“One thing I’ve found to be true over the last week is that if you want to get to know a device or piece of software well… teach people how to use it. You’ll probably learn something too.”
X32 Tips for Creating Library Templates. An incredibly beneficial aspect of your Behringer X32 is utilizing its ability to remember. Not only will we cover scene management, but introduce you to 3rd party utilities which make saving and retrieving files to and from your computer much easier than the X32’s native ability. X32’s automated control surface is designed to present you with the control you need, when you need it. A total of 29 programmable LCD Scribble Strips offer channel/bus identification that mirrors what is being controlled. Use them to enter input/output tags, plus add icons you recognize at-a-glance.
- Check the ‘tap’ setting on the X32. On the Behringer X32, the ‘tap’ setting lets you decide at what point in the signal chain to send that specific channel to the P16. In other words, you can send a channel with or without EQ, with or without compression, etc. On the X32, navigate to the ‘Routing - p16 out (or ultranet)’ tab.
- Ideas for broadcasting online using the Behringer X32 June 29, 2018. Derek “One thing I’ve found to be true over the last week is that if you want to get to know a device or piece of software well teach people how to use it.
This observation, which I posted as a tweet, seems to hold true for several others. As I continued to help nick with his x32 broadcast configuration, which I began discussing in my last post, we made some interesting discoveries. These discoveries lead me to a fresh sound for my streaming setup as well.
Open the ROUTING menu, select the CARD OUT tab, and select new sound sources for the card’s output channels. Connect the X32 to your computer via USB. Windows users will first need to install the latest driver available from Behringer.
The desire to revamp my broadcast configuration started with Nicks discovery of a rather disturbing problem with the combinator, which I will discuss in a bit. However, to fully appreciate this oddity, it’s a good idea to understand how multi-band compression works. Corel for mac os x.
A multiband compressor allows you to split a track into different frequency ranges (called “bands”) and compress them independently.
You can choose to compress only a certain part of a track’s frequency spectrum, or apply different flavors of compression to several areas of the spectrum.
You can choose to compress only a certain part of a track’s frequency spectrum, or apply different flavors of compression to several areas of the spectrum.
This effect is useful in a broadcast environment because, if used correctly, material from a wide variety of sources can be molded in to a uniform sound. If you listen to most terrestrial radio, you’ll hear how everything is at the same volume, has the same amount of base, etc. We weren’t trying to take the combinator to the extreme of some stations though. We wanted a more subtle version of that effect.
Nick and I discovered that there were two major contributing factors as to why the combinators defaults make this impossible. These problems effected him more than I, as his configuration is more reliant on the combinator than mine, so it will be discussed in a future post, as I said above.
Band separation
I had initially discovered The first, and biggest problem, which you hear in Drues video. The combinator uses a 48 db crossover between each of its 5 bands. This means that very little sound that one band processes is evaluated by the others. The results are a hollow and brittle sound, as the frequency components of most voices and music are brutally sliced apart by the crossover. The brittle quality comes from the fact that when sound falls through the proverbial cracks, you can tell. It’s basically the audio equivalent of having a group of people sing in harmony, with the problem of each person being in there own practice room! Naturally, the people will sing much better together if they are close to each other, and can hear those around them. So, the first thing to do is narrow the isolation of the audio on each band by changing the crossover from 48 DB to 12 DB.
Now that the harsh hollow brittle sound is eliminated, its time to configure the combinator as if it were a standard single band compressor.
All of your standard parameters are available for your tweaking pleasure… Threshold, ratio, attack, release etc. However, other parameters exist for further sculpting of sound.
Crossover Frequency:
This parameter adjusts where the audio is divided. Install bootcamp usb. If the material the combinator is to process has a lot of base, letting it focus more on shaping the lows may be ideal, same with the highs. Fortunately, its possible to make the distribution such that a very nice balance is achievable.
Band solo:
It is possible to isolate the audio processed by each of the 5 bands. If the audio is pumping or being crunched, the problem frequencies are obvious. Granted, that may be the desired effect, and if it is… use something else, there are software plugins that let you do hard clipping.
Band specific threshold and gain:
This lets the combinator be used as a dynamic eq.
Do fun mastering tricks like compress the highs, then turn them up, or play with the low bands so that you compress tracks until they have less base than you want, then boost the low gain until the base has came back. Then notice that material with less base gets more, and base-heavy tracks lose a bit of it.
Do fun mastering tricks like compress the highs, then turn them up, or play with the low bands so that you compress tracks until they have less base than you want, then boost the low gain until the base has came back. Then notice that material with less base gets more, and base-heavy tracks lose a bit of it.
spectral balance control:
This parameter is enabled by default. It does more harm than good, as Nick discovered.
the idea behind SBC seems to be that the overall output should increase if the differential gain of any band drops by a specified amount of DB. The degree of auto-makeup is governed by the Spectral balance controls threshold and speed settings.
Nick discovered a big problem created by SBC which, in his case, broke more than it fixed. The mock scenario was a voice break with a quiet music bed in the background. His voice was driving some of the bands in to limiting, and the SBC was trying to keep the combinators overall output gain the same as its input. The result was a strangely equalized bed being boosted in volume when he talked! No good!
