Re: LS9-32 - HELP!
I acutally say, don't make any setup changes unless you must. You want the house guy to be there to assist you, and if you reconfigure his board, he's (unfortunately) likely to get in a pissy mood - depending on the quality of the guy and the venue. Beyond that, if he knows how the board is setup, he will be more help to you.
Step One: Push the SEL button. Always make sure you're working with the channel you want to work with by pushing SEL first.
Step Two: Push the home button. When you're done with something, hit home. Always come back to home. Get used to leaving from home and coming back to home.
Step Two.5: Turn up the gain on your channels. Get it on up there, don't be shy. But we don't run digital desks at unity on the meters. This is clipping. -12db is a nice place to start. Push CUE and listen to the channel in your headphones.
Step Three: Push the ON buttons. Turn your channels on. And turn your masters on. And turn your aux masters on. There are lots of places your signal can get stopped. THEN bring your sliders up. We all know not to turn a channel ON while it's hot, but remind yourself. It gets confusing as you're bouncing around in menus.
Step Three: Double Click the Send Select buttons. This brings you in to sends-on-faders. It's like having your whole own mixer for each aux send. Use this for monitors and effects. Just ignore the ''selected send'' knob and use Sends On Faders until you get used to it. When you're done, push HOME! If you're feeling really clever, run your mixes from the second layer of channels so you have separate EQ and dynamics on your monitors and effects sends. If this doesn't immediately make sense to you, you probably should forget about it until the second gig.
Step Four: Where are your effects returns? They could be on Stereo knobs or they could be on channels or wherever. Remember, you have to turn them ON before they will pass audio. And you have to turn the SEND to them ON. And you have to turn each CHANNEL you want sent to it ON on the MAIN layer AND in the MIX you're sending it from. There are a lot of ON buttons to push to get an effect routed!
Treat your effects just like outboard effects on aux sends. You don't put reverb ON a channel, you put the channel IN to the reverb mix.
Step Five: Only use Matrices once you're badass on the board. Otherwise you will get lost.
Step Six: Use the dynamics and EQ on each channel. This is where Digitals are badass. You have full parametric EQ and dynamics control on each channel. Most people have it set up with a gate and a compressor on each channel, but you could change this if you want to. Use your gates. They work very well.
