SHELLY STEFFENS: My name is Shelly Steffens. I've been a front-of-house sound engineer for the last seven years or so. Today, I'm working at the Empty Bottle in Chicago.

Tonight, I will be mixing three bands, [SOUNDS LIKE] some fellow local acts.

I was just going to show you a channel strip and talk about everything that goes into making a single channel strip.

So we are done with the aux send section and next we will just get to the heart of this channel, which is the fader strip. This has -- first up here is the ability to pan left or right or any varying degrees in between left and right, hard panning left and hard panning right, and we are running our system in stereo here so I often will at least slightly pan things throughout the evening. I tend not to use the hard panning here just because there are some very distinct areas in the club that if you hard pan anything you will miss hearing completely on the other side of the club, so as far as using it in a way that's typical of kind of mixing in a stereo field, I don't tend to use the pan in that way here at empty bottle.

After that, you have your mute switch that will turn on and off the channel. After that, we have our mono switch. This sends everything that's coming into this channel to the mono out of the board. We are not using our mono out, but if you were sending something, you know, to make a separate recording or you are using your mono out as opposed to the left and right out, which is what we're using here at empty bottle, you would have the ability to send this channel anything that comes after this fader to the mono out of the board. After that, we have our left and right. This is just sending the channel to our left and right out directly. And then, these next four buttons are sending to these bus channels, so we have eight busses on the Crest console, and you have the ability to send to all eight of them from each channel. If I wanted to send to two channels at once, I would, let's say select bus 1 and 2 or group 1 and 2, and I would, with the pan set in the middle here, you'll be sending the same amount of whatever was coming into this channel to both groups 1 and groups 2. Now, if I wanted to just send to one of those groups, I would use my pan switch to isolate this channel and have it just go into group 1. In the same way, if I wanted to just go to group 2, I would set my pan all the way over to the right and I'll be sending everything from this channel to group number 2, and the same goes for 3 and 4, 5 and 6, 7 and 8. If you want to send to all eight busses at once, you can do that. You would be doing that if you had your setting there and all of these pressed down.

And then the next switch is your PFL switch, which stands for pre-fader level. This is, if you have this depressed, you can listen to the signal that's coming into this channel before it goes to the fader, so it's right after the preamp. So I will often use this if I want to listen to a channel on my headphones, I'm hearing some distortion maybe on that channel, and I want to checkout what's going on, I'll set my out, indicate that by using the PFL switch and then listen to my headphones what's going on in that channel.

After that, you have two lights that indicate you have the PFL turned on. You have your PFL indicator and your signal light, and that just indicates when it's green that you're getting a pretty steady signal incoming down that channel.

After that you have your mute group assigns. We have four mute group assigns here (A, B, C, and D), and you can use all four on the channel or one or two or any combination of the four. Works great. If you want to mute multiple channels at one time, you can set all these channels to be on mute group A and then using our mute group master over here, you can mute and unmute those channels using one button, so you can use multiple channels you can mute at one time. So, you can see when I press mute group A, I'm muting all of these at once and I'm muting them all at once.

[PILLARS AND TONGUES PERFORMING SOUND CHECK WITH SHELLY STEFFENS]

One thing that makes it good for this particular venue is its size. We have 28 channels that we can use. We have a 24-channel snake, so we have four channels besides the snake that we can use for other things as well.

Things that are different with this versus other boards I've used, there isn't that variable high-pass filter that's usually pretty standard for consoles of this size. This board does not have it, but the work-around for that is using that shelving, variable shelving, so it doesn't totally have the variable high pass but it has something similar so that makes it okay to use.

Another thing that makes it different than other boards of this size is that it has, as opposed to having VCAs, it has groups, so a lot of boards in this price range may have VCAs. This board in particular does not. It has eight busses. One thing that makes that better is that with busses you can insert on the bus. VCAs you cannot insert on. So I mean some consoles have both, they'll have busses and VCAs and will have one or the other. I think for our purposes, that works pretty well that it does have busses because you can insert on the busses and you could, you know, the limitations with a number of compressors that we have and the number of outboard effects that we have -- outboard processing, rather, that we have. It allows us a bit more flexibility. As far as using those units, we can use two compressors on a bus as opposed to using those, you know, compressing each individual channel, so we can send a whole bunch of channels to a bus and use compression on that bus as opposed to having, if you had VCAs instead of busses, you would not be able to do that. You would have to -- the VCAs are only amplification; there's no separate routing that you can do with that, so that is a benefit I think in our particular -- at this particular club because we are a bit limited as far as the number of compressors that we have and things like that.

I've never had anyone complain about the number but it's just allowing us more flexibility.