Working with other peoples scenes

[Lisa Lane-Collins]

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!

 

[Helge A. Bentsen]

Having been burned by a number of scene issues over the years for all the reasons you list + some more I refuse to use any scene built by another tech unless I have time to load it in advance a couple of days before the gig and walk through it.

If this isn’t an option, I roll my own.

 

[Rob Timmerman]

Having been burned by a number of scene issues over the years for all the reasons you list + some more I refuse to use any scene built by another tech unless I have time to load it in advance a couple of days before the gig and walk through it.

Heck, I've even been burned by my own scenes (workarounds for system issues that ended up stored in the scene, but were fixed properly later). At this point, I'll almost always start with a template scene of some type, but not a scene for a specific act.

For the venue scenario where there are multiple techs mixing a rotating lineup of acts, I suspect that the viable options are either having "house rules" about what gets stored in a scene, or each tech has their own library of scenes. And this isn't fundamentally different from having a few different people that rotate through the positions in a band - what sort or reaction would you get if you asked a substitute guitarist to start with the main guitarist's pedal and amp settings?

 

[frank kayser]

I'm with Hedge with a caveat - I roll my own *if* I have time to do it, and if I have knowledge and permission to do so. We have five techs roll through, and each has their own "style". Sometimes it takes me more time to psychoanalyze what has been done (strange routing, using cut PEQ method rather than an additive PEQ use, etc.) than to start over. This is in a venue where I have "seniority".
Another venue where I get called in occasionally, I do not have save-to-mixer privileges, that has odd routing to match the odd layout of amps and speakers in the room - I have not been there often enough to sort out all the nuances of the setup. I need to leave minimal-to-no footprint after I leave. Rolling my own there is really out of the question. I need to make lemonade with what lemons are left to me.

 

[Riley Casey]

The cake and eat it too solution to all of this is to do your scene management on a computer or iPad. Pull the scene or scenes from the console you think might be the best starting place and adjust from there or start from scratch either way you're up and running without making changes to the saved internal scenes. . This way you don't upset anyones expectations when they come in next particularly anyone less experienced who might be seriously impacted by not having their starter file as they left it.
I ran into this situation last week mixing at a venue I'd never been in on a console I use perhaps twice a year with a genre of bands I probably haven't mixed in 30 years. A computer and iPad running Mixing Station connected to the console and a few minutes running Smaart before soundcheck to get a baseline and it all went smoothly. I mean it was punk bands in a 500 seat room so not that hard but still.