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Physical Layout of Mixers by Marc Schonbrun

One thing is for certain—mixers have lots of buttons and knobs. This can scare people at first, but like all things, it makes sense if you know what you're looking at. Figure 10-1 shows an outboard mixer and Figure 10-2 shows a screen from Pro Tools computer software. You can see that the two versions, hardware and software, look very similar in their overall layout. A mixer consists of three main elements: input/output, channel strips, and master sections.

Figure 10-1: Mixing board hardware

Input/Output

The input/output section is the basic function of a mixer. This is where the physical connections are made on the unit. At minimum, a mixer will have a stereo “main” output, where all the individual channels are output. Some mixers give you alternate “bus” outputs that you can use (more on this later in this chapter). A bus is simply a path that audio can take. In the case of mixers, it's a path inside of the mixer. Better mixers give you individual outputs for each channel, but these mixers tend to be expensive.

Figure 10-2: Pro Tools 8 mixer

There will be one input for every channel that the mixer supports. Other inputs include channel inserts, which can be used to patch effects into individual channels, and auxiliary inputs, which allow effects to be assigned to any track in the mix. The better the mixer, the more aux effects you get. There is more about aux effects in our discussion of master sections later in this chapter.

Channel Strips

Figure 10-3 is a close-up of a channel strip from a mixer. These vertical strips are duplicated for every input channel your mixer has. If your mixer supports sixteen channels, your mixer will have sixteen identical channel strips, one after another from left to right. This takes up most of the space on a mixer.

They're also the reason that professional studio consoles are so massive—they contain many, many separate channels. From top to bottom you might find these common mixer elements, which are labeled in Figure 10-3.

• Aux Section: This is where you mix in effects that are on the auxiliary channels.

• EQ Section: This is where you can adjust the equalization of the sound balance between high and low frequencies of a signal.

• Pan: This knob adjusts where the signal is placed from left to right of the stereo image.

• Mute: This mutes the channel from the main mix.

• Solo: This mutes every other track and solos the selected track or tracks; you can use this on multiple channels to isolate a few signals together.

• Bus Assignment: This sends the selected channel(s) to a bus output and bus fader.

• Channel Gain: This is where you set the volume of each track, using either a rotating knob or a vertical slider; channel gain is used for setting volume levels after you record, not during the recording.

Figure 10-3: Mixer channel strip