Introduction to Music Production

Hey there! My name is Ian Lima, naturally from Brazil, living in New York City now. I’m here to do my Assignment for the third week on the course. I’ll talk about the Channel Strip: the Signal Flow through a channel strip in a Analog Mixing Board. Let’s do it!

The mixing board that I am using is a Behringer XENYX X1204USB. I’m completely far from understanding everything that it haves and the course is helping me a lot. So, for this week I’ll stick only with what we’ve seen so far. A couple of pictures of the board:

So, here is a picture of the INPUT SECTION. We all know that the signal flow starts with an analog source. The propagation of our voice or the vibration of the strings on a guitar or bass. And they’re going to be capured by a mic or a pick-up. This is the place where all gets in. It’s the PRE-AMP section. It’s where you going to bring your Mic/Guitar level to the LINE LEVEL. On this case, the TRIM knob is named GAIN. It’s also very common.

____ XLR Cable input (Balanced)

____ TS(Unbalanced)/TRS (Balanced) Cable input.

____ LOW CUT button.

____ GAIN/TRIM knob (where you set your signal to the line level).

This board provide some different things from the one we’ve seen on the course video. Here on the bottom we see the INSERT SECTION (AUX and FX) and this FX is a EFFECT knob. It basically sets the level of the effects that this board haves. We can also see a COMPRESSOR knob, on the top of the EQs. The compression is something that we are learning this week so I’ll not get into it now. The EQ (High/Mid/Low) is where you can equalize the sound on the line level before it gets to the speakers/phones.

__ Compressor knob.

__

__ Equalizer knobs

__

__ Insert section (aloud to add external devices into the signal flow) knob

__ FX knob (Controll the level of the effects of the board.

The knob on the top is the PAN. It does not move information, it only controls the balance of the sound (right/left). The Mute button simply cuts the signal that is getting into the board. If pressed it mutes the sound and the led lights on. On the side there’s a SOLO button, when pressed isolates it from all the other channels. You can only hear what is comming out of this one. What happens with this one inside of the computer depends on the DAW. The led light also gets on when pressed.

And here we get to the most important part of the mixer: the volume fader. Remember: you want to keep Unity as much as possible, so you may leave it on the U. On this mixer, there’s a number 0 instead of the U we saw on the videos. Your line level should be set on the TRIM/GAIN knob that we’ve seen on the INPUT SECTION.

Unity / 0

The Main Section:On the right side you can see the leds where you going to, basing on the colors, set your line level. There’s also on the bottom the main level control, it’s going to b

Level Control LEDs

Power / Phantom Power LEDs

Master Volume Control

Thanks for taking time to check my assignment!I hope it was helpful in some way. This devices are very complex and can be tricky sometimes to know how to use all the correct terms. Can’t wait to see what’s next and get to figure a lot more of thigs out. Take it easy!