Effects and Mixers - Confused

seansigep

seansigep

New member
I dont know what the deal is, but I am totally confused as to how this works.

I have done searches here, on tweakz, and other places, and still don't understand the effects thing on my mixer (Behri UB1202).

What kind of things would I plug into the effects (would a stomp box work, or are we talking rack mount type stuff), where would I plug it in, etc. And what are the knobs labled "FX" for?

I think the purpose of it is to put effects on the signal after its gone through the mixer, but I'm not sure. Can someone explain this to me like I'm in 1st grade?

And I'm dead serious. Maybe its just that I haven't visualized it yet, but I really dont understand this.

Thanks guys, you are always helpful to budding home recordists.

Sean
 
You can use any effects box with your mixer, for guitars or vocals... anything. It's just a case of getting a 'dry' (un-processed) signal to the FX box and accepting the 'wet' (processed) signal back from the FX box.

If you take the example of microphone effects, if you plug a mic straight into your mixer it won't sound very nice because it'll be missing all the lovely echo effects and stuff... so you obtain a Vocal Effects box.

This FX box will typically have a single input and a single output. But thanks to your mixer, you won't have to buy an FX box for every mic! That one FX box will be able to give effects to as many mics as you can plug into your mixer.

To feed the effects box, you wire the 'Effects send' hole on your mixer to the Input on the effects box. The output from the FX box is then typically wired to the 'Effects return' on the mixer. Both these 'Master' Send and Return holes will have a volume dial associated with them, determining how much you send, and how much you receive, for all of the microphones plugged into your mixer.

To individually control the amount of FX for a particular microphone, you adjust the 'FX Send' on that channel the mic is plugged into. This allows some mics to have more FX than others.

That's about it really!
 
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Good Bah'ing! :)

It's no problem if the mixer doesn't have an FX Return, I never use it anyway! Just plug the return into any available channel on the mixer and treat it like any other instrument in the mix.
 
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