hello and welcome back to the channel. in this installment i wanted to talk about five typical
mistakes that are made by behringer x32 and midas m32 users and how to avoid them.
i did a similar video for the xr18 but i wanted to do one dedicated to the x32 and the m32
and i wanted to go a lot more in depth on this one in mixing regardless of the console
gain staging and signal flow are important concepts so a lot of what we'll go over here
will ultimately tie into those concepts at the end of this video i'll have one specific example of
why this is important it's an example of one major pitfall of a commonly made mistake and i want to
show you what will happen if you make this mistake but before we get to that we'll start here and in
reality these first two fit neatly together in the puzzle that begins your sound check so without any
further ado the number five mistake made by behringer x32 users is improper gain settings
people mistakenly believe they need to bring the gain up to zero on the channels of an x32
or an m32 or they don't really know what they should be set at at all and think it's arbitrary
channel gain should be set to show -18 dbfs on the channel meters these meters are at
a different scale than an analog console these are dbfs db full scale therefore at sound check
you want to adjust your gain so that your input meter is hitting -18 dbfs or at least thereabouts
this is important to keep your gain staging starting correctly from the beginning
and consistently across the board establishing this baseline setting keeps your signal flow
consistent after the gain control from one step in the channel to the next and consistent channel to
channel show to show and even band of band the gain is essentially the first step your signal
from the stage will hit in the console that you have any control over there is some margin
of error here so don't think you have to be 100 perfect with that minus 18 dbfs level on the meter
invariably eventually someone will sandbag you at some point and not give you performance levels at
soundcheck no matter how much they claim they are playing or singing at the volume they'll be
at when the show starts but in most cases that'll be fine you can deal with it with the fader if it
happens a little more fader a little less fader that's fine whatever it takes to get the mix you
need out front we've been focusing on the channel meter but there is another way to meter your input
you can solo a channel via the solo button on each channel with the board's default settings
this will send just that solo channel to your headphones where you can listen to
the channel if you want and it will send the signal to the solo meter on the board screen
as shown here this meter has more resolution than the individual channel meters or the meter in the
gain section itself so it gives you a little more accurate look at the signal for setting the gain
i should mention it's a good habit to go ahead and turn off any channel compression
channel gates or channel eq before you start setting the gains you can go ahead and engage
those later in the process and we're going to talk more about eq here in one of the further steps
ultimately our goal here is set the game properly at the sound check and then let the game be set
and forget and tying into all of this is mistake number four improper use of sins and faders
at soundcheck as a rule the first thing you should do to start a sound check or really as soon as you
power up the console is mute all of the channels at least mute the channels that you're using the
channels that have something connected to them or just play it safe and mute all the channels
and for the most part people do this part right then they start the sound check or
line check and they set the game hopefully like we just mentioned and then they make the mistake
that mistake is they simply unmute the channel leaving the channel fader and monitor sims
wherever they were left from the last show this is an invitation for trouble if there's any noise in
any of the lines in any of the channels as soon as the channel is unmuted it'll be in the system
for all to hear or maybe the levels are even hot enough that unmuting the channel sends you a blast
of feedback not only is feedback painful but it can be damaging for speakers it's even possible
someone is on stage saying something private and when you just unmute the mic at volume well
it's not so private anymore so the thing to do is to select your channel make sure it's muted
the fader down the monitor sends turned down as well then have someone sing or play and you
set the gain control on the channel as we talked about in the first section now while we're on the
subject of faders and the game control i want to mention something that some people will recommend
as a way to set your gain it's actually something that's left over from 50 years ago literally at a
time when consoles didn't have much metering and everything was a hodgepodge so consistency wasn't
really all that possible what they'll tell you to do is to bring the channel fader up to unity
and then adjust the gain knob to get the level in the house that you want to hear and that's simply
not a good method there's a reason the console has metering and there's a reason it has faders i can
assure you the faders aren't there to be set at unity and just be left alone so if someone tries
to give you this type of advice it may be well meaning but it's out of date so you know not to
do that now we've discussed the proper way to set gain that the gain should be -18 dbfs on the scale
your faders and sin should be down so with the gain set now you're ready to hear your channel
you can now unmute the channel and bring the fader up slowly to listen to your signal in the house
you can also now re-engage your channel eq so you can hear and set your eq in the house
depending on your desired workflow or what the band wants you can now give the musicians their
desired monitor levels for that channel as well or you can finish the line checks for everything and
then do the monitors in a second pass and now that we're talking about eq and following our signal
flow chain that brings us to mistake number three not utilizing the high pass builder in the eq
section behringer calls this low cut either term means the same thing the high pass filter
or low cut is a slope not a clip it will roll those off at a slope not cut them off abruptly
if nothing else you should at least engage the low cut filler at 20 hertz that will reduce subsonic
material that is below the usable range from getting to your amps and wasting headroom it
should also make your speakers a little less susceptible to over excursion in general live
music settings there's really no downside to using a 20hz low-cut filter on every channel but
that said it's pretty likely 20 hertz can be moved up to 30 hertz or even 40 hertz especially if you
don't have a wall of subs and several thousand watts of power on the subs and if your system is
not even using subs then definitely go with 40 hertz if not even a higher cut off if you don't
understand the concept of high pass filters at all then at least engage them on every channel and set
them at 20 hertz if you want to experiment and learn then move them up to 30 hertz and even 40
hertz to see if you notice a negative difference on any channels like your kick and your bass
guitar and like i said if you don't have a wall of subs and thousands of watts on those subs you're
