Hey guys and girls, Aleš here from gainmedialab.com, welcome to my exciting world of live audio mixing. In today's
episode I talk about two different approaches to mixing live sound. One is
with mixing with input gain set to a unity gain and the other one is mixing
with faders at zero. I'll talk about how these two approaches came about and what
are the differences in the workflow, but before we jump into that - make sure
that you have hit the subscribe button and turned on the notifications, so that you
don't miss any of the new videos that I post every week. With all of that said
and done- let's just start the show. Let me just quickly explain the setup
that I have here. I will be showing this with 10 channels of drums- the multitrack
is already coming into the board- and I will start first by setting the input
gains on all channels to a unity level, checking with with my solo Cue bus and
then mixing with faders and then I'll sort of redo it with mixing with faders
at zero. And I will explain why these two approaches came about and why people use
them, what are the differences between them. So let's start by saying that all
of the gains or should I say trims are set to -18dB, just so that we have a
clear representation of what I'm doing with these gains. Nothing is set on these
channels, so no eq's, everything has been flattened out, no compression. So this is
basically just mixing with gains and faders before we do anything else. So
the first workflow would be to go to every channel that we have, push on the
solo button and then raise it until we get a reasonably unified level of all
channels. When I say reasonably unified level, we have to consider what the
console is seeing. These are Program Peak Meters what you are looking at on the
meters, but the console needs RMS level. I won't go into detail what that means in
this particular video, but what that means is I'm trying to guess the RMS
level for all those channels depending on how much transients there are in a
particular signal coming into the board. And that's why I try to keep them all at
-20dB-ish. I'm not very strict about it ,I make informed
decisions in terms of how much transients I hear in these signals and
then adjust my trims accordingly. But, you know, the quick and easy way would be to
sort of say: OK, this channel has to go to... I'd say - 15dB, because we have
quite a bit of snare still present and then the second one, the second overhead... See, I've started with the overheads,
because it doesn't really matter what channel I start with because I will be
setting all of the input gains at the same level. OK, and then I can start
with kick and I will shoot a bit higher with these gains over here, because kicks,
snares are really really transient rich sounds and that would translate into RMS
levels with a bit lower values. If I would just set them at let's say -20dB, that would be a bit low for the console to operate correctly, right. And
then we're just running through all the channels... just checking polarity here. Snare... Let's check the polarity of the snare.
First against the overheads... this is better. I'm checking the polarity between
the two snares. You can hear the low end coming back and you can already see that
I've pulled down the overheads because I don't need all that
level in the mix. Here's where it's getting interesting, right? The hihat.
If I put this at zero and go - OK... SOLO and pull it up, you can hear that
every time the hihat comes in it's really really loud, so I need to
pull it back in the mix, right. And the toms the same way. I won't do the
toms in this particular session because it just would be too long. So let's
figure out what happened here. So all of the input gains are now set
approximately the same level and the levels in the mix are then adjusted with
the faders. Now why is this a good thing or a bad thing. The good thing about this
is that whatever I do in terms of signal processing right now - I can apply EQ, I
can apply compression, I can apply gate - it should sort of stay relatively the
same all across all of the channels. So if I'm running through the board really
quickly, that sort of makes it much easier and all the channels will behave
approximately the same or very similarly. So all the threshold levels will start
grabbing at the same level, all of the gates will start grabbing with the same
threshold, all of the EQs will sort of have, you know, the same values in terms
of how much is plus six or minus six on a particular filter for every
channel. The downside of it is that you now have
all these faders all across the board and when you look at a mix, you're not
particularly sure, you know, where those levels are. Plus, the resolution of the
faders, because these are logarithmic, are not as precise in terms of moves as they
would be if everything was sitting at around zero, right. Because this this is
five dB, right. This movement which is about half an inch. But if I'm over here,
then you know five dB is this. So maybe a quarter of an inch. If I go lower than
that, that's an eighth of an inch, even lower than that, you know, sixteen. So you
lose the resolution, you lose the detail of fader movements. So even the tiniest
fader movements if they are done over here on the board will have much larger
value discrepancies than if they are run around faders at zero. So less detailed
work with the fader, but you get more consistency across the board in
terms of signal processing. Let's do it the other way around and talk about
mixing with faders at zero. Mixing with faders at zero sort of became a standard
a long time ago when analog boards were everything that was available at the
time. The way faders worked in the analog days was when they were set at zero, they
would leave the signal through or leave the signal pass through
unattenuated. When something happened in terms of attenuation or addition, those
faders would affect the sound by putting some sort of a resistance in the signal
path, just to allow you to have control over the level. So the actual sound of
the console was different if you were running with faders at zero or not. In
digital domain, however, this is not an issue, because these are basically
digital controllers. They don't actually pass any audio through them. With faders
at zero mixing you sort of have to start- if you don't want to go back and redo a
lot of these steps- with your most prominent signals first. So the loudest
signals first and they will sort of give you a baseline of where your levels will
be and it's basically just that so you start with all of the faders set to zero
and now you have a visual representation of your default or zero mix. And
then we'll go through from channel to channel, right? OK, notice the hihat, right. If I
would... if I were to set it at unity gain, trim level would be at around zero, right.
If I were to set it for mixing with faders at zero.. it is let's say at
minus six. So there's a six dB difference in the input gain level. OK, let's say that we are now satisfied
with the mix of the of the drums, you know, the levels are here, let me just...
OK, this is flipped, that's fine and we also need to do this... and as we do this
right the level sort of increased because of the summation between these
channels, when I flipped the polarity, so maybe I need to reduce the levels a bit. All right, so this would be a difference
in approach. Now when this is done, all of my faders are set at zero. So I have the
most detailed options when it comes to now mixing, because you know these moves
can be really subtle, but check out what happened with the levels. So we had most
of the levels in the previous example set at around zero dB trim, just because
the way the multitrack was recorded. It was recorded with the mentality of
setting all of the input gains at around unity gain. But now, you know, these are
all across the board- so -5, -7, -2, -9 on the snare
bottom, -6 on the hi-hat... So that means that we have, you know, anywhere
between 4-6, sometimes even 8 dB of difference in terms of the preamp
that is hitting the console. What does that mean for the workflow? Well, it
doesn't really matter which approach you take, but you have to know what it does
to the console itself. Running this on a
digital board with faders at zero would probably mean that all of those
adjustments for the EQ and compression and gating or whatever processing that
you do on the channel will have to be very much individual for each channel.
You know, you can't really go across the the board and say OK, all of my tresholds for gates will be at -22 or 25 or 27 and
you know "-ish" around that level, but you really have to go
channel per channel and decide what the best levels are and you also have to
think about A/D conversion. So whatever choice you decide to do, and I'm not
saying that one is better than the other, they are just different sides to the
same story, but you have to be aware of what are the pros and the cons. So
hopefully this sort of Illustrated what the differences between two approaches
are. If you have any questions, leave them in the comments below and while you're
doing that, make sure that you like, share and subscribe to my channel and also to
visit gainmedialab.com for more audio deliciousness. Thanks for
watching and I'll see you in the next one.
Take care, mix great shows, bye.
