Read the first part of this piece, "Live Mixing Tips for Services: Basic Concepts", which ran on the website on Thursday, September 19.
A lot of people focus in on the band when mixing for a service which is great and very important, but those other inputs on your audio console are also important. The computer audio sources for videos, background music sources, speaking microphone inputs, etc., are all very important as well.
If you are using a digital audio console, it is a good practice to set these input channels to recall safe for scene/snapshot recalling.
Here are a few ideas to help you work with those inputs:
Fade
Specifically referring to the speaking microphones, you want to fade these microphones up and down, rather than doing a hard mute/unmute. It is especially important for headset/lavalier microphones. These type of microphones pick up a lot of background noise, and it can be distracting to hear background noise through those microphones, only to have a hard cut off and therefore no longer hear those background sounds.
Always fade out these microphones. In fact, leave these channels always on and have the fader down when they aren’t needed, and then fade them up when they are needed.
Quick Access
You will always want to organize your audio console in a way that makes it easy to have access to these input channels. Maybe someone is coming on stage that wasn’t planned for, or maybe there is something that is happening out of the norm and you need to get to the audio fader for a video sooner than you thought.
You never know what unexpected needs will arise, so you want these channels in a place that you can access quickly. As previously mentioned, regarding keeping these channels on, if the channel is on, it is easy to bring the fader up and be “on call” for a quick transition.
In addition, if you are fading the input channel(s) up, then you will not have an abrupt on, if you missed the beginning of a video playing or someone talking.
Post-Fade Settings
If you are running your monitors for the band from your front of house audio console, then this is very important. Set all your playback devices and speaking microphones to post-fade for each of your monitor sends. Again, this is a part of leaving those channels on and always accessible.
If you have those inputs set to prefade for your monitors, then the band will always hear those microphones, even if the fader is down all the way for the house mix. Similarly, this is an issue if you are checking audio for a video, or accidentally leave the preservice music playing after the band starts playing. The musicians will hear this in their monitors, even if you don’t hear it in the house. It can cause confusion when the band needs to hear what they need to play. Make sure all these inputs are set to post-fade.
Additionally, post-fade helps with managing levels for monitors automatically. Let’s say you have a soft person speaking through one of your speaking microphones, and you are just riding the fader up a little bit for the house mix. This will automatically change the monitors by following this fader movement, and therefore the band will hear this softer person more clearly in their monitor mix, without you having to change it in everyone’s mix. This also helps if you need to grab for those faders in an emergency situation, since the band will get the faded in/out audio.
Recall Safe
If you are using a digital audio console, it is a good practice to set these input channels to recall safe for scene/snapshot recalling. Doing so will help treat the band as a recallable set of channels and only affect the band, when you recall a scene and therefore the other devices/inputs can be controlled independently, which is very handy. It means that if someone is talking on stage or you are playing a video and need to change scenes/snapshots, you can do so without the audio from the person speaking or the audio from the video changing. This also helps with any EQ changes that you make with the speaking microphones.
If you change the EQ for those microphones, that EQ will stay the same no matter what scene/snapshot you are on or moving to.
Final Thoughts
Learning audio can be a significant challenge. It takes a lot of research and practice.
Hopefully some of these basic tips have been helpful as you venture more into learning the art of audio. It is an ever-evolving art and there is always something to learn whether you are a novice or an expert. Never stop learning and always have fun!