Hello, and welcome to the Soundcraft Video Manual Series. My name is Austin, and today I will be exploring how the FX Sends and Aux Sends pages work in your Ui series mixer. Let’s get started. Let’s begin with the FX. The way that FX works on the Ui-series mixers is that there are 4 independent Lexicon FX processors on the mixer, each with their own send and return channels. Much in the same way that you would route FX to a separate FX unit back in the old days of analog mixers, you have an output send channel that you send input channels to, and then a separate return input channel for that processed audio to come back to the mixer on. I often use a car on a highway analogy to describe the signal flow, here. If you can think of your audio signal as a car, the audio would need to literally flow out of the mixer via some kind of road, such as a cable, to the input of the effect unit, which was maybe a reverb or a delay box, and then out of the output of that box to the input of the mixer. Once it’s back in the mixer, you would pull up the fader of the return channel, and subsequently blend the processed, or “wet” audio, in with the original signal, or “dry” audio. The Ui-series mixers function in the exact same way, albeit completely digitally. So, the first thing that we need to do is send some audio to our FX Send bus. To do that, we’ll click on the “FX Sends” button at the top of our main mix page, here. In the top right corner, you can see that there are tabs for each of our 4 FX processors, each one assigned to a different effect, such as reverbs or delays. Whichever one is selected is the one that we’ll be sending signal to. So, we’ll go ahead and turn up the input channel for our test input to send it to the reverb on FX 1. Now that we’ve done that, in order to actually hear that effect, we need to return it. The FX return channels are located on the main mix page, for when you want to return it to the main mix, and in any of our Aux Send pages, which I’ll get to in a moment. For now, let’s navigate back to the main mix page. We’ll scroll over to the end here, and now we can see our 4 FX return channels, and so to bring back that processed signal, we just simply turn up the return channel for FX 1. Now, our audio has made the full trip from the input, to the FX Send, to the FX Return, and then to our main mix. Moving onward, let’s take a look at our Aux Sends. There are lots of interchangeable terms out there for this, auxes, busses, mixes – at the end of the day, they’re all just additional outputs. In the case of this mixer, an Aux is just an output that you can send inputs to, like a separate mix from the main mix. This is why they’re most used for monitor mixes or in-ear monitor mixes, since you have lots of control over which audio gets fed into them. To create an aux mix, let’s click on our Aux Sends tab. As you can see, similarly to the FX Sends, it opens a mix view where we see all our input channels, but this time with everything being the color yellow rather blue, to indicate that these are going to an aux. We’ll make sure an aux is selected in the top-right corner, and we’re ready to go. We can push up some channels here, and now we’ve got audio flowing to an aux. The master channel that you see all the way to the right, here, with the big gold fader, is the master fader for this particular aux. Also, really quick, let’s touch on sending FX to one of your auxes. Let’s say that this is an aux mix for your singer’s stage wedge or in-ear mix, and they want to hear some reverb on their voice. The first thing we need to do is actually send their voice into the effect, so we need to navigate back to the FX Sends menu and make sure we’ve done that, by turning up the fader on the vocal channel going to the reverb. Once we’ve done so, just like with our main mix, we navigate back to the aux, scroll over to the right, and we can see our FX return channels. We just turn up the fader for FX 1, and voila, we have FX in our monitor! Keep in mind that you cannot send different FX to the monitor that you do the main mix – because the FX Returns are still pulling from the same FX Send channel, so whatever you send into FX 1 is what’s going to be available to return. Lastly, let’s talk about how to setup auxes 9 and 10 on your Ui24R, because doing so requires us to make a detour to the patching menu. This only applies to the Ui24R mixers, specifically, because the Ui12 and Ui16 models do not have this capability, and the channels that are assigned to their respective inputs and outputs cannot be changed. Here in our mixer settings, which you can get to by selecting the gear icon at the top of the screen, we’ll select the “patching” tab to get to the patching menu. What we have in front of us is a grid layout that shows all our various input options along the x-axis, going from left to right, and then our outputs going along the y-axis, from top to bottom. You can use this to create all kinds of custom routing and signal flow configurations, but for now, let’s focus on setting up our auxes. What we want to do is route the master channels for auxes 9 and 10 to a set of outputs on the mixer. As you can see, when I select “masters” along the top row, it gives us all our master channels as inputs, and then when I select “HW Outs” on the side column, it gives us all our physical outputs as selectable patches. Now, as we investigate the middle of the grid here, we can see that auxes 9 and 10 are not currently patched to any output. We’ll need to pick one and draw an intersection point to do so. Typically, the most conventional way to do this is to utilize an unused or unneeded headphone output on the front of the mixer, given that they’re balanced outputs just like the XLR outputs are, and they would work just fine for this purpose. We’ll click and hold on to the block, then let go after a couple of seconds to remove it. Since auxes are mono by default, we want to send the aux master to the left channel of the respective headphone output. We’ll go ahead and do that for aux 9, going to the left channel of headphone output 1, and then let’s repeat that for aux 10, going to the left channel of headphone output 2. Now, we’ve successfully routed our extra auxes to those channels! One additional note I'd like to include is how to replicate this on the Ui12 for auxes 3 and 4, or the Ui16 for auxes 5 and 6. This is done through the Global Settings menu by changing the Headphones Out option to Aux. Since the Ui12 and Ui16 do not have a patching section, the mixer will automatically route both auxes to the left and right of both headphone jacks. So, in the case of the Ui12, aux 3 would be on the left side, and aux 4 would be on the right. That’s obviously not ideal, unless you were trying to setup a stereo aux, so to get around that, you’ll need to use a specific kind of splitter cable, where the tip and sleeve are fed to one ¼" connector, and then the ring and sleeve are fed to another ¼" connector. That's all for now, we’ll go into more detail about even more that you can do in this menu, including routing audio from a DAW on a computer for multitrack recording, or using Soundcheck mode in a future video. For more news, product information, and troubleshooting tips, visit us at soundcraft.com or our Anytime Help Center at help.harmanpro.com.