How does a Mixer work?

I know this may sound like a stupid question. But, I really have no idea how a mixer works?

Think of a mixer as a telephone switchboard. Remeber on the old western movies, when the local operator wopuld patch each call through to their respective party line?
Well, an audio mixer takes many individual signals, and joins them together. Then the mixed signals are sent to a new location.
ie:
You have one amp, but 4 singers.....
Ch1-Larry
Ch2-Moe
Ch3-Curley
Ch4-Shemp
**each of the four mics gets plugged into their own channel of the mixer, then a single output ( or 2, in stereo, if that's called for ) gets routed, or plugged into the amplifier.

That way 4 mics are "mixed" together as they enter the audio path into the amp.

Does that help?

Man, my typos are terrible !
sorry, folks - typing with the mittens on again !

Some, but what are all those slidders, and knobs for? I had a mixer once, for a PA system, but people kept complaining, that they could not hear the person speaking. I thought that once you pluged a mic in, or a keyboard, and turned, up the voulme, it was loud enough, but I guess I was wrong.

[This message has been edited by analogcontrolfreak (edited 09-26-2006).]

Well the knobs and sliders are used for multiple things. As you've noticed some are used to control volume and pan of each channel (or an entire mix/main out sometimes). That's the easy part. Some mixers also have something called 'input gain'. Normally a row of knobs on the back of the mixer or close to the input jacks. Differs on each model of course. Anyway, the input gain helps yoo give extra volume to outputs that are too quiet. On signals like mics gain is normally turned up quite a bit. That's what that PA mixer you're talking about didn't have probably, or the person using it didn't know how to use it right. Just guessing here...

Now, there's more knobs. EQs. Most of my mixers have a 4 band EQ. Nothing you would normally use on the main output of today's workstations since most have built in EQs. But they still come in handy. Say you're playing a bass on your Poly 61 and it's just way too heavy. So you turn down the bass EQ a bit. In short, it's not a must to use mixer EQs but it sure helps having them there.

There's also FX sends. Used to send a signal to an FX processor. Some of today's mixers have built in FX but none of my mackies do. Most analog mixers don't. So you have to use FX processors. You connect them to your mixer and use the "Send" knobs to adjust the level of FX for each channel.

There's also buses. Think of buses as extra outputs. Right now you only need one output as you will only connect to your Hi Fi. But eventually you might get a DAW setup or synths with external inputs (for vocoding, processing, filtering etc) and the extra outputs will come in handy.

So here you go. Mixers 101.

-ED-

[This message has been edited by 3351 (edited 09-26-2006).]

Thanks Ed! It's easier for me to understand, when someone writes in a simple form. As opposed to the way Most information is written. Especially over on the TweekHeadz web site.

Just curious Dave, do you have a spare copy of the Stooges CD, I lost mine, and I've really like to replace it. Mo was one of the best Cross-cut saw players I've ever heard. nyuk...nyuk... ...nyuk

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...shboom

[This message has been edited by shboom (edited 09-29-2006).]