- Hi, I'm Jordan from Kettner Creative.
In this video, I'm excited to show you
the Mackie ProFX10v3
audio console.
This audio console is built for all types of events,
including small live events, live streaming,
audio recording, or hybrid events
where you're mixing live events
and live streaming, for example.
Now in this video, I'm gonna show you how to connect
a couple of different types of microphones,
a line level source.
I'm gonna show you how to connect it to your computer
and I'm gonna give my thoughts on some of the features
included in this audio mixer
compared to other audio mixers in the same category.
Now, if you want to see pricing or specs
for anything that you see in this video,
while I'm working with this audio console,
please check out the links in the description below.
You'll find everything there,
including the current pricing of this Makie ProFX10v3.
This is a super cool audio console
that can do a whole bunch of different things.
So I'm gonna show you those now.
On the back of this audio console,
we'll start with the main power out options here.
There's this kind of proprietary
locking power connector here.
So plug in our power cable and screw that in.
Is nice to have a locking power cable
on something like this,
especially if you're using this in a desk environment
and you just want it permanently installed,
and don't want to have to worry about that.
The on switch has already turned on
and there's a USB output on the back as well.
I'm gonna connect that USB cable to the computer.
When you buy this audio console,
it comes with a, A to B USB cable.
I had to buy my own that went from the 2.0 output
on the back, to USB C but that's totally fine.
So on my computer here,
I'm just sitting file new audio recording in quick time,
and I'm just gonna hit record
so we can actually get a select the
ProFX and then hit record.
That'll allow us to have a recorded copy
of everything that we do on this audio console today.
So, first of all,
let's talk about the main outputs.
Main outputs It has XLR and quarter inch.
The quarter inch cables can accept balanced
and unbalanced cable.
So if you're connecting these to any type of speaker
or amplifier or something like that,
this is what you would use your connect that was up here
to your powered speaker. Next, I wanna zero out the board.
What that means is we're gonna mute all the inputs here
by default. I want everything muted.
I want all the white knobs turned all the way down.
This one can stay up.
We'll talk about this blend knob in a little bit,
but we'll leave that one right in the middle for now.
We want the input gains all the way down.
We want these gray compression knobs all the way down.
We want these gray knobs up,
these orange knobs down and these blue knobs up
in the 12 o'clock position.
Now we're gonna start by increasing the level of the main
output of this mixer, to where it says U or unity,
which also stands for zero.
If you're coming from a console with faders on it,
that's a great starting point for the output level
of this audio console. Obviously throughout your event,
you can turn this up or down depending on what you need,
but this is the best starting point for this place.
Now, one common complaint about this audio console
is that yes, this level does not have any impact
on the USB output of this audio console.
This is just for the stereo outputs up here
for your powered speakers. So keep that in mind.
If you think that you faded this out,
your mics might still be on and coming out of the USB
output onto a live stream. So please be careful about that.
That brings us to one of my favorite features
of this console that is not common with other audio consoles
in this price range. And that is the mute button,
not a lot of small audio consoles,
like this have mute buttons. And it's great that this does,
for the reason that I just mentioned.
If you want to go off air for a minute or two,
you can just mute your inputs and leave it at that.
Another common thing is people use this console
for live streaming all the time.
It's a great format of console for that purpose,
but with a live streaming audio console,
you might have two or three different computers
plugged into this thing.
You might have two or three different microphones
that you use depending on what you're doing.
And this allows you to leave your mix saved how you had it
for each input type,
and then you just unmute them as you need them.
That is super handy.
It's a really nice feature to have it in a console
of this size.
Next, we have the control room inputs
with independent control room volume.
So if we have studio monitors,
you can use that. We have a headphone jack here.
So your headphone volume is there,
there is a main mute output here again,
that's just for your speakers.
So if you get really bad feedback or something like that,
you can just choke the speakers and then figure it out.
So that's helpful.
And then,
so your stereo output here will always a copy of that
will go to the USB on the computer. So keep that in mind.
We'll talk about the USB inputs from the computer
at the end.
Okay.
So what we're gonna do now
is we're gonna plug in a microphone
and that's going to help us walk through
all the features of this mixer
as we deal with that microphone.
So, first of all, we're going to plug in this XLR cable
from the first microphone here.
