I Desperately Need Some Advise On How To Use A Soundboard-Music Heads Help Me

[Phog Allen]

Good evening gents. Well this is a sad tale to tell. It involves a fifty year old man looking for a corner to hide in. I volunteer at times to help with the sound system at our church. Mind, I am not familiar with mixing and sound boards. At all. So I am learning on the job. This morning's efforts were a disaster. The regular sound man was on holiday so he asked me to do it. This is usually pretty easy. He keeps the board set at some pretty well defined defaults. Sort of a generic starting point. Normally I just need to open a number of inputs and mics. Some tweaking with the gain and the faders is always needed but nothing too serious. We are not a rock down the house congregation but do mix up the traditional with contemporary and live instruments. Well the proverbial wrench was thrown into the gears. On Wednesday we had a guest children's choir from Uganda and the settings on the board were tweaked out for their show. Nothing was reset to any sort of standard, Enter your gullible and and now well humbled "sound man". And that chaps is a huge joke. The performers could not hear themselves in the monitors and the main speakers were roaring to the congregation. I usually never touch the master volume controls(I guess that is what they are called) but managed about two songs in to tone it down. The other people running the show kept telling me to turn up their instrument inputs which I had already done. Anyway, you get the point. Uneven sound, poorly mixed vocals. Oi. Tonight was much better since one of the other lads sort of tweaked the settings a bit.

Fine. Where does this leave me the next time? And I have now done this enough to know there will be a next time. We use Behringer 3282A desk which I believe has 32 channel. We run the mics through wireless receivers next to the sound board. Most of the instruments are hard wired. Okay, is there a sort of default starting point? I have included a generic photo of the board I grabbed from the web. If I understand things correctly each column is a channel. From top to bottom there is a gain dial, a row of EQ dials, then the AUX dials, a few buttons I am completely lost around, a square button that opens or closes the channel, and finally a fader slider on the bottom. The AUX dials are all turned completely down except the bottom dial which is all the way to the right. I ASSume it is sending the signal to whatever output we have connected to a CD recorder. Sorry to be so tedious but you can tell I am very green concerning audio mixing and sound control. If you want to see other photos of the desk a search on Google images turns up a lot but none of them are very close up. Thanks for any help.

Cheers, Todd

 

[i8ntskeered]

Schnykies, Todd. It appears that you have been thrown into the deep end with a lead vest on.

I have been in the "business" for around 28 years and will help as much as I can. First, I have a couple of questions for you?
1. Does the "mix position" stay intact permanently? That is, do have to set it up and tear it down ebery service or not?
2. Do the services have elements that remain constant? Does the band have a fixed line-up, etc.?
I wull look at the cut-sheet for that console and explain the lay of the land to you when I get to work tomorrow. This is my full time job, btw.

Meanwhile, a bit of prayer and some divine intervention couldn't hurt.

 

[i8ntskeered]

Oh btw. Is there an eq for the whole system?

 

[Phog Allen]

i8ntskeered(great handle by the way). thank you for the fast reply. I will try to answer as best I can.

1. It stays put in the balcony area.

2. Yes and No. We are a small congregation so the for the most part the music leader grabs the same mic each Sunday. Others grab whichever one is handy. The four or five wireless mics are all colour coded with screen caps(I guess that is what they are called) with a corresponding tag on a channel on the board. Blue, Red, Orange, etc. Instruments can vary but not too much. Acoustic guitar tied into a pickup. Electric and bass guitars into pickups. Drums, organ and piano have no mic or other attachment to them. They put out enough sound to usually pick up pretty well right through the mics for the singers. There are also two hanging mics directly above the choir which are just behind the main stage singers. I sometimes open them when the piano or organ player is accompanying one or two singers for offertory or closing. It keeps the recording of the singer from sounding almost a cappela. I hope all that is not too muddled.

I did a bit of YouTube searching and found I was way off on the AUX function. It sends the sound to the stage monitors. We have two monitors on each side of the stage angled toward the center. There are two main loudspeakers set well in front of those monitors to help reduce feedback.

The amps sit behind the stage and I am unsure if there is an EQ sitting back there with them or not. There is not one at the mixing desk. Again thanks for the help.

Cheers, Todd

 

[Phog Allen]

Bump.

 

[i8ntskeered]

Excellent bump, man. The fact that your gear stays put gets you ahead of the game. The channels that your sound guy has set should be close enough to allow you to just push faders for the main mix. I'll try to give you the quick and dirty overview to get a BASIC understanding of how things work.

You are right about the aux sends. They are actually an output bus that can be used for many different purposes. In your case they are used to send a monitor mix (or mixes) to floor wedges, in-ear monitors, or a fold-back to a headphone mix. I'll touch on that more later.

