Lessons

Lesson Info

Output Faders

Ok let's talk a little bit about output feeders eso all of the op invaders on this side of the council are very similar in how they bank to the input failures you've got your odds one eight banc one through eight bank your august nine three sixteen bank and again only have the eggs nine through sixteen bank if if you're if you're using nine three sixteen if you have sixteen august is enabled if you're using on the eight only the first eight will be enabled you've got your eight mano matrices right now you're eight model groups but these would be stereo groups if you're setting him up that way and then finally you have your vcs so we're going we're going to talk about how you set up each of these and your master bus and how you can use each of these two sort of set different outputs and rounding depending on what your needs are um let's first talk about the master fader so if you look in the output section right now we brought up a globally cute I'm going to turn that off for the left a...

nd right you also have the mono this is something that's really cool and really helpful to understand about the master fader it's the master fighter has thes three check boxes if you notice across all of the three masters the left, the right and the mono feed those check boxes mean that those air all linked, so if I bring up the master fader, if you see all three of those are actually being brought up simultaneously, if I want to adjust that let's, say I on ly wanted to control the left and right feed and not control the motto feed I could turn off the mono center, feed on, check it, and now my master fader only controls the left and the right and that's really helpful sometimes if I want to independently control like a press feed with the mono feed, or if I want to independently control the stage volume or like the stage failed side phil or a front phil on, I don't want to have that leak to the master favor you could do that. The other cool thing is that you can actually build in offsets gain offsets across left and right if you needed to obviously the preface it should be if you're if you're setting up that you would do any of those offsets and your speaker controls with your amplifiers that left and right are equal and your feed to left and right is the same. But if for whatever reason you can't and you're noticing that left is a little bit louder than right and you want to bring those down, I'm gonna go ahead and reset these two zero you probably want to have your anthrax muted or your speakers muted while you do this just to be sure ongoing. Uncheck one and I'm gonna bring this down. Uh, let's, just bring it down three d b and then when I re check this, those offsets are committed. So now whenever I make any changes, those offsets are still built into any changes that I make throughout the rest of the show. If I ever want to reset those to be unified again, I'll un check this and just reset all the favors to zero and then recheck it, and now they're unified again. So that's just a helpful thing if you ever want to do an offset from left to right while you're mixing left and right main outputs um, we talked about banking, the output feeders, let's talk about groups for a second, so groups are really helpful. A lot of people ask what's the difference between a group of matrix and the cia, they also to serve very specific purposes. Groups are basically buses, they're called groups on this council. A lot of people call them buses what's happening with the group is that if I decide, I want to send channels twenty four, twenty five, twenty six to group one, so I'm going to select twenty four on and assign each of those two group one um now that those three channels are not only being sent to the left and right bus, they're also being sent to group one andi all of the audio is actually physically passing through group one now what I can do with group one is I can actually bring up inserts on group one so I could bring up a plug in I could put all of the drums through group one if I wanted and then bring up a stereo compressor on group wanted to bus compressed all of those I could bring up on e q plug into globally e q all of the channels that associate they're going through group one on that's really helpful with groups and it's different from the cia is because vcs I'm not actually physically routing the signal through the cia. The cia is just controlling the fader volume of each of those individual channels, so we'll talk about that in a second, so let's go back really quick toe how you assign groups I showed you really quickly the easiest way in the bus assignments section of any individual channel e I know that let's say all of my drums and actually let's just set this up really quick so we'll have so let's say here's all my drums I'll bring the subsidy asking here all the channels that I want a bus, all these drums to the drum bus right now, I have the groups set up a cz mano groups, but let's say that I wanted to make this a stereo group because I'm actually panning the drums left and right, so I want to make sure that I'm setting up these output groups to be a stereo, so I want to select each of the group one into and make this a stereo group, so I'm going to go to the options page when I go to buses and over here, if you notice under panning it saying stereo group mode, simple mode, more expert mode. So there's two different ways that I can set up a stereo group I can either set it up in simple mode so that every single change that I make or aiken set up all of the groups to be all stereo or all of the groups to be all mano that's really helpful if I want if I know that I want to commit to that and I know I want all my groups to be stereo, but let's say I only want to use one stereo group let's say that, like on ly drums, I really want to be stereo, and I don't want to use the other eight buses for processing that I could use for og sense, so what? I'm going to switch this to expert mode. And now what I can do is I can go back to each of these groups and I can select stereo pan let's say drums on this like stereo pan and it's going to ask me which groups I want to send them to you see they're all flashing so I'm gonna choose group one and two and I'm gonna do that for every channel in the drum bus and now um I'll exit out of that mode and I'll make sure all of these drums are also not assigned to the left and right bus and now if you look in the group channel I