A common approach to sound mixing is the three step approach;
1. Set fader’s at 0 point (that’s about 3/4 up the fader).
2. Set the gain.
3. Turn on the channels
4. Wait until the end of the service.
Looking at the fader’s, they are all in a flat line. A flat line is a great place for your faders to sit because in the position of unity, they provided the most granular control. They also allow you to bring your faders back inline to a base level if somone plays with your faders. [note: read more from Dave in the comments regarding this]
Where I see issue is in step 4. "Wait until the end of the service." At this point, I have seen board ops ignoring the EQ process and ignore the mixing process.
This four step approach ignores several areas including EQ’ing and sound mixing. I’ve mentioned EQ’ing a lot on this site such as the EQ 101 and the EQ 13 step approach. Today, I want to turn to sound mixing.
For now, let’s define EQ’ing as adjustments made to an individual sound or channel. Then let’s define sound mixing as the interactions between and across channels.
For this example, let’s set up a team wtih a singer, an acoustic guitar, a piano, and a violin.
How will these four sounds interact? Much of this depends on the song. Some songs might have the guitar playing the melody while the piano plays rhythm some songs might be chords/rhythm on the guitar and melody on piano, which I think is the more common style.
Where does the violin come into play? Does it echo the melody? Does it play a counter melody? Does it just play an instrumental halfway through the song?
For the sake of practical application, let’s say it’s rhythm guitar, piano melody, lead singer, and violin to play the melody (or something related) between versus. The tempo of the song is slow. Now we have to mix those sounds together.
The easiest method is flatline; all sounds at the same volume. But that option doesn’t provide the sound that represents the song. So we start with the vocal level and place that out front. Then we give it support with the piano right underneath. Then bring in the guitar to move the song along. Now we have this violin. We want the violin to give the song a little more emotion so we highlight it. How?
Imagine standing in a forest. You hear the wind blowing the leaves around. You hear the creeking of branches. You are hearing a song. Then, out of nowhere, you hear a songbird sing its tune. That bird’s song stands out against everything else, not because it’s louder, but because it’s different.
Try taking the EQ of the violin and pushing up the high frequencies. But bring it’s volume down round that of the supporting guitar. You might even turn down the high frequencies of the guitar.
You goal is that when the violin plays, it crys out like the songbird. Free. Unchained. Yet part of the story. That’s sound mixing.
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I'm Chris Huff and I've been working behind a mixer for over twenty years. Since 2008, I've been helping other sound techs learn all about the art of church audio through behindthemixer.com.
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Good reason for faders to be NEAR “0″, not rigidly SET AT “0.” For the reasons mentioned (adjustments to mix between and within songs) Also, what happens if a child, or inattentive volunteer pulls something else out of whack? You need to keep those people careful or out of the sound booth, or you need to make emergency adjustments! If faders are flat, for adjustments, you would have to change the gain structure, which will affect EVERYTHING else! Sounds like a bad idea to me.
What I like about having faders not flatlined is that it gives a visual representation of the mix. (Most aux sends are pre-fader) With all channels coming in balanced, you get a visual representation of your mix structure. In the example you might have piano at “-2″ violin and guitar at “-4″ and vocal at “0″ If you know your mix, you can quickly see whether or not a channel is set right in the mix for the appropriate time. For instance, an electric guitar is about to solo, when he does, he should be around “-1″ but he is sitting at “-5″ for his supportive role. You can now make the adjustment before he starts.
Some people witll intentionally set their gain structure so the faders are a bit lower or higher so, like you said, it gives the visual impression of the balance in the mix.
All true that a mix needs to be balanced. However, establishing a proper sounding mix with faders that all sit at unity in a flatline is actually a very good thing to have and a much practiced way of mixing by the big boys. This is easily done by utilizing proper gain staging and not so hard to accomplish with a properly setup system.
There are a couple of great benefits to this, but I’ll just throw out a scenario. Let’s say you spend a rehearsal or even a service getting your mix put together with your faders in all kinds of weird positions. At some point you leave to take a bathroom break and when you come back you find a couple of kids that broke out of the nursery having a great time sliding the slider things up and down. Or let’s say it’s not kids and just someone leaning across the board for who-knows-why and bumping faders all out of whack. What do you do? If your baseline mix was built so that your faders all sit at unity, you can quickly recall that mix.
Another HUGE benefit to having your faders sit at or around unity is that is the sweet spot for your fader’s throw. Fader’s(and pots) all operate on a logarhythmic scale. Basically this means when you move a fader an equivalent distance at any spot across the fader’s throw, you don’t make the same audible "dB" adjustment. Faders are much more sensitive around unity vs. 2/3 of the way down the throw. Keeping your faders near unity gives you more control within your mix to make finer adjustments as you mix. In other words, moving a fader 1mm near unity could be a .1 or .2 dB change, but the same distance at the bottom of the throw could be as much as 5 dB or more depending on the console.
Dave
http://www.goingto11.com
I also agree that faders should be around the 0dB mark most of the time… Not to the extent that they shouldn’t be moved, of course they should, but 0dB being a good sounding basic mix with being used on-the-fly to accentuate or diminish certain channels momentarily.
There is at least one more advantage though that Dave didn’t mention and that is that when you mix this way the positions of the channel aux sends sends give you an accurate visual representation of the aux mix… That is to say if all your faders are around 0dB and all your auxes are in similar positions you know the aux send is going to sound much the same as the main mix (assuming the auxes are post eq).
I made an error in my posting and thank you for the correction. My intent was to later bring up that each song is different and while a baseline of unity is a good place to start, that the board op still needs to change the faders from one song to another when the songs call for it. As long as the baseline is good, the changes should only be slight.
My experience has been through seeing board ops set faders at unity for three-to-five singers but never mixing the sound so the group of singers never blend.
I’ll edit the article to clarify
RIght on, Chris. Robert Scovill calls that level managing when you set and forget, and level managing is not mixing.
Dave
http://www.goingto11.com