- Hi, I'm Jordan from Kettner Creative and in this video,
I wanna show you how to set up a small, basic sound system.
A lot of the things that we go through in this video,
hopefully its short,
are also applicable into large events as well.
So,
when you first arrive at the venue,
you wanna take a look around
and come up with your strategy right away.
You might be meeting an event planner
or some other contact at the venue
and you need to understand what's happening
and get the lay of the land, where they want the podium,
where the main area is and where the speakers
may or may not go.
As a general rule of thumb,
you want the speakers to be in front of all microphones,
that's like best case scenario.
You can't always make that work
but you're setting yourself up for failure
if you put your speaker right behind the podium mic
or something similar.
You always wanna get the main amplification,
away from the microphones as much as possible,
in a practical scenario you can't always do that.
So when I walk in the the room is generally go,
meet the client or meet the event planner and find out,
make sure we have the right equipment
and make sure we have the,
we know what the event is and confirm all the details,
like start time and all that
and then the first thing I will do,
is I will connect the mixer to power.
The reason that I connect the mixer to power,
is because when I start at an event,
I wanna start with what I call big problems
and work your way down to little problems, right?
So if you plug your mixer into power and there's no power,
you know you have a bigger issue that you need to sort out,
before you start running any other cable.
You need to figure out one,
if it's the mixer that has the issue
or two if it's the venue power that has the issue,
in which case you need to start, you know,
finding whoever is in charge of maintenance at the venue
and go from there.
So,
here's like a small Yamaha MG10, 10 channel mixer.
So we'll plug in the power.
Power cable here
and then turn the mixer on.
So you can see that there's a power light here,
so the mixer is on.
While you're doing that, while you're plugging things in
and screening the power in the back,
you wanna be looking at the mixer itself,
you never wanna be zoning out.
You wanna just, take a look while you're working on it,
make sure the master volumes down,
make sure all the channel volumes are down.
Make sure that the last guy that finished with the board,
set all the EQ flat, make sure that all your gains are down.
You wanna do that before you turn the mixer on,
to make sure that what comes out of the mixer,
when we connected to the speakers,
is what you expect it to be.
So you need to start from zero, always,
especially with an analog mixer, with a digital mixer,
if you're walking in with a saved show,
then that's a different story.
So the same thing,
we wanna make sure that the speaker has power now.
So the speaker might be somewhere else in the room.
So we'll find out where we wanna put it,
so it's away from the microphone
and then we will plug in.
As we're plugging it in,
before you connect it to the outlet,
you wanna make sure that the speaker's turned off,
that all the gains are set to zero.
In this case, we'll be feeding at line level.
So you wanna check all the switches,
you wanna turn the DSP off and the high pass frequency off.
You always wanna be starting from zero.
So we checked all that, now we can plug it in.
Now, some people don't like plugging the speakers into power
until you have all these signal cable run.
Well, sometimes we're in a situation where we're doing eight
of these sound systems in a day, right?
So like I said, in my mind, I'll sacrifice,
what some people call best practice
because of the practicality of,
you're probably in a room that has a dead outlet
and you need to know that,
before you start running other cable.
So I'll usually plug it in, turn it on,
you see that there's power, then turn it back off.
You don't want the speaker to be turned on,
when you connect it to the mixer.
So as a general rule,
you run the speaker before you run any of the inputs.
Some guys like to run everything,
all the inputs and all the speaker things,
before powering anything on
again, I think the practicality of that is pretty terrible
because you can run it all
and then you go to turn it on
and figure out that you have a power issue and you know,
soundchecks' in half an hour
so I think it's more wise,
go through the process of confirming everything,
as you do it.
So here we have,
speakers now connected to the stereo output of the mixer
and then I'm gonna turn it on.
So the speaker is now connected to the mixer
and it's on at zero.
So the first thing I do before I check any microphones,
cause usually with microphones,
you have like a bunch of wireless,
a bunch of wired microphones
but I like to test what I know
and what I know is music from a iPhone or my phone.
So let's quickly find a,
track, so I plug it into one of the channels,
at the end of the board.
So I can see that it's playing on my phone.
I set the volume on my phone to 75%,
make sure it's working there
and then I start by bringing up the master on the mixer,
up to about 50, 60% and then I'll bring up the channel,
of the phone that I just plugged in.
So that's pretty much it.
So you're just making sure that there's sound,
coming out of the speaker.
Now, if this was real, I'd let it go
and then I'd start wiring up the microphones,
while the music's playing
and while that's happening,
while you're wiring up the microphones,
it's good to just be listening to the room.
How echo-y is it?
How present is the base?
Like how does the room sound?
Is it really echo-y or dead or is it, what is,
what's the room doing?
You wanna be thinking about this,
while you're running cable.
So now we start on the first channel.
On the mixer, everything works, on an analog mixer
everything works in channel strips, so vertical lines.
So everything to do with the microphone that I plug in here,
is directly below it.
So again, before I plug anything into the mixer,
I'm making sure that everything is zeroed out.
The gain is down, the compressor is off,
the EQ is flat and all the auxiliaries are down.
The pan is flat and the volume is down.
Once I've confirmed all that, I will plug it in.
Here we just have a wired Shure 58.
So,
the Yamaha MG10,
has kind of like a, an indicator here on the gain switch,
of were a good starting place is,
so while I'm talking, I'll just bring it up to that.
Now it won't make sound until you bring up the volume
to match it.
Check, check, check, check one, two
and there we have it.
So 99% of events, you just leave the EQ flat,
unless you actually know what you're doing.
So all the green knobs should be pointed up.
If it sounds a little muddy to you,
which sometimes like a wired microphone will
or a vocal mic will, just bring the low down a touch
and on this particular mixer,
there's a high pass filter on it,
so you can just engage that and turn that on
but generally you can tweak the mids a bit,
but I mean, we get people calling us and texting us
and all the EQ is turned down and the volumes up
and that didn't actually do anything.
If you know anything about EQ,
if you make the same adjustment on all your EQs,
it's just bringing the whole volume down.
Generally speaking, if it's talking head
or just vocal only just leave the EQ flat.
If you're getting feedback,
it's because of bad speaker placement.
So you either need more speakers spread around the room,
in a lower volume
or you need to move the speaker from behind the microphone,
'cause that's what's causing your problem.
Once the first microphone is done,
then you can pretty much follow the same process,
for all the other microphones as well.
When people rent sound systems from us,
we put a piece of tape here,
so you can label it on the tape, which is best practice
and that's how you set up a small sound system
and that's my approach to setting up a small sound system.
If you have any questions, just email us,
events@I kettnercreative.com
or give us a call (604) 427-1629.
Thanks.