When I first started putting my name forward as an audio engineer to work on events, the number one anxiety I had was getting sound into the mixer, and getting sound out of the mixer. This is, in the most basic sense, THE JOB. It can be very daunting when you have to approach a digital mixer, especially if you are new and it may well be your first time using a specific mixer, or even a mixer by that manufacturer. In the beginning, sometimes you’re not even sure what it really is that you need to do to set one up.
Now that I’ve got countless hours in the hot seat under my belt and have used most common manufacturers’ digital mixers, I realize they’re all essentially the same, you just need to figure out how that manufacturer goes about doing certain tasks. To save others some anxiety, I’m going to go over all the steps on arguably the most common digital mixer(s) of how to tackle the routing.
The Midas M32/ the Behringer X32 are so similar in operation that we can talk about them together as one. They are the digital mixer “entry point” for many events, venues, you name it, so I believe it is fitting to cover them specifically as by definition, they are what the majority of readers may encounter and need help with. From this point on in this article, I will refer to only the M32 to keep the word clutter down but just know that all of the following will apply to both consoles equally.
Understanding Digital Routing
Before we jump right into digital routing, it is important that we understand how analog desks behave, but more importantly, how digital is different. On analog, there is a physical connection between the xlr connection on the console and the channel fader that corresponds.
In digital world, I like to think of two realms - physical and virtual.
You’ve got a selection of physical inputs that are connected to your mixer in some way.
These could be:
The local inputs on the back of the mixer or on a stage box connected digitally by a digital audio standard (in the case of the M32 this standard is AES50).
They could be “card” inputs from aftermarket expansion slots on the back of the mixer. The most common one is a Dante card or a USB cable to a computer.
Alternatively, they could be jack and rca inputs from a stage box.
All of these make up the physical realm. They are the physical connections that you can plug a cable into. These physical inputs allow you to connect an array of audio signals to your system. The problem with these inputs is that they are digitized, and then disconnected from the mixer. All the input signals float around in the virtual realm. They are disconnected from the faders on the desk. Inside the M32, in the virtual realm, there are 32 input channels and 6 auxiliary channels. We then get to cherry pick from our physical inputs which virtual input we want them to appear on. You can think of it as once you make your physical connections, there is still another connection to make, a digital one. This digital connection is like drawing a line on a diagram from the physical input to the digital channel fader. The beauty of this is that we can draw that line, more or less, in any way we want to.
To get signal in and out on digital mixers, you need to connect something from the physical input to a virtual input within the digital world (channel fader), and then connect a virtual output to a physical output.
Routing Inputs to Channels
We talked about this concept of physical and virtual routing so let’s dive into how we configure it. Physical routing is the easy one, I can plug a mic into an xlr input labeled “channel 1”, and I can plug my main PA into two xlr outputs (I use my last two available for L and R). In order to handle the virtual realm routing, you need to press the “routing” button on the side of the M32.
This will bring you to a screen that routes the physical inputs to the virtual ones - and essentially the faders on the desk. The M32 routes in batches of 8 channels at a time. In columns of 8, the channel faders are listed. You can then select from a list what physical input you want these channels to pull from. When you turn up fader 1, what sound source do you want to control?
“Local”: The inputs on the back of the mixer. If you set channel fader 1-16 to pull from local 1-16, you have set up a stand alone mixer with a 1 to 1 patch.
“AES50”: The digital standard that Midas uses. These are what you want to select if you are using a digital stage box. “AES50 A” will be the stage box connected to the AES50 A input on the back of the mixer and so on for the “B” input.
“Card”: USB input of 32 channels
This gives me the flexibility to have my first 16 channels on my mixer pulled from a stage box connected to AES50 A, which could be a stage box on a drum riser. Channels 17-32 can be set to pull from AES50 B, which could be a second stage box elsewhere on stage that is connected to the AES50 B port on the back of the mixer. Any of these inputs in banks of 8 could also be pulled from my local inputs on the back of my desk if I wanted. This gives me better options as far as where I place my input sources (mics, di’s, playback machines, etc). The “Aux in” section is a further 6 more inputs that can be fed from either the jack physical inputs on the back of the mixer, or an AES50 stage box, or local 1-6 (the local xlr inputs 1-6). This can be configured in whatever permutation works for me.
