Re: Some thoughts on "mixing"
Scott,
Your answer lies in both my and John's posts.
A guitar player adjusting the "volume" at their guitar should not ever be any type of "problem" for the soundman. Consistency doesn't mean every thing is always the same.
Consistency means that the volume and tone dialed in by the guitarist is appropriate to the arrangement of the song.
Once your gain is correctly set through the system, any change the guitarist makes at the guitar should result in a minimal change at FOH. While I might make small changes at FOH, the point of having solid gain structure from the beginning is so you don't have to make any large, radical changes. Once you can add some light compression, it is rare I make ANY change at all to the guitarists fader that is song dependent once the set is underway. My assumption is that the minor changes in tone/volume made at the guitar are what the guitarist wants reflected in the FOH mix and are part of their arrangement. I think live music is better when the tonal pallette/volume varies from song to song so the ear is encountering something new. Therefore, I don't see it as part of my job to try and smooth out relative volumes, especially within each song. If a band hires me for multiple shows and wants me to put on a producer hat to help them with their arrangements, that is a different story, but for a one off show, I am going to let their arrangements stand the way they present them.
Therefore; once the show is underway, I actually spend minimal time on the faders, and certainly don't ride all of them all the time like I see some mixers do. Instead, I spend most of my time on the effects, which I like to vary every song, and the dynamics, where fine tuning actually solves all of the level related problems. Add a couple DCA's for a rare lead part that really needs to stand out and all my bases are covered.
Which leads back to my original thought, if you stop thinking of mixing as relative volume and start thinking as relative gain, it is a lot easier to reproduce the bands arrangement as they are presenting it, rather than trying to figure out what they might have intended.
As an example, I had a typical five member rock band where in the third set the singer suddenly became a third guitarist playing an acoustic/electric. At first I could not hear that the acoustic added anything to the mix, nor could I hear any of the sounds I associate with an acoustic. However cueing the channel showed the signal was equally as strong as either of the other two guitars, and the headphones told me he was playing a one chord drone that was distorted into pure fuzz (you literally could not tell when one strum ended and the next started). Since it was obvious he was playing a fill and not a lead part, it was clear I should leave the level underlying the other two guitars, rather than trying to place it on top.
On another gig, the lead guitarist changed to an acoustic/electric for part of one of the sets, and during soundcheck all he did was strum it. During the set, one of the songs was a fingerstyle Steve Miller song. With the gain correctly set, I would bet no one would have noticed if I just left the level as set because the rest of the band pulled back nicely to leave him the space to play, but a small bump of the fader put the guitar nicely front and center. If it is done as a volume swell rather than abruptly during the intro, then the change becomes part of the arrangement and the audience perceives it as a positive part of the overall mix.
So those volume changes that you may see as a negative, may actually serve to highlight what the guitarist is doing because the audience will focus on the change. Many great artists have learned to highlight parts of their music by making the key instrument quieter, rather than louder. The instrument will then have greater impact if the volume swells back to its original level. I am not going to be the one to remove that dynamic the artist chose to create.
