Ringing Out Mon­i­tors (Digital)

In this guide you’ll be shown to how ring out the mon­i­tors. You can ring out any mon­i­tor as long as each mon­i­tor you wish to ring out has a graphic EQ on the send to it. In this exam­ple we’ll show you how to use the built in 31 band graphic EQ on the SC48. Both this guide and the ana­logue ver­sion use the same prin­ci­ples and techniques.

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Patch­ing Monitors:

1. Patch in the mon­i­tors as you would regularly.

Because you’ll be using the built in graphic EQ on the SC48 you don’t need to patch into the out­board graphic EQ, just the lim­iter and amp.

2. Patch in the lead vocalists' microphone to channel 1 (or whichever channel you choose but make sure you remember this later), then point the lead vocal mic at the lead vocal­ists’ monitor/​s.

IMPOR­TANT: Every­one in the room should be wear­ing ear pro­tec­tion in from this point onwards.

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SC48: Graphic EQ:

1. First click the Aux 1 – 8 but­ton to change the bank of 8 faders on the far right of the con­sole to con­trol the aux masters.

Click the select but­ton above the aux mas­ter chan­nel you are work­ing on, in this case it’s aux mas­ter 1 and bring the fader up to 0dB.

2. In the Out­puts page, click the 31-​band Graphic EQ tab. Then click the graphic EQ pop-​up menu and choose an avail­able mono or stereo graphic EQ.

3. Next click the but­ton "Send 1 – 2" on the left hand side to channel 1’s rotary con­trol. The but­ton will light green, and text will appear on the dis­play say­ing Aux 1 level.

Then click down on the rotary pot in order to turn on the aux 1 send. A green light will appear at the bot­tom of the pot.

Slowly increase the send level to aux 1 until feed­back begins to occur.

4. Press the graphic EQ band switch to select one of the two banks of graphic EQ bands, 20 Hz — 630 Hz, 800 Hz — 20kHz. Inputs 1 – 16 are tem­porar­ily replaced with fre­quency fader con­trols.

5. Start push­ing a fader, one at a time, lis­ten­ing for an increase in the feed­back vol­ume. If the feed­back doesn’t increase then make sure to reset the fader to 0dB, this will makes it eas­ier to locate the fre­quency of the feed­back. Once you’ve found the fre­quency of the feed­back pull that fader down –3dB.

Increase the aux send level till more feed­back occurs and repeat the process.

Note: Feed­back can often occur in octaves, for exam­ple if the main spike is at 1 kHz, there will prob­a­bly be feed­back at 500 Hz and 2 kHz.

6. Con­tinue step 5 until the aux send level is at or above 0dB with the aux mas­ter on 0dB. This will pro­vide more than enough level through the mon­i­tor before feed­back occurs.

Tip: Be care­ful when ring­ing out mon­i­tors that you aren’t cut­ting too many fre­quen­cies from the sig­nal. If you over cut, then the mon­i­tor will sound extremely unnat­ural for the performer.

Your graphic EQ at the end of ring­ing out should have a few sur­gi­cal cuts and not look like a moun­tain range!