hello again and welcome back to the channel. there have been several requests for a video
about ringing out monitors, or front of house, so that's what this video is about. since behringer
gives us an rta on the x32 and the x air we'll want to take advantage of that technology.
and this will be the same on the midas m32 and the mr18 as well on the surface of the x32. the
rta will be enabled in the meters section on the x edit and the xa edit software the rta can be
enabled directly in the eq section. although i like the spectrograph i think for teaching
purposes the bars will work best so that is what i'm using here and not enabling the spectrograph.
on stage you'll want your vocal mics in place and you'll want your wedges positioned and powered up.
next you'll want your gain set on your vocal channels. since this is likely prior to the
arrival of the band you can use your own voice to generically set the vocal gain or you can
just set it by experience you only need to be in the ballpark for this process and you can
fine-tune the gain later when the vocalists are actually there to check their own mics.
on your vocal channels, if you have the monitor buses set as post eq then you'll want to reset
the channel eq. you can check that in the sends section of the vocal channels or you can just
flatten the eq anyway. it's also not going to hurt to disable the channel compressor if you're using it.
so now we have our vocal mics and monitors in place and ready and our channel strip is ready.
now we need to choose our first monitor and for our example, bus one is monitor mix one, and we
need to reset the bus eq. unless you have some specialized eq settings in place specific to
your boxes. in that case you'd want to leave those in place and just add these coming eq
changes in addition to those. i'm going to go ahead and enable the low cut filter in this example for
a fairly standard setting for wedges. in this first example i'm going to use the parametric
eq here and explain that, but i will also use a graphic eq and talk about that option in a bit.
bring your main monitor bus fader up to unity or your normal setting which in most cases should
be unity. on the x32 surface i'm going to choose sends on fader and choose the first monitor bus.
now i just need to go to the vocal channel that is the closest mic to mix 1 and slowly slowly
bring that fader up. we want to bring the fader up slowly because we're
trying to hear and control the onset of feedback and not launch it uncontrollably.
and we are watching the eq window to see our rta working. it will show us the feedback point. we can
bring the fader back down once we hear it and note where the rta showed us the feedback area.
we then need to slide one of our eq filters to that point. and i should note we want these
feedback filters to be set at peq. we want to center our filter on that feedback point
and we want to narrow the Q for a narrow surgical cut and only cut a few db to start with.
since this is the first point that stood out, it's probably going to be the worst point so
we'll likely need to cut more, but that will show itself as we go along. if you don't like working
with sends on faders on the surface then you can just choose the vocal channel and choose the
monitor bus on the surface and bring up the bus control. and do this exact same technique this way.
and although i'm using the encoders underneath the screen here, you can use the eq controls on
the surface if you prefer. whichever methods you're more comfortable with.
now we repeat the process making sure our first point is really centered where it needed to be
and listening for a second feedback. in this case the second point is fairly close to the first.
we can repeat the same process, a surgical narrow few db cut or we could widen the Q on the first
filter to capture both feedback points and save a filter. since we're trying to be surgical, we'd only
want to do that if they are very close together. the other thing that you might notice is the
first feedback point starts ringing a bit as we go through this process. that's really to be expected.
since it was the first point to rear its head, it's likely the most sensitive spot. so when we start
pushing to find a second and third feedback point, the earlier points might show themselves to need
to be cut a bit more. after about three or four passes to look for these hot spots that's really
about all we should do. normally you'd expect to find something in the low mids or lower region
but in this case it was pretty well behaved. we're really looking for hot spots and not just trying
to make the mic feedback randomly. if you push hard enough you'll continue finding feedback
but the detrimental effects of too much eq will create a vicious cycle where you've taken away
too much of the monitor and the musicians will continually want more. and more will just lead
to feedback when what they really needed was a monitor without too much eq work done on it.
you want to leave some life in the box! we now need to just repeat this process for each monitor mix.
so now let's talk about using the graphic eq instead of the parametric eq.
on the x32 you'll have to insert graphic eqs into the effects rack to assign to your monitor buses.
on the x air edit software the graphic is always available in the monitor bus
eq window by selecting it like this. you have two choices of graphic eq besides the parametric
and you want to enable the rta here.
follow the same process as before with slowly bringing up the vocal fader of the monitor mix
you're working on. listen and watch carefully for the first onset of feedback. the graphic eq doesn't
allow us to be as surgical as a parametric. that's one of the drawbacks with the graphic eq. the rta
will still show us the feedback point but it won't necessarily be centered to the eq points of the
graphic eq, and you can't change the frequency points of the graphic. they are fixed. they are
fixed points and they are fixed width. so sometimes you'll just have to compromise. if a feedback point
is between two sliders on the graphic, i wouldn't necessarily pull back both of those two sliders.
instead i'd just cut the frequency that it was closest to and realize i'll need to cut a little
more to allow the width of the graphic eq point to catch that feedback point. and again the same rules
apply as before... repeat this process two or three times. on the x32 surface we have the option of geq
on faders which gives us control of the graphic eq in sections of 8 in the bus master section of the
console. we can then adjust which eight frequencies which we'll have control of with this encoder.
the lighted mute buttons are telling us those faders are centered at
0 db on the graphic eq. they don't mean muted when we're in this mode.
so this is how we ring out the monitors. so now let's talk about the front of house.
to quickly ring out front of house, do this - mute all of the channels except for the vocal channels,
and make sure your main fader is all the way down. make sure your vocal mics
on stage are in their normal positions. bring your vocal channels up to unity in the house.
select your house eq, whether it's the graphic or the parametric. now slowly bring the main fader up,
just as before, listening for the onset of feedback and watching the rta to see where that feedback is.
repeat this two or three more times following the same process that you used for monitors.
work in small steps and cut as little as possible. since i mentioned setting the
gain in this video, here are a couple of links for videos talking about setting gain and signal flow
on the behringer and midas digital platform. one for the x32 and m32 and another link up
here, following it, for the xr18. if you're coming to digital from analog there might be some things in
those videos that you need to be aware of. if you're unsure about bus settings and some of
the terms like tap points, pre or post eq, pre or post fader, then this video above explains those
things in basic monitor setup for the xr18, and should be useful information. and that
information translates to the x32 or the m32 so please check that link out. if you like this
kind of information please like and subscribe to the channel, click the bell for notifications,
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or questions below. check out the other videos, thanks for watching, and i will see you next time