quite even but if we zoom in a little bit closer one thing that stands out to me that I'm hearing and I'm also seeing is that there's quite a lot of Peaks going on here it's quite a lot of plosives there's quite a lot of sharp s's a lot of sibilance going on and that's pretty standard for any directly recorded dry vocal and you can visually see that the waveforms a lot more spiky than it is down here on the compressed version where everything looks a little bit more fatter and a little bit more tamed the Peaks aren't quite so high and the dips aren't quite so low so now let's have a listen to the vocal tracks that were sent out to the dbx rack compressor and see if we can hear a difference here we go you can't feel it I can't see this happening [Music] if you are real then we must deal with everything unless you're scared [Music] hold me how come you don't know how come you don't know how come you don't know how come you don't show [Music] okay so to me the vocal just sounded way more present way more upfront you'd expect that from a compressor I thought that rat compressor did a really great job really happy with it it's only a plan maybe between three and five DBS of compression so we've still got plenty of Peaks you can see nothing's been squared off really really nice sound I'm really happy with that so let's listen to the final version which is the drive vocal sent into the internal Zoom l20 compressor and see if there's a difference we can see here already that the actual waveform looks quite Big And Chunky but there still are quite a few spikes in there so obviously we didn't apply too much compression which would have led to a really squished sound and but hopefully this is going to retain some decent quality as well so let's have a listen here we go and I can't see this happening stay Within if you are real then we must deal with everything unless you're scared hold me till you're dying me how come you don't know how come you don't know how come you don't know [Music] okay so really nice and I'm very impressed with that because it's only a one knob compressor I was being quite cautious with the application of it I'll probably only turn the dial up to about nine o'clock so it's only using about a quarter of its power and I've got to say it's applied just a decent amount of compression there it's brought things a lot more further forward but it still kept a lot of the transients intact the worst thing you can do with the vocal when you're applying compression printing like this is that you can overcook it and then you just can't get those Dynamics back it's much better to maintain the dynamic range so you can manipulate it in the door or on the l20 in the mixing stage now one thing you've got to consider is that the rack compressor has a lot of controls you can control the knee the attack the ratio of the compression so yeah some good options there I'm really happy with the dry signal again the preamps sound fantastic really really nice they obviously preserve the whole vocal really well the rack compressors doing a sterling job and the inbuilt compressor has worked really nicely too so if you don't have a rack compressor to send out to I think using a little bit of the actual inbuilt compressor is a viable option foreign [Music]

Channel: Pete's Guitar Universe

Views: 30,658

Keywords: zoom, music, multitrack, recorder, studio, guitar, mixing, recording, zoom l20

Id: 3zySOqjdaMA

Length: 20min 12sec (1212 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 30 2023