I’m wondering what’s emerging as the industry standard for this?
I work at a place with a few different techs and the same roster of bands coming through every month or so. On any given show night it’s a roll of the roster die what tech gets matched up with what band, the skill level of the techs varies wildly. Slow and steady a collection of scenes has grown on the console and many bands arrive now with the expectation of recalling a scene and barely doing a line check. They’ll waltz in and say ‘recall so and so’s scene’ (this will either be a scene pulled by a tech that sounded good to them or the most recent one that reflects the assorted line up changes).
My ego says ‘no I want to pull my own mix!’
Pragmatism says ‘whatever works, if they’re comfortable with that, if it’s going to save time, use the thing that’s already built’
The catch is everyone has a different way of mixing. Some of the techs fully exploit the capabilities of the desk with surprise bus groups and expansion and fx being fed back in on themselves and mystery matrix channels sitting where bus 7 and 8 should be which you later learn are for tweaking the monitor mix in headphones to make it a more accurate reflection of the foh. And some techs, myself included, use confusing internal routing in order to get the patch on the stage to suit the layout on the desk because in a limited set up time that’s the path of least resistance.
Even when the scene is straight forward and the stage sound is on point, foh still never sounds quite like you’d want it to sound and now you have to unmix. Especially if you forgot to reset foh graphic, with everything already equed there’s no where to go.
But scenes are here to stay and we can’t be the only techs in this position. How do you all fair? Will you work with another tech’s scene? Have you developed a method for getting aquainted with its quirks and peculiarities in a hurry? Do you use the scene but reset the graphic eqs because new day, new environment, new problem frequencies? Is this a skill we should be mastering?
Being asked to frustrates me because I can pull a mix blind in this venue in a couple of minutes that sounds pretty much there! Infinitely quicker than interfacing with an existing scene. But I also hate being defeated by this part of the job description!
I work at a place with a few different techs and the same roster of bands coming through every month or so. On any given show night it’s a roll of the roster die what tech gets matched up with what band, the skill level of the techs varies wildly. Slow and steady a collection of scenes has grown on the console and many bands arrive now with the expectation of recalling a scene and barely doing a line check. They’ll waltz in and say ‘recall so and so’s scene’ (this will either be a scene pulled by a tech that sounded good to them or the most recent one that reflects the assorted line up changes).
My ego says ‘no I want to pull my own mix!’
Pragmatism says ‘whatever works, if they’re comfortable with that, if it’s going to save time, use the thing that’s already built’
The catch is everyone has a different way of mixing. Some of the techs fully exploit the capabilities of the desk with surprise bus groups and expansion and fx being fed back in on themselves and mystery matrix channels sitting where bus 7 and 8 should be which you later learn are for tweaking the monitor mix in headphones to make it a more accurate reflection of the foh. And some techs, myself included, use confusing internal routing in order to get the patch on the stage to suit the layout on the desk because in a limited set up time that’s the path of least resistance.
Even when the scene is straight forward and the stage sound is on point, foh still never sounds quite like you’d want it to sound and now you have to unmix. Especially if you forgot to reset foh graphic, with everything already equed there’s no where to go.
But scenes are here to stay and we can’t be the only techs in this position. How do you all fair? Will you work with another tech’s scene? Have you developed a method for getting aquainted with its quirks and peculiarities in a hurry? Do you use the scene but reset the graphic eqs because new day, new environment, new problem frequencies? Is this a skill we should be mastering?
Being asked to frustrates me because I can pull a mix blind in this venue in a couple of minutes that sounds pretty much there! Infinitely quicker than interfacing with an existing scene. But I also hate being defeated by this part of the job description!
