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  • #39728
    Profile photo of moonfacemoonface
    Participant

    HI all, newbie here, and i mean newbie.. i am new to the live sound mixing world. one question i do have is stereo groups!
    where, what,and why would i want to use a stereo group, and suggestions. there are 2 stereo groups on the gld, whats is the best way to use them, and how you route them ect.. thanks.

    #39746
    Profile photo of cornelius78cornelius78
    Participant

    A group is an audio path that sums whichever inputs you send to it. The summed signal can then be routed to its own output and/or another audio path (eg LR or a matrix.) On the GLD, a group also has it’s own processing (peq, geq and compressor) and can have an insert (either local digital fx rack or outboard) applied. If it’s a stereo group, the channels routed to it will be panned the way they’re panned in LR. In most cases you’d un-assign the channel from LR, assign it to a group, then assign the group to LR. In other cases you’d assign the channel to LR and to the group, but not assign the group to LR. You application will determine which is best for you. Some uses include:

    Level control: route all your drums to a group and control their overall level using the group master fader, without affecting their pre/post send levels. In some cases you’d be better served using a DCA, or a combination of both. On analogue desks without VCAs, it’s an easy level control, and another gain stage.

    Group eq: if you’ve got 10 mics that all need the same eq, instead of eqing them individually, you could send them all to a group and just eq the group. With ganging and copy+paste this is less of an issue with digital, but it can save a lot of time if working with analogue.

    More eq+geq: if you’ve got some lavs that keep feeding back despite your efforts with the individual channel peq on the lavs, route them to a group and the group supplies another four bands of peq+a geq to help notch out feedback.

    Group compression: Send all your backing vox (or horns, or guitars etc, and their fx rtns) to a group and compress the group. If one singer is singing, the compressor won’t be doing very much, but as more voices are added you get more compression, helping to “glue” them all together and keep them as a BV section, if this is the kind of sound you’re going for in your mix.

    Inserts: Route all your drums to a group, and insert an FX processor (eg a reverb) over the whole drum mix. There’s a post on the blog about someone using a deq on a string group to scoop 200Hz when the strings got heavy to leave space for vocals.

    Summing for personal monitoring: If you’ve got a personal monitoring system but don’t want to send 10 individual channels of drums to it (because the personal monitoring system doesn’t have enough inputs, or it’s too cumbersome for the muso to mix the 10 drum channels, all they want is a basic drum mix,) you can instead send your 10x drums to a group and then send the group to the personal monitoring system as a single channel (or 2 if it’s a stereo group.) In doing this you only take up one or two inputs on the Personal Monitoring System instead of 10, and the muso only needs to worry about adjusting the level of one or two channels instead of 10.

    I’m sure others have a lot more creative ways of using them, but that’s probably enough to get started with.

    By default the GLD has 2 stereo groups. It’s bus structure is flexible though, and you have 20 mix outputs to work with. You could run 20 mono (or 10 stereo) groups if you wanted. How you use them will depend on your application. As an example, (obviously my usage applies only to me, I’m sure others do it differently) if I’ve got the time to set things up properly I like to use 3x stereo groups (vox, keys, drums) and 2x mono groups (gtr, bass.) The other 12 available buses I use for floor wedges (if I’m mixing monitors from FOH,) mains and overflow.

    HTH

    #39749
    Profile photo of moonfacemoonface
    Participant

    thank you so much cornelius for your reply.. I will take my time and read your reply.. Thanks you so much.. i will let you know how i get on.. many many thanks again… thats a great reply… cheers..

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