- Hi, I'm Jordan from Kettner Creative.
In this video, we're going to show you
how to set up and connect the Blue Yeti USB microphone
with an audio mixer.
A lot of people want to do something like this
in order to unlock the microphone, so to speak.
Maybe you want to mix it with other microphones,
maybe you're looking at using some of the high end features
from an audio mixer, like compression, EQ,
or something like that.
We're going to walk through all those options,
show you what the options are,
show you which settings I recommend
and how to connect this so you can record
through an audio mixer to your computer.
Now, if you are looking for current up-to-date pricing
or specs for anything that you see in this video
as we set this up, please check out the links
down in the description below.
We have current up-to-date pricing and specs
from a variety of online retailers
to make sure that you're always finding
the best price possible
if you're looking at buying anything like this.
Next, you might be looking at this Blue Yeti
and wondering why it's not on the factory stand
like yours might be.
We do have a separate video
that I'll link in the description below as well
with five tips to get your Blue Yeti sounding
as good as possible without spending too much extra money,
kind of 20 or $30 of accessories
to get it up closer to your mic,
add a shock mount, a wind screen
and some settings that we recommend
that will really make your Blue Yeti sound
much, much better, so do check that out as well.
So, first of all, in order to connect the Blue Yeti
to an audio mixer here,
you do need to make sure that it's powered.
The best way to do that and the best starting point for this
is to connect it to your computer
and make sure that your gain is all set up
as you normally have it
to make sure that it's working properly
for your input source, which is actually your voice
going into the microphone.
Once you have the Blue Yeti set up
as you normally would have it set up,
then we can talk about connecting it to an audio mixer.
In this video, we have two different audio mixers here
in front of me.
I highly recommend both of these.
You really can't go wrong with either one.
The Yamaha has been super faithful to me.
I've used it at thousands of live events over my career.
Plus, our company has rented it out
to close to seven or 8,000 events
and they've been absolutely bulletproof for us.
The Mackie ProFX10v3 audio mixer
is a little more full featured.
It has the same reliability.
I don't have as much experience
in terms of thousands of events, but I've used it a lot.
And it does have some really, really cool features.
We have another video in comparing these two.
So if you are looking for an audio mixer,
check that out as well.
But for the purposes of this video,
there are distinct differences between these two mixers
and we're going to talk about that
when it comes to connecting your Blue Yeti
and making sure that you have the right settings set up
for what you're doing.
So the best way to do this is, like I said,
you power this up, you power up your audio mixer,
and then we're going to take the output
from your headphone jack and plug that the audio mixer.
In order to do that, you'll need a cable like this one.
This is the best type of cable to use for this.
It'll basically take your headphone jack output
from the Blue Yeti
and it will convert it to two quarter inch cables
so you can connect it to any audio mixer or audio interface.
Typically, you always have one that's white
and one that's red.
The red is always for the right side,
the white is always representing
what would have been your left headphone.
So we're going to plug this into the Blue Yeti now.
Plug the cable into the headphone jack
into the bottom of the Blue Yeti.
Now we just have to connect this to the audio mixer.
When you're connecting this to an audio mixer
you have two options generally on an audio mixer like this.
You can plug it into the stereo line level inputs here.
You can see that five and six on this audio mixer
are linked to a single volume knob.
You can see there, it says level five, six.
That means that with the two jacks, it'll sum them,
and give you a single volume knob,
which is quite ideal for something like this.
Another option here is to use the quarter-inch input
on this combi jack.
You can see here that it says mic and line.
The mic level input is referring to the XLR
cable input here.
And the line level input is referring to the quarter-inch.
Now, if you want, you can just plug one of these in
and that'll work just as well.
Most people by default will plug in
the white end of the cable because that's the left ear.
If you're going mono,
most people say just to use the left side.
Now on the Mackie mixer here, we have the same inputs.
We have six, seven, which are stereo quarter-inch input
and we have the combi jack inputs here,
just like we have on the Yamaha.
And we have some other ones that just say line three
or line four.
You can use any of those in the same way
that we're about to use it with the Yamaha.
But what's new on the Mackie here
and the reason that we brought this in,
is it has an insert, which is also a quarter-inch cable.
You don't want to be using this for your input.
You want to be using the line level input
where it says mic and line up here,
that's a way better input to use.
The insert is a tool that you can use
and it actually will take
whatever's coming through this channel strip,
send it to an external piece of gear
and bring it back through that jack.
So it's not an input jack.
I do just want to clear that up,
give you a helpful tip there.
So first of all, we're going to try this
with level five, six, with line five, six here
on the Yamaha mixer.
We'll plug it into there.
Next, we're gonna turn the stereo level up
all the way to this triangle position.
On the Mackie mixer, there's a U which stands for unity,
that's the same thing.
On some audio mixers there's a zero or an infinity sign.
They're all saying the same thing.
That's where you want to have that input
or that main stereo output set.
Next, we want to turn up this level here
to this triangle, zero or unity position.
Now, right now, I have the gain on the headphone output
set to about 60%.
And you can see here that we're hitting zero.
I don't like turning up the headphone jack here past 50%
because it does start to get noisy and hissy.
