Your first session
Goal: from a silent, freshly-installed console to one source audible in the main mix, saved so it comes back tomorrow. Ten minutes, no stagebox required.
If you do have a REAC stagebox, read the hardware guide first — especially the network interface rules — and then follow the same steps, choosing a stagebox input instead of a local source at step 2.
1. Open the surface and check you are live
Open http://<host>:8880/. The connection indicator in the header must read
Connected. If it reads Demo (offline), stop here — nothing you do will make sound —
and see
the web UI cannot reach the server.
2. Give the desk a source
Everything the machine is playing is patchable. The quickest source is any application: start music in a media player, or audio in a browser tab.
Open the Patchbay chip. Its rows are the live sources the server can see and its columns are your input channels. The player you just started appears as a new row. Tick the cell where that row crosses channel 1.
More than one source may be summed into a channel. A source feeding several channels is flagged, with a count, so a fan-out is never invisible.
3. Send the main mix somewhere you can hear
Below the patchbay grid, the output routing row picks the real sink each bus and the main output feed. Set Main to your headphones or monitor interface.
If Main stays silent from here on, the cause is almost always the output route, not the mixer: see silent main output.
4. Set the gain before the fader
Select channel 1 in the fader bay and open the Processing chip. At the top of the strip is the head-amp gain — the input trim, a different control from the fader.
Bring the trim up until the channel meter sits healthily in its working range and never touches the clip indicator on the loudest part of the material. The strip's state dot tells you the same story at a glance: grey for silence, green for signal, red for clip.
Gain first, always. The fader is for balance, not for finding signal.
5. Bring the fader up
Push channel 1's fader up to around unity. You should hear it. The main meter moves.
Mute and un-mute the channel to confirm you are hearing the path you think you are.
6. Shape it, if you want to
The Processing chip lays the channel out in signal order — trim, high-pass, gate, EQ, dynamics, inserts, fader — with a tab for each part.
- EQ draws the channel's response as one curve. Drag a band point sideways for frequency, up and down for gain, wheel over it for Q. The high-pass and low-pass points sit at each end of the same curve.
- Gate and Compressor have their own tabs with the same live curve treatment.
- Plugins adds LV2 inserts from the curated catalog.
None of this is required to finish the exercise.
7. Save the session
Press Ctrl/⌘+S, or use Save session in the header. Give it a name.
A session is the whole console: every level, mute, solo and send, the buses, the matrix, DCA and mute-group membership, every plugin chain with its parameters, the routing and the surface layout. Loading one moves every connected screen at once.
The Setup chip's session browser lists, loads and deletes saved sessions.
What you now have
A channel with signal, gain staged, routed to a main output you can hear, saved. From here:
- Operator manual — the whole desk: buses, DCAs, sends, cue/solo, feedback suppression, scenes.
- REAC hardware — putting a real stagebox in front of it.