Right Oh, um, I'm reasonably happy with the vocals situation on stage, the band still aren't here, which comes as no surprise as they don't actually exist. So what I'm going to try to do is to use some sampled stuff that I just so happen to have on my laptop to make some judgments about some of the instruments that the band may or may not be using. The first thing I need to do is don't need to deal with having a little bit of a listen to my drum sub, just make sure it's doing what I want it to do with a kick drum in it. Obviously a kick drum has program that I cannot mimic with my own voice, but either in terms of its dynamics or its frequency. So recording is quite handy really is just like a sound check a bunch of single beats.

The kick drum. And I'm just going to dial it initially into the drum sub. I'm going to listen to it from here, just to make sure that it's everything's doing what it ought to really. So here it comes. And there it is. Sounds like the low end of a kick drum.

Okay, I'm going to now Donal some into the wedge as well. And I'm always shy. That sounds pretty much like a kick drum to me. I'm reasonably happy with that. I'm going to leave the graphic from sub flat at the moment. I should only use it to deal with any resonant frequencies that I get from the live microphone and the live drums skin, but sonically that sounds quite fine to me.

I'm reasonably happy with that. I am now going to send the computer feed to all the other monitor mixes. And I'm going to listen to a couple of other instruments. Maybe a little bit of bass guitar, which again, contains some frequencies that I can't get close to vocally, and also possibly a couple of other instruments. Well, seems to be plenty of level there. I'm quite happy with the sound of it.

It sounded very much like a bicycle. To me, and looking at the output meters of the auxiliary sons, there is plenty of headroom. And I think that that was probably as loud as we're going to require a bass guitar to be in a room like this, I'm not going to spend a lot of time messing around with recorded stuff because it's only really a very approximate guide. It doesn't bear much representation to what's really going on, because there's no loudspeaker microphone relationship going on there. Basically, I'm just trying to make sure that my monitor system is has Sonic integrity that the various different instruments like bass drum, bass guitar, I'm going to play some a little bit of electric guitar. Then I'm going to play some stereo keyboard stuff.

And I'm going to leave it at that because all I really need to know is that the monitor system has the integrity in the dynamic range to handle all instruments without either running out of headroom distorting or rattling, humming blessings. Well, there's no physical problems with any of the speakers that I haven't been able to find with my voice. We've done the kick drum, we've done the bass guitar is little bit of electric guitar. Well, that seems to be quite enough for that. It seems to be handling it all perfectly well. That all sounds fine to me.

The only other bit of playback that I'm going to do is going to be a stereo instrument. I'm going to start with the strike piano and the reason that I'm doing this is just To make sure that the phase relationships are correct, as far as my inputs are concerned and to demonstrate the fairly cataclysmic result that can sometimes happen if one, there is a phase problem between the left and the right and the instrument. So what I'm going to do first of all, is I'm going to play it through the front of house speakers with the piano panned hard left and hard right. And just to make sure that it sounds okay, then I'm going to switch one of the channels out of phase and send them both to one wedge on the stage which is going to be mix three, in fact, and listen to the result of mixing the two signals out of phase with each other.

And then I'm going to pop the phase button and there is will become very clear and obvious. So let me find my piano sample Okay, so I'm here is the piano through the pipe system, both channels are in phase Okay, I'm gonna switch one of the channels out of phase now. So that is proved to me that it's I can still hear the piano quite clearly though without too much of a problem. What I'm going to do now is just rewind that sample so we start from the beginning I'm going to switch the PA system off, switch the monitor system back on. On I am Going to send the signal to mix three only. And I'm going to start with the interface channel.

And then I'm going to add an equal level of the out of phase channel. And the result will be predictable If nothing else, I suspect. So here it comes. So here's the first channel of piano in mix three as much noise level zero dB, here comes the anti phase channel. There it is. Because the signal is essentially very, very similar, left for RIGHT, WE'RE what we're doing is subtracting one from the other.