Another input source you can choose to feed channels is “card”. This is a USB card installed in the mixer. If you had a laptop connected with USB, you could send up to 32 channels from that laptop to the mixer. This is useful for things like virtual sound check or playback from Q-Lab without using jack cables. You can set these to come in on your input channels or on your auxiliary channels.
Routing Outputs
Let’s get into the meat of it. There is only one page for routing inputs, but multiple for routing outputs. Along the top of the screen, there are tabs for outputs for AES50 A, AES50 B, card outputs, and xlr outputs. If you page over past the xlr output screen, you get to the patch screen. The patch screen is a good starting place.
You’ll be able to see that there are 16 outputs along the left. These are virtual outputs and currently don’t correspond to any physical outputs. These outputs are virtual holding places that we can select a signal to send to the holding place. This is done on the patch screen. We then use the “xlr out” tab from the block routing tab to choose what outputs we send those selected signals out of on the back of the desk. On the bottom right of the “xlr out” tab, we get a patch overview to show us what is currently assigned to come out of the output ports on the back of the mixer.
Don’t forget about our two stage boxes! We have a stage box plugged into AES50 A and AES50 B as well. The outputs on these can be assigned to anything we want independent from the local outputs on the back of the console. Virtual output 1-8 could be assigned to come out of AES50 A physical output 1-8. But that virtual output 1-8 can be anything, remember we defined what was in virtual output 1-8 from the output patch screen. We could have outputs 1-8 come out on the 8 outputs on the back of the console, but outputs 9-16 come out on the first 8 outputs of our stage box plugged into AES50 A.
On the card screen, the channels along the top, although you’re on the input tab, show what virtual outputs the card slot (USB) has. If you select “Local 1-8”, this is tapping the local input channel before any processing. This is a direct out from the channel.
You could feed your card outputs from either local inputs or from any inputs on either one of your stage boxes by selecting either AES50 A or B. You can even send mixes to your card outputs. Remember, if you select outputs 1-8, these are the predefined outputs we selected under the output tab.
Want to record all of the channels you are mixing? If you mirror your input screen in the card tab, you can set up a DAW to multitrack record your live show.
Under the AUX tab, you can configure anything to be sent out of the jack outputs on the back of your desk.
Confused? Things can get hairy - fast! If you’re not careful, this is where in the pressure of the moment, you can find yourself tripping over your thoughts trying to assign outputs. Fear not, check out the accompanying video to this post (at the top of the post) to see every screen in this process!
Another great capability of digital mixers is to create “custom fader layers”. This is essentially building your fader banks one fader at a time to suit what you are mixing. Maybe you only have 10 audio sources coming into your desk but they are split between local ins, stage boxes, laptops connected via USB, and playback from a jack cable. It only makes sense to organize all of your faders next to each other so you are not paging through multiple fader banks any time you need to make a mix decision. In order to accomplish this -
Scroll over to the “user” tab
on a single fader by fader basis, you can decide what source that channel on the desk will get its audio from.
after you populate the user inputs how you like go back to the input tab and scroll down to “User ins”.
Here we get 32 channels of user definable inputs. If you select, for example, user input 1-8, the first 8 faders on your console will be what you defined them as in the user tab.
If we press the first encoder under the screen from the user input tab, we get to user outputs. Here we can set some auxiliary inputs. For instance, we may have used all of our local xlr outputs, but want to send some aux’s out as well, maybe to the laptop on the card slot. Under the card tab, if we scroll down, we can set user outputs as our source. This will now tap those auxs we set under user output on the card output.
Recap (Finally!)
That routing is pretty intense, and the M32/X32 seem to want to make it as confusing as possible. These desks are notorious for being clunky, and to be honest, are sometimes a bit of a nightmare to work on when other digital desks accomplish the same things in much more intuitive ways. Nonetheless, as these mixers are so common, it's important to know that everything is patched in banks of 8 from a physical location to a virtual location, then back to a physical location (for outputs). This is a confusing one to read and follow along, so make sure to check out the video at the top of the page to really grasp these routing screens.
Once you’re routed and ready to go, one of the first steps to mixing is EQ. If you need some concise, actionable steps to make EQ decisions, our 3-step EQ PDF is made for you. Check it out, it's free!