If you've ever turned up this headphone jack a lot
I'm sure you noticed the same thing.
But we don't have a lot of options here.
We have a little bit of headroom,
but it's the same thing on this Yamaha audio console
or any other audio console.
Once you turn it up past this triangle,
zero or unity position,
you start to add more noise into your recording
and it's not always the best way to do it.
So one way that I prefer to do this, the best for me,
is to unplug what we just did.
Then we're going to plug the white cable
into this first input here.
We're going to turn the level up
to that zero unity position.
But here we have a proper preamp
that'll help us set the gain a little bit better.
So I'm going to turn the headphone down to 50%.
I'm hoping that that will reduce some of the noise
coming from the Blue Yeti, that background hiss.
And you can see here that the level is at minus 10.
So what I want to do here is I want to turn this gain up
until we're consistently hitting zero.
The preamp here is the best way to be adding gain
or volume to your recording.
You can see here, it didn't take much
but now we're consistently hitting zero.
And when I look over at my computer here,
I can see that I'm getting a similar output
from the Blue Yeti itself
because I can see the meter for that and the Yamaha.
So this is a better way with less noise to do it,
in my opinion and my experience.
Now let's talk about some of the cool things that we can do
with an audio mixer now that we have this connected.
What are the benefits of connecting the Blue Yeti
to an audio mixer like this?
One of the first things that we can do
is we can add compression.
The Yamaha and the Mackie here have a one knob compressor.
Basically what this does, is it will kind of...
A rough way to think about it is it will auto mix for you.
It'll make your quietest parts a little bit louder.
It'll make your loudest parts a little bit quieter.
So you're not spending the whole time recording,
trying to mix and change the volume knob
to make sure that the audio is sounding consistent.
I'm going to turn this up to about 50% here.
And you should be able to hear
that it just narrows the dynamic range of my voice
a little bit
and it does make it sound a little bit more even.
Now you don't want to over compress
'cause that'll act like a limiter,
it kind of flattens you out and takes all the emotion
out of what you're saying.
But it is a useful tool
if you have a bunch of microphones like this
and you're recording something like a group podcast,
this can be really effective for you.
Let me turn that off now.
The next thing that you can do
with a microphone like this plugged into an audio mixer
is you can add a high pass filter or a low cut,
depending on what your mixer calls it.
They basically do the same thing,
let me you click it on now,
and basically offers a low end roll off.
You might not even hear the difference
depending on the headphones or the speakers
that you're using.
But this basically makes sure
that nothing from this microphone goes below 80 hertz,
basically takes this out of the subwoofer
of whatever device people are listening to you from.
It cleans it up a little bit,
just removes a little bit of that mud.
Next, if you want the highs
just a little bit more articulate,
if you want to highlight the S's or something like that,
you can turn the highs up.
If the S's and the more sibilant frequencies
are kind of annoying and shrill,
if somebody has a lisp as they're speaking,
you can turn that down a little bit
and it will help to warm up that voice a little bit.
If you want more articulation coming from your voice,
you can turn up the mid just a little bit.
It's at 2.5K, which is where most of the articulation
from your voice comes from.
Again, don't go too crazy with the EQ,
but something like that could help you
stand out a little bit.
And again, you can do a little bit more of a low cut,
if you do want to kind of make your voice stand out
a little bit more amongst background noise
or something like that.
There's some simple things that you can do
that should help your Blue Yeti to sound a little bit better
and a little bit more clear in your recording.
And that's one of the main benefits
of connecting to an audio mixer,
plus the ability to mix it with other microphones.
So what are the downsides of doing this?
What are the things that you need to look out for
to make sure that you're not actually degrading the quality
of your audio?
To help illustrate the point here,
let's talk about the Blue Yeti in itself.
It's a USB microphone,
which means that it has a built in audio interface.
There's a microphone, which is the analog pickup device.
Then it converts it to a digital signal.
Then for the headphone jack,
it's converting it back to an analog signal.
It's coming to the Yamaha mixer here
where you're adding gain, level knob, another level,
and then you're converting it to a digital signal
for your computer.
So, you have the gain on the back of the Blue Yeti,
the gain for the headphone output, gain, level, level.
So there's five different devices
that have the ability to add noise into your recording,
that background hiss, that might be annoying.
You might notice it, you might not,
depending on the headphones or the speakers
that you're using.
And then generally, so not only are five gain devices
generally a bad thing in any input chain,
but you also are going analog, digital, analog, digital
to your computer.
Every time you go back and forth between analog and digital,
you will increase things like noise and latency as well.
So that's the big thing that you want to look out for here.
You don't want to get too crazy
with the gain on your Blue Yeti.
You don't want to get too crazy
with the volume on your headphone output.
You want to keep most levels
at that triangle or unity position, if at all possible,
and use as little gain as possible
to avoid adding unnecessary noise into your recording.
That is the biggest thing
that you want to be looking out for
with a setup like this one.
If you have any questions that we didn't cover this setup,
please leave a comment down in the comment section below.
Again, if you are looking for pricing or specs,
we have links down in the description below
with pricing and specs for you.
And if you want to see more videos like this in the future,
please like and subscribe.
Thank you for watching.
(bright music)