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Inputs and Outputs

Let's talk a little bit more about inputs and outputs then the back of your mixer looks like this um channel one channel two we kind of brief we talked about this phone oh cd right so if you're going to plug in like a cd turntables plug it into cd what if you wanted to plug your um your phone in like could you plug your phone into this thing? Yes think if you had the right chord okay, good. So this is a good time I think to talk about the different types of cables so this sort of standard red and white and this very, very common in in consumer audio products like this red and white cable that you'll see the red is the right that's how I always remember red right r r and then the white is is the left one so red are that's always going to go in there? It's really important that you plug? I know this sounds really stupid but it's really important that you plug the red into the red and the white into the white I can't tell you how many times like I will be trying to help somebody who's tro...

ubleshooting their set up and it's a simple is the white and red were reversed and especially when you're dealing with software that can create a whole host of problems like with, you know, timecode vinyl the timecode cds well can actually happen is it can send the signal backwards so the deck instead of playing forward starts playing backwards because the inputs were reversed so that's how it's it's reading it um so we need to have we don't need to have the right cable so the red and white these they're called arca cables okay, just r c a the little letters are cia and you'll have a red one in a while when you plug both of those in it's giving you the right and the left so he's giving you the stereo signal right and left coming out of your phone you would need tohave like that little version like the one that like you have for like your headphones like this little guy this is called an eighth inch um so this is theeighty finch jack s o that would go into your phone and then the other end of it would be an r c a cable that you plug into would you plug it into phono plague in the city? Okay, you put it into cd and then that would control it on channel two that would be like your second channel, right? Where else did you plug it in there's somewhere else on this particular mixer ox good I could plug it into ocs and then there's a separate knob that you'll see for like auxiliary so that controls the auxiliary input now is there any difference between plugging it into cd and plugging it in tow? Ox might not I don't know about those mixers, but you might not be able to thank you yes o r filter correct, so like, um usually when you're plugging into an auxiliary it's basically just giving you the volume he's usually not giving you like full control it's like not giving you a fader not giving you like, ah filter or an e q or something like that some mixers, it will give you that, but not all mixtures. The other thing is that this is not going to be in the cross fader also so you won't be able to, like, use the cross fader with the oss, which might be a good thing like if you're plugging in just this and you want this toe run as like a backup or you know you're, you're not going to start deejaying yet you just want to put some music on in the beginning of the night when people are coming in, maybe just put it on the ox and then that way, when you step up to your gear, you still have both sides the other really, really important thing that you probably won't get if you plug it into the ox is this you won't be able to cue the ox on most mixers so that that makes it very difficult to then try and mix if you don't have the ability to q something up so obviously plugging in the phone is fine, but you wouldn't want to plug in one of your decks in tow ox because you want then have the ability to to really cue it up you have no e q you'd have no ability for it to be in the cross fader is just not ideal it's really meant to be like yours third thing uh the afterthought cool um we also have this signal g nd any idea what that is around the ground the ground the digital gear doesn't need a ground but the turntables most of turntables come with a ground wire it's very archaic the fact that you'd still need to, like, use an actual ground wire it's one of them like biggest pain's toe like sit here especially after like one of these little things gets ripped off and you'll see that a lot and you'll see that like especially if you're you know you're really digging out and you're playing like, you know, different venues and whatnot you know, some of these obviously, like, you know, you're going to take care of your gear, you know, the best but like, you know, when people come in and they're using the house gear stuff gets beat up, you know, and on that little cable is important it's important that it's grounded because otherwise it's not going to send a proper signal through through to a mixer if it's not grounded so always check to make sure it's grounded some turntables do have internal grounding like they've actually taken the ground wire and grounded it to the actual turntable inside of it um but check to see check to make sure um last one here mike I'll just go back to the ground uh what is a telltale sign of the ground being broken would you say like a like a specific high frequency that comes from carlo yeah like that ground hum that you'll get ah let me see if I can achieve that might not be able to achieve that here no, I mean in a in a good way this is performing well that like the ground is not hooked up but occasionally what you will find is that, like then things they're not balanced properly and the signals that balance properly which will then throw things off. You know when you start using software and you're using like a turntable and cerrado or track there's something like that the system is actually fairly sensitive like if every if everything has to be calibrated sort of the right way in order for the time code to read properly back and forth so you know if like an r c a cable is messed up like if one side of the cable just isn't connecting properly and this happens this is a common problem um or like the ground wire gets stripped off and broken and like now it's not grounded you may find that it won't work properly and I'll go over some things tomorrow as well with some like tips and tricks for like troubleshooting techniques on the fly like you know there's plenty of times probably I would say more probably close to like forty percent of the time that I get to a venue in using house system like house system that there's some sort of issue where something is not all the way of perfect um and it can be a small is like the turntables not properly calibrated meaning the um the pitch has, like worn over time and being at negative too on the pitch and should be negative too is now no longer negative too it's really two point five you and stuff like that like small things like that the turntable needs to be tuned or big things like the tone arm is broken you know or that the rc a cable the cables are are busted where they're not like connecting properly so there's a decent amount of issues that kind of come with that, you know, and so there's ah there's similar issues with like a digital player like this but usually a little bit less because there's a few uh less moving parts in something like this um although you know and there's something about the control of the turntable to that you're not sometimes getting so you kind of you know you lose one for the other um mike this input right here's for your microphone um that cable is this cable you know what this is called courage just a quarter inch this's a finch this is a quarter inch um so would you be looking for is you need a quarter inch to go into that and then on the other side of it you