Lessons

Lesson Info

System Settings

We're going to jump right in and go into the system settings, so when you first get saw that set up on the s forty eight, the very first thing you should do is you powered on its go straight to the system settings and make sure you're setting it up exactly how you want to. So a couple things to talk about when you're booting up empowering down the council for first, the first thing you want to do when you're booting up the console is you want to make sure that both power supplies are connected and you have a monitor connected on dure going toe. Just push the power button right here on the back of the console and boots up immediately into standby mode and that's while the computer actually loads the software it's important to know that it takes about a minute and ten seconds for the entire system to boot up and that's important, because if you're in the middle of a show and you lose power somehow to front house, you should you need to plan on at least a minute and ten seconds for the en...

tire council to be able to boot back up if you should lose power that's a lot of the reason why there's a primary in a backup power supply. If either one of those comes undone or fails during the live show, you actually get a notice on screen tell you that there's been a power failure to one of the power supplies and that you should check that make sure that it's connected so that both primary and the backup power supply could be used as soon as you boot it up. It comes to the main page, and the first thing it's going to do is load all of the input channels from the last save scene or the last save show file it's going to load all of the graphic hughes and all of the plug ins that were associated with the very last show file that was used sometimes you might load up a show file if you're working on a council that's not yours that has plug ins that you don't have the authorizations on the I lock for s o those will pop up and ask you either to authorize the use the demo mode until you remove those plug ins from the system and we'll talk a little more specifically about how to manage plug ins a little bit later on we get into the plug in section so once you put up the console and everything said you should be ready to go, the important thing to know is that there's two modes that the s c forty eight and pretty much every did you design we're avid venue counsel uses, and those are config mode and show mode, and the reason this is set up is that they're certain changes in the settings that happened on the council that actually cut out audio being fed to all of the output buses before making any changes. And so during show mode, any change that you make to any parameter on the console is is great out and doesn't allow you to make any of those changes in show mode on the reason for that, obviously, is that you don't want to stop any audio from actually being fed to the speakers or to the monitors because you're making a change examples that like that would be loading another plug in if you load a plug in the main output, cuts out while it authorizes the plug in and loads it and then cuts back in eso when the council's in show mode you can't load any plug ins on bears, dozens of examples of those type of changes that are made for the council on the show mode prevents you from accidentally engaging event in any of those while you're sending up or while the show is actually running, so the default is it opens up in show mode, not a lot of the changes can be made, the first thing we're going to do is switch to config mode. And you should only switched to config mode before the show starts or before anybody's on stage, and you should always make sure that your speakers are are muted, your main output speakers or turned off. While you're making a lot of the changes and create in case there's, any clicks or pops for many of the system changes and can figure out that could happen. So there's two ways to switch out of config mow the first easiest way is just to the very top. You just tap that config mode button, and now the councils and config mode and all of the options and changes that you need to make her available. The other option is to go to the mode and just double click on the bottom part of the screen, and you can switch to configure it that way. So that's, the basic idea of system and config mode let's go out to go over to the options tab, and we're going to look at sort of the main system setting. So, as I explained there's to mix engines on dh, you can use any of the dsp power on those two mix engines to power any number of input channels, effects, returns, graphic, e cues or plug ins. And so knowing in advance about how many channels you want to be working with allows you to maximize the rest of the dsp to power more effects returns to power more graphic accused or more plug ins if you know that you're mixed session is going to be very plugged in intensive but you're not going to have a lot of input channels you might want to consider reducing the mpa channels to save more processing power for plug ins in a way a lot of this works is you actually go over to the devices tab and the devices tab will show you what each of the mix engine parameters are assigned to so each of the engines have nine dsp slots available and you can see right here the system right now is set up the two mix engines which you can't change we have forty eight input channels eight effects returns sixteen graphic e cues and six dsp is available for plug ins so that's not a lot left over for plug ins but it depends on how how many pull against you plan on running if you look at the devices tab it shows that the first mix engine it's going to use one dsp spot for the master mix engine you have to have that you have to be able to actually mix everything in the council so that can't go away after that every individual slot can handle eight channels of input channels so we have one two three four five six which gives us forty eight input channels we have another eight channels for effects returns the output helper is another dsp