Mixing is about control of gain structure.
Saturday, I had my first guest BE in the bar. This was someone who has good credentials, knows what is what, has worked all the big local rooms, and owns a local studio that has recorded many of the big regional bands.
The band is an Irish/Celtic rock act including fiddle and pipes as well as assorted shakers, whistles, congas, and other stuff. I started with the board zeroed out, monitors nicely rung, and the house graphs set flat (having already voiced the pa to my taste in the drive rack).
In typical bar fashion, there was a horserace showing on the big projection screen in front of the stage at the same time we were to be line checking. So line check was going to be without visual connection with the stage.
The visiting BE turned one of my own tricks back on me and asked me to pull gains while he was still on stage with the band. I have done the same as a BE in festival settings where I trusted the FOH guy. Sometimes it makes more sense for the BE to be on stage overseeing the patching and giving instructions to the band.
We did a full line check and set the monitor levels with him on stage and me in the booth. 4 compressers and gates were used on drum channels, one stereo compresser was strapped across the instrument group, and another across a vocal group. The vocal group was double bussed.
The first song was the soundcheck, and he started, like I usually do, with the instrument channels at -5 and the vocal channels at unity. By the end of the first song he had finished his adjustments to the channel eqs, walked the room, and made a couple adjustments to the FOH eq. By the end of his second song, he had the effects dialed in.
His comment to me, " now we relax the rest of the night".
And he did. Other than varying the effects and making a couple of song specific adjustments like when a conga mic did double duty as a trumpet mic, nothing required 10 fingers on 10 faders all the time.
This was also the first show I could sit back and watch the gain post mixer through the eqs, the drive rack, and the amps, and everything was nice and clean. We were getting a lot from the system without stressing anything, no apparent distortion, and plenty of level at all frequencies throughout the room.
Mixing is about control of gain structure.
The only really wrong with the show was the band, in true Irish fashion, wanted to sit around for 2 hours after the show drinking, without packing anything up on stage.
