Okay, I have set this mixing desk up to accommodate a simple band. Our simple mythical band today has a drummer, a bass guitarist, a guitarist who has an acoustic guitar as well as an electric guitar, a piano and for vocals. And, as you can see, I have punched him in to the stage box in the regular way. As you can see, I have kicked snare hurts. rack tom floor tom, I've had bass guitar, lead guitar, and then acoustic guitar piano, left piano right. And the four vocals starting with stage right, stage center stage left and the drum vocal.

That's 15 channels in all, I'd probably put a spire vocal in channel 16 Now, what I have done in this particular situation is that I have double perched these channels. So starting at Channel 25, I have the same input list again, an exact duplicate of it. But I have made these buttons, different colors. These are going to be the dedicated monitor channels, and I might have a different color so I don't make a mistake of sending a front of house channel to a monitor channel, which is going to cause me some difficulties later on when I come to mix the show. So the first and most vitally important thing to do is to make sure that they are not sent to the front of house as well. So for example, here's the kick drum channel.

I removed that from the left and right stereo. So if I now push the fader, it won't be sent to any audio bus at all, unless I select it in one of the auxiliary send buses. This is vitally important to remember to do this because these desks will all different fault with sending all of the channels to left and right. And in order to preserve our independence, it is necessary to switch every one of them to the stereo bus. As you can see, I'm doing this right now. And we go all 16 of them.

So now I'm safe in the knowledge that nothing that I do with any of these channels is going to affect the left and right bus which is a mix to the pie. The second thing that I need to do is to I need to configure some auxiliaries, I need to make sure that the auxiliary sends that leave the desk to go to the stage are pre fader for any of the channels that are shared in this situation, I actually because I've managed to duplicate all of the inputs. I can't actually use the faders because I won't be using these faders to mix the front of house So it is possible for me to do post fader sons. This makes it easier to control feedback quickly. If I was sharing the channels, then obviously the monitor sons need to be pre fader therefore not affected by the fader movements.

So here you can see on the console, the first five auxiliaries or 1234 and five are the stage right stage center stage left drum wedge and drum sub mixes respectively. And I have got for post fader effects buses to use for front of house. I have however, added a fifth effects bus because increasingly these days I find that musicians like to have reverb and monitors. Now I am not going to use the house channels to derive an input to this reverb, I'm actually going to use the monitor inputs because it isn't an entirely dedicated to the monitors, I'm not going to share a reverb between the front of house and the monitors because that will usually require you needing the reverb to do two different things. So I like to have an entirely separate reverb that is entirely independent of the front of house that is, derives its input from the monitor channel, not the front of house channel.

That's a crucial thing. Having set the desk up in this particular way, and having made sure that I have got graphic equalizers allocated digitally inserted if you like on all of my five monitor outputs and on the left and right mix to the PA system. I am now ready to actually start addressing the stage situation the loudspeakers on stage. And I'm going to start by testing them, making sure they work properly, they will sound the same as each other, and they're all in phase with each other. So that's what we're going to do next.