Today's Lesson

A quick tip regarding input gain. The first thing you want to do after plugging mics and instruments into your mixer is set your input gain using the gain trim knobs. This is vital to achieving the best performance from you mixer and PA system.

Have each player sing or make some noise while you adjust the knob to allow more signal into the input. Ideally, you want to get the level on the meter hitting consistently into the yellow, but not into the red. The red means clipping which will cause distortion and could cause damage to your gear over time.

Once you’ve got these levels set, don’t touch them.

From here user your faders to make necessary level adjustments in your channel mix.

The only time you should ever adjust your trim knobs after the initial setting, is in the instance that a channel begins clipping consistently during a performance. Slight clipping every once-in-a-while is fairly normal and won’t cause problems.

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