Okay, so let's get comfortable with mixes so that we can stick any mixer down no matter how big it is. Okay? There are a lot of mixers out there, but once you pretty much know what the basic sections do, you gotta walk up to any mixer, you know without breaking a sweat. Okay, we're going to be using this little Mackie mixer right here as it has a pretty easy layout. And it's very typical in terms of the features that are available in pretty much almost any mixer out there. I know that many of you might be using a digital mixer.

And this is old school right here. Yeah, it is old school. But I've also found that learning the basics on an analog console like this really allows you to understand pretty much any board that's out there. No matter what console you have certain things pretty much never changed. You still need to know about setting up your levels at any accusing oxen Perfect and awesome monster mixers, and other types of signal routing. Seeing all this happen on an old school mixer like this really seems to kind of help you understand these concepts.

And I've also brought along a midsize precise digital mixer as well. I know these aren't the latest mixes that will not the point here, there's no way of nine, you know what mixes you're going to be dealing with. But you know, using these two here, in this demonstration will kind of give us all the tools you need to understand how to get it around a mixer. This section will just be about the mechanics of how to use a mixer. You know what buttons to press, what knobs to turn, although there is another section later on, simply called mixing where we'll go through examples of how to mix a song from start to finish. This section is all about the tools available.

And the mixing section later on is actually how to do it. Hands on Okay, so that being said, let's look at this mixer. On your typical mixer, you can split the front panel into two main sections, the input section, and the master section. Now, you might notice over here in the input section, it's really just a bunch of identical channels that take your inputs that are coming from the stage from these inputs right here. And then the master section over here is where things start to get a little bit different. Maybe there's subgroups or stereo returns matrix 10s, maybe built in effects and graphic equalizer, for example.

My point is that the bulk of a mixer is the input channel section. And guess what, they're all the same. So don't get intimidated whether they're at pro challenge here or a bazillion. It's really no big deal. Just learn one of these guys. And then you've learned them all.

And a master section over here might be a little bit different from console to console and we'll tackle that in a moment. But all you need to know right now is that all of your inputs come into these input channels like a kick drum mic, snare drum mic, high hat, Tom's overheads, bass, guitar, keys, vocals, and so on. And you just mix them up into a main mix that comes up over here. So forgetting all the stuff over here, let's look at the input channels. And we'll start with the first one. But before we look at all kind of the bells and whistles of an input channel, let's look at a principle that is crucial to understanding things like how to set levels control, noise, distortion, how to basically get a very clean signal and that is gain structure.

Whenever you bring an input into a mixer, you have the basic three different places to set those levels. You have the input gain, that goes through the channel fader, then which then goes through the master fader. Now if you crank up your input gain, you end up getting distortion. Well guess what that will follow you through to your channel fader and then also of course in your master fader. But if you get so Amid distortion and then you go back to input gain here and lay it very low, then you'll see what happens downstream a channel fader is low, the master fader is low, you see those green indicators in each LED ladder. So if you set your input gain very low, and you had the bright idea of cranking it up in the channel fader, and guess what you'd be bringing up a bunch of noise, and that would follow you through to the master fader.

So really, a job when we start bringing things into a console is to set the input gain so that we can have a nice healthy level of course, you'll have a bunch of input gains, and they'll all be set to different levels, depending on what you have hooked up might be a very hot guitar, or a very weak microphone, you need to make changes to each input gain to give you the best signal to noise ratio. So you now understand that we could have a bunch of different inputs coming right up here. I mean, everything from like a like a trickles through a firehose, and our job is to tweak their game so that they can all kind of come in kind of like on a level footing. It really doesn't matter whether the input is really a you know hot guitar with an act of preamp or a little quiet microphone.

My job is to miss mess with a game wrap here. And all things being equal, I can have a mixer with all the faders can looks like this, the old barely even at the zero DB mark. And let's see how. Okay, like I said earlier, I have my mic coming into input channel one here, and the first thing we'll look at is the gain knob. Up here on some mixes, it might be called a trim knob or sensitivity, but it's normally one of those titles no matter what you call it up here, his job is the same to boost up the signal level of whatever is coming into this input channel here. So when you look at a mixer like this, it has so many places to adjust signal.

Here they are in order of signal flow. We have the game novel The trim knob. This is by far the most coarse adjustment on the board. Its job is to pre amplify or you've heard preamp right? the quietest microphone or maybe not boost, the loudest DI box and basically everything in between. Then we have an input fader right here.

Then that input Credit goes over to the main fader. And then out to the amps and speakers. That is your job. You want to make sure that your main fader and your input by the normally live around the zero DB mark and make your main gain adjustment up here at the trim or game. These faders here are optimized to be the quietest right around here, the zero DB or sometimes it's called a unity position. So that's where we're going to start.

