Between the 7th and the 24th of May 2019 I have been mixing for all the popular music recitals at work. The variety of music that the students have played has been massive. “Blackbird” by Rumer, “Come Fly With Me” by Frank Sinatra, “Starlight” by Muse, there was some Queen and some Black Sabbath. By the end of this month I will have mixed for approximately 70 different live acts, each one between 15 minutes and an hour, excluding sound check.

It was a great three weeks with some great performances as well as some big challenges. I was very blessed because I was not required to do any large amount of rigging or derigging for it. The rigging was done the week before by some live sound students who had their own gigs. I agreed some specifications prior to this with the live sound teachers so I knew exactly what would be set up on the first day of my mixing. I made very few adjustments to their set up and made use of the infrastructure that they had put in place. The list of adjustments is below.

1. Added some extra microphones to the kit – Kick In and Snare Bottom
2. Added an IEM pack to the stage to supplement the 5 wedge monitors that they had already placed on stage.
3. Changed the output from a stereo configuration to a LCR set up with an E8 as a centre fill.
4. All of the monitoring moved to the FOH desk to remove the need for a separate monitor desk.
5. I put a computer and RME madiface next to the front of house booth to enable me to multitrack every performance.
6. My laptop acted as a playback computer, a lighting controller using a chamsys miniwing and the display source for the projector.

The main purpose of all of this was to make it as easy as possible for one man to run the whole show, front of house, monitors, playback and recording as well as lighting. At the end of this post I will include a channel list for those who are interested.

Highlights from the three weeks

1. Card and compliments. There are several highlights from the last three weeks, chief among which is a card that I received from a number of the performers saying thanks for the smooth running of the events. It is so rare to find a crowd that is so appreciative to the techs who stand in all black. Several of them took the opportunity to thank me for my work during their own recitals, I felt very humbled by this.
2. Isaac Lynch had the longest set of anyone, his lasting an hour for his Masters recital. The set was very well put together with attention given to the arrangement of the music. He had two guitarists, a keyboard player, a bassist, drummer and two backing vocalists. I panned the 2 guitars out fairly wide bringing either one in if they had a solo at any point. The video bellow is a short extract from one of my personal favorites that he performed.
3. Alex Wood is at the time of writing a second year student and a very talented singer. The band played very well together with great dynamics leaving me lots of time to think about the details. For example, I used 2 compressors on Alex’s vocal channel and I would ride the threshold through the performance to give a nice level of compression throughout. Because she sings with such a wide dynamic range I would have had the option to have no compression right at the bottom or perhaps 20dB at her loudest. Her vocals then went into a bus that I had a deesser on just to help clear them up a bit. From memory, the EQ was very simple with a 6dB cut from about 1KHz down, a HPF and a high shelf to help her cut through the mix.
4. Estragos was a prog band formed for a performance module that has now sadly played for the last time. It featured: Nicoleta Assioti, Josh Fielden, Alex Vallejo, Sam Brice and Luke Birkett. To be honest, I didn’t know if I should put Estragos in the highlights or the challenges section because they were definitely both! I mixed for them several times over the period and they played some awesome music, heavy sections lots of punch, awesome solos, loads of delay. I received lots of compliments from people when mixing for Estragos, including Stewart Worthy, the Subject Area Leader for Music at the University of Huddersfield. The challenge came from managing the volume of audio coming in. When mixing pop music I find it to be like painting, broad strokes, I might have some backing vocals over there. Prog music is more like tetris, a lot of different sound sources coming in and you need to get them all into their place otherwise you will end up with a hole somewhere and you going of the top of the screen. From a technical stand point everything was extreme. I duplicated the input channels for them because I wanted to gate a lot of the sound sources. But didn’t want to have any unnecessary gates in the monitors. The overall level on stage presented a challenge as well so I never took my right hand off the three vocal faders. The level of the cymbals in the size of the room drive the mix to a certain extent and to get the vocals to sit on top I used quite an extreme EQ on the Vocals themselves, notched out a 3dB or so from each of the guitars at around 2KHz and pushed the faders when any of them were singing. When they stopped singing between lines I would put them back slightly to prevent feedback. The mix was a challenge but the performance was amazing. Nicoleta is a great singer who engaged fully with the band, commanding the stage and captivating the audience. The second video here is of Alex Vallejo for his solo performance. The audio is just from the GoPro that I used to film everything as opposed to a combination of desk feed and room mics in the other videos, but I thought it was a fun piece so I decided to keep it in.

5. Callum Harrison was a surprise to me, a very unassuming person with a big voice. His performance was very easy to mix for the most part, allowing me to enjoy his spectacular performance. I did have one moment where my heart went straight into my mouth. In one of his songs he took a walk off stage and then lay down, continuing to deliver his performance from the floor. Right in front of the center fill. I realized what he was about to do early enough to flick through to my output matrix to bring down the level of the center fill until he returned to stage. Fortunately I saw it in time to do this an completely avoided any feedback. His results are back now and he achieved an astonishing grade. His video showing that amazing performance is bellow. Enjoy.

Challenges

SD8 fader fault. Over the few weeks that I was working on this, a fault began to surface with several faders. Initially they would flicker around a point following a change of fader position as controlled by the motors in the faders. Any change of bank, layer or the use of sends on faders could intermittently cause the faders to flicker. Over time this problem developed and some faders could jump up to 100%, initially very intermittently but on some faders it began to happen almost every time you swapped bank. This was an absolute nightmare because I by preference control all of my auxiliary channels, including both monitoring for the band and for effects sends, via sends on faders. In one particular set of recitals, one of the output faders controlling stage monitor 2 jumped up to maximum several times giving guitarist Tom Bamber a big scare.

When this fault became very problematic I took a break from sound checks to phone a contact that I have at Wigwam. Dave generously took time out of his day to explain how to re-calibrate the faders over the phone. Unfortunately this did not work and it appears to be a problem with the faders themselves and we will need to send the desk off for repair very soon. To get around the problem in the mean time I identified the most problematic faders and reassigned channels that were on these to other faders, prioritising outputs and also those with sensitive microphones that were at a high risk of feedback. I wasn’t, for example too concerned about the bass that was mainly comprised of the DI signal and was 90% of the way up its fader already. This solved the problems on the most part, making it much easier to run subsequent performances.

Technical Information

Solo Performance Tech Spec