Steal the console file I use to mix the president

VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION

Corporate shows are easy, right? It's just someone talking on a podium, maybe some walk-in music, video playback. What else is there to it? Just a couple of faders and make it happen. This couldn't be farther from the truth. Although bands are a lot of fun to have their own set of challenges. Corporate shows can oftentimes be even more complicated.

You've got someone presenting from zoom. You've got mixed minuses. There's a broadcast going out. Got to make sure the room sounds good. Gotta be able to preview stuff without making the room. Get interrupted. It's pretty complex when you're in the light of fire. So today I'm going to share you my exact template that I use in the X 32 and every corporate show I do.

It has a lot of thought and small changes behind workflow that I've been able to refine over hundreds of shows in this seat. I've been able to do shows for the president of the United States, CEOs of the world's largest companies and some of Silicon Valley's most exciting startups. So I want to share with you everything I know in this one template that's available to you for free.

In my audio tool kit, you can get [email protected] slash audio toolkit. It's got a ton of other great stuff in there. My audio mass survival spreadsheet, my nine E Q pivot points guide, but you definitely want to grab this console file, especially if you're a road dog. And now that COVID has turned everything upside down, you're probably going to have to take on some corporate shows.

So I'm going to give you all my secrets away and exactly why I set up my whole file template this way on x-ray too. Let's jump right. All right. So here we are an M 32 edit. This is my corporate console file template. I'm going to assume you're pretty comfortable with the X 32 or three, two itself. This is not a tutorial on how to operate that console, but showing you how I bring my corporate show workflow to this desk.

All right. So we're going stop. Outputs then work back to inputs and that will give us some context. So you have 16 buses and x-ray too. And I use the first eight of them as subgroups. So I've got lot of PA. So any lavalier microphone would be sent here, post fader to this bus and then the handhelds podium and do a M M which I call mix minuses.

These are the sources like zoom or anything from VMX or any other thing? That's a click, a VidCon source. I put right here, media, PA, this is any playback. So video playback or any sources that I'm using for audio playback, like Spotify or Q lab to do anything is set here all post fader. And this is banned PA.

So this is if I had someone singing the national Anthem or someone doing a small acoustic set in between corporate presentations, this is where they would be sent. So all of these discreet types of sources do not hit my left right directly to get sent to these subgroups first. And then as you see here on the LA LA PA a go to conf channel and I'm able to make sure it goes to the main out, they're also sent to the mano or center, but I don't use it for.

Semi Oxford sub I use it as a way to collect all my inputs and then have as a motto send, I can send back into smart. So I can monitor that from my console so I can have RTA a single channel, or it can have a dual channel of transfer function, comparing a reference Mike in the room to my actual console file mix.

So that's how I get stuff back into. Bus number nine is full back one and full back too. So those are two separate monitor mixes. Oftentimes you want to have a one of these onstage right in front of your onstage challenge. If there's a Q and a section session, and you have handhelds being passed around the room for Q and a, you'll want to make sure and send those microphones to that wedge or that full back.

And that met me before, before the presenter to hear that. And they'll have. To if I have someone in a band, just a solo, acoustic guitar player, something that is set up for them. So I have two separate sense ready to go for that. And you'll want to send everything to fall back one for the presenter posts fader.

So you're not having to worry about muting QA microphones all the time. So when you bring them up in the house, it brings them up in the wedge. But for full back to, in a traditional band setting, they usually want a pretty stable monitor mix and they just want to hear themselves. So I'll do everything to that pre fader and go.

Bus 11 is my zoom mix minus and then zoom X minus one and two, each of these respective buses. So if I have two machines on zoom or whatever, Skype video conference software, I'm going to get audio in from them and I'll come in. And one of my input channels, I need to send them audio back, but if I'm getting something in from them, I can't just send them straight program or left.

Right. Cause then to hear themselves back again. So it mix minus if we're already to do sends on fader here, I'll select this bus. I got to my inputs. It's getting everything except themselves. And I can choose to send them walking music or not, or whatever. And I also have a separate bus for talkback if I needed to talk to them.

So I'll have my talk-back microphone routed there. You have a about a and B a usually goes to the house. Then I have B that's Ratatouille, the zoom mix minuses. So cause it's like, Hey, you're going to be up in 10 seconds. They can hear. And then I have a separate way to communicate with them. So I have two separate zoom inputs and then a bus 13 is my Dougan trigger bus.

We're going to come back to that one, but it's an auto mixer on the X 32. Dan Duggins patent has expired so everyone can use this algorithm. This is more or less the Dougan as popularized on Yamaha consoles. And now others, this is my vocal effects bus. So if I have someone singing the national Anthem, I have a bus ready to go with.

Those inputs sent there. And I'll have on effects one through four, all get bus 14. So they can have any effect sent to there. And then they have their normal returns that are coming there and have my program bus. This is where basically everything that's going to the house. And now, plus my nap microphones on my M room microphones to give us something, some wetness are all set here and I can apply separate processing to it like this limiter to get it nice and hot to a program volume out the gate.