Then we make a coarse adjustments right up here. We'll turn this guy up here until we peak now on a lot of mixes. There'll be a little peak light like this little light If you're overloading the preamp on Miss mixer, you have both that and then also you can press solo. And you can check your levels over here. So let me just check the levels of this microphone here. Hey, so you can see if I, if I hit this pretty loud, then I'm picking up here.

So mic back that off. I shall not speaking that loud if I wasn't, you know, a screaming guy in a heavy metal band, and maybe I'll have to back that off. So I think that's about right. And on some mixes, like I said, If you press the solo, then you can see what's going on over here. Hey, hey, hey, I'm averaging around the zero DB mark. If I'm speaking really loud, it'll go a little bit over that.

And so between these two guys, and I'll be different on your mixes. But this one really is the way to go most of the time on a lot of mixes. Because what you want to do is just if this was kick and snare, whatever, you just bring these guys up until they start peaking and then you back them off just a little bit. So adjusting the gain of each channels preamp, Hear one sure that each child beta can live comfortably at the zero DB or the Unity Mac, then you just make a blend of what you want just by using the faders. Just set up the main game knob first and then you're good to go. But keep in mind that some boards will have you do this in slightly different ways.

The most common is a little overload LED, where you bring up the game until it peaks and then you know it lights up and then you can back up a little bit. No matter how you do that the principle is the same, do you want all of the inputs to be roughly kind of on the same footing. So I brought in some inputs here, this is obviously not from from a live concert but this is from a multitrack recording where I brought them all in here I have kick drum, snare drum, I have bass, acoustic, lead vocal, and a Background Vocal right there. So on a typical mixer, you know most of these channels will be up around the Unity Point, that's not really the big deal. The big deal is what's going on up here in the the trim knobs or the game nodes, you just want to make sure that they peak occasionally, if they're peaking too much, then it really won't happen.

It won't really matter what happens downstream from that, because if it's distorted up here, it's going to go all the way through. In fact, along those lines, some mixers may even have a pad up here, that if your input is too hot, and you have this guy all the way down to the minimum position, and it's still peaking, there might be a pad button there, where it'll attenuate that signal down, maybe 20 DBS like that. So let me bring this back up here. And so you can see you can actually check the levels without even hearing what's going on down here with these guys down here. You basically just want to obviously, that's way too much. And you just want to have it peeking just occasionally right there.

So some people just bring everything up to the position, and then adjust this to taste to how loud they want the sound, that's not really the best way to go, the best way to go is to make sure these guys are peaking just occasionally. So you're getting the best headroom out of here. And then you can set this to how loud you want that to be. So for example, you know, you could tie here that might be too loud to mix. Maybe it'll live down here because you don't need the guitar that loud mat mix, but you definitely want to set this guy to give you the best headroom, so it's picking occasionally. I feel like I've been kind of drilling this to death in here, but it's really important about this game stretch because here's the deal.

When you think about it, a kick drum here. Now you could have had the same level, look at the level over here. You could have the same level if you brought this all the way down and then crank that up. Same level, but are distorting the heck out of this preamp right up here. And once it's distorted there, there's nothing you can do downstream from that. So really, this is the place where you really want to make sure that you're giving it enough level to go through well, but not too much.

So it's just daunting. So gain structure. It's really a biggie and I'm sorry if I spent, you know, a lot of time here, but it's really crucial for you to understand. You know, all of this, if you want to clean signal sets or gain too high, you'll get distortion that will follow you all the way out to the mixer, out to Speaker set it too low and you'll need to boost it up later bring up all the noise instead of just right in your head. You know, you'd be happy camper, okay, so we gain structure out of the way let's look at the rest of the controls at the top of a mixer channel. Now, I mentioned before on some mixes that you'll have a battle up top here, it'll say pad and a pad will attenuate a signal or bring it down about 20 DBS before it hits this guy.

So for example, if you grab this trim knob or this input gain, and you brought it all the way down the minimum and you're still peeking, then a pad button might be able to help you there and kind of clamp that down. If your input is a little bit too hot. This particular mixer doesn't have it because this the way this trim knob or scan knob is set up that this is almost like a pad from here to down here, but sometimes you'll see a pad button up there or sometimes the same minus 20 db. So you'll know what that's all about. The one little critter you do see quite often on the top of input channels is this guy here with a little marking that kind of goes like that with kind of a slope going down. This is called a low cut filter or sometimes it's called say roll off or a high pass filter.

We learned a few things ago, the lowest notes that a person can sing is around 80 hertz, unless you're Barry White. And the only instruments that live any lower than that, your kick drum and your bass guitar. So in the entire frequency spectrum, the only thing that lives down there, that is the views is the kick drum and bass guitar. And here's the kicker, those frequencies are tough to reproduce, you have to move a lot of air to move those notes through your speakers. I mean, have you ever seen some workers working over time? So here's the question.

