Some like to do it sitting down. Some like to do it standing up. You now what I’m talking about. Wait, no, not that. I’m talking about how FOH mixers approach their work: standing behind the console or sitting behind it, or some combination thereof. It’s an important topic for a number of very good reasons, some of which may not have occurred to you.
It’s A Matter Of Health
How you position yourself in relation to the console makes a difference acoustically — the console is a reflective surface, and how you perceive those reflections and how they color what you hear depends on the angle of incidence of your ears. But there are other, more obtuse but equally important aspects to this equation. Several significant health studies have drawn direct correlations between sitting and health. A study published in 2012 in the American Journal of Epidemiology discovered as much as a 37 percent increased risk of dying by those who sit more than six hours per day versus those who spent less than three hours a day on their rear ends. They link not just lack of activity in general but sitting specifically to maladies like obesity, Type 2 diabetes, and increased risk of heart disease. FOH mixers certainly tend to move around more than their studio counterparts, especially those on tour. However, the influence of sitting on morbidity remained significant even when physical activity was factored in.
As soon as you sit, several things start to happen: electrical activity to the leg muscles shuts off; calorie burning drops to one per minute; and enzymes that break down fat drop 90 percent. After two hours of sitting, good cholesterol drops 20 percent; after 24 hours of sitting, insulin effectiveness drops 24 percent and the risk of diabetes rises. People with sitting jobs have twice the rate of cardiovascular disease as people who work standing up. What’s happening is that, when you sit for long periods of time, your body goes into storage mode. When that happens, it stops working as effectively as it should. No wonder sitting is being referred to as the new smoking.
Smart Sitting
So, there’s a lot to be said for standing. On the other hand, sitting gives the mixer the point of reference needed to center the mix, the most critical joint of the triangle that is the live-sound plane. And, it turns out, you can sit smartly. Steve Knight owns Crown Seating (www.crownseating.com), a Denver-area company that makes chairs for a number of critical applications, including specialized ones for dentists and surgeons. The touring version of his virtù® Stealth Chair is out on the road with dozens of shows, and he’s opened an outpost office in Nashville’s Soundcheck rehearsal facility where FOH mixers for artists including Taylor Swift, Blake Shelton and Rascal Flatts have been regular visitors. A conversation with Knight about the act of sitting reveals more then expected.
“For hundreds of years, we’ve been taught to sit up straight, with the waist and the knees angled at 90 degrees,” he says in a tone that suggests this has been bad advice for us bipeds. It might have helped pack more people into cathedral pews in the Middle Ages, but once the tools to accurately measure stress on the spine were developed, Knight says it became apparent that being upright might be morally desirable but physically distressing.
“Stress begins when you bring the hip joint above 45 degrees. When you go to 90 degrees, the tailbone tilts under the pelvis,” he explains. “That puts pressure on the lower lumbar area — vertebrae one through five. That creates a cumulative trauma disorder.”
Conventional chairs let people recline; what they can’t do adequately, says Knight, is let them decline — lean forward without slipping out of the seat, and with the seat continuing to provide support. His Stealth chair does that, with up to a 9-degree forward slope that drops the knees below the pelvis and takes the stress off the lower back, creating what he calls a hybrid “sit-stand” position. The chair also has rubber bushings at its connection point between the seat and the support piston that let the chair stay with the user as he or she leans forward or back, left or right.
The bottom line (so to speak) is getting whatever you’re sitting on to follow your movements rather than restrict them, thus encouraging what might be somewhat ironically called “active sitting.” It’s an approach that’s been around in various forms for a while, such as inflatable exercise balls, which, when used as seats force, the user to constantly make tiny, active motions to stay balanced, in the process exercising muscles. The problem with that, of course, is that you never get a chance to sit back motionless, a state you often need while mixing a show, to assess the state of a mix.
So, the chair remains the FOH throne. What you can do is pick a good one, like the Stealth, which was designed with what you do in mind, offering options like a foot ring that provides leverage so you can lean forward to reach the entire work surface. And like many who responded to our online survey on ProAudioSpace.com, you can also alternate sitting and standing as you work. (As Ryan Hammond put it, “I do both. I stand up when I’m dialing everything in, and after that, I sit down and enjoy the show.”) Of course, the goal is to find that combination of movement and being stationary that works best for you.
Taking Their Stand
Here are a few of the responses from our recent ProAudioSpace.com forum survey on the sit/stand subject.
Kevin Snyder: “With most digital consoles now, you can sit and still reach everything, but… some consoles just won’t allow you to sit — or not for long, anyways.”
Greg Boucher: “I find myself doing both. Usually I dial in the mix standing. Then, when I’m happy, I sit down. I have also found that an engineer standing looks more attentive. It’s just image, but sometimes images mean everything to a client…”
John Clarke: “Since I do a lot of corporate work (during a recent gig I operated all of one fader), I’m sure the client would actually feel nervous if I stood for the event. Music is different; you need to be up, at least until you have a near-perfect mix.”
Danny Leake: “Standing, definitely. I can’t sit on a Stevie Wonder show, because I have to see which mic he’s going to… as Steve will change the set list as the show goes on. The audience is seated at first, but very quickly everybody’s on their feet, and I can’t see the stage if sitting. I don’t trust video, because the shots are not always on Steve.”
