hey there my name is Drew brashler and in this video I'm going to talk to you about dcas on the Behringer X32 or midas's M32 if you're brand new to my channel I am all about helping you feel more confident in your production gear no matter where you're starting from so let's go ahead and dive in now a DCA stands for digitally controlled amplifier and it is the same thing as a VCA or a voltage controlled amplifier now dcas and vcas are the same thing however vcas come from our analog days back when we had analog consoles now what a VCA and a DCA is is it is a remote control to the inputs that are associated with it now I'm going to say that again it's a remote control to the inputs that are associated with it so we can take any channels and we can associate them with a VCA and then we can take that VCA and turn it up or down so if we had channel one and channel two and we Associated these with one VCA or DCA in the baringer X3 2's case and we turn that DCA up then it's taking these two microphones or these two channels turning them up if we turn that VCA down it's turning them down but one thing that a VCA and a DCA does not do is it does not sum these two channels together now we do have some things on the X32 that sum things together are mono bus our stereo bus and all of our mix buses are a form of a summation Point meaning that it takes multiple channels in our case with the X32 we have 32 channels uh and then also we have our eight oxes it takes all of those and it can sum them together in either a mono or a stereo channel so we can either take all of our 32 channels and put them down the mono buus which makes that technically one channel or we put them down the stereo which makes them two channels now the benefit of a summation point is that we can actually insert something on it so we could say insert an EQ or a compressor and we can globally edit all of the sounds of all of those microphones that are going into that summation point now of DCA does not sum we cannot take a EQ and apply it to a DCA we cannot take a compressor and put it into a DCA it just doesn't work because you can't insert on something that doesn't sum the channels together so that is what a DCA is and is not but how is it going to be beneficial for us well the nice thing is about the X32 and the M32 is we have these eight dcas on the right hand side now this is going to be the same case if you had the full size the Compact and any of the X32 and M32 models that there are we have the dcas on the right hand side now we also have their channels on the leand side now what a DCA is helpful for us to do is we can take an entire set of inputs say the drums assign it to one DCA and then I can turn up or down that DCA to adjust the overall volume of the drums with one fader so how do we do that well it's pretty easy we can simply have all of our channels here and then when we want to assign a channel to a DCA we just have to press and hold the select button and then we can then apply this DCA to these channels here once we are done we can just simply release the DCA so I'm going to go ahead and play some audio out of my xive card into the X32 to show you how this works so here we have our drum mix here and what I'm going to do is I can just take my DCA and I can turn it down and that's by turning it down 10 DB or I could take it and turn it up okay and so what I'm doing is if I turn this down by 10 DB it's in essence me taking all of my fingers and turning all of these inputs down by 10 DB but if we have something say down in the -20 or the -30 and I was TR try to adjust these down I can't just simply take all of them down the same amount as far as distance of the fader because as we get down to the bottom of the fader it's going to turn down even more we can see that the resolution down on these fader between here and here is infinity to -60 which is about 60 DB of difference and that's almost in about a quarter of an inch or about 6 millimeters here so we can also see that as we're up towards the top here we can move a quarter of an inch and that's only moving 3db up or 3db down that's because our faders are a logarithmic type of fader which is good because that's the way our hearing is so if I was to try and take all my fingers and adjust this up or down it would be impossible to maintain the perfect mix that I had of these channels and that's where the DCA comes into a benefit is we can just take this up or down and that's in essence mixing all of these up or down that amount so one really cool feature that Behringer added to the X32 in a most recent firmware update is the ability to have a meter on the DCA now this is something that not all console manufactur ERS have done and I actually kind of really like this feature I wish that other console manufacturers would jump on board and do the same thing but I realize why is then it's because a DCA is not a summing point now I've said that a couple times in this video but I want to show you how these meter readings work for a DCA because it's not a summing point so it's not taking the overall calculated mix of all of these channels and showing us what our metering is it's just taking our overall meters and calculating an estimated meter for the DCA so in this example I have pink noise playing into both channel one and channel 2 now channel two I have inverted the polarity of it so if I sum channel one and channel two together it is going to in essence remove all audio because one is out of polarity with each other which would cancel out all of the sound which is pretty cool it's actually it's