If it's top work, moving those frequencies around, we want to reserve those frequencies, but just those channels who live in that area, right, the kick drum and the bass guitar. But here's the problems. Those frequencies are quite often coming down at vocal mic channels, and it'll be very helpful to filter them out. That's where this load Cut switch comes in. When you press it, it will cut out all the low frequencies on that channel, normally and around 80 hertz. You can turn this on every channel, except the ones that actually have useful content down there below 80 hertz or in this case is 100 hertz right here.

So your turn out on everything except the instruments that have stopped down that 90 that would be the kick, and also the bass guitar. But we said before that a vocalist doesn't sing anything below around 80 hertz. Well, I mean, that's true, but it doesn't mean that there isn't some low frequency junk coming down that microphone line. There's always low frequency junk floating around the stage things that are reflections of the bass guitar and kick drum kind of bouncing around the building, low frequency traffic noise coming through the walls, all sorts of disk junk that you want to filter out because they have no business and data passed through to mixer and it's 30 A speakers set the low fat, low pass filter on the vocal mic and all that low currency jack will be close it out, and it won't interfere with your vocalist low notes.

Now, you might think this nitpicking, but imagine you had 20 open mics on the stage, all reproducing this low end car just rumble on the stage. The net rumble within 30 speakers in your portal kick drum and bass guitar will have to compete for that headroom, your app and speakers need to work hard, reproducing those frequencies down and make sure that you know this the only ones getting through by using that low cut switch on all your channels except your kick drum and your guitar and your low end will suddenly become a lot more clear and punchy. So in a nutshell, you can roll off any channel unless you know that channel does produce some useful content down there in those first couple of octaves under 100 hertz or 80 hertz, some mixes roll up at 100 hertz, some mix up, and mixes roll up about 80 hertz, but it's basically down those first couple of octaves.

Really the only instruments that produce usable content down there is going to be your kick drum and your bass guitar. Now, okay, let's go on to phantom power. I said earlier that condenser mics like this guy here, need power, and dynamic microphones like these guys do not. Now if you have a condenser mic hooked up like so this one right here, you do need to have it powered. Some condenser mics might have a built in battery. Some are powered by an external power supply, but most will be powered remotely from your mixing console.

If you have it switched on. In this case, there's a little phantom power button right here. If you turn that on, then that phantom power will go right down this standard XLR cable from your console and power this guy up. Some mixers have a switches like this, across every channel here, some have a master one like this particular mixer here, some digital mixers will have the setting of turning this on and off hidden somewhere down the menu, just look at the details in your particular manual. And if you're having a hard time finding that setting on your mixer, now if your mixing console doesn't have phantom power, then you'll need to, you know, you'll need to look elsewhere maybe in the form of an external power supply, particular microphone. So that's kind of about it.

But the top of the input channel the big part of it is the gain knob. And the pad we looked at the low cat or rumble kill switch and all sat down and power. Typically the next section in a lot of mixes is the EQ and that's where we can mess with the frequency content of your signal coming down it now the most basic version is just a bass and treble on your home stereo. But as you'll see in a moment, there's a lot more control in your typical mixer on average humans About 10 octaves in frequencies that's that tonal spectrum. And a real piano would be around here with going from about the fundamentals of a piano go from around 27 and a half cycles per second to a little over 4000 hertz or four kilohertz. That's the fundamental frequencies there either times about that.

But rather than getting bogged down in all this specific curves and things like that, I tend to break down a tune of four different kind of neighborhoods, the lows which live around 20 hertz, to 200 hertz, the low mids from 200 hertz to 1000 hertz or one kilohertz, the high mids from 1000 to 5000, or one to five K. And then the highs from five K to 20,000 K. And all of these instruments live in these areas. You can see the dark as the darker color is showing the fundamental and the overtones that don't get too worried about this. We'll be dealing with A lot of this in detail when we start eating individual instruments, but you kind of get the idea that the instruments live in certain tonal ranges. Now, all EQ is is just boosting or cutting certain frequencies or certain frequency ranges and we've all dealt with just a basic issue before you know, on most mixes, you'll have a bass and a treble.

You can base the treble up, pull the treble down, base, the bottom end, or pull a bottom and out. That's what a typical basic EQ looks like. Let's have a look at a little bit more advanced one, and it might look something like this. Don't get intimidated, but basically on this display on the left hand side that showing the lows all the way to the highest that's gonna be a graphic representation so if we had the low shopping and high shelving, bass and treble just like we did before we can boost the highs and look at the graph you can see that we're boosting the highs or we're cutting the highs. Same thing we could do boost the lows, or cut the lows. This is just basic bass in trouble separate call that show me accuse because it deals with the kind of the bookends.

