hello again and welcome back to the channel. i thought on this episode we would take a look
at five typical mistakes people make with the behringer xr18 and what you can do to avoid those.
as always please like and subscribe to the channel . okay here we go number one is improperly setting
the gain when you're sound checking a channel and someone is playing or singing into that
channel you're looking for minus 18 on the meter. again that is minus 18 on the meter,
not 0 db as some people might tell you. the reason for that is the meters are at a different scale.
these meters are dbfs db full scale. that makes all the difference. you do have some margin of error so
it does not have to be perfectly -18 but it should be in the neighborhood. okay and now we can move on
to number two. number two is opening a channel too soon during sound check. besides just muting the
channel you want to go ahead and bring the fader back and you want to bring all the aux sends back
as well or bus sends for your monitors. this way once you've set the gain you can now unmute the
channel and slowly bring the fader up to bring the sound into the house without any surprises.
and the same goes for the monitors, if you just unmute the channel, but left the fader up, it
could blast off into feedback or whatever, and not exactly what you want to hear. so just remember to
bring the channel fader up slowly and the monitors up slowly to avoid any surprises.
that brings us to number three. number three is don't mix on the gain knobs!
the gain should be set and forget. that's really important. so remember that: set your gain and
leave your gain alone once your gain is set. use your fader and your monitor sends to adjust volume.
the only caveat to not touching the gain knob during the show would be if someone were to
sandbag you so bad during the sound check that they either almost are clipping, or are clipping their
channel. and you really have no choice at that point. on the other hand you do have a bit of a
margin for error, so if they're a little low or a little high it's not a problem. you can compensate
with the fader or with the sends. just leave the gain alone. changing the gain after you've set the
gain will change the levels of everything in that channel after the gain control. that
includes not only levels in the house but also the levels of the monitors and the effects sends.
in this example i'm going to show the monitor one output level meter and i'm going to play with the
gain and you can see how the monitor level is going up and down with me adjusting the gain.
obviously that's not something you want gains for all intents and purposes should be set and forget
and that brings us to number four. number four is overlooking the high pass filter in the channel
eq section. the high pass folder is also known as the low cut filter. it means the same thing
the high pass filter or low cut rolls off the low end but that said it's a slope not a cliff .
lows roll off, they don't fall off . even if you don't thoroughly understand the high pass
filter and the ways that it can be creatively, and surgically used, you should at least be using the
filter in a generic kind of way and setting it at a 20 hertz roll off in the channel eq strip,
truthfully if you don't have a wall of subs you can probably go ahead and adjust that up
to 30 hertz or even 40 hertz. if your speakers cannot reproduce signals that low there's no
use asking your amplifier to actually amplify signals that low. you're just wasting head room.
beyond that you can use the high pass filter to remove rumble and mud from channels that don't
have low frequency content in the first place. for example things like the keyboards, the kick drum
the low toms, the bass guitar all of those will have low frequency content so you'll want that low
cut filter at 40 hertz maybe 30 hertz or 20 hertz. on the other hand things like the snare drum the
high toms the guitars and the vocals, they could all actually use something like a hundred hertz .
in any case you definitely should be using your high pass filter on your channel strips .
that brings us to number five, and number five is : don't be over eq'ing. that is extremely important.
for one thing, just using the high pass filter might get you really close to what you're
looking for with the eq. many times with the eq less is more it's typically better to cut
offending frequencies than to try and compensate by boosting around them. as a general rule you
typically get more aggressive with things like drums versus vocals, which you tend to want to
have more of a light touch with. if your eq looks anything like this chances are you've done more
damage than actually enhancing the signal that you were trying to enhance. it's impossible to say what
your vocal eq should look like, but it should look more like this than the previous example.
and while there's nothing wrong with a couple of small eq boost here and there,
you definitely don't want a signal that's boosted and looks like this.
besides sounding fairly unnatural that's likely going to be a feedback nightmare as well. if you
find you're dialing yourself into these kind of over eq'd settings you're probably best just to
go ahead and reset the flat. many times flat is going to be better than anything that's over eq'd .
sometimes less really is more. and that should do it for this video. please leave any comments
or questions below and if you would like me to do a deeper dive on anything we discussed
in this video or something along these lines please let me know and maybe i'll be able to do
that as well. and as i said, as always, please like and subscribe. i'll see you next time