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Where a vinyl turntable plugs into the mixer

Lesson Beginner Stage 1: Your First Setup November 2008

On YouTube this video is called New DJ?, where to plug the vinyl turn table into a mixer

What this lesson teaches

A very short lesson aimed at somebody unpacking their first setup. Two things in it.

Red to red, white to white

The plugs coming out of a turntable are RCA plugs, also called phono plugs, and the two names cause real confusion - "phono" is both the plug and the type of input.

An RCA plug going into a socket marked PHONO. Red to red, white to white, every time.
0:24 An RCA plug going into a socket marked PHONO. Red to red, white to white, every time.

They go into the sockets marked PHONO on the back of the mixer, not line. Red into red, white into white.

The colours are a universal convention: red is right, white (sometimes black) is left. Worth committing to memory now, because you will meet it on every amplifier, speaker, interface and television you touch for the rest of your life.

The rule that matters more

His second point sounds like housekeeping and is not. The turntable on your right goes into the right-hand channel of the mixer. The one on your left goes into the left-hand channel.

Electrically it makes no difference at all. The mixer does not care.

It matters because of what happens under pressure. DJing is full of moments where you have about half a second to pull a fader down, and in that half second you do not look - your hand goes where your mental map says the deck is. If the layout is crossed, your map is wrong, and the moment you most need to act is the moment you find out.

It also matters for everybody else. Any DJ who takes over from you, or whose kit you borrow, assumes the obvious wiring. Set it up the normal way and the booth is readable by anyone.

This is a two-minute decision you make once when you unpack, and then never think about again - which is exactly why it is worth getting right the first time.

Contents of the video

Alright folks, another video for you dedicated to the complete total and utter new DJ. Look in the description, follow the link, that link will take you to the djtutor.com website whereby you'll see more videos dedicated to the new DJ on setting up their gear for the first time. In this one we're looking at these guys here and these guys are attached to a vinyl turntable. They're known as phono plugs but more commonly they're known as RCA plugs. From a vinyl turntable into the back of your DJ mixer, you will have to plug these in to the area where you can see phono. Above there, you can see it. It's spelt P-H-O-N-O. You'll have the red one and the red one will be plugged into the red socket. The white one will be plugged into the white socket. If you have your mixer in front of you and you have a vinyl turntable to the right and a vinyl turntable to the left,

Then, the vinyl turntable that's on the right hand side, you will plug these cables into the phono plugs on the right hand side of the mixer. If you have a vinyl turntable on the left hand side, you will plug the phono plugs from the left hand side turntable into the left hand side of your mixer. Practice and enjoy!

This transcript was produced automatically from the audio of the video and may contain mistakes.

This video is part of

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Below this line is the back catalogue, newest first. Useful for browsing, but it is not a course - the videos are in the order they were filmed, not the order to learn them in. Work the stages instead: each one assumes the one before it.

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