Why Rent When You Can Own? (cont'd)The birth of an in-ear rig By Jim Roese |
I now had a single rack space, price conscious, 8-channel AD/DA converter with both rear input and output. Although this converter sounds OK, careful choice was made in input routing placement, and the spare vocal, 3 of the stereo tracks, and monitor talkback were routed to the Behringer interface. The analog outputs gained thru the use of this piece supplied output for the one remaining pair of in-ear output auxes, drum thumper, and a “just because” aux. I now had a rig with 32 mic-level inputs and enough outputs for 4 sets of stereo ears, a drum reverb, vocal FX, cue mix, drum thumper, one extra aux, and dynamics and eq on all channels.
Those of you that know this console know it has a stereo buss, and 8 auxes for output That raises the question – Where does the thumper send come from? That was easy also. I chose to send one of the kick drum channels to buss 8 along with the stereo buss. I left buss 8 unassigned to the left/right stereo buss, and sent it to an optical output on the Behringer converter. I low-passed the buss 8 output at 80 Hz and added a large narrow spike at 40 Hz using the onboard EQ in the console and Voila, a perfect thumper or drum sub output.
In FUEL’s situation, the drum tech baby-sits the monitor console & flies faders. For this reason, the drum mix is sent out of the left/right stereo main-mix buss. Choosing this routing allows the drum tech to get back to his artist’s mix on his cue-mix in-ear pack just by hitting the solo clear button. Auxes 1-2, 3-4, 5-6 are stereo paired on the desk and sent out to the remaining three artists mixes. Aux-7 is used to control the onboard drum reverb, and aux-8 is used for vocal FX. Fuel has a 30-channel mix. Channel 31 is set for Monitor talkback, while channel 32 is used as an FOH talkback. All drums and FOH talkback are routed thru the onboard pre-amps in the console. This choice was made solely for the convenience of the input-trim gain pots locations on the console, as these channels will be the ones tweeked the most, especially on dates with rental gear.
Note color coded P-Touch labeling for input layers.