Okay, we have laid the stage at least I've put the monitors in the correct positions on the stage. We know they all work all the rest of it. So it's now time to actually start making some noise with them. What I'm going to do is I'm going to take the old trusty sm 58 just a regular SM not a beat or any of that fancy nonsense, but then absolutely bog standard, which is my kind of reference microphone ready is a sort of industry standard microphone and I've plugged it into the channel on the stage box that is allocated to the lead vocal. So I'm going to talk into the microphone. As I explained previously, I've got two layers here.

One set of inputs for monitors the other set of inputs for Front of House The only thing that is common between these is the gain. So in order to set the correct gain, I'm going to start not with the monitors, but with the front of house because this is the most important in terms of keeping the game structure through the desk. So this is the thing that I'm going to use to calibrate to. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to put it into the PA, and I'm going to get what I would consider to be a decent level out of the PA system without any unpleasant noises, pop clicks, bangs, hums and buzzes or feedback. And once I'm happy with that, I'm going to turn a PA off. And if I have a price monitor situation, if I have a problem with the monitor situation, I can then use the trim to change the incoming level.

Relative to the game that I've already set. So the all new mutes left and right the PI System, and I'm just going to push the fader here, hey, hey, and there is no EQ, no high pass filter, no nothing on this mic. It's absolutely super straight. And the minute I'm doing a noise, zero DBS on the channel that I'd probably like to have just a little bit more game a little bit more sensitive. So I'm just going to turn the gain up a little bit, as you can hear there. And often now it's getting towards the edge of instability there.

If I push it a little bit more ahead, yes, now be getting to become quite unpredictable. So well. Zero dB, have turned the gain up. So I'm doing about zero DB on the input led And it also looks like I'm doing about zero DB on the output meters. This would indicate to me that I've got a correct game structure through the desk that the outputs are at the appropriate sensitivity. So I'm quite happy with that.

So we need to know at the moment about the front of heels, so I should mute it. There it is muted. Now I'm going to start on the monitor channels. there when I have pushed the push the fader up, because it is actually necessary to have the fader up because I have had configured all of the auxiliary sons to be post fader. So as the faders on the monitor section will actually work, which is the unconventional way of doing monitors Generally, if you're doing more Just in front of us, you would use pre fader Sutton's. Because obviously, you would be sharing some channels as we don't have to share any channels.

I can do the whole thing post fader without getting confused. But of course, it does mean that in order to make any of the sun's work, I have to push the fader. So the fighter is at zero and we have the same game. So I now hit the fighter flip button. And if I so know the mix that I want, I'm going to start with the center vocal mix this being the center vocal microphone, she's mixed to there, I have salad mix two and select it. And if I now push the fader, we should hear some sound coming in of the wedges in the middle of the stage.

Now they're not pointing towards me, they're pointing away from me so it's difficult for me to make an accurate judgment. So the first thing I want to know is is not a sensible sort of a level. And it would seem like it to me, it would seem like it to me. Yeah, there we go on quite happy with that as a level, it means that the console is correctly calibrated as far as the outputs. levels are concerned for the monitors. I can of course, vary the individual output levels on the fader without compromising my input.

But it's nice to run everything at zero dB. It means that you don't get any unpleasant surprises, and it's a good general practice to have a proper game structure. So that seems kind of okay to me. And maybe I'll just push it a little bit later. So at what stage it starts getting unstable, which is around about as far left as that is considerably level. than I would think anybody is ever going to need a vocal, also anybody who can actually sing.

So I'm going to go back to zero. And I think I'm just going to nip up on stage and have a little bit of a listen to it. Just before I do that though, I'm going to mute this mix. And I'm going I'm going to spend some level into all of the other mixes as it is reasonable to take as a given that all the members of the band are going to want to hear the singing. So here I go with mix one, and I'm going to put about 60% of the level that I put into the vocalist own mix or what I call the local mix. So nice mix one which I should now turn off and his mix three is mix three, we go the same kind of deal.

