Hello and welcome back to the channel! For this episode i thought we would
discuss the effects rack in the behringer xr18,
and the midas mr18, and dive into the routing, patching, and using the built-in
effects. there seems to be a lot of questions
around this topic on the forums, and i think it would be a big help to
study the signal flow as the first step. so let's take a look at these diagrams
i've made. We have our source, the singer and her microphone, into our
channel. the first point in the console is the
gain control. everything follows the gain control.
since it's first, any change of the gain will affect
everything after the gain in the signal path.
on our sends page we have the various tap point options for our bus sends that we
can choose from. this is where the selected bus gets its
signal. there are various options, but besides
anything else, these will either be pre-fader or
post-fader. pre-fader, and every option above it in
the sends window are all (overall) pre-fader. the terms pre-fader or
post-fader are all referring to the channel fader.
if a bus is pre-fader then nothing you do on the channel fader
will affect the bus. the pre-fader bus is before the channel
fader.
if the bus is post fader, then anything you do on the channel fader
will affect that post fader bus, since it's after the channel fader. so
you can see here, i have a typical monitor bus that is tapped
pre-eq, which is also pre-fader. ...at the top part of the diagram...
if you follow the red line you can see that the monitor bus send took
its signal before the channel fader. therefore it's pre-fader.
that's because we don't normally want our monitors following the house faders.
i'll leave a link for a monitor setup in the text below.
as we follow the signal further, there's the channel fader itself.
after the channel fader would be our post fader busses.
in this case, i have an fx send here. it's typical for effects sends to be
post fader. post fader effects sends are also the default setting
of the console. you generally want your reverb and other time based effects to
follow the channel fader so that the effects balance, once set,
stays relative to the channel level. let's go ahead and add a reverb to the
signal chain, and we need to add the effects return as well.
in the MAIN tab of the effects return channel, we have an option to send this
channel to the left and right mains. the default will be highlighted and
that's what we want here. if you're not starting from scratch on
the default console setting then always make sure your effects returns
are engaged to the left and right main out. there is a caveat to that, and that
would be if you're sending your reverb to a subgroup
before sending it to the house. in that case
you would not want the effects returns assigned to the main left and right,
and you would want that subgroup instead assigned to the main left and right.
that would just complicate things right now though so we'll stay with the
typical setup here... but i will leave a link in the text
below for a video about subgroups if you want to study that more.
so now you can see how the reverb is running parallel
to our vocalist's signal, and both of those signal paths are meeting at the main
output. that way we'll get our vocalist feeding
the house, and we can blend in our reverb at
whatever level we want via the channel effects send,
and the return, to balance our wet dry mix
in the house. [Reverb Example]
[Music] now let's talk about a place that seems
to trip some people up. one area that seems to cause some
confusion is the subject of 'inserts'. we do have a
digital insert point on our channels as you can see here.
meanwhile, the effects rack offers us the option to
insert any of our four effects, and doesn't seem to put any
limitations on that. they can be inserted on the channels, our
main left and right, or any of the bus outputs. I suspect
some people are coming to this for mixing in the box on a DAW,
and who take the quickest way to put a reverb or delay on a track,
and simply insert the plug-in on the track rather than setting up buses on
the DAW. ...and i'm sure some people come to the
digital console platform from mixing on an
analog console, and have used an insert cable and patched a reverb or chorus
into a channel to save a bus for something else on that
analog console. ...and so there might be some instinct to
try those same things here. earlier i said the xr18 doesn't
seemingly give you any limitations for inserting
effects... but in fact there's one huge limitation
for inserting time-based effects like reverb,
delay, and chorus:
behringer doesn't give us a wet dry balance control on those plugins!
if you insert a time-based effect on a channel or bus
you'll only get 100 percent full wet, and you'll lose all dry signal and
there's no way around that. this is perfectly fine for compression,
and amp sim, or any plug-in where you want the effect
itself only. but that's not usually reverb, chorus, or
delay. now, before you begin to think behringer
really dropped the ball here, we need to think about some things:
there are six xlr aux outs on the front of the console...
there are six buses on each channel that we can assign
to those six xlr outs.
the four fx sends on each channel are dedicated to the effects rack.
they can't be assigned to an output. there are four effects slots
in the effects rack and no matter how we route it,
our plugins have to have a slot. therefore,
there's no point in inserting a reverb, delay, or chorus.
we're not going to gain an extra output by using an insert,
and we have to put the effects plug-in in the fx rack to use it,
so there's no way we're going to gain the use of a fifth plug-in...
or an extra bus output. without a wet dry balance control,
for a time-based plug-ins, there's nothing gained by inserting it over just
reaching up to the effects send to put reverb on our source. but all that
said, this is for time-based effects. if you
want to use an amp sim or one of the vintage compressor emulations,
then that is exactly where you should use it as an insert.
one place it's fairly common to use a vintage compression emulation
is a subgroup. maybe you have a drum subgroup,
or a vocal subgroup, and you want to glue them together with a vintage compressor
plug-in. that's a perfect example of a place to
use a compressor insert. create a subgroup...
choose the compressor you want...
and insert it on the subgroup.
or you could insert it directly on the money channel,
put it directly on the singer's channel. another popular insert option is the
de-esser. choose the de-esser and insert it in the
channel of a vocalist that needs de-essing
i'll put the diagrams i used here on the free side of my patreon page for anyone
that wants to download them and print them out,
rather than trying to pause the video to study them here.
the patreon link will be in the text below. for patrons i'll upload a version
of the xr18 scene that i used in this video.
i like the leisure comp for a vocal subgroup and the plate is my go-to vocal
verb that i like to put on effects bus two.
the combinator is a popular insert for the mains.
let me know what effects you like and leave me any questions below.
this is the link to the video discussing subgroups, and here is the link to the
combinator video. As always, please like and subscribe to
the channel... click the bell for notifications...
there are affiliate links in the patreon link in the text below.
check out the other videos. please share them on social media...
and i will see you next time