have all of these being sent to the actual group one into and I have my stereo group here it's actually set up is a duel mano group which is how expert mode works but I'm going to go ahead and pan each of these left and right or they're automatically pan because of how we set it up on dh so now I'm going to sign this group too left and right bus and now I have a stereo group effectively that I can use for the trumps to be able to buck all of those channels through the stereo group on dh two the mains so that's that that's like the basic way of busing anything to a group is selecting his channel using the bus assignments and because I haven't set up the other channels that way aiken bus. Anything individually? Just a group three and those showbiz green instead of orange, which is the expert mode stereo combined way let's say I wanted to send based a group three. I can bust that just a group three, for example, and then that's the easiest way to assign buses that way the other way to assign buses so let's say, wait, turn off the bus assignment. Um um the other way that I could do is with what's called multi assign so it's like I say, have my groups here, um and I want a multi assigned all of these groups to this model bus. I'm going to select group one same multi a sign. And then I could just select all these channels and turn off multi sign. And now all those channels are automatically assigned that bus that's really helpful if I want to, um, quickly and very effectively a sign of bunch of channels to one specific bus, you can just select the bus and quickly assigned that way. So you could even assign each channel individually or using the multi assign the last thing which is cool. So now we have all these things. That sign here is what's called in this works for both groups, and for vcs is what's called group spill or vc a spill on you might be familiar with that term, but what that does is let's say that I'm working within a group and I don't want to see any other channels, but what's in that group, I can double tap a group, and it spills all the channels to hear of just what I'm working on. So now these air just this channels assigned to that specific group, and it hides all the other individual channels, so these are no longer used their dead. I'm on ly looking at whatever is in that channel, I mean, group one still mode and aiken double tap your tap again, and it removes and takes me back to the normal mode, so groups billing is really helpful if you're on a different bank and you're working and drums and you're confused as to what the snare is doing, you can quickly spill the group over to your failures just what you were doing and go back to what you were doing and not have to switch back to the other bank. So that's really helpful to sort of switch back and forth? Um, talk really quickly about direct output patching so all of the channels have right here what's called a direct out that allows you to send any of the channels specifically a top of the channel strip to or at the insert return or pre fader to send it tio any sort of external source most of the time this is going to be used to recording so if I have all my input set up, have my channels let's say I want to send all of those two pro tools with the f w x interface going in approaches. I have thirty two channels that aiken direct out channels through a firewire cable the pro tools so I'm gonna go ahead and set up let's say channels one through thirty two and now the direct outs are being fed from each of those channels back too. Um, the inputs on pro tools the thing that remember about this that's important is that even though I bust those out puts it doesn't mean that I've actually activated them. So before I do anything I have to activate those outputs and you could do that individually. I need channel by just selecting the channel and then clicking on direct out and activating the output, and it shows what channels it's being sent to in the actual channel control strip, but I have to individually turn on the direct out for each of those which also brings me the one thing I wanted to mention a quick way to apply a change too bank of channels or a whole group of channels is instead of clicking in every channel individually you can click the bank below, and it says multiple input selected, and I could hold down multi select click every bank across the entire council and activate direct out that way, and now all forty eight channels are activated, the direct outs it's really quick way to set up for recording, to just drag the direct outs across the outputs page on the patch bay, and then to activate all the direct outs that way, and then when I want to exit multi select, that takes me back, and if you look into those channels, all the direct outs are activated, and that actually works on most of the channel set ups you, khun apply to any bank of channels by just selecting groups or multi selecting multiple channels. Okay, so direct out and patching, we talked about vcs, so visa is they're very similar to groups on dh that they control the overall output level of a number of different groups. They're a sign in the same way. The only difference with the cia's is that they're not actually you can't bring up an insert on a v c a, and you can't send the cia anywhere, it's, not it's, not a bus, you're not sending something to the cia and then sending that somewhere the visa is just controlling a group of fighters, this is really helpful for large input mixes where you want to have a visa for drums, guitars, bass and vocals. You don't necessarily want a bus compress all of them. You just want to have one favor to help control them. So let's say we'll go back to our drums here on let's say, um, let me just set these up really quick so let's say, have my eight channels here and I want to sign those two a drum vee see, eh? I'm going to do the same thing as I would for a group. Aiken either select multi sign for a one and then dragged those across for for one. And now these visa is they're going to control the overall output of those eight channels if you notice it doesn't actually change the fader and what you actually see in on the screen is it shows in red in tiny little sort of like uh, um, semi transparent feeders, the change that the visa is having on the fate of. So if it's up, it shows me that I'm actually mixing a higher if it's below it's actually reducing the amount even though the favors air set there. So that's, how the