About 60% of the novel, I'm going to mute that one now. And let us now select mix four, and there's mix four, that's the vocal in the drum wedge and again the same day and about 60%, I do not need to put any of it in mix five, that is the drum sub, the drum sub only deals with 80 hertz and below, and my voice doesn't go down that low. And even if it would, the first thing I'm going to do as far as equalizing is concerned, is I'm going to apply a high pass filter to the vocal microphone. If I actually sewn on the channel, you can probably hear that. If I use proximity effect and get the microphone ocean close to my mouth, you can probably hear it popping. So I can get rid of that just by selecting the hyphens filter and donate into band 80 hertz.

It is annoying to have something on us, there's no chance of my voice being able to reproduce any frequencies lower than that. So we just want to get rid of it ready. So now I'm going to open up all of the monitor mixes. So there you go. There's just a vocal all over the stage. I'm not going to take the microphone, have a little walk to the stage, and a little bit of a lesson.

Right? Okay. So I have dialed in. There's microphones into all of the mixes on the stage. And as usual as one makes a judgment from front of house, rather than doing it on stages is only me here to do it. I have to be I can't be in both places at once.

And of course, it's probably a little louder than I would generally have expected it Be I'm not too worried about this No, because it's gonna make it much easier for me to find and identify any potential feedback issues. So I'm just gonna have a little walk around the stage and listen to these wedges, and make some sort of a judgement about how they're gonna sound. They're all on at the moment. And I'm just really checking here, that they all sound pretty similar to each other. And that there's no ridiculous hotspots anywhere where they're all coupling together. I'm actually going to be doing almost all of my cueing just using the center pair because their frequency response will be different from the three single ones as I explained earlier, because of the effect of coupling to wedges together and also the lowering of the impedance of the amplifier.

Know that he's driving them. So the whole game structure and EQ is going to be a little bit different in the center mix. That's obviously the main mix. So that's what I'm going to concentrate on. So I'm going to pop the mic in the stand and I'm just going to nip out front. I'm going to mute all of the mixes except this one in front of me.

Now I'm reasonably satisfied that this is about the maximum cipher level that we can get out of the microphone. So I'm just going to pop the mic in a stand. There we go. Now I can just hear these wedges in front of me. And as one can tell, they are quite boomy in the low frequencies. Base rather than sub i would say.

Now, calling frequencies in monitors, or calling frequencies generally, is a skill that you can only really learn by experience. There are plenty of nice little charts that you can get that give you the frequencies of all the notes on the piano keyboard for example or the notes on the guitar fretboard. I have a little simple straightforward formula that I use, which is very easy and not a problem to remember. Or Well, not actually not all orchestras, almost all casters use a standard tuning, which is called concert tuning. And what that means is that the middle eye on the piano keyboard is 440 hertz. Therefore, the a an octave above middle eye is 880 and the A below is 220.

It's a reasonably straightforward relationship. I am actually reasonably experienced at calling monitors and not mad at identifying frequency sees some people cheat and use an analyzer. I use these because I find they work or other data. Very often you can be fooled by analyzer, it can be a tail wagging the dog situation, and that you try and address problems that aren't actually the cause but the symptom. So for feedback, for example, if you have more than one frequency feedback going on, they're generally going to be harmonics of each other. And what you need to do is you need to deal with the fundamental.

If you don't deal with the fundamental than any of the overtones that you do manage to EQ out. We'll come back if you push the level. So I'm going to try and make these wedges feet back a little bit here now. And let's have a look here. We're going to get close to them. Hey, Aha.

Too few different males shapes and see if I can, hey, aha, aha. Hey, hello, mother there we were having this amazing time. Well, it seems fairly safe it doesn't seem like there's going to be any severe feedback. One of the things that one always has to watch out for as a monitor engineer as a specialist monitor engineer particularly. But in this case, I am the monitor engineer and the front face engineer, but I still with my monitor hat on, I will be watching quite carefully because singers very often have a tendency to misbehave with the microphone. For example, after having sung a line of a tune, very often they do something like this.

