First, turn on the power...
Assuming your going to plug your instrument into channel 1:
1. Turn the "trim" or "input" (however it's labeled) dial at the top of channel 1 all the way down (to the left.).
2. Move channel 1's fader (the slider at the bottom of the channel strip) until it's set to "unity gain" (the "zero" level about 2/3 or 3/4 of the way up the slider.)
3. Plug in your instruemnt.
4. Turn off the "mute" button on channel 1.
5. Start turning up the "trim" control for channel 1 until the green level light on channel 1 starts flashing, but not so high where it's always on and/or the "OL" or "overload" or "clip" light next to it also lights up.
At this point you have sound coming in through your channel strip at a rough but close volume level. The instructions that follow after this are dependant in their specifics as to how the buttons are laid out on that particular mixer, but in general:
6. Next you may need to route channel 1 to the proper output channels. On that mixer I believe it has only two output busses, which will typically be used to correspond to Left and Right. The pan control on channel one will set just how much of the signla goes left to output 1 and how much goes right to output 2. You just need to see and make sure that channel strip 1 ins indeed routed to go out to those output busses.
7. Slide the faders for the stereo output busses up until you are getting a decent reading on your LED VU meters. If you have to turn the outputs up past zero, that means you don't have your trim on channel one turnd up high enough, Turn that up until your meters look right when your stereo output faders are sat at unity gain like channel 1 is. If, OTOH, you send the meters into the red without hardly touching the output sliders, then your trim on channel 1 is too loud and you need to dial it back a bit.
8. Make sure your headphone and/or CR (control room) monitor is set to monitor your output busses and adjust your headphone volume control dial to comfortable listening levels.
HTH,
G.