Now you can see that the first two jacks are combi-jacks,
they'll take XLR or quarter inch cables
next beside them in three and four,
the XLR is separate from the quarter inch jack
on the first two channels here, there's a high Z button.
That's basically a 20 decibel pad.
So if you're plugging in a high impedance instrument
like electric guitar or bass guitar
straight into this mixer,
that will help scale it back just a little bit
to make it more appropriate for use with this pre-amp
now below that we have an insert
an insert is a quarter inch jack
that basically splits out to a Y cable.
And you can just plug either end of that Y cable
into the inputs and outputs of an outboard
piece of equipment.
So what that does is it takes a single from here,
it'll loop it through an outboard processor
and bring it back.
This is common for something like a compressor,
you take it out,
you compress it and you bring it back into this channel
for the rest of its processing. So one day,
perhaps if you're buying this as a live streaming
audio console, that might be a nice upgrade for you
in the future. That being said,
we're going to talk about the built in compressor
that this mixer has.
Below that we have this low cut switch,
which knocks off everything below a hundred Hertz,
and it helps clean up some of that mud.
That's common in vocal mics. Next we have the input gain,
and we're going to show you how to set that up now.
So according to the manual,
they want you to unmute the channel
and then turn up the gain until this green light here,
blinks, there's this level set button. So right there,
it's just starting to blink.
But if we look at the meter here,
you can see that we're somewhere around plus three,
plus six plus 10. If this meter is not moving for you,
then just press this two phones button.
And that's no good. If we were recording this right now,
we haven't sent it through yet.
We'll do it again in a second,
but you'll notice that it sounds super Clippy.
One of your recording to your computer, through the USB,
with the input like that.
So we needed to dial that back somewhere below zero.
So we, we don't want it going yellow at all.
We really want it somewhere between the seven and zero
mark there.
So once we're there,
then we're going to turn up our input.
And now we can hear the mixer through the computer.
So you should be able to hear this microphone now.
So now I'm going to turn up the game back to where it was
and you can see here what kind of clipping it has.
So as we hit that, plus six plus 10,
it should sound pretty clipped right now.
And that's no good. That's not what we want.
So we're going to bring the game back until we're back down
to this kind of minus seven, minus four,
minus two range there.
Now a tool that can help us do that better is a compressor.
How the compressor works on this Mackie mixer
is it basically just reduces threshold.
And it has a fixed six to one compression ratio.
Once that threshold is exceeded.
So by turning this up halfway,
we're reducing a bunch of gain off the top.
And once it's hitting that mark, wherever this line land,
then it gets compressed six to one
for everything above that.
So really helps to bring those louder parts
down into an appropriate range.
So if we're really worried about this zero getting breached,
then we can bring this compressor up.
And it's basically just to put that limit in there for us.
So that's a tool that you can use here
and now you can see that it's just not going past zero,
even though I am talking a little bit louder now than I was
it's still not right there. I got it two plus three.
So we'll see how that sounds.
See if you can hear any clipping there,
but it does definitely help quite a bit.
So I'm gonna leave that on.
Now I'm going to flick on this low cut
and see if you can hear
the lower frequencies drop out a little bit.
It should just sound a little bit more clear with this on.
I'm going to leave that on, the three band EQ here.
The key to EQ is just make subtle changes.
If you're doing a talking head podcast,
just leave it straight flat.
If you're in a live environment
and you're getting a bit of feedback,
just reduce the highs a little bit.
If that does not work,
then put those back and reduce the low, mids a little bit.
Again, if you want to clean it up a little bit,
you can reduce the lows.
If you want a little bit more vocal presence,
you can increase the mids.
But the key here is to not make the same move on all three.
Now this EQ will
adjust the volume of those frequencies
by about 15 decibels. So if you turn them all down,
you'll just reduce the input gain by 15 decibels.
If you turn all three up,
you increase the game by 15 decibels.
So don't make the same move on all three bands.
Don't turn them all up.
You're just going to make it louder
and don't turn them all down.
You're just going to make it quieter.
So keep that in mind.
But yeah, just, if you can't hear a difference,
just put it back to flat.
It'll probably sound better that way.
Next we have this FX send.
Now an FX send works
kind of like an aux channel on this mixer
so we can dial it in and it'll come out.
