Unity Mixing Part 2
IF YOU MISSED PART 1, FIND IT HERE.
I read a really cool story that was the inspiration for this blog topic about Delwyn Brooks. Delwyn came up assisting at Little Mountain Sound and has a page full of credits to his name. At Little Mountain, junior engineers were given the night recording gigs (usually for the local bar bands wanting the Little Mountain name for half price). There was one huge stipulation placed on them: they could use nothing other than the gain knob and console EQ and they absolutely could not use any outboard gear. How’s that for earning your pay?!
When the senior engineer arrived in the morning, all of the console faders had to be at unity and when he pressed play on the multitrack, there had to be a solid mix already happening. Not a perfect mix, but one where all the elements were in their appropriate places. If the junior engineer couldn’t learn to get this right, he didn’t continue to work there.
When Delwyn explained this, it was like a huge lightbulb lit up in my head. This is the answer our engineers are seeking, and the problem all along is that we didn’t know how to ask the question! Once you get this concept, the paradigm shift that follows ALWAYS changes the mix, the process, the soundcheck, the repeatability, and the consistency of the engineer.
I think the best way to set the channel gain on the console is not focusing on each channel itself, but rather, listening to where that channel fits in the mix. To quote Steven Covey, begin with the end in mind. Ever seen the house console photos in Live Sound magazine taken before the soundcheck, where you can see all of the console faders parked at unity? Now you know what these guys know: dialing in a mix is so much easier when you’ve properly gain matched at the front-end, and it sounds best too.
This is not to say that you mix the whole show from the gain knobs – once they’re in the right position, mixing is properly done at the faders. But next time you mix, build your mix with the perspective of “what if I couldn’t move the faders from unity?”. The mix will sound better when you’re done because the audio has better gain staging throughout the entire console – most importantly at the master mix summing buss just before the mix hits the console outputs. Those who mix monitors from the same console as FOH as we do at Kensington will find that monitor mixes are more consistent and can be dialed in more quickly. In fact, once you master this concept, I’ve been able to accurately pre-build monitor mixes before the band even steps on stage and have little, if any, changes needed once the band plugs in.
Try it and let me know how it goes. Here’s to better mix techniques!
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Introduction
My name is Tim Corder. I started this blog in February 2007 because there were so few of what I considered good church audio resources available at the time for my team. Fast forward over 5 years and I'm still at it, sharing learnings about the journey towards making audio great. I go through periods where I post a lot and other times when I don't. I'm thankful for the opportunity to share it all with you. Thanks for visiting! 
Hello Tom,
Having read this article some questions came up.
Is it still possible to clip a signal this way?
Do you still use PFL? Or do you completely rely on your ears?
And if you rely only on your ears how do you gain every channel
seperately?
My apologies if my questions are being answered in the article,
but I’m a bit new to the whole mixing thing.
Sure you can still clip a signal if you turn it up too loud. In reality, the biggest adjustment you’ll probably make is gaining down channels that are MUCH hotter at the pre then you’re actually going to use in your mix.
PFL would be necessary if you’re using a console without individual signal meters and to doublecheck yourself that you’re not pushing a pre too hard somewhere, but yes, I’m suggesting setting gain in such a way that you’re using your ears and building your rough mix through the channel gains.
You gain them one at a time. When I’m setting up my drum kit during soundcheck, I bring up the channel faders one at a time to unity, then dial the gain for the particular channel until the balance starts coming together. So its a combination of using your ears and then spotchecking on the meters to make sure you’re not going to overdrive a channel or do something else really detrimental to the signal.
This also means that I’m probably in the minority of soundchecking a drum kit by having the drummer play a pocket rather than hit each drum individually one by one. My problem with going drum by drum is that most drummers will hit the drums that way at a completely different intensity then they will when they’re actually playing a groove. So you spend lots of time massaging all of those drums one by one, then have to make major changes when he actually starts playing. Since the drum kit is a collection of individual sound sources, I find it more effective for the way I work to dial in EQ, balance, and compression while listening to the kit as a whole. If I need to, I may drop out all of the mics but the snare, for example, just to hear what its doing as a part of the whole, but I’ve found much faster and efficient mix results by soundchecking the kit as a whole.
Does this answer your questions? These are just my principals. There’s certainly other ways to do things – this is just what works for me.
Wow thanks for the quick answer.
Yes this definitely answers my questions, thanks very much.
P.S. sorry for the Tom instead of Tim.