Now instead of adding them, we got the classic face cancellation. Now, this is not something that necessarily I would have noticed hearing it in the pie first of all. Now, it is vitally important. If you're going to try and rectify the fault that you find the fault whilst you are not running the program should demonstrate to you what's going to happen. Because obviously, if that keyboard player was listening to that, he would need it to be a lot louder. So if I turn it up considerably, and then I correct the phase problem, then the results will be cataclysmic.

And I shall demonstrate to you what it's going to sound like. I'm going to run the piano with the left and right out of phase. And I'm just going to switch the firt the anti phase back in phase without changing the levels at all, and we'll see what happens to the mix. Say we go with a bit more of the piano out of phase. And I'm just gonna switch it in phase now. As you can see, it's an enormous difference.

And society if you're actually messing about with the switch whilst the instrument is being played, it can lead to all sorts of unpleasant consequences, loudspeaker damage, musician damage, people being unhappy. So that's one little thing to watch for. If ever you're mixing a left and right signal, or stereo signal of program from one instrument into a mono wedge, what you're effectively doing is summing two signals. It's vitally important. They're in fights with each other. The face problem could actually If there is a phase problem, then it could be anywhere from the output of the instrument itself.

It could be the quarter inch cables that connect the output of the piano. If it's an electric piano to the DI boxes, it could be a switch on the DI box. Most di boxes, I've got a polarity switch on them. That switches, flips, pins two and three. So it's 190 degree phase inversion. It could be a faulty patch cable or a mic cable.

It could be anywhere in the system. I'd like all fault finding. The only practical method is to start at one end and do one thing at a time until you fix the problem. If you don't do that, then you will be essentially wasting your time because you don't have any conclusive evidence you need to find Smoking Gun. Basically. These days very often the most common one is the face button on the DI box or mic cables have been repaired incorrectly.

I have just done a little European tour on I think on the front 20 something shows that we did. Most days, I found a nitrile face cable somewhere and outer face speaker cable. So despite it being glaringly obvious, I'm afraid it is still a very common problem in the industry. And if like this little venue, you have a box with 30 or 40 mic cables in one of them is out of phase and nobody spots it. It can be in a different place every day. And so if it's not part of a stereo pair, it can cause you all sorts of other problems that can be difficult to watch.

Identify, you know, for example, if it would be one of those four vocal microphones and all four people are singing the same note at the same time, then you'll have a similar cancellation issue. So as I say, it's pretty easy to spot and it shouldn't be happening in the first place, but it does. So be aware because once there is an interface cable in your system somewhere it can be very hard to follow and it can take months even years. For this reason, actually, on digital consoles are never past stereo channels together. Many people do. But as far as I'm concerned, all that does is it makes it much more difficult for you to mono it up quickly.

If one side fails if you have a faulty DI box or a faulty cable, or there's some problem with the instrument, then if you do spot it, it's just a simple case of grab the pan pot Quick and pan it into the middle. Rather than having to go into the link menu of the console, which can be two or three button pushes away, before you get the correct page, then unlink them before you can move the pan pots that can take 10 seconds, which is a long time in the middle of a song. Particularly if it's the melody that's only coming out of one of the speaker stacks. So when Yeah, for that reason, I think that pairing channels is it's just laziness really. This particular mixing console offers you all sorts of lovely options, that if you pair channels, you can choose what you gain together.

So you can have independent gain, you can have independent EQs. It's a little checkbox menu. And pretty much every facility that's offered on the input channel, you can choose to pair or not to pair. So if I'm going to pair anything, I just pair the EQs together so what I do today The left hand side is done to the right hand side. I certainly don't want to lock myself out of the mute or the pan. I want to vote to mute each channel individually, I want to print each channel individually.

And I can't afford half a dozen button pushes to get to the point where I need to beat and do that if there's a problem in the middle of a song. Okay, I think that at this stage in the proceedings, having tested all of the speakers, plugged a whole bunch of microphones in had a look at the band's back. There isn't really very much more I can do until the band get here with their musical equipment. I feel reasonably confident that I have a very good starting point. I have it all saved in my dash file. So should anything happen I can record it all quite easily.

And I am now Just waiting for the band. So she will go for lunch I think and wait for them to show up.