I'm usually giving it 11 DB of gain and on the output trim minus one. So it's a net total of 10 DB increase. I would go ahead and bring the squeeze Nene attack all the way down. Usually the knees at zero attack is as fast as it can. So I don't get any clipping and releases really quickly at 32 milliseconds.

I just want to slap down to any peaks and get out of the. So those are that bus. Then I have my six matrices, which are usually end up using more like a system processor or DSP. So if we don't have something separate I have my left, right. Fader, everything goes there for the main mix. And my left right is sent post fader to all six of these matrices.

So I have PA left and right. I have a front fill sin of a subwoofer sent an off left and right. I'm not a big fan of Oxford subs. So I matrix lives there and just gets the whole feed. And then I take care of whatever processing. Divide out low versus mid and high to the PA on that end. So I don't like having two places where it can fit low.

And if there's too much low end user queue and trust that I did the system tuning and a front end to make it sound right. And those go through whatever outputs. So back to our inputs. So my first four are 1, 2, 3, 4, and by default, they are sent to my love PA group. And I can apply processing across them.

If they're handhelds, I'll flip them over a center to the handheld PA group. And that's the color coding alike as the light blue for love. And then red for handheld. But sometimes I work with companies that have color coding on the handhelds and I'll go ahead and change the color on the channel to match whatever colors on the microphone.

As far as the actual processing on them, all I have set is the high pass filter. Most often if I'm myself cutting around 400 or so with that, EEQ I have a compressor set, three to one ratio, no makeup gain, three millisecond attack for speech. Sometimes I'll go as fast as one. So one three-year 10 is what ended up doing.

The release is also very fast too. I don't want stuff getting squashed, no syllables getting brought down for a while, went to do its thing and get out of the way. So very fairly fast attack and really fast release is what's going on here. You can see on the bus sends, it's being sent to the laugh PA group.

And no. So nowhere else at the moment if I knew that this microphone was going to be used for Q and a, I would go ahead and send it to fullback one for so they could hear audience questions. So that's the same across all these RF channels. So it just got to make a decision at the top. Do I got two lofts?

Do we handhelds one law, three handhelds or all four handhelds? Any of them are viable it's as open here for a podium. So this putting microphones. Podium PA subgroup. And that subgroup sent to the mains. And if I go over here to my effects, slots five through eight, you can see, I have the DS are inserted on each of these four groups that would have dialogue to them.

And so bus one, bus two, three, and four, all had the DSR on a setting of 10. And that way I'm not having to do on individual channels. It's. Usually to have enough time or brain space to think about being able to dial into DSR on a per channel basis. So just all everything that's going to that subgroup is going to hit that DSR and then go out to that.

The only downside is since I cannot send a group a bus to a bus on the x-ray to my program, audio doesn't get that DSM. This is not just a place I've chosen to lose to get some extra inserts available to me for other use cases. And so just to refresh on this four buses, it's loft PA handheld, PA podium, PA, and mixed minus.

So that means any spoken word input. It's going to hit a. And then have a podium spare, almost always. If I got it on the truck, we'll run two podiums and have a neat little 3d printed little clip that has them clipped right together, which is super handy. The second one's always muted and I bring both faders up together.

And then I can just with one stroke, use two fingers to hit it and pop over. If I lose that for. Channel seven is a spare 58 quilt up downstage center with a twenty-five feet of slack on it. So any point I lose RF, I lose the podium can reach under the stage. I have that microphone there and available as a spare.

This is stolen from band world. This is not uncommon to have for your golden channel or your lead vocalists. So that's what's going on there. Then I have. Eighth channel, which is my duke and trigger. Okay. So on XRT two, unfortunately the auto mixer can only work on the first eight channels and that you can see here with these labeled X.

What that does is it has all these inputs Gain effectively. And so if any, one of them is up and the algorithm detects that it's the loudest and most prominent, it's going to give that gain or prominence to that channel. It's not quite a gate, but some people like to think of as a smart gate, that's only letting through out of those eight channels.

What's strongest. And so this is not for two vocalists harmonizing with each other. They're full game represented there, but this is for dialogue, great for back and forth. So it's phenomenal. If you have eight lavs on a panel, you could throw them all in this group. So since you only have eight channels, and if you have more inputs than that, you can get creative with it.

So I have channel eight. If I go up to the channel setting or. It's sources, bus 13 and bus 13 is right here. If I do sends on fader, let's look on what sent to it. So what's sent to it is both of my zooms and my playbacks. And so that's AB X and Y. This is the common nomenclature for a and B for graphics, machines, X, and Y for video playback machines.

Those are sent. Bus. And what that means is if I have a podium and someone's conversing, and then, Hey, we got Dan on, zoom is here and he's looking at a 90 inch TV in the back talking to zoom. And then that person talks on zoom. That's being. As well as to the house, as the duke and trigger and says, all eight of those channels are weighing the gain against themselves.

The duke and trigger is going to outweigh any ambient information going to the podium microphone, and it's going to take over. So now zoom has prominence and that assures me that I'm not going to get the zoom going back into the nap microphones or the podium microphone coming back and getting a feedback loop.