v c is actually show up and the same thing with groups you can even spill the cia's if I only want to see this the cia can just double chicken again double tap it again and just the channels that are assigned to that spill onto the input haters um and I can assign though our control those that way um okay, so moving right along we've covered groups we've covered direct outs we've covered vcs let's talk a little bit about mute group's new groups are really helpful for a number different circumstances let's say that you want to create a new group for every instrument except the vocals because they might make an announcement you can assign um you group one so I'm gonna select me a group one you say a sign on I'm going to select every channel except for maybe twenty four, which happens to be the one mike that the emcee is using when I go back, I go out of sign mode and then new group is on you'll see that the mute button is flashing on all those channels, which means that even though that channel isn't isn't channel muted, the mu group is on muting all those channels that's a really quick way too, while you're mixing live, be able to reach up and just kill everything while somebody else steps up in talks so there's no feedback or no extra noise you can use that for a number of things and there's eight new groups that allow you to be able to use okay, so matrices we're going to cover really quickly major seas are a little more complicated a matrix mixer basically allows you to take any combination of groups aug sen's or even up to eight user defined inputs and create a separate mix of those for someone else. Typically I'll use a matrix for a sub send and I'll just send the left and right feed to the matric I'll put our two matrix one and then use that matrix one fader to control the amount that I'm sending to the sub's, but you can send this for recording let's say that she wanted to have the program feed the maid stereo mix plus two crowd mike's that you have set up for a recording you obviously wouldn't want to feed the crowd mike's into into the p a for feedback reasons, but you definitely want to have them on recording so what I would do for that sort of show you how you can set up that, um we'll go to select the matrix mixer here, so we'll pick matrix one um it's like matrix one and this brings up the matrix mixer on the right side of the matrix mixer you have four options that are sort of predefined you have the left and right left and right main mix that mano mix then the user to find mix I'm gonna activate those and turned them all the way up and because they're stereo link there pan left and right on so now the main mixes being fed to this mixer um well that's right that the cia was down so you can see the main mix is now being fed to matrix one um and so major it's one now has that feet let's say I also wanted to blend in some of I also noticed that we set the matrix feed to be pre fader for the masters so the matrix fetus still being fed the master feed even though I've brought down the main feeder um let's say I also want to send it now the crowd mikes so let's say we've put crowd mikes on channels thirty eight and thirty nine or you have thirty eight thirty nine so I'm gonna name this crowd left and crowd right I'm gonna go to my outputs page and the cool thing is that this allows me to a sign up to eight custom user assigned sources for my matrix I can use group auxerre or the mains or I can use any of the user to find ones and the cool thing about that is that most matrix mixers on ly allow you teo make a separate blend of any of your output buses so I would have to dedicate on dogs end just for my crowd mikes to be able to send them to the matrix mixer which would mean I would have to augment that I couldn't use but to use the user to find inputs I'm gonna go click on user assign and find my source as crowd left and crowd right and I'm gonna have those pickups be at the top of the channel um and then I'm gonna go to my matrix mixer and shoes crowd left and crowd right turn those on actually, I'm gonna put those on three and four so I can stereo link them and pan them left and right um and now there's, no crowd likes playing into that, but now those crowd mike's would then be fed to the matrix. And now I have this matrix that I can use. I can also take two matrices and blend them together to be a a stereo matrix. If I wanna have sterile matrix one into be on a stereo pair and at this apply that toe one into and I want to go back to my stereo matrix, you'll see matrix one into is actually paired as a stereo pair on each one of those air parent left and right s o now in the patch bay I would go to my outputs from my matrix feed and maybe feed the stage outputs fifteen and sixteen for one into and then I could pete patch that stereo output from fifteen and sixteen into whatever recording device amusing in the matrix mixer is now recording the mecca the mixture of the left and right main feed and the crowd mikes and I can adjust the level between those two using the matrix mixer here um so yeah that's kind of how I would go about setting those up it kind of just depends on how how what you're using it for andi matrix mixer is very flexible you have eight of them or four stereo matrix mixers that you can use to sort of define however you want to use them the last thing we talk about is we talked briefly about this is for outputs is the dogs outputs so any of the sixteen dogs outputs in sixteen dogs mode you can link to be stereo pears and we showed you how those how you set those and how you can change the pickoff points for each of those following channel pan once those air linked um you can follow channel pans so that whenever you pan the individual channel across left and right it mirrors that across dogs one into that's really useful for a stereo headphones for example and then each of the pickoff points you can change to be a different points in the the channel strip whether you want the accent to be pre cue pre mute or pre fader s o. For your outputs tab, you can click on the outputs page and you see all of your output. Masters your dogs. One, three, eight, nine, three sixteen. Matrix one through eight. Group one through eight v c, a one through eight on all of those outlets give you a tremendous amount of flexibility to be able to create a number of different mixes for effects. For stage monitors for recording a broadcast feeds for your main mixes down there's a lot you can do.