PreSonus Studiolive 16.0.2 Fat Channel

Welcome to my series on the Presonus StudioLive 1602 digital mixer. Okay in this video we're going to be discussing the fat channel which is the blue area of the mixer. Now in this area you have several different what used to be called rack items that we used to carry around and nowadays everything's condensed into digitized and everything is right inside the mixers. Now we have high pass filter, a gate, a compressor, three band parametric EQ. You have your channel copy, load, and save buttons, your channel selector indicator, your microphone phasing, and the microphone's 48 volt phantom power for condenser mics, and the channel's pan control. Now the fat channel can be applied to any of the 16 channels that you have coming into the mixer. You can also apply the fat channel to any outputs of the auxiliary sends one through four. You can also apply the fat channel to your main output and you can apply the fat channel to the effects A and B units that are built within the mixer. So you might want to start trying to think that the fat channel it's an easy trap to think this is only for the input channels. It's not. It's for things going out of the board as well and the effects that are used within the board. So if you have a bright reverb and you want to darken it up, use the EQ, hit the select button on the effects unit that you want to change the EQ of that reverb on, and you can apply the fat channel to your effect. So the one other thing that people aren't getting with this board and you should know about is the signal flow. The signal comes in through a channel's input and it's going to hit the fat channel. So the first thing it's going to do is come in the fat channel and hit this phase switch because it needs to know how you want to phase the input. If you get a couple mics that are too close you get what's called phase cancellation and it sounds funny. It sounds like there's frequencies mixing. It sounds like an old radio or something. If you start hearing that try hitting this button on the channels that are causing it and see if that doesn't clear it up for you. The other thing it's going to do after it hits the phase button the signal is then going to go to your high pass filter and then from there it's going to hit the gate. Now after you hit the gate you're going to go into the compressor, process the signal there. After that the signal will hit the equalizer section and then after the equalization section it comes what appears to be backwards and hits your limiter over here. So just because things are laid out in a certain way in front of you does not mean that is your signal flow. The signal flow is going to be different within the board depending on what you're doing with the signal. But it's important to at least be familiar with how that signal flows through the fat channel. So when you change something in your EQ you're going to know what something's going to change if you start applying compression. You might kill some of your highs and kill your output. You need to know how to overcome these things. So you need to know the flow of the signal. So these things can all be applied to your effects, your outputs for your singers and monitors, your main floor and all the channels. So don't limit yourself to only thinking that the fat channel can be used with your inputs. It can be used with your outputs and when you start using it that way you're going to want to wish you could save these things so that you don't have to hunt down that too bright reverb and then rework it so it sounds good again. That's what this save button is for. You can save anything you set up with any of the inputs and outputs of the board. Just label it so that you remember what you set it up for. So if you want a dry reverb according to your dry reverb save it under a name that says dry reverb and maybe has your name or initials on it or something. So that's the fat channel.