And as you can hear, this is beginning to fade back already. Of course, if you point a live microphone At a loudspeaker source that is out there is it is amplifying, or that is being amplified by it like I'm doing now, you will be able to produce a range of feedback depending on where you point it, and how close you get. It's just this general handheld thing that I'm concerned about, as we can hear about that note, which I would say he is probably going to be about 200 or 250 hertz. I'm going to go back to the desk in a minute with the microphone, knowing what I do now about this. And I'm going to first of all deal with the feedback issues. And secondly, deal with some of the actual Sonic issues because there's a couple of things about the sound of these wedges.

That's it. Don't like very much. They tend to seem to be rather enthusiastic, shall we say, in terms of energy in this mid range or kind of area around there, which I'd say would be from about 200 to 500 hertz. And there's something I'm not particularly keen on around about a, that's an A note, they're just probably about 800 hertz. So what I'm going to do, so I'm going to go back to the desk, I'm going to get out of the graphic equalizer that is inserted on this mix, and I'm going to push a few frequencies. So as I can hear them, I can identify the ones I don't like.

And then I'm going to take bits off them away. And I'm going to come back on the stage and hopefully find out that mix sounds an awful lot better and is more stable. So that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to take the microphone with me I'm just going to have a little bit of a listen. Okay, so here I am at the front of house. I'm going to select the equalizer that I require, which is the equalizer inserted on auction Erie to here's my visual representation of it.

By using these hundred little buttons here, the assignable encoders, I can select a particular section of the equalizer. I can push each individual fader at a time. Each one of these fighters represents three notes on the piano keyboard, mostly two white ones in the black end. But obviously depends on where you are on the keyboard. But yes, it is what we call a one third octave or a 31 band equalizer. And it's a reasonably powerful tool.

Now there were three areas that I think I identified that I didn't think ticularly like. So we start with the lowest frequencies, that's dealing with fundamentals before we deal with harmonics. So I'm going to start around about the 160 200 hertz area. And I'm just going to start by pushing, we're going to start with 100 hertz, actually, I'm going to push that and put that back to zero because that doesn't sound too bad. 125 hertz, you can hear there's a little bit more energy in that particular band. Here's 160 hertz.

And as you can almost certainly hear, that's beginning to cause us a problem. Here's 200 hertz, and again, that seems to be very loose and uncontrollable. So as we go, I'm just going to do a little cut there. going to do about three DVDs cut of each I'm just going to carry on showing my cell frequencies is 250 hertz, I think we've probably got a bit too much of that and as well as 315. And that seems to be getting back towards a normal sort of response. So I'm going to keep going on up the graphic equalizer, you have to bear in mind that the more work you do on the graphic, the more cutting you do, the more you're reducing the overall level and therefore messing around with your game structure.

So it is advisable to EQ judiciously and take away as little as possible rather than as much as possible. So we're going to continue having a little look at some of these frequencies is 500 hertz, that seems fine. 630 hertz, 800 hertz, and that, again, is beginning to sound a bit uncontrolled, and I do seem to remember identifying a frequency Didn't like around about 801 K or something of that nature. So I'm just gonna continue listening to frequencies here. And yeah, at the moment I've just done a little gentle cutting from one K to two K, a little bit more rather severe cutting from 315 hertz to 160 hertz. So you can see I've got a little bit of a slope going on here.

I can now do an A B comparison here. This is with the equalizer on and this is with the equalizer off and you can tell immediately, there is quite considerable difference there. And I would hope that you would agree that the latter one sounds more like me than the formal one does. And the objective of the exercise here is to get the wedges to be as flat responding as positive as possible. And what that means in practical terms is trying to make me sound as much like me through the microphone as I do, acoustically. So there we go, I'm reasonably happy with that.