This effect send here,
but if we want to process the effects,
then we have that choice as well.
So what we would do is we turn this up here to this unity,
right in the middle, we'd unmute the effects,
would increase this here,
you should be able to hear this effect kick in now.
Now I'm gonna turn it off,
turn that off, and put the mute on and turn that down.
And that should get rid of the effect there for you.
So that's how that works. And then we have our pan.
So I can pan this to the right.
You should be able to hear that and I'll pan it to the left.
You should be able to hear that as well.
Okay. So that's it for this microphone.
So now we're going to mute this
and move on to the next microphone.
All right.
So next we're going to do this condenser microphone,
bring it up, turn the gain up.
And as we can see nothing's happening
and that's because phantom power is not on.
So we're going to turn phantom power on,
then unmute the channel.
And then we're going to increase the gain here
until we're back to that kind of minus seven to zero,
I'm going to bring in a little bit of compression there
to help us keep where we need to be.
And then I increased the level here
and now you should be able to hear this microphone.
So again, if we want to make this a little more crisp,
you can add some highs like that.
If we wanna make some vocal presence
then we can push the mids up a little bit,
and if we want a more drastic, low cut,
we can turn the lows down as well.
So lots of options there.
Again, we can pan this microphone left or right as well.
If you want to see the pen on the meter,
just unclick that to phones button.
And now you can see what the main output is doing there.
So a couple of different options for you there.
But other than that,
that's how it condenser microphone works with this setup.
Again, just please really keep that number under zero.
If you're doing a USB stream for live streaming
or something like that,
the next thing I'm going to show you
is plugging in a line level input.
There's a couple of different ways
that you can do it on this mixer.
You can plug it into the line three or line four Jack,
or you can use a stereo input.
What this stereo input does is that
it automatically pans them for you left to right.
Now, you use a cable like this.
This will take a headphone Jack
and it'll convert it to two quarter inch cables.
This is a bad example,
but you can see this one has a red ring.
Red is always right.
Especially if you're live streaming with this audio console,
you don't want to get those mixed up.
It'll confuse everybody.
That's watching your show with headphones on.
So I'll plug this in and then you can see here,
we don't have gain for a line level input,
but I'm just going to turn the track on here.
Unmute the channel. That's 5/6.
You turn that up.
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I'm going to turn that down.
So that's how that works for 9/10.
You can use this 3.5 millimeter Jack,
if you have an aux cable or something like that,
or you can use an USB input.
So now we're going to talk about how USB inputs
work on this audio mixer.
By default,
it will accept up to four inputs from your computer.
So two different stereo pairs.
The first stereo pair comes into this blend knob,
and you can choose to send it to your headphones
or control room by switching that button there.
Now, what you can do with this
is you can pan it to 1/2.
So you're just monitoring your headphones
or you can pan it all the way to this side
and you can monitor just the inputs on the mixer.
So why this is helpful is if you're a multi-track recording,
you might want to be listening to the song
that you're working on. While you lay down a new track.
If you don't wanna see you have a guitar amp or something
right beside you, it's plenty loud.
You just want to hear what's coming from the computer.
You can do that.
Now this blend knob is zero latency,
which is really helpful when you're recording.
If you're doing something like recording a live vocal,
you'll probably want this right in the middle.
So you can hear the vocal coming in through your microphone
at the same time,
as you can hear the track that you're working on
through your headphones or your monitors, but again,
maybe you just wanna hear your input or whatever
you gotta choose that blend. That's completely up to you.
The next input is 3/4. And by toggling this button,
you can choose to send us down this 9/10 channel
and you can do whatever you want.
That way you can EQ it, send it to the stereo mix
or send it to an aux or this affects send.
So that's helpful that they have it broken out that way.
So that's how to set up everything common
on this audio console.
Again, if you want to see pricing or specs
for anything that you've seen in this video,
please check out the links in the description below.
If you have any questions or comments
or you wanna see a follow up video
of how to do a very specific thing,
please check.
We do have a playlist for a whole bunch of different videos
with this audio console.
So check that
to make sure we haven't already made the video,
but then leave a comment in the comment section
and we'll make the video if there is a need for it.
Also,
if you want to see more videos like this in the future,
please like, and subscribe.
Thank you for watching.
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