it's pretty fun I I'm geeking out about this and I'm hoping you guys are geeking out about it too so I have these two channels as a DCA control from my DCA 1 so these are all controlling these two channels so as I turn my DCA up and down it will adjust the volume of these two channels now I'm going to go ahead and unmute this channel so we can see that I have this audio playing into this zca and it is showing up on Main meter in the top of the console now I am going to unmute the other channel and show you that the audio is just going to remove itself you won't be able to hear it because of that polarity shift that I have in there so I'm going to unmute this and we can now see that there is no audio playing but I have two channels that are at Unity gain with unity gain amount of noise and it's being summed to nothing because it's identical but out of polarity with each other we can see that there's no metering up here because it is Essence zeroed out because it's the same thing reversed polarity but my DCA is showing me that I have8 or Unity gain of signal coming from these two channels and that's true because I do have8 DB of audio processing through these channels going to this DCA so the metering is just showing you an estimated total of what these meters on the channels are showing it's not actually summing them together because my stereo bus is summing them together and it has removed all audio because of the way that these two channels are interacting with each other with one having that polarity reverse so as I bring this down we can see that we have our audio coming back up and as I get this closer to zero that comes back down again now with this being said I can turn this down and it will show me that I don't have as loud a signal going into my DCA which is true but if I was to bring these up together I've basically taken all of the audio on my left right that's summing these and it's zero but on the DCA it's showing a little bit now another really cool feature that Behringer came out with with the X32 with the new version 4 firmware is this thing called the DCA spill and it's actually really convenient so say I'm mixing here on the left side of my faders and I have the rest of my my band dcas here and I was wanting to go adjust something on the drums one thing that I could do is I could just press select on the drum DCA and that in essence spills out the channels that are associated with this DCA which is pretty cool but there's even one more thing that we can do say I Associated these two drum buses with this DCA as well so I'm going to press and hold uh my DCA and I'm going to select my two drum subgroups and I'm going to go ahead and release and I'm mixing here if I press this it's not only going to show me my channels that are associated with this DCA but it's also going to spill my subgroups which is actually pretty cool because that's not something that we've been able to do before on the X32 so this is just one other way of being able to speed up your workflow now how do I have my dcas on my console well I have my drum bass guitars Keys tracks and then I have effects the this one is my vocal effects and then I have my vocals and then I have all of my band so I double patch all of my band with this DCA so that I can take my band up or down in volume so I have my drums bass guitar keys tracks effects vocals and band so as I'm mixing on a Sunday or at an event if I'm wanting to overall lower the volume of the entire band all I have to do is just grab these two faders and I bring it down or up and I can instantly keep the blend of my vocals versus the band now one thing that I like to do with these dcas is I like to set them at zero which means that they are not going to add or subtract any gain to any of the channels that are associated with them now that's one thing that you do need to do is keep the is up at zero if you do have anything associated with it because if this is all the way down and you have the band start playing none of the audio is going to pass because this is turned all the way down same thing with the mute if we mute this it's going to flash the mutes on the channels and no audio from the drums is going to come through so my mixing tip for you with diving into DCA is set these all at zero and then as you're in soundcheck get your blend of all of your instruments that you like so get the the blend of the kick drum versus The Snare and the toms and the overheads get all of that Blended well and then what you can do is you know that if this is at zero that is your Baseline mix and so then say a song needs a little bit more bass guitar or a little bit more keys in that in that particular song once that song is done all you have to do is drop these back down to zero and you know that you're back back at your Baseline mix which is super helpful I hope this video was helpful for you learning what dcas and vcas are if you have an old analog console but it's something that I use every day when I'm mixing it I find this to be very very helpful when I'm mixing a big show that has multiple inputs greater than just my 16 inputs because I have all of my band here on these eight faders including my effects which is very helpful if you haven't already make sure to subscribe to my channel here and if you happen to have any questions or ideas of videos that I should make for you in the future drop them in the comment section below because I'm always reading through those to find the next video that's going to be helpful for you if you haven't checked out my website it's at Drew brashler docomo much