In the middle we have parametric EQ some more of a bell shape, you can see that we're boosting a neighborhood of frequencies. And we can scan around and decide what never frequencies that we can be boosting or cutting for that example. any decent parametric will give you a third control called a cue where you can tighten up or broaden out frequencies that you're boosting or cutting So for example, I could not shout or cut just a very narrow set of frequencies and slide around. So I could just surgically slice out or notch out a set of frequencies very narrow set. Now, to find those bad ones, I normally boost up a very narrow set and stop fishing fish around the noxious thing that we really don't like. In this case, that's that kind of the boxiness of that acoustic guitar.

We can then notch out just a couple of DBS that in fact, I might just broaden that out just a little bit and just take out two or three dB. So you can see the entire audio spectrum can be broken down into four main bands of lows, low mids, high mids, and highs. On some mixes. You might just have bass and treble, or say bass, mids and treble like in this case here, this is actually what I would call a three band EQ with a sweepable mid range here, the lows and the highs, a shelving EQ just like we saw. So on the low shelving EQ, you can either cut or boost up to 15 Db from usually around, you know, the first couple of octaves. In this case, this is b 80 hertz.

So everything from 80 hertz on down, you can pull out this first couple of octaves, or you can boost those first couple of octaves to get some low end on from whatever's coming down this, this particular channel. Now let's jump up to the top end here, which is at treble or high end here. Now, this guy's a shelving EQ as well centered around 12 kilohertz. Now again, don't be confused about the choice of this right here as frequencies and double with every octave you can see here, that this is really only going to be affecting the top part. As of what we can hear, so you can either boost that top octave or you can cut that top octave. So if we can hear, let me just round up to 20 kilohertz, then an octave down from that will be 10 kilohertz.

So you can see that this guy here is really boosting just the very, very top end of se, not even the top octave, it's probably less than the top October what we can hear, but that's really where all the sparkle is. So just a few DBS added here can add some spark of my voice. Obviously, once you boost up to 15 dB of this top octave, it gets fairly harsh, but if there's a particular instrument that you want to roll that off, you can do that right here. So you can see that the low and the high, they're both showing you choose the mid here, a sweepable Eq. In other words, you can still boost the mid range, or cut the mid range, just like you do with these guys here and you can actually see these accounts coded. The blue knobs here are boosting the low, boosting the mid, boosting the highs or cutting on those three ones here, but the mid range is a little bit special because once you boost, then you can sweep that frequency around by using this knob here and everything from 100 hertz, or 50 601 k two K, three K, eight K, you can then dial in the particular frequencies you want to boost in that mid range, or you want to cut in that mid range.

And again, these numbers are exponential so it doesn't go like 100 hertz, 200 hertz, 300 hertz, 400 hertz by 100 hits. It's because these are exponential every time you go up an octave octave by double, then we are dealing with 100 hertz, hundred and 50 then 601 k three K, eight K. All of these are exponential So again, two shelving issues, and one sweepable mid range EQ, the blue knobs do the boosting and the cutting, but in the case of the mid range, you can actually slide around and decide what particular frequencies in the mids you want to boost or cut what we'll look at how to set up a queue in a hands on section later on, you know with all the tips and tricks but you know certain frequencies or sorry, certain instruments, but that is going to get a grasp the idea that you can tweak the frequency content of any of these input channels independently, you know, maybe roll up some lows on some drum overheads or maybe take some of the nasal equality out of the lead things might each child has his own individually GP to mess with or not.

You don't have to screw around with EQ. If you don't want don't go make the rookie mistake of just boosting the high end of every you know channel run across they also have a rule Really, really harsh mix. Most EQ adjustments can be in the range of, you know, boosting or cutting just a couple of dB and remember you have cut as well as boost. Quite often, the best way to increase the mid range on a signal is to pull out some maybe lows that might be muddying up the sound. Like I said, we'll look at some real world examples when we mix a song later on. But for now, just know that we have the ability to tweak the sonic spectrum on any channel.

If all your band gains are set to the 12 o'clock position, then you won't be boosting or cutting any frequencies, you'll actually quite often feel a knot right at that 12 o'clock position. On some mixes, you actually might have an EQ in the outbound that you can push down and pull out if you just want to kill the EQ circuitry completely on a channel. You can do it right there. It's useful on a soundcheck if you want to add some settings by dropping in the EQ in and out so that you can hear your EQ change the music I'm not too harsh. Now might have mentioned that before your particular mixer might have one or, you know, more or less elaborate settings in this particular one here. Sometimes there's just a bass and treble control.

Some have four band EQ with cue controls that you narrow or or spread out the frequencies being affected by the YouTube chat. But by what we've learned here, you know, and what we're going to learn in the mixing sections of the course you'll be able to really handle any each use situation with these