Blog 3: Studio Signal Flow

This blog requires choosing a studio at the SAE Perth campus and completing a comprehensive signal flow. I’ve chosen to do a traditional BLOG entry as opposed to a VLOG for various reasons. Firstly I’m not the most tech savvy when it comes to making good videos, secondly I usually despise the sound of my own voice, and thirdly, unlike many audio students, I actually don’t mind writing. So here it goes.

I’ve chosen the Custom 75 desk for my signal flow BLOG, which is the largest desk on the Perth SAE campus. It’s a 40 channel desk of which we were required to have a 1 on 1 signal flow practical assessment on during Trimester 4, so this will be a bit of a refresher for me. It’s also the desk that I will be recording my 4 piece band on during week 9, so again, it’ll be a great refresher of the signal flow for this particular piece of hardware.

The first step of the signal flow is to make sure you have some talent in your recording room ready to go with their instrument. After attaching the appropriate microphone to an XLR cable, plug the opposite end into the appropriate input channel at the stage box which corresponds to the control room next door. Make sure you know which type of microphone you are using and whether or not you’ll need to engage phantom power during setup of the console.

Once the mic is plugged in you’ll need to turn phantom power on (for a condenser mic) then you’ll need to check the gain level of the signal. You’ll want to turn this up until you get a nice healthy signal without showing any signs of clipping. Make sure your musician plays their loudest during the gain check so that you avoid any unexpected clipping during the recording process.

Next in the signal flow we have our AUX pathways. By default these paths are set as a pre-fader listen. That means anything sent to an AUX channel will not be affected by the master fader of the channel down the track. On the C75 however, we have the option to rout this to post-fader listen, or to our monitors, or in fact both. This selection is reflected by the lights that illuminate depending on which option you choose. Primarily, we use the AUX sends for headphones into the recording room next door, so that the talent can hear themselves, as well as communication between the audio engineer and the musician during recording.

To create a headphone send you need to select AUX A (press this on the channel strip and the light will illuminate indicating a selection has been made). You need to then make your way over to the centre of the console and make sure the AUX master switches are turned up and set it so it sends the signal to the headphone send A (which will also illuminate when pressed).

Next we have our EQ section. The C75 desk allows us to configure the level and the bandwidth of each of these frequency sections. We have our low, low-mid, mid-high and high frequency parameters that we can tweak to our liking on the desk.

This is followed by our MONITOR section which we control with the maroon panning style knob to adjust our monitor level into the control room. Below this is the main feature of this desk which is a RETRO mode, which emulates the sound of the classic 1970’s NEVE circuitry, or when deselected emulates the clean sound of modern circuitry.

Now we reach the fader section of the channel trip and we need to raise this to unity so that the signal can be passed post-tape into the DAW, but we still can’t hear anything just yet so we need to move over to the MASTER panel of the console in the middle of the desk.

The C75 also features a compressor with various functionality for all your compression needs. Our AUX masters and headphone sends also live in this section of the console which we covered earlier.

The large red dial in the centre of the console is the overall monitor volume switch for the console. We need to make sure this is turned up so we can hear what our musicians are playing. Below this is our talkback function so that we can communicate with our talent via their headphones.

Last but not least, we need to make sure we turn up the two red L&R mix and MASTER faders to unity. Since we haven’t routed any of the 40 channels into assignable groups, we won’t need to worry about the grouping section of the desk. The purpose of grouping is so that when mixing, you can adjust the level of all the drum mics for example, as a group rather than having to adjust channels individually.

Now making sure we have all our correct inputs and outputs assigned to our channels in the DAW, and the tracks are record armed, we are ready to RECORD!