Mike Rivers wrote:
In article writes:
Hi when doing live sound how do you setup the mixer?kick on slider 1 snare 2
or do you put the vocals on one then add the other stuff as you go?is there
a universal accepted norm?
There's no universally accepted norm, but people get used to their
favorite layouts, so if you're setting up for someone else to mix,
their preferences might be different from yours.
Almost all of the live sound work that I do is festivals where I don't
always know the group and rarely have a good idea of what they'll do
until the set is nearly over. So I have some sense of relating the
board to what's happening on stage, I tend to group vocals together in
a sensible order, then start with the instruments that change,
dedicating a reasonable number of channels to things that I'll be
using throughout the day.
For example (assming the board is big enough) I'll decide what the
maximum number of vocal mics I'll need will be and if there's a little
"headroom" allow for a couple more. If I think I won't have any more
than six vocals in a group I'll dedicate channels 1-8 for vocals. I'll
set them up left to right across the stage for the vocalists (who, in
the festival scene, usually also play instruments) with a couple of
exceptions. If the drummer is (as typical) in the middle, I'll put his
mic last so the four up-front players/singers will be on four
consecutively numbered channels.
I tend to put drums near the end since they might not be used much of
the time (these are folk festivals) and dedicate channels to them.
I'll use a mic for the kick, one for the snare, and one or two
overheads. No need to mic all the toms in this sort of music and this
sort of situation. Since a lot of bass players use pickups, I'll try
to dedicate a channel to a bass direct box, and typically put that
just to the left of the kick drum channel.
Oh, and the MC's mic (and I always try to have a dedicated one) is
always the last channel, so it's easy to grab without thinking too
hard.
Everything else goes left-to-right across the stage, starting with the
next channel following the vocal set. So a solo singer with a guitar
would be on channels 1 and 9 on my preferred festival setup.
Same here. I do mostly festivals and corporate hotel gigs, so my
setups are usually fairly tiny in comparison. left to right matches
left to right on stage. voice of ghod is the last channel on the mixer,
and the wireless mics in-between. Everything gets labeled clearly
so that random AV guy can walk in and probably do the right thing.
--Dale