I'm going to get up on the stage. And I'm going to have a little bit of listen to it now. Wave the microphone on it, see if I can make it misbehave. And if that, if I'm happy with that, then I'm going to move on and I'm going to make an EQ for one of the single wedges. And as they all sounded the same when I tested them, there is no reason why I can't just cut and paste that EQ. So I only really have to EQ one of the mixes.

Of course, I can't copy and paste a single word you mix to a double wedge mix, auxiliary, because the frequency response of two wedges together, as I explained previously, is different from the frequency response of a single. So at the moment, I'm just concerned with the center pair. I'm going to go up on stage and share with them. Okay, I've had a bit of a go at Aqa English mix here, I've got rid of most of the stuff that I don't like. And it sounds a lot better, it sounds a lot more like me, I think it's possibly still a little harsh. And what I'm trying to do here, of course, is to present a musician with a completely flat sounding and by flat I mean having an even frequency response.

So that if, for example, we wish to use these wedges to amplify a piano, all the notes will strike with the same amplitude relative to their frequency, of course, where I do particularly over EQ, one fader let us say, the 400 hertz of the 440 hertz fader if I was to push that all the way down to the bottom and do 15 Db Cut, then any song that they try to play in the key of A on the piano will have middle I missing from it. This is obviously not a result. So what I'm trying to do is get a nice flat sounding mix that I can present to the musician. And she'll go through all of the things that we may need to do to supplemental to that to deal with inputs in a minute. I'm mostly happy with this. I still think it sounds a little harsh.

I try to move the microphone around a little bit. Because I'm very much aware of proximity effect, which is a really good example right here. If I hold the microphone right close to my mouth, then the low frequency response in my voice is rich and warm and lovely. All I need to do is move it one centimeter and I don't lose much in the way of level but I do lose Find a lot of low frequency, five centimeters, most of the low frequencies gone away 10 centimeters, I'm wasting my time. If I did drama behind me now, the vocal would be inaudible over the level of drum kit coming down to microphone. If you're dealing with novice singers, it's a good idea to explain proximity effects to them, particularly with a view to monitoring.

There are a bunch of other things, it is also necessary to explain mostly to singers. And I'll talk more about that when I come to talking about the input section generally. So I'm just going to do one more little tweak just from memory here actually, which is going to involve taking a little bit more of that low end of that mid range energy out that 200 hertz or you'd call it base or low mid. I suppose. To round about there that the crossover happens. And I think also, it still sounds a little bit hard around about maybe one K, six to k. So I'm just going to do those two little tweaks.

Then I'm going to set about EQ in a single wedge. And I will see how that compares to the pair. Okay, I'm just going to do those couple little tweaks that I just spoke about there. Let's select the appropriate part of the equalizer. And I'm just gonna give the fans a little push. Just assume I want to identify exactly the frequency that I heard up there that I don't like.

And that's what it is those two fellas there and there was another little nasty one. roundabout here somewhere, maybe not that one, maybe that one has Hey, hey, it's unique son, she go, there we go. Yeah, I'm going to just take a little bit of that just to make it a little bit less hard. Okay, I think that's a reasonable starting point for a pair of wedges. The next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to EQ one of the single wedges, and I'm going to do a little bit of a cheat. Because those wedges are particularly easy to turn around and point at me.

In many small rooms, you'll actually be able to do this. Obviously, it's more difficult with a pair. But I'm just going to type that mix one on the downstage right there. I'm just gonna turn it round physically on the stage. So as it's pointing at me, it'll make it my coming and going backwards and forwards to the stage and the wear and tear on me poor old knees. A lot less.

So I'm just gonna go and turn around, turn mix to off and next So this is mix one, I'm just gonna spin him around temporarily pointing at the front of house. Just to get a better idea of what it's going to sound like. I'm now going to go and shout into it. Right I am just EQ in the mix I've just switched around to have a little bit of a listen to its mix one there, Donal the graphic open, I'm gonna do the same thing. I can already hear some stuff that I don't particularly like that seems to be fairly similar to the last wedge. Certainly that's on a verb between 250 and 400.

