- Hi, I'm Jordan from Kettner Creative.
In this video, I'm gonna show you two different ways
to set up an audio mix minus.
Now before I show you those two ways,
I'm gonna talk about what is a mix minus.
A mix minus is used
if you're trying to conduct a phone interview
or a video conference or something like that
while using an audio mixing console.
What it does is it allows you to send them the entire mix
from your audio console minus themselves.
The last thing you need
when you're doing a Skype interview, a Zoom call,
or a video call on your phone or a phone interview
is for the person on the other end of the phone
to hear themselves with like a two or three second delay,
because that's extremely distracting.
It's bad enough that you're already trying
to communicate with the delay,
but what you don't want
is that person on the other end of the line
getting distracted by hearing themselves on a delay
while they're trying to communicate their point.
So we need to create a whole mix for them
minus themselves and send that to them.
Now what do you need to make that happen?
I'm gonna go through everything that you need
to make that happen for two different methods.
But first, as a very broad stroke,
you need an audio console that has an aux output.
I have two different audio consoles here,
I have the Yamaha MG10XU,
which is a console that has an FX unit,
and I have the Yamaha MG10 which does not have the FX.
Now, one thing that you need to see here
is the Yamaha MG10 in this top right hand corner,
it has an aux send.
Over here on the Yamaha MG10XU, it has an FX send.
What you need to know is that an FX send
will work exactly like an aux send
if your FX are turned off.
So assuming you're doing a video call
and you don't want digital delay or reverb or pitch change
or any of the 24 FX that are built into this board,
you can turn the FX off on the mixer,
and you can use the FX send as an aux send.
Now I'm gonna show you how to do that.
Now that we know that the FX send
is the same as an aux send,
I'm gonna get rid of the mixer that has an aux output,
so I can show you how to use this.
So in the first example here,
we're gonna connect it to a phone.
Say we do this all the time,
we work a lot in the live event industry,
so we'll have somebody come up to us with a phone
and say that there's four panelists on the stage,
the person on the phone
needs to be able to hear all four of them,
and the people on the stage
need to be able to hear whoever is on the phone,
they need to have a discussion.
So we'll have our phone,
most phones don't have a headset adapter anymore
or a headphone jack,
so you'll need something like this,
which is a lightning to headset adapter.
Now a headset adapter is different than a headphone adapter.
So it has all three, it has stereo sound like a headphone,
and it has a mic input built all into the same connector.
If you buy the official adapters from Apple,
whether it's USB-C or lightning, this is the standard.
So if you buy the official ones,
you don't have to worry about it.
Some of the third party adapters will be cheap
and they won't work in the same way.
And then we have a cable like this.
This cable basically breaks it out
so we can feed the phone XLR,
and we can take stereo sound
or what is now a headphone adapter from this phone.
If you want pricing or if you wanna see specs
on anything that you see in this video,
we have it all linked in the description below.
So check those links out
and you can find where to get this adapter
and the pricing on all the cables
that we're gonna use today.
So here we have the headset adapter.
The first thing that we're gonna worry about
is we're gonna worry about getting this headphone jack
plugged into the mixer,
so those who are on the stage in our fictional event
can hear them.
This works exactly the same way
if you're doing a video stream,
you want the people on your video stream
to hear the person on the phone as well.
So we're gonna connect that there.
And then we're gonna plug it in to input five and six.
So with our fictional event here,
we're looking at the mixer,
let's pretend that we have four microphones,
those are all turned up.
And whoever is on our live stream
or whoever is on the stage or in the room with us,
they wanna hear who is on the phone,
so all five of these knobs are turned up.
Now, as we already discussed,
the FX send is the same as an aux output
when the FX are turned off.
So we want the person on the phone
to hear everybody but themselves.
We're going to turn up this FX send
which is acting as an aux send.
And normally you'd calibrate the levels,
but for the purposes of this video,
we're just gonna pretend
that that's exactly where they need to be.
Generally speaking, pointing it right at the triangle
is a real great starting point
that's known as zero or unity.
It's where that sound is the most efficient.
But we don't want caller
in channel five, six to hear themselves.
So that has to stay down.
Everything else
because we wanna send a whole mix minus themselves
so the whole mix is turned up minus themselves
will come all the way down
and come up through the output here.
So now we need to connect that output to this XLR.
So here we have a balanced TRS cable.
We'll plug that into the FX send
which is acting as an aux send,
it converts it to a balanced XLR.
And we'll plug that into the phone.
So with this situation, we have a perfect mix minus setup,
where we'll be able to hear the caller on the phone
and the person on the phone
will be able to hear everybody but themselves.
Now what if the device that you're using
doesn't have this headset adapter?
The first thing I wanna say about that
is most new laptops, MacBooks excluded,
MacBooks just have a headphone output,
but a Dell XPS for example has a headset adapter on it.
It looks like a headphone jack,
but it has a little headset symbol.
This headset adapter cable that we recommend
will work for that as well.
But say you have an older laptop.
If you have a laptop like this,
this has a headphone output and a microphone input.
So for something like this,
we will unplug the phone that we were using.
So the cable that was coming from the phone
will now go into the headphone jack
of our laptop or our computer.
Plug that in.
And then we need to,
what we need to do next
is we need to plug a microphone into the computer
so the computer can hear what's on the mixer.
So to do that, we're gonna use the same FX send
and we have this cable
that goes from quarter inch to eighth inch.
And yes, it's gonna be mono,
but generally, I've never heard of anybody
on the other end of a Skype call or a phone call
complain about mono sound.
So there you have it,
it's the same approach and the same mixer settings,
but you will need another cable
so you can get the sound coming out of the laptop
and feed the sound into the laptop.
So that's how you set up a mix minus
either with a phone or a device with a headset adapter,
or with a computer that has the traditional
line in and out jacks on the computer itself.
If you have any questions about this,
please leave a comment in the comment section below.
If you wanna see more videos like this in the future,
please like and subscribe.
And again, if you wanna see pricing or links
or descriptions of anything that you've seen in this video,
please check out the links in the description.
Thank you for watching.
(upbeat music)