So I have any playback source of zoom and then any video roll. So it helps me do that as well because. Sometimes you're juggling a whole lot of input. So when you come to a video roll you don't mess around with the mute group. We're bringing them all of them down. And so if I have playback X rolling, nice and hot, and it's also being sent to this duke and trigger, it's going to automatically duck all of those previous seven inputs.

The downside is if you have more RF than just seven or more spoken word channels and just seven you're going to have two. Either put them somewhere else or lose the duke and trigger functionality. But I think it's really handy. I started doing this this year and I've loved it. It's a lot easier to do on a console that has the Dougan built.

And you could just simply set up that bus and send it to one of the 16 channels, but an x-ray two, this is my workaround to make that. Sorry. We talked about this as a, just another input for zoom machines. Zoom ones seem to have AB usually the graphics, audio inputs than X and Y are the video playback inputs.

And then these are my two band channels and you can see here, I've got the leisure compressor inserted. That's my favorite vocal compressor. Sometimes I'll do the Ultimo 1176, but I like this one for vocals most of the time. And then band instrument one and two. So if I got to do, oh, that's. You know, a girl and a guy singing and one's playing acoustic one plans, mandolin, this is ready to go all right there.

And then I can choose to send them to either one of the fullbacks. If I don't have any CUNY and microphones, I can have one full back for the guy, one full back for the girl. Or if they're having to share, monitor whatever. And so this is all their allocated and ready to go. The rest of my inputs here I have blank just if I have a bigger band and I have a few inputs blank here in front of zoom, just in case I have more.

RF added, but I try to squeeze as much as I can. That's useful to me in these first 16. And then I have the band on the next 16. So I just moved down a layer for the band segment and then go back to the top for any transitions. Although of course could put these on DCAS as well. If I wanted to. So go here.

I got my nap microphones and those were at unity. Make sure an unassigned those from your main stereo bus cause. Your net microphones and well, I mean, my, these, these are the ambient microphones in the room, cause you've all listened to some program recordings of a show that, you know, they're giving out awards and people erupting with, with clapping.

And you're seeing that in the room on the camera shot, but you're not hearing it. You're just hearing one open microphone on the stage. It just sounds dead and dry. So not microphones. I was placing a pair of microphones, usually one or two spots. It's usually they've got two screens in the. You able to place them under the screens panhard left and right.

Or recently I've been like placing an X, Y pair at the back of the room right where camera one is since that's a primary shot, that's looking at the stage. Your microphones are listening as if you were at camera one. You just got to watch out for any noisy comm or chatter from that camera platform.

So anyway, so those nap microphones just high passing them, sending them straight to my program bus only, not my main. And then I can adjust them accordingly, which brings me to the DCAS. I've got tunes, key lab in iPod, which are, are my ox inputs, an x-ray to, you can flip these over, to pick off the card input, which is pretty cool, or just use the quarter inch ends on the back.

So tunes left and right is almost always Spotify that's playing at all times through a looping playlist key lab is for any specific. Cues or moments in the, in, in the show. So key lab is a great software to do that. I've lately I've been using Farago but either one works. So if someone has a very specific bumper music or the actual musical talent, if someone's singing over a track, I'll have a separate machine there into that input.

So I can always get to walk in music whenever I can. If there's a break. Between segments or something goes wrong. It's always there, always on. And then the specific moments from that Q lab, and then I always have on iPod left. Right. And then. Just eighth inch cable hanging out, just in case the client walks.

I'm like, Hey, can you play this song? It's only on title for whatever reason, and I need to play it right now. I can quickly just have them plug in their phone or plug in their iPod and get playback from front of house, no matter where they're at while we're here on the Oxys and returns. These are just the effects, returns for anything in the vocal effects.

So just go haul a plate and a couple of delays if I don't have any singing or. Musical talent. I'll often flip these effects over to be the Combinator which is pretty cool. So I can have this as a multi-band processor and get more fancy with leveling out the podium microphone or someone who has a very dynamic voice on a handheld.

So that's what I will do if I do not have musical talent. So when I'm in show, what this looks like in front of me, it's usually the first team, first 16 channels, as you see here, and then. A to DCA, so it can always bring up walking music whenever I can. Any audio cue that specific or any of like the client front of house music, the need to plug in last minute the vocal delay amounts.

This is DCA tied to that, so I can do any delays. And then I have my nap. Mike's here on DCA eight, and I will duck these during any video rolls around hearing people, clinking, forks, and chattering. When we're playing a video I wish I could also have these on a duke and trigger, but we only got a input.

So that's why I've chosen to leave out of that. All right. That was a quick walkthrough through my corporate console file. It, you know, it feels simple just to collect all these sources, make sure the sent the right places, but there's a lot of little functionality. I hope that was helpful to you. Again, you can snag that for [email protected] slash audio toolkit.

Just you'll get an email. A link to a page has a bunch of resources and it'll be there in big, bold letters, corporate console file template. You can go grab that this works on the X 32 or M 32. What I want you to let me know below is what other corporate show hacks do you have in your template?

What am I missing? So why is a really cool piece of your workflow that I need to know about? Let me know below a Michael Curtis. Thank you so much for watching. I love making things sound good. I love getting to share this with you. I'll catch you next time.