The model number usually tells the story of the ins-and-outs (literally) of the console. 3282 = 32x8x2 = 32 inputs x 8 submasters x 2 (stereo Left and Right) main outputs. The inputs are kind of a no-brainer. You plug a mic level input (microphone, etc.) into an xlr input. The xlr is the microphone cable, with a round 3 pin connector. Or you could have a line level input, which is a regular 1/4 inch (headphone-type) connector. Mic level is -10dBu. Line level is +4dBu. What this means is a regular microphone input level is going to be a lot less "hot" than, say, a keyboard or CD player or video deck.

This brings you to the "gain" section of the input strip. Top knob of each channel. The gain section controls how much signal voltage is allowed through the input strip. Too much signal allowed through the strip will result in "clipping", which results in distortion and really nasty sounding stuff. It can also cause speakers to blow in extreme cases. The very first thing you need to do when you have a new input, such as a guitar, mic, or anything is set your input gain. There is a button down by the fader marked PFL. This stands for "pre-fade level". Pressing this will turn your output meters (top right corner) into input meters. This will show you how much signal you are letting through the input strip. Ideally you want that level to be around 0 dB. There will be peaks in the signal, but try to keep it in this range. In the yellow LEDs are ok at times, but if you start hitting red, you need to back that down. Keep in mind that if you have more than one PFL active, you will see the gain level of all channels selected. So just do one at a time. And de-activate your PFLs when you're not adjusting gain levels to see your output level. Remember -- stay out of the red.

The EQ section takes a bit more than I can write in a paragraph or two, but I'll just tell you that the starting point should be flat. Flat means all 4 bands (your console has a 4-band fixed EQ on each strip) should be set to 0. You can adjust the tone from there.

Moving down to the fader section, you have buttons beside the output faders that assign that channel to an output bus. The buttons are marked 1-2, 3-4, 5-6, 7-8, and main mix. Selecting one of these buttons assigns that channel to either a submaster (the 8 faders between the input channels and the main (L,R) output faders), or the main output faders. A subgroup allows you to adjust the output of a whole group of inputs, say vocal mics or drums, with one fader. Need more drums in the mix? Push up the drum subgroup instead of all 8 drum input faders. Make sense? Ok. If you have a "new" input and are not sure where to assign it, I would select "main mix". That sends the signal straight to the main outputs. Just make sure you don't have any other groups selected as well. That could lead to bad things, man. Bad things. Ok...not catastrophic...just weird.

Back to the aux sends. I would bet that you have at least 2 mixes going to the stage for monitors. The aux sends, used in this capacity, control the level of each channel that is sent to each mix. Say, for example, your center stage vocal monitors are on aux 1 and you want to turn that singer's mic up in that monitor mix. Find the input channel for that microphone. Go to the pot for aux 1 and turn it up...SLOWLY. You get to the level he/she wants and get a loving smile of appreciation from said singer. Be careful when turning up levels in monitors when you are mixing from front of house. Too much and you could give the performer what we call a "brain dart". Not fun. And everyone in the building turns and glares at the sound guy when those happen. Not fun at all.

Ok. So I know this is a LOT to take in at one time. I've been doing this since the 80s and I'm still learning, myself. I'll PM you my phone number and we can discuss things further or if you have any specific questions you need to ask, or find yourself in a panic situation. I'll be more than happy to help in any way I can.

Peace.

 

[Phog Allen]

Mike, thank you for the detailed explanations. I will re-read the post several times to better take in what you are describing. It very much helps to start make sense of what is going on at the board. One other question. If you look above the 8 faders you mentioned to the right of the board, there is a vertical strip of pots numbered 1-8. At the top of this strip I noticed there were two yellow stickers labeled 1 & 2 next to the 1 & 2 pots. I was unsure of what those do but left my hands off them Sunday. From their location I am guessing they are related to the 8 AUX channels.

I am going to try to find the time to go play around with the thing when no one is depending upon it. That way if something goes crazy it will only affect me! Great response sir.

Cheers, Todd

 

[i8ntskeered]

You're correct. Those 8 pots are for the aux sends. You can raise or lower the level of each aux globally with those. Basically put, if you have a vocal, keyboard, hi-hat, and bass guitar in aux 1 and the performer is happy with that mix but needs more volume...turn that knob up and the whole mix gets louder. So the yellow tape with 1 & 2 most likely means monitor mix 1 and monitor mix 2.

Good call on playing around when nobody is listening, too. The more you can get your hands on the rig and play around, the more you can learn what is what and what goes where. Hands-on experience is the key.

Cheers, my friend.