How important is VCA capability on your mixer?

Re: How important is VCA capability on your mixer?

mackerr said:
This matters for effect sends, and subs on aux sends.

Mac
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Neither of which is common on many bluegrass shows, which just reinforces my point that what is important to your mixing style depends on what you are used to getting. When VCA's are available, that is what I will use, when groups are all that is available I am not going to cry about not having VCA's, I am going to patch what is most convenient for me that day. While mixing on groups may not be the best situation, when at best you have 1 channel feeding a vocal reverb, and 1 bass channel in the aux subs, making small relative changes on the groups is not really a major deal, even if the post fade auxes are not following it exactly.
 
Re: How important is VCA capability on your mixer?

mackerr said:
If the mixes are set to be unity gain on a switch, instead of variable gain on a knob, is it a fixed gain aux, or a group?

Mac
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When the 3 colour switch on the group/aux masters is clear (white) Midas calls it a group and the on/off switches on the sends act just like group assign switches.(they are unity gain, post fader and post pan)
Captian Obvious here, for those who already know lots about the purple beast.

I love having VCA's when mixing iem's for all the reasons Mac stated. All your hard work creating post fader balances stays intact and tracks as you do your vca fader moves to control the balance between sections or fade out open mics.
Group mixing is handy if you have to do a lot of mix minus routing to the matrix sends or if you do a lot of group compression (horns, BG vocs, drum kit)
If I had to sacrifice one, it would be the groups.

That's my 2 cents or less.

Cheers,
John
 
Re: How important is VCA capability on your mixer?

back in the day i had more than my fair share of band engineers walk up to my PM3,3.5,4K having never seen a VCA desk before. my standard speech always included the phrase 'audio groups are for routing, VCA groups are for mixing'. i still think that's the most succinct way to say it...

as to which is more essential, as stated before, that depends entirely on what you are doing. i pretty much never use audio sub-groups, preferring to do any weird mix-minus stuff via aux sends. easier for me to get my head around. and if i have to use a non VCA desk, i die a little inside. but that's just what works for the kind of stuff i do. YMMV...
 
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