So like a good tutorial-following person, he went to layer 1 of the combinator, and pressed the third knob below the display to disable SBC. However, nothing happened! So, I started playing around with a freshly instantiated combinator, and due to being in a hurry, accidentally pressed the fourth knob.
, that did it! The change was almost as amazing as that made when adjusting the band separation.
The rest of the story, as such.
After a bit of coaching from me, Nick was routing channels to sends, pairing them to create single stereo outputs, and processing each of them the way he wanted.
If you have any questions, leave them in the comments so that the answers benefit others. Plus, embedding a twitter conversation that starts with the same text as a post title looks ugly to me. So, I’d rather not.
Author: Derek
Welcome to my Behringer X32 FX Series tutorials. Today we are going to be looking at how to insert an effect on the Behringer X32.
Inserting an Effect
The Behringer X32 effects section is a very important part of the X32. Not only does it allow us to add some pretty neat effects, but it gives us access to some very valuable tools like compressors, DeEssers and graphic equalizers.
Side-Chain vs. Insert
There are two categories of effects that the X32 gives us access to, ‘Side-Chain’ and ‘Insert.’ There is a big difference between the two, so let’s jump in and take a look.
Insert Effect
An insert effect is just what it sounds like, it is “inserted” into the audio path of a channel or bus. This is an effect where you want to process the ENTIRE signal and you do not want to hear any of the original signal, only the processed signal.
When working with analog consoles, you would need to grab a physical cable and use the Insert Send and Insert Return jacks on the back of the console. Plugging into these jacks would literally interrupt the audio path, send audio out of the Insert Send jack. You would then need to route the signal to the effects unit, then the output of the effects unit would go BACK into the Insert Return of the console, thus returning the signal.
When we are working in the digital world, we are doing the same thing as the analog signal path, just we are doing it without physical cables.
An Insert Effect is like one of the following:
- Enhancers & Exciters
- Any Compressor (like the Leisure Compressor, Fair Compressor, and Ultimo Compressor)
- Equalizers (like the XTEC EQ1 and XTEC EQ5)
- Graphic Equalizers (like the GEQ and TruEQ)
- Effect Modelers (like the Stereo Guitar Amp and Stereo Tube Stage)
Side-Chain Effect
Very much like the Insert Effect, a Side-Chain Effect still needs a signal path of audio. However, with this type effect, you want to add it as an addition to the original signal. Typically you would use this for Reverb, Delay, Chorus, and Flanger. These are going to be used to fatten up the signal and give another cherry on the top or some more frosting on the cupcake, but not completely replace the cupcake!
When working with analog consoles, you would send audio either out of a direct out of an individual channel, or you would use a mixbus to add multiple channels into that effects send. The return of the effect would then go to an Effects Return and then be blended into the mix using the Effects Return fader.
With the X32, we have 4 stereo effects returns (which can be changed to 8 mono for advanced routing). The 4 stereo effects returns are defaulted to be the returns of FX Racks 1-4 and can not be changed.
A Side-Chain Effect is like one of the following:
- Reverbs (like the Vintage Reverb, Room Reverb)
- Delays
- Chorus
- Flanger
![Behringer x32 output setup Behringer x32 output setup](https://i.imgur.com/OYtSlIe.jpg)
FX5-FX8: Let’s Insert an Effect!
Now that you know what the difference between Insert and Side-Chain effects, let’s take a look at how we go and insert an effect.
There are two places that we can insert effects on the X32, the easiest place is via the Effects section of the console which we would get to by pressing the ‘Effects’ button and then tabbing over to the ‘Home’ tab.
The first two rotary knobs on the console are how you change where an effect is inserted. Take your last rotary knob and select one of the FX racks between FX5 and FX8 (we will get to FX1-FX4 later). Now we can rotate the first two rotary knobs and see that we can select all of the channels, mixbusses, matrices, and main busses on the console. Once you like your selection, depress that rotary knob to confirm.
Next, you will need to activate the insert in your selection. Depress either the 3rd or 4th rotary knob and you will see the ‘Ins’ turn orange.
Now the effect is inserted into the channel path of Ch 01 as we can see above!
Behringer X32 Output Setup
FX1-FX4: A Little More Tricky!
With FX1 through FX4, it is another step to insert an effect. The reason why is that FX Racks 1-4 are for both Side-Chain effects AND Insert effects.
Behringer X32 Bus Output Routing
Use the first two rotary knobs to select ‘Insert’
Next, we will press ‘Select’ on the channel that you want to insert this effect on. Then tab over to the ‘Config’ tab.
We can see that there is an Insert section on the right-hand side of the LCD Screen. This is where you can do an insert to any of the FX racks and a hardware insert via the Aux in/out. At this point, you will want to select which effect you were planning to insert on the channel, bus or matrix.
Next, you can press the insert knob to activate the insert.
Lastly, we can look at the home tab of the effects section to verify what we just did:
That’s it! But… wait (literally)
Now you can use any of the insertable effects that you wish! One thing that you do need to be aware of is that when you insert an effect. That extra processing that you just added to that one channel takes a bit of extra time. That extra time varies depending on the effect but mostly is around 0.71ms. Depending on how advanced you get with your routing and processing (parallel compression with a group) this can cause a few issues. Just keep it in mind!