Re: Why is mixing considered...
For Jason and Hammer,
I am not sure which is the chicken or the egg. Is that pay and responsibility due to the person mixing being responsible for all aspects of the sound, or is it because the person responsible for all aspects of the sound also happens to be the one mixing?
I like the way Dick said it and put it into musical terms but: Great system = easy mixing, Less than good system = difficult evening.
My comments were really more addressed to the levels under where a band is touring an entire crew, and where the house tech sees having a guest engineer as something unusual or infrequent. On the other boards there were some comments that were negative to band techs.I was basically thinking of some polite way to say to the house engineers "If every guest engineer on your system is unable to get a good mix, maybe you better start trying to figure out what is wrong with the system."
As with any performer that is doing a large number of shows, I have had nights that were up and nights that were down. I tend to nitpick at the performances that were less than my standards, but it seems that the shows that really had significant mix "problems" were invariably equipment related. I can only really think of one show where it was honestly my mental "I should have known that" goof that started when I believed a house tech about the way his system was patched.