Sort of a down. So let me just push some of these frequencies so that we can hear it. Of course, one has to turn the equalizer on. And there we go. That's now definitely working. And as you can hear, there's some stuff going on there.

So it's broadly going to be 35 Similar to the, to the pair, possibly just not quite, I don't need to be quite so severe with the EQ. That seems to me quite reasonable in the low end, I just need to do something about this hardness as horribleness, which is going on around about two, two and a half thousand cycles two and a half k. So I'm just gonna put a little bit of a cut in there. So I might the response nice and smooth. And I think that sounds reasonably like me coming out of that wedge. So without further ado, what I'm going to do is I'm going to copy this and I'm going to paste it to the other two single wedge mixes. That will only leave me with the drum sub to EQ and I'm going to use a different method to EQ that.

Okay, so Let me just copy and paste these EQs into mixes three and four. There we go. I'm just going to have an the final little wonder up on the stage. Then I'm going to explain. Once I'm happy with the sound of the monitor system as a starting point, I'm going to explain some of the techniques we use for dealing with inputs. But in the meantime, I'm just going to go and have a final listen just to this microphone and this channel to make sure that I'm happy with it sonically in all four of the floor mixes.

So turn all the auxiliary sends on and I'm just going to go and have one more little wander around the stage. Okay, so here we have now the vocal mic. nice and loud. I think this is as loud as it's ever been. need to be on this stage? I would say that if the singers got any go about them, it's probably going to be something of a challenge getting the PA louder than the monitors.

And this donation sincerely hope so anyway. So I'm just having a little bit of a listen to the wedges here. Having a little bit of Walker in stage as a singer might. And making sure it's all safe. There's nothing unpleasant gonna happen. Even if I go and lean on the drum fill here.

The microphone doesn't feed back. Let me see if I can make it feed back here. Let's do something responsible. Yeah, there we go. That was probably my glasses. Let me see if I take the glasses off.

And it goes away Well, almost completely. You'd be amazed about reflective surfaces pitch your face. Glasses should you be sufficiently myopic is to need them on a daily basis like myself. But I don't expect that kind of misbehavior from singer. There are many ways in which singers can misbehave course, particularly with microphones. And there are some really good ways of making them feedback.

One can, for example, block all the air off the back of the capsule by holding it like this. Or one can even do the hip hop thing, which as you can hear is already causing a perfectly acceptable vocal mic sound to be completely awful and very prone to feedback. Since I let go of the capsule, there it is. It's back again. It's all super lovely smashing wonderful. And now it's not super lovely machine wonderful.

In fact, it's pretty hideous. If you are unfortunate enough to have to deal With a bunch of hip hop, MCs or whatever it is nomenclature that they choose to bestow upon themselves this week, then you will have to have some radical approach to EQ in the channels. That's the next thing that I'm going to talk about here. Now I'm quite happy with presenting this stage as a decent starting point to a band. My echoing work is pretty much done here. I don't intend to touch the graphic equalizers anymore.

Because this is kind of what I need them to do. Any further work is going to be done using the parametric equalizers on the input channels in order to correct the anomalies of the inputs and make them usable both in front of house and in the monitors and so That's the next thing I'm going to talk about. But right now, I'm quite happy with this EQ stage. If the band were to walk in right now, I would cheerfully say to them, yeah, you can go right ahead and set up. I'd be careful I've watched them if they move any wedges about, I don't want moving anything too far because obviously it will change the sonic relationship. And once they've done sand jacking, I will be spiking and labeling everything, as is my want of an afternoon in order to prepare for any further acts who might be appearing on the bill.

So um, yes, equalling done here. Now I'm going to go and prepare my inputs.