likely going to be fine with a 40 hertz low-cut filter that setting is going to be just that
much better for headroom in the amps and helping with any potential speaker over-excursion issues
if we take the concept of high-pass filters a little deeper and be a little more surgical we
can dial them in more via the source that would be the ideal way instruments like the kick drum
the deeper drums like the floor toms the bass guitar keyboards synthesizers all of those are
instruments that i would expect to use a 20 to 40 hertz setting for the high pass filter
those are all instruments with deep lows but sources with less low end energy like guitars
snare drum higher toms and vocals are going to benefit with something like a 100 search setting
for the high pass filter that will clear some of the mud and low end stage wash from those channels
it's important to note what i said earlier the low cut or high pass filter is a slope and not a cliff
lows don't just disappear below that cutoff frequency they just gently roll off don't assume
everything below the cutoff frequency is just gone it doesn't work like that you should always
have a bit of an eq strategy and any eq strategy should start with the use of the high pass filter
and now that we're talking even more about eq that brings us to mistake number two that behringer x32
users make over eq'ing it's hard to tell you exactly what the right eq should look like for
your sources but it's generally pretty easy to recognize over eq'ing generally speaking for any
type of pop rock or modern country drums will be where you might expect the most aggressive use of
eq even then just to a point guitars keys vocals those can usually work well with just a minimal eq
especially when you start with the proper use of a high-pass filter as your first step
let's take a look at a typical vocal eq i would expect to see a vocal eq look something
like this when you're eq'ing a vocal maybe you hear a little wooliness in the vocal if so
you should look to cut that first not try to boost to minimize it so that wooliness is
typically something in the low mids so you would want to find that low mid area and cut that some
listen closely as you make each change and try and make sure it did what you wanted
don't just keep digging the hole deeper maybe after removing that wooliness
you now hear a little bit of a sharpness to the vocal typically that would be in the high mids
so go ahead and reduce that area a little bit as well and maybe after you fix that problem
you notice that the voice is lacking just a little bit of a shimmer a little high end so go ahead and
add a little bit of high end and in this case a high-end shelving eq works really well there
sometimes it could be that maybe only one of those things is the only thing you really needed to do
and instead of that high mid cut maybe you needed to add a little bit of high
mid to make the vocal stand out above say the other instruments generally we're only
talking about a few db of difference and only at a few points a lot of times something like
a synthesizer won't really need any eq at all or at least it can certainly be fine without it
in most cases a little eq goes a long way so if your eq typically looks anything like these
examples it's a good bet you're over re-cueing always try to eq with a strategy of cutting first
and boosting only secondarily and try and use a minimalist approach a little goes a long way
and listen to each step as you do it boosting especially should be limited i did mention the
drums being somewhere that in modern music can be a little more aggressively eq'd
let's go ahead and call up the kick drum channel in this scene and just take a quick look at it
you can see the high pass filters being used there's a low end boost for some bottom end on
the kick and there's a low mid cut to take out some of the wooliness and open up the
sound of the kick more making it less muddy and then there's a couple of upper mid boost
those upper mid-range boosts we see would be to emphasize the beater
emphasizing the beater lets us hear the attack of the kick drum so it's not just a dull thud
doing that aggressively will make for a clicky kick drum and if that's what you want that's how
to get it that said make sure the genre you're mixing actually calls for that and this brings
us to the number one worst mistake a behringer x32 midas m32 are really the user of any console
can make and that is mixing on the gain knobs don't mix on the gain knobs gain knobs should be
set and forget you have sins and you have faders to adjust the mix and the monitor levels
we're back to discussing signal flow and with the gain knob being essentially the first step
any changes you make to the gain will impact everything else down the line
once the show is going some of these impacts might not be as obvious as others or you might put the
blame for the symptoms on the wrong things when we talked about gain settings earlier i mentioned
there is a margin of error lower or higher if you did get sandbag during sound check and now during
the show someone is hitting harder than -18 dbfs consistently unless they are suddenly redlining
or threatening to just live with it at this point you can bring the fader down to compensate in the
house and you can bring the monitor sends down on the channel if anyone is complaining on stage
if it's the opposite problem and they're not even getting to minus 18 db fs on the meter just
run the fader a few steps higher than normal to compensate if you were to readjust the gain now
you're effectively changing the threshold settings on things like gates and compressors that follow
in the signal path on that channel and you're changing things like your fx sins on that channel
but here is the biggie you're not only changing these things and the house levels when you adjust
the gain control you're changing the monitor levels on that channel when you change the
gain control because they come after the gain control this is the example i mentioned at the
start of the video that i wanted to show you these meters coming up here are showing you
the output levels for outputs one through four which are mixes one through four in our monitors
watch what happens to those levels as i adjust the gain on the vocal channel they go up and down with
each movement of the gain knob even a small amount of adjustment on the gain knob can make a drastic
difference that's not just a meter issue that is the monitors on stage getting louder and quieter
not only are you changing the monitor levels that the musicians on stage are hearing
but if you're taking the gain up you could be getting those monitors closer to feedback
feedback doesn't care what knob you turn up to make a source louder when it gets loud enough
it will feed back if you've ever had a band in a club or your church or other setting telling
you that the monitor levels keep changing and you've argued you weren't touching their monitors
well if you were adjusting the gains while they were performing then actually you were changing
their monitor levels or at least you were if your monitors were coming from front of house
so all of these things tie together and you can see why it's important to at least have a basic
understanding of signal flow and how changes in one place can cause changes downstream
that you might not even think about it's all interconnected and that is it for this episode
please like and subscribe i hope you found this helpful and i will see you next time