process that runs that we can't do without the output the espy is another one and then we have to graphic accuse on that leaves us one, two, three, four, five, six slots available for plug ins so if we wanted to change that, we're going to put this consulate config mode and go to edit and now you see that you can actually make some of these changes you can't change the number of effects returns, but if I reduce the input channels too turned to, um and click apply the council's going to reboot, and when it comes back up, it'll show you that reducing the channels to thirty two actually gives you more dsp slots available for either more graphic used. If you have a lot of graphic accuse you want to run on your aug sends for monitors, for example or more poignance so now it's going to be back up in show mode? I have thirty two channels and now I have eight dsp is available for plug ins. If I wanted to edit that again, I can change that onda add up to twenty four graphic accuse which would be twelve stereo mixes, so if I was running twelve monitors and I wanted to make sure I had twelve graphic e cues across twelve stereo in your monitor pairs for example which would be pretty intensive but there are definitely situations that call for that then I'd want to be able to use that and maybe reduce my input channels or reduce the number of plug ins that I'm using the most common way that your problem going to do that is when you're using the show or the consul and on a monitor consul on for the stage mixes if you're running a lot of stereo mixes on stage for for example in your monitors in addition to actual four wedges then you might want to consider increasing your graphic accuse and last year using analog outboard graphic accuse before your power am sir before your powered monitors a lot of that just helps you have mohr additional graphic e can control of their outputs before you actually start mixing um because we're just going to kind of run through the basic setup of the consul I'm going to switch it back to forty eight and put channels and sixteen graphic accuse and it's going to reset the council again and now when the council comes back up you can see that the basic default setup is here it has to mix engines forty eight channels a effects returns sixteen graphic accuse and six dsp is available for plug ins so that should be enough for most settings or most situations that she would use so we're going to kind of run with that, as we continue here, the bus configuration, the main bus configuration there's sort of two options for how you can sort of mix your front house you have three out puts you can either run it as stereo left and right plus a mano bus or you can actually run it as a true lcr mix where you're panning across three speakers across the front of the stage, especially for larger venues where you have a wider throw you want might want to be might want to switch to an l c r mix where you're actually running a center channel and then a left and a right um, something important to note too about those buses is there's something called center divergence, which we'll talk about later on here in just a second and senator virgins basically allows you to control of the amount of panning between the center channel and the left and the right when things were pen center. So we'll come back and talk a little bit about how to use senator virgins to control your lcr mix most the time I use a left and right mix plus mano a mano mix could be used for a lot of different things you can use the mono mix for a subwoofer, for example, and then just use outboard crossovers to be ableto low pass and high past the left and right and the mono you can use the motto for a separate feed for a mano press feed you could use the motto for a stage phil or front phil andi you can also use those matrices for those as well but what kind of walk through those different setups andi make any of those changes you just put the show on config moan and then click edit um the bus configuration so as I said, sb forty eight has twenty four buses that you can use in three different sort of set ups the first would be able to use eight monologues is which gives you avs one three as mono aug sends to be able to use plus eight stereo groups so if you're using stereo groups you have to reduce the amount of buses that you're using for august ins the other option and sort of the default option is sixteen oxidants you have sixteen monologues and eight model groups if you're running mano groups and then the final option is sixteen dogs is plus eight variable groups and what those very little groups allow you to do is use them as individual mano buses romano groups with the ability to link to them together as stereo groups that you compare individually but obviously with twenty four total buses you ate variable groups you would only be able to use up to four stereo groups plus the sixteen monologues if you wanted to use it that way so right now we're going to set it up just with sixteen ogden's and eight mano groups, which is kind of the standard on dh that's pretty much the most change that you're gonna make to this system. Page quick note that pretty much every change on the system page requires you to restart the console and again, like I said, it can take up to depending on plug in authorization, it can take up to a minute and ten seconds to load up the entire council, so if you're in a hurry and the band's about to go on stage, make sure that you're not making any change to the system configuration because you might be holding them back waiting for the council to restart. Um, ok, we'll move to the buses tab um, so like I said, each of the buses you have sixteen mano buses or sixteen monologues is that you can control on the cool thing is you can actually link any of those aug sense together to be stereo boxes and there's two ways that you can then pan between them, you can either use the stereo pan on the dog's control section of the bus assignment to pan separately from the channel panning, or you can actually choose what's called follow channel pan, which