need a um xlr cable which we actually don't have it on this one but I think the next slide we haven't xl are out here we go this is that sc that's right there s o actually sorry can flip back to that one side right before that to the okay perfect. So the master out here I've got two out so I can send two signals out this is independent of the q I also have a q that's probably on the other side of the mixer but over here I've got two ways of sending out so I can send this to, um some sort of amp that will then like go to a speaker um and then I can send this other one teo maybe a recording device of some kind or whatever uh these are both arcia though um and can we flip to the sec the next site yeah, there we go. How many outs do I have on the sc for you? Yes you don't hear so I've got I've got three out right? So I've got xlr out which is sort of um or standard more standard cable connection so excel ours like an xlr cable is used quite commonly in the audio world audio and uh yeah audio world s oh, from what I can do is you know this provides for a longer length the um the xlr does um and they're they're better for like, connecting and chaining you could like connect xlr together like the male and female ends and then be able to like run longer cable that's one of the biggest benefits toe xlr out r c a cable a little red and white arsenic what would be really hard to find like one hundred foot garcia cable one hundred foot arcia arcia cable would be pretty difficult to find whereas one hundred foot xlr cable is not so difficult to find andi so I have my master out one a master out too which is r c a and then what's my booth out how many uh what what kind of cable is that? Yeah it's a quarter inch out for the booth and what does the boot do in the booth monitor good so it's a separate out that I can control with a different knob so I can adjust the knob of the volume of the booth independently this is really really important to serve is like your monitor it's like let's say you're sending volume out to your big speakers but your monitor maybe you want to keep a little bit lower in volume you don't want that to be so loud because it's just you who's hearing that so you have independent control on the booth that you can control that volume that's actually a very very good feature on a mixer so again you saw the mixture before that the pioneer three fifty that was the pioneer three fifty which is muchmore lower and cost then something like this um and a big part of that is like you know some of these pieces like there's no xlr outs on that mixer there's no booth out on that mixer you know so already just with the outputs you're losing a little something and then with this we've got inputs s so we've got three different imports we've got two different mikes we've got an xl are in for a mike which that's helpful because then I can use a standard xlr xlr cable and plug the microphone in I've got two mikes so this is great like let's say I'm let's say I'm d jame weddings and now people want to give speeches and I can hook up a microphone like a wireless microphone that can then travel around and I can still have a microphone like close to the deejay booth you have two mikes taken control or or maybe two people are giving speeches or whatever there's a ton of uses for that um and then this controller also has, um usb so some of some of her and this is a mixer slash controller it's like sort of an all in one so there's kind of a bridge to the controller side of it but um some controllers will on ly work with software so the thing is completely like you can't do anything with it until you plug in that usb and run that usb to your computer if you don't have that usb and you don't have your computer, that controller doesn't do anything so it's not a stand alone that's what we call it a standalone mixer or if it I can work with out that this is an actual standalone mixture also with the controller so it doesn't need to be plugged into the laptop for audio's still to come out of it um same thing with this tractor controls the two same thing it's a standalone mixer we don't even have the usb plug him right now and we're able to still use it as a regular mixer uh huh and same thing with this rain sixty two but if you get into some of the, uh more affordable controllers that's the that's what you give up is that like then it only works when you can hook it up to your laptop um cool any questions so far with mixers uh last piece of the mixer and while we have this up we've got our headphones ok so we've got our q and that's often times with headphone is referred to on the mixture it's called q uh see you e on the mixer so if you see that that's that's the headphone so I'm able to q on this make sure I'm able to queue just this side just this side this one you're able to actually cue up the auxiliary on this mixer um I'm able to q I'm able to put both of them in the queue if I want I'm going to put none of them in the queue I can adjust the volume um this also gives me the ability to split q which you know now we're getting into crazy stuff here split q so it's blinky will do is it will basically give you you can adjust what you want to hear so you can hear what you're queuing like what's next in this head in this side and on this uh aside you're able to hear the master the master was playing so by split cue when a mixer has split cue that means that this is actually a great way we're going to get into manual beat matching in a bit here, but you'll find when we start talking about manual be matching, you want to hear the ambience you want to hear what the mat the master's doing to sew your wind to hear two things at once so in order to do that for the most part I'm doing this I've got one headphones in on my cue ear the other one I have off so I can hear the what's going on the master what split q allows me to do is it allows me to get this same effect by having both ears in so this is a great feature if you lived in a apartment and there's people above you and below you and you want to practice d jane in the middle of the night um split you will be a great future if you don't have split too then all you're getting is you're getting the master and the q altogether in both ears at the same time which then you're not separating your ears which then could kind of screw you up in terms of like your man, you'll be matching um other things um effects like I don't want to get too far down into effect you wanna talk about some effects software effects uh tomorrow ah you have software faxing us have hardware effects you often can have the same effect on both hardware and software so let's say an echo for instance I can put an echo if my mixer has an echo effect that means I can put turn on the echo without having the software going so I can do an echo to even if I've got a regular vinyl record plugged up or I could do an echo to my phone I can do an echo to the mike and I can do all that now if it if it's just software that I'm only able to affect what which uh audio I selected to um but I still have that type of option inside of software um cool we do have one question about but I know you're going to cover more of that tomorrow um question I have a new mark uh seven fx what do you think about the effects bar ah and sounds on it as opposed to using effects and yeah yeah um so the um there's a couple of things one I think that like the hardware effects we'll give you I think it comes down to preference really more than anything but I personally like to definitely have a knob that I'm turning which you can still do with software effects you can map some of those software effects to two actual hardware like controllers and this gets into midi mapping and that can get into a whole another discussion but um, the effects far that comes with the thie seven is a good ad on peace. I mean, if you have it, I would. I would use it.