Gain. I did my best to get gain set right before anything else. It does no good to change the gain after I have set compression, reverb, IEMs etc because changing the gain changes all of those things and your settings won’t be right. Main objective is to get the gain at a level where you are mixing as close as possibe to unity (0 db) on your slider. This may be in the green, may be yellow too. I had a situation with Dylans guitar that was not ideal but I just had to roll with it. His amp (the Vintage) started cracking really loud. (Ryan, I think it’s the solder joints on the input jacks.) So and the very end of practice he switched amps and the other one was much louder. I didn’t get a chance to change the gain but he was pegging the red some. I tried to roll with it and had to mix with his slider way low but i really didn’t want to change the gain in the middle of the set because he would have lost a lot of level in his IEM mix. At one point it got so hot that I had to creep it down some just to get it out of the red and keep it from breaking up. I didn’t bring it down to where I would normally have it though just enough to get back into “safe territory.”
Drums. I brought the drums up in the mix so they were just below the vocal. I was mixing with most of the drum faders in the correct region and I had the DCA around unity gain. I really didn’t make the drums any louder it just made them more present. Kick and Snare are the main objects of my attention here.
My philosophy is that when the whole band is playing, drums and vocals should be prominent. You will still hear the other parts but more so, you will miss them if you were to mute them. Bass is a prime example of this. During sound check I regularly mute channels on and off to see if I hear a difference. If I don’t hear a difference, I turn that channel up to see what I’m missing. Sometimes, I’ll just let it go hidden knowing that it will “re-appear” during other parts of the setlist. Violin is a good example of this. BGVs are another example. For certain songs the BGVs need to be more prevalent, like this Sunday for Trust in God. Those are things that I would put in the production notes. Other songs they are not as prominent or maybe just one BGV is more prominent, like a harmony during a verse. These are things that I listen for and adjust on the fly.
Speaking of adjusting on the fly. Some channels are ridden during that whole set; keys, E Gtr, and vocals being the primary ones. Worship music is so dynamic and different instruments are constantly taking prominence in the mix. So it’s not just bringing things up. It also, bringing them back down in the mix after that section of the song is over. Here are some examples from Sunday:
Pretty much any time the song breaks down it’s going to be over a keyboard soundbed. I was always anticipating those moments and ready to bring the keys up. the idea that we don’t want the music to just disappear in the mix. We still want the energy and volume to be somewhat consistent.
This Sunday we had both Dylan and Kevin on electric. During the song What a Friend, there is a guitar part that echos a part every time “What a friend I’ve found in Jesus, what a friend I’ve found in You” is sung. I noticed that Kevin was playing that part so every time I was ready to ride his channel up and right back down for that part. Dylan seems to do a good job at boosting those types of parts on his end so you just have to listen. But the main thing is I knew that part from listening.
Ac Gtr on the intro and outro of What a Friend is another example.
Audio can be too loud for a room. I found myself keeping my master level in check because, with the acoustics in our room, things can get blown out if overall volumn gets to loud. Natural tendency is for us to experience volume creep as we mix a set. For me, the best offset is to be aware that I may need to tweak the master down a very small bit, but not always. At this point, I‘m not interested in using a db meter because I’d rather us mix with our ears than our eyes. But just being aware of the level in the room is always a good thing.
Bass compression. The threshold on the bass compressor was so low that that just the slightest amount of signal was getting squashed. This led to a squish, loose sound. I raised the threshold to where it was only compressing maybe around 5db then I adjusted the makeup gain by 5db. The bass got a lot more punchy. 3:1 ratio is what I was using.
Vocal compression. I just bring the threshold down to where we are getting 3-5 db of compression (3:1 ratio) during the loudest parts of them singing. The adjust the makeup gain by 3-5 db. We don’t want all the vocal channels in heavy compression all the time. Just enough to level out the louder parts
Vocal EQs – Sometimes a well eq’d vocal will sound thin by itself. The first adjustment I was making to the vocals during practice/sound check was to make a little scoop in the boxy region of 200-400 hz. My next target would be boosting just a bit somewhere in the 3k-5k range to add a little bit of presence.
Reverb. To keep reverb from making the vocal mixes too muddy I would boost the reverb amount on whoever was singing lead. This can be done using SOF but you can also access a single channels reverb on the screen by clicking on the bottom left to show all buss sends for that channel.