The Questions in your Mind

As you are mixing some instruments and vocals together, there are several different questions you can keep asking to evaluate which channels need to be modified. At the typical youth event or concert, the primary question is “Is this as loud as I can get it?” Even in my own high school years I got a thrill from being in the front row or mosh pit and see how much noise I can sustain. Hearing the actual instruments or words to the song came second to thinking I’m cool because the subwoofer was disrupting my digestion.

But as I find myself mixing worship events and caring more about hearing the words and