Ran the sound mixer / desk at an event for the first time

[tony]

Quite a few years ago I bought a Soundcraft 12 channel mixer after seeing a friend use his at a new years eve party / jam. I never really figured out how to use it.

This past weekend I got my chance. Our music club has a twice yearly camping weekend that I’ve posted about previously. Most of the weekend is jamming. Saturday afternoon we hold an open mic that others are welcome to jam along to as well. This year I took my mixer and speakers and ran the sound for the whole afternoon event.

I was fortunate to have the club’s regular sound guy as well as another sound guy on hand to coach and guide me. I was expecting it to be stressful. Thankfully it wasn’t.

I now understand many of the knobs and features and had a blast doing it. Also new appreciation for all the skills those sound professionals have. Just running a single cable you have to be aware of all the details… does it have the right ends and are the ends the correct gender and has it been plugged into the correct socket on both ends.

I’m looking for another event to do the same so I can lock in what I’ve learned and have taken notes on the things that were new.

If you get the chance, don’t be afraid to try it.

[Richard_close2u]

Cool stuff Tony.
Did you also play?

[Majik]

Nice one.

I’ve been doing sound and lights for some local bands for several years, although I’ve not done it for a couple now (mainly as I was not in the country).

Aside from knowing all the cabling and controls, you also need to worry about monitor levels and mixes, and feedback avoidance.

We started off with an analogue mixing desk with a large “snake” between the desk and the stage. Often this meant the desk had to be located pretty close to the stage, which meant earplugs. This is the old desk:

A pub gig, with me showing a new guy the ropes:

A few years ago we upgraded to a digital mixer (Behringer XR18) which makes the monitor mixes and feedback control so much easier. You can also control it from a tablet, so my setup was to put the XR18 on stage as a “stage box” and run a single network cable around to the desk, which was connected to a small wireless router and a laptop.

The XR18 does have its own wifi, but it’s quite unreliable (especially when it’s on the stage surrounded by metal drum kits, lighting rigs, amps, and piles of cabling, so I prefer to go wired to the laptop and have a small wifi router for the tablet.

The advantage of the tablet is you can walk around the venue and get the sound balance right from any location.

The XR18 also has gates, EQ and compression on every channel with RTA (Real Time Analysis) on the parametric EQ which is great for dealing with feedback as you can see the exact frequency spike where any feedback is occurring and just pull the frequency down with the mouse or a finger.

It also has built in effects, like reverb, which can be applied to any channel and bus.

We used to monitor with wedge speakers but, a few years ago, the band upgraded to IEMs with the Behringer PM16s so they can do silent stage and each band member gets to control their own mix. I will mention that the drummer of the main band I did sound and lights for has used a high-end electronic kit with IEMs for years.

Cheers,

Keith

[tony]

I didn’t play during the afternoon session. I could have had one of the others take over but didn’t. Played heaps over the weekend. And more when I got home, I always get new song ideas from such weekends. Sat nite we were up past 2am.

[tony]

Great stuff Keith. We deliberately kept it simple for this bush / camping weekend. No monitors / foldback. We only had 1 DI so micing up the instruments was a challenge. 3 vocal mics, all SM58s.

Here’s an “action” shot

[Majik]

By the way, if you are familiar with DAWs, especially DAW channel strips, there’s a strong parallel between these and mixing desks.

This is, of course, obvious if you consider that DAWs mostly evolved from digital and analogue studio consoles which were, really, very large mixing desks.

In fact, the channel strips and bussing on the Harrison Mixbus 32C DAW is designed to look and act like those on the classic Harrison 32 series physical consoles that were originally launched in 1975, and were popular throughout the 80s:

Harrison Mixbus 10:

As an aside, Harrison have recently released LiveTrax which is a DAW designed specifically for Live mixing and recording, which integrates with Allen and Heath consoles, so it’s come full circle.

Cheers,

Keith

[tony]

I am familiar with DAWs and have used Reaper on a number of occasions. It’s amazing what can be done with them.

Personally, while I’m a fairly hard core / deep technical person, having coded some fairly complicated software in my time, I don’t care a lot for that technical side of music, whether it is DAWs or mixer desks. I like my music experience to be far more what I call organic.

I’m thrilled to have learned my mixer well enough to be able to use it, mostly it will stay in it’s box, I’m not pushing for a career in sound production. I just want to know enough to use it should the need arise.