View Single Post
Old 10-30-2012, 10:02 PM   #41
Razor
Human being with feelings
 
Razor's Avatar
 
Join Date: Mar 2012
Location: Beaverton, Oregon
Posts: 98
Default

Quote:
Originally Posted by yep View Post
Um, wow. This is going to sound unintentionally condescending, but have you ever done live sound in a working venue with multiple live acts?

"Sound check" is to make sure the mic placement and feedback control is good. Unless we are purely talking about DJs, the "sound" and relative level of the band is going to change drastically from song to song, as well as being vastly different in front of a packed, sweaty house of screaming, bass-absorbing fans than it was at the empty 6pm soundcheck.

I spent years working as a live FOH mixer. Maybe there are massively big-budget stadium tours with separate techs to control repeatability in specific speaker feeds, where they could do the live mix like a studio mix in that way, but I never encountered them, even dealing with some pretty famous major-label acts.

Sound-check, in my experience, is mostly placement-testing and feedback-control. Fader placement might be useful for like half a second into the first song. When the crowd starts screaming, you need to crank the leads and upper-mids to stay above the white-noise roar. When the crowd gets bored/quiet, you drop off the ear-splitting highs and crank up the kick/snare/bass and whatever instrument is kicking ass at the moment.

This notion of set-it-and-forget-it live mixing is either more advanced skill and budget than I have ever seen, or else pure fantasy. The plain reality of live FOH mixing is that the noise floor is changing constantly in both volume and timbre, and that's what you have to stay ahead of. When the audience is screaming and into it, you need to punch up the presence-range clarity to deafening levels to cut through it, and when the audience quiets down, you need to back off the ear-splitting upper midrange and get them back into it with a punchy, bass-heavy clap-along sound.

That's been my experience, anyway.
I have to agree with yep here.

I use scenes because I'm not the only engineer that does sound at my church. We have a few other people and I don't really like how they set their EQs and Comps. Having recall-able EQ, Comp, and in my case especially, head-amps, is very nice.

IMO, motorized faders are really only necessary if your mixer has layers. I use an M-400 mixer with 48 channels and in order to give it a small foot print it only has 24 faders, but it has 3 layers (1-24, 25-48 and AUX 1-16 + MTX 1-8).

I can never go off the sound check levels once the worship set actually starts because the sound is completely different in an empty room than a room full of people. That and musicians tend to play differently when a crowd is there than when they're just playing to the sound man. I've had the gain setting be perfect at sound check, then the worship set starts and the singer is clipping the mic input. Or the guitarist hits a pedal and clips the mic input (or gives me a super weak signal that I can't do anything with). Then of course, when they switch from a fast tempo, guitar-driven song to a slow, piano-driven song, I have to change everything.
Razor is offline   Reply With Quote