means that if you change any of the panning on the individual channel to the main bus it mirrors that exact panning between the stereo august and that you're sending this is really helpful if you're managing both monitor mixes two stereo in ears and front of house mix on the same council, any changes that you make to the panning will also be reflected in the changes too to the stereo august and and so the way that you change those is again you put the show the council and config mode and go to edit on then any of these that you want to link together let's say that I had to stereo in your monitors that I wanted to use I could apply the changes to link those together on now that those air linked I can click follow channel pan, which means that the panning that I make on any of the channels that are being sent to odds one into our august three and four will be mirrored on the panning between ons one and two and three and four so that's just something helpful that kind of allows you to smear the panning between stereo aug sends this is also something that you probably would want to do if you're setting up the council is a monitor counsel if you're running in your car in your monitors staring into monitors from the monitor counsel, you probably want to follow the channel pants so that you're not switching back and forth between the pan assignment for the channel and the pan assignment for the august send it kind of just depends on how you want to set it up so we're gonna play that these air now just sixteen normal ox ends the next thing to talk about and this is something super cool about the s c forty eight and all of the d show consoles is that sorrel? The venue consuls is that you have a lot of flexibility decide where all the pickoff points are and pick ups are basically asking you where do you want any of the inserts or aug sends or matrix mixers to be fed from on any one individual channel you can set them is all pre cue pre mute or pre fader so right now all of the aug sends are fed pre fader right here you can see that they're all set up individually that way now each of the channel strips, which we'll get to in a second also allow you to individually decide each whether each ogg send on each individual channel is pre fader, but this is the global control to decide whether or not each of those pickoffs to the august sends or pre fader you could also make sure they're pre mute um and pre cue so you have a lot of control is to decide where you want that pick off point to the august and actually be and the cool thing is, it doesn't stop just with eog sends you could do the same with pretty much any of the buses on the council, so if you go to the pickoff stab, which is sort of the next thing we're going to look at here input strip fader pick off point decides from the input strip where you're picking off any of the inserts where do you want those to pick off from? So do you want those to be pre or post theater? I highly recommend you probably want them to be pre fader there's, not a lot of circumstances where you'd want to input strip fator pick off to be post vader. You want the failure to be the last control being sent that you have control of before being bused to the main bus? Um, but there might be a situation where you might want to use that the matrix sources allow you to decide when any of the output buses are being routed to a matrix mixer, where they being fred from s o right now, the auxerre being sent pre fader to the matrix, the groups are being sent pre fader and the left and right plus mono is being sent post fader this is one change that I actually always make on the console, because I typically like to set up in front of house counsel to run my subs on a matrix and I want the matrix to be a true independent matrix feed to the sub and not to be post fader from the left and right fator, and so I'll show you how to set up a sub on a matrix on the s c forty eight later on, but one thing that I always do is switch the matrix feed to the left and right, plus mano to be pre fader that way, the feed going to the sub is a completely independent from the left and right on def, I'm bringing down the left and right mix I'm still feeding the sub and I have complete independent control. I usually do that to start off mixing and then later on in the show. Once we're closer to where the final mix is unusually switch it back to post fader once those levels are set so that I have complete control with just one favor of the outputs, but it kind of just depends on the scenario delay compensation. You can delay any of the input channels or any of the out the channels and it asks whether you want delay compensation off completely off on the mix on lee or the mix and the inserts in the cool thing about this is that all of the dsp process processing that happens is automatically compensated for before getting to the output stage. S o delay compensation basically allows you to decide whether you want that just on the mix the mix and the inserts which of the plug ins or the hardware inserts or you want it completely off I would keep it on the mixing the inserts unless there's a very specific reason why you want independently manually control all of the delay compensation um finally the master insert points for the dogs masters they're pre fader for inserts the group's pre vader's stay with matrix and left and right there might be scenarios where you want the master to be post fader on any one of those master output banks but for the most part you most likely would want them to be set up his pre fader okay, I'm getting into solo and monitor section really quick we're going to actually come back on the buses tab you have a lot of control over how soloing and monitoring happens on the council and this is intentional for when you're using the council is a monitor counsel you want a lot of flexibility to set it up to behave in the way that you wanted to behave we're going to go come back and go through this extensively later on so just so you know under the buses tabs where you control whether all the solos or pfl stereo nfl solo