One of the cool things I get to do is travel around to a lot of churches and conferences each year.
Most of the time, I’m just hanging out and talking to people, which I really enjoy. But when the session or service starts, I typically migrate towards front of house to see what’s going on.
What I have observed is a somewhat disturbing trend. Now, this may make me sound like an old guy and a Luddite, but I’m really not. OK, I am old, but I’m not a Luddite.
But here’s what I’m seeing; with the advent of digital consoles at front of house everywhere, I see a lot of engineers spending a lot of time tweaking plug-ins, turning on all the compressors or playing with Smaart, but not a lot of time on getting a good mix put together.
Now, to be fair, sometimes this happens at conferences where there is not a ton of time to do a full sound check, or at least not as thorough as one would like. That’s a different problem, and a different post. But, what I see is people focusing on the wrong things. So here are some suggestions based on lessons I’ve learned over the last 25 years of mixing.
Start With Good Gain Structure
If you know you are going to be short on time for your sound check, get your gain structure right first. Before you start loading up the plugin rack or setting up all your cool parallel compression, get the gain structure right. Nail this, and you are 80 percent of the way there to a good mix.
As I’ve said before, there is no plugin that will fix an overloaded and distorting input. And if you don’t have enough gain, you’ll be fighting noise the whole gig.
It’s important to remember that for many, many years, engineers mixed with only a simple 3- or 4-band EQ on the channels, and maybe a few channels of compression. While I don’t advocate going back to those days, the point is they made it sound great by focusing on the basics. Start there, then dress it up.
Build The Mix First
Again, I see a lot of younger guys spending time trying out different plugins on the bass, when what they should be doing is bringing the mix together. Once the mix is sounding good, then go after the cool stuff.
I remember hearing a story of a guy who spent all of sound check at a festival getting the rack toms sounding amazing. Problem was, he ran out of time and never got to the rest of the band. As a result, the show pretty much sounded terrible, except for those few seconds each song when the drummer hit the toms.
Don’t get so enamored with all this cool new digital technology that you forget what you are really there to do—mix. When I am training volunteer engineers, I teach them to mix on a simple analog console first before letting them step up to the DiGiCo. If they can demonstrate putting together a great mix on a GB16, I’m pretty confident they can do so on an SD8.
When Time Is Really Tight, Skip The Fancy Stuff
Sometimes we have to do events where we get a couple songs as a “sound check,” before the doors open. That is not the time layer effects, parallel compress or insert seven plugins on your lead vocal. Get your gain right, build the mix and go after big problems. Then when the lights come up, mix the show, tweaking as you go. Ideal? No, but it will sound good.
Do we wish we all had time to record the rehearsal, then spend a full day tweaking every setting on the board and making it perfect? Sure, maybe. But we don’t all have that all the time, so we need to make sure we’re focusing on the right things when time is tight.
Give it a go and I can promise you your mixes will sound better in less time.
