Spitting inputs for separate processing

[MikeParticipant]

I should preface this by saying I don’t know at all what I’m doing or talking about. I have not been been able to search for answers because I don’t know the words to use. I’m the guy that sits at the sound board at my church. We use a GLD 80 with ME-1s and I can turn things up and down and fiddle with the EQ, but that’s about it. My predecessor purchased the system and set it up, but while he knows more than I do, he was basically learning on the fly too. He has moved out of town so I can text him, but am mostly on my own.

As I understand our system, we have all the inputs coming in on the left side faders. We have two different outputs mixes – one to the main room and one to the videocasting/recording system. The audio going to the video sounds thin and amateur. We’d like to put some effects on the video output, but the room is very boomy, so we don’t want effects on the sound in the room. The guy in charge of recording doesn’t want to load up the recording of spoken vocals with effects in order to keep them intelligible. The setup guy thinks the way he set it up, we could put some effects on the whole mix to the recorder, but then would have to fiddle with turning it on and off depending what was happening.

We have a bunch of unused channels. Can I use those? In my imagination, it seems like I should be able to take for example the singer’s mic and assign it to multiple faders which I could then process independently and assign to output to the two mixes.

So I guess I have 3 questions:
1) Is that possible?
2) What do I call that process so I can google up tutorials and find it in the manual?
3) Any general advice on books or resources to help me do this better?

Thanks,
Mike

[MikeShandParticipant]

You can certainly do that. You can assign a single input port to multiple channels and hence faders. You can either do this in the preamp page (choose the input port you want assigned to that channel), or the io page (select the input port and then choose the channel you want to assign it to. Use info at the bottom to find what is already assigned. Each channel you assign is added to the set. Use “unassigned” to clear out the list.

See page 8/9 of the manual for details of assigning via the preamp page, and note what it says about trim on surface etc. Basically you can only control the preamp gain of the input port from one place, but on the other channels to which it is assigned you can use trim to adjust the level up or down from what the port gain is giving you. But note that changing the preamp gain will change all the channels.

See the manual page 34 for info about setting via the io page.

Hope this gives you a start.

Mike

[MikeParticipant]

Great! Thank you so much for the specific instruction, but especially thanks for referring me to the page numbers in the manual. When I went to look at them in my “User Manual,” my pages did not match what you were saying. That caused me to investigate and I discovered the “Touch Screen Reference” which seems to have a lot of information that will be helpful to me.

I’ll see if I can get in there this week to fiddle with it.

Mike

[NathanParticipant]

Mike if you just want effects on the broadcast mix and not FOH (front of house) mix then you don’t need to parallel process the channels. Simply assign the FX returns to the broadcast mix and not the FOH mix.

Another simple solution would be to place an ambient mic somewhere, this is a mic intended to capture the sound in the room, by adding this into the broadcast mix you will something that is a more accurate representation of how things sounded in the room that going straight out of the board.

Finally some compression on the broadcast mix maybe useful as you generally want less dynamic range than you would have live.

[MikeParticipant]

Nathan – If I understand what you are suggesting, you’re saying we could put FX on everything going out to the video system collectively? I think that was previously rejected because they were concerned effects on the spoken mics would make it difficult to understand the speakers. But as far as I know, they never tried it to see if it would be problematic. But that’s why I was thinking parallel processing (look at me learning new words) might be a solution if it was possible.

I was going to experiment with an ambient mic, but for different reasons. The video guy was hoping to include congregational prayer and comments. I don’t figure that will work for what he wants, but I hadn’t thought about trying to blend it into the mix in that way. I suspect I’ll mostly get just airy noise which wouldn’t work for him but might help the sound. Something to fiddle with at least.

The video guy does post processing on his end. I don’t know what that includes, but will suggest it.

Thanks for the suggestions.

I haven’t been able to get there when there was time to mess around with it yet. Maybe this weekend…

Mike

[MikeParticipant]

I finally got time to mess around with this along with the other sound guy (who knows more about all of this than I). At first, we kept getting reverb only on the house mix and not on the video mix. Eventually, we were able to get it to do exactly what we wanted.

Thanks again for your help.

Mike

[SteffenRParticipant]

Mike, basically you should hardly try to understand the differences of the Mix types… Aux or Subgroup are the two things to get used too

see this post for assistance

[MikeParticipant]

Steffan – Yes I should. In my normal life I teach 3rd grade. One of the things I try to do every year to help me empathize with my struggling students is to keep learning stuff. It helps to remember what it feels like to be trying to grasp new ideas and figure out what someone is talking about. For me, this certainly qualifies.

I’m generally the sort of person who needs to understand, not just memorize steps. I’ve been working at it, but it’s hard to do without practical experience. Our system basically works well. I’m not setting it up and tearing it down. We aren’t usually changing things. I can’t really ask the band to come in and play for a few hours while I experiment, and I don’t want to fiddle too much during the actual service. I’ve read a lot, but without the practical experience it’s difficult to really understand. It’s a great reminder for my own teaching.

It has been a long time since I’ve been this far out of my depth and had to work to learn new stuff. Knowing things and being smart is much more comfortable.

[Author]

Posts