in place how to set up a monitor wedge on the main fader ducking and trimming and we'll talk about a lot of different ways that soloing sort of interacts and can be set up to interact in the council um, we're going to spend some time talking about snapshots, so we'll come back and talk in great detail about how snapshots work but there's also some global settings here that allow you to make some changes and there's one really important one that I find really interesting you can actually change any of the parameters on pretty much the entire council within a scene and assign it to a scene. The scary thing about that is that for most situations you probably would not want to assign the gain pad and phase of a microphone preempt to a scene if you accidentally recall the scene that massively changed the game structure of every microphone cramp in the middle of a show, it could be pretty disastrous, so the one thing I always do is turn off gain pad and phase control on the snapshots, and what that basically allows me to do is make sure that no matter what happens, I would make sure we do this anyways. But the global control has turned off. There might be a scenario in which you could create a scene that has separate game controls and we'll talk about what some of those situations are, but for the most part I usually turn that off the each of the sixteen aug sends can be set up as either monitors or effects, and the reason that it doesn't really change the nature of those buses, but you can label each of those is such so that when you're setting up scenes, you can actually identify which ones are being used, his monitors, and which ones are being used it effects, so that is all controlled within the snapshot control paging system settings here, um, there's a lot that can be done with scenes and midian, many machine control in many time code. We're not going to get into much of that in this workshop were made basically sticking with controls within the actual consul, but you can actually assign snapshots to specific many events and then control all of those events from an external many source like approach was, for example, or like any other show control type device that you want to use, but we're not going to get into a lot of the actual many timecode control miscellaneous tab this is actually find a lot of really great tools that really helpful you haven't oscillator, and the oscillator allows you to send pink noise, white noise or variable science or specific frequencies to any of the output buses, and this is obviously very useful for tuning your front of house p a you can use white noise to patch specifically to the speaker's or you can use pink noise. You can adjust the level, turn it on and off, and how the routing for that goes it's a little kind of weird in in the actual venue software, but when you switched a routing mode for the oscillator, you get a little message that says in route oscillator to selected mode, and now you can go back to any of the output chat tabs and choose which output buses you want to route that oscillator, too. Um, so as you select each one of them, they blink blue on, and then when you're done routing, you have to turn off routing. Um, that's important to note, too, because when that button is selected for either the two track the talk back or the oscillator when you're routing that you can't control anything else on the council until you turn off rounding mode, the only thing you can do is select which output channels you want about that, too. Um, something with the talk back. We're going to talk about how you set up a talk back. Mike on the s c forty eight. You can use an individual channel if you want, or you can use the dedicated talkback, mike input on the back of the console, and you can actually route that to a specific channel, or you could just not use the channel and route it directly to an output and use the global control. When we set up for front of house, I'll show you how I use the talkback, mike, which makes it easy, there's also a way that you can set up an event in the events tab to be able to automate muting you're talk back, mike on and off with one of the function controls, or the user to find button a couple of ways to do that. Um, you have tapped tempo, which is really cool tap tempo allows you to use a button on the console. You can actually use any of the the push buttons on the council you can assigned to be your tap tempo button on and that's actually something I use almost every single show. If you're mixing a band, you wantto if you and your using delay or any sort of echo azan effect, you want to be able to align the temple with the song, and if you don't have the songs pre planned out with tempo, you want to tap that real. Time so we'll talk about how you set that up but the tap temple was right here and that could be turned on and off on and then you're the system clock you know which pretty self explanatory um the interaction allows you to set up the council to be able to exist on ethernet network it allows you to change the input safe bank safe and so safe which we'll talk about um it allows you to change some of the media and characteristics which we'll get into later on we talked about meeting we already talked about the devices we'll talk specifically about how to control some of the plug ins and how to authorize and install those plug ins on and then finally the last page on the system set up is the invents page and the events allow you to create any specific trigger and action events that you can use for very specific things that action it can actually really helpful so we'll walk through what some of those are so yeah that's basically the system set ups tab that's setting up the council I know that stuff is super dry but it's really important to know where things are sometimes you spend forever looking for things where is this one setting that I have to find a check this one box to use its on sub tab so once you really understand that's have you save a lot of time when you're at the show. Not scrambling around, looking for what some of those are.