Occasionally, I get a chance to provide the sound system and let other band engineers take over once I have the system settled. This gives me the wonderful experience of kicking back from the pressure of mixing to mentally critiquing the band engineer mixing in front of me. But not all band engineers are experienced, so I find not much delight in their lesser skills, but a learning lesson of what I would do to improve the show in their shoes. From this experience, here are some of my mixing tips that everyone should review. Mixer Centric
The biggest offense I see is engineers who do not understand where front-of-house is relative to the layout of the venue. If the FOH position is toward the back of the room, you need to understand you should be mixing fairly quiet, as most of the audience is getting a much louder show than you are. I find a lot of young engineers mix at loud SPL regardless of where their mix position is. While105 dB SPL peaks at FOH are providing loud rock ‘n’ roll show for the console operator, 111 dB SPL peaks for the audience in front the FOH may be cause to complain or leave the show in protest.
In club venues, the name of the game is beverage sales. If your audience SPLs are pinning the ears back in the front seating, those patrons are probably not enjoyably conversing, dancing or drinking as much if the loudness were cut back in half (-6 dB). I know some FOH engineers have egos and believe if the audience does not have rapt attention to the performers on the stage, the loudness is not up enough. Personally, I know I am having a successful club gig if the dance floor is busy and patrons around the FOH position can still laugh, converse and enjoy the show at the same time.
Now if your FOH position is a bit too close to the stage, you are going to have to walk the venue every so often, or get a trusty assistant to audit the loudness for you in other locations. I find that upfront mixing hurts my compensation for stage wash blending, and I need that SPL audit walk to handle that bucking bronco of keeping the loudness contained.
Mixing with Your Senses
Another problem I see is console operators getting lost in the show and not catching the song’s natural cues for musician solos. With the exception of great musicians in quieter gig settings, most soloists do not pump up the volumes enough in large rooms. Thus, the FOH engineer is responsible for goosing the fader a touch when a solo happens. To me, this is the worst console operator offense, in that inattentive mixing of a show takes emotion away from the performance, very similar to a lighting director who paints a different color wash per song without providing accent cues as the music presents them.
I surmise that inattentive sound engineers get caught up in the visualness of the front men (or front women), and end up mixing with their eyes and not their ears. Yeah, the house sound dude reading a paperback novel while babysitting the FOH console is inattentive, but at least his ears are not betrayed by his eyes. I love to give kudos to production persons who nail the cues, but I have only silence to those who do not pay attention.
Reverse Therapy
When your ears are working, but something needs to come to the top of the mix, the easiest thing to do is goose the chosen source’s fader up 5 dB in the hope of curing the problem. But if you do not keep an eye on things, you will soon succumb to fader creep and have to periodically rebalance everything in the mix.
So, the old adage is to bump something up by bumping everything else down. There is no harm in this, but it is very hard to teach newbie engineers this philosophy. A lot of this comes from not using those beautiful things called subgroup masters or VCA masters, as a lot of operators just nail the masters at 0 dB and continue to mix on the source (channel) faders. The more maturity I get on consoles, the more I find that setting the non-vocal subgroup masters 5 dB to 15 dB off of 0 dB for the start of the show makes things easier to balance up as the start of the set turns into the middle. If just mixing the show on the channel faders, I now am riding the bucking bronco of readjusting dynamics processors and delay/reverb sends on channels as they go up and down with the show.
Equalization Masturbation
A lot of FOH engineers, both new and experienced, can fall prey to an EQ knob orgy that could be called equalization masturbation. Just because they are available does not mean that every EQ knob must be tweaked and re-tweaked continuously during the show. I find that if I flatten up the EQ sections of every channel, with a few exceptions, I tend to get a high fidelity copy of what is going on for the sound onstage. I did not spend thousands of dollars buying good flat response mics only to screw up the mix with channel equalization.
I believe in the garbage-in, garbage-out perspective on miking bands onstage. I usually get paid to convey a reinforced version of the stage sounds, not perform sonic miracles to dubious sources of bad instrument tonality. Yes, I will do some commonsense adjustments like balance the boom and click in the kick while scooping out 200 Hz a touch and dump some lows off the hi-hat and overhead cymbal mics if all the other drums are miked up. I have been amazed with many gigs in which I ended the night not having to adjust many of the instrument mics from flatness. Of course, a lot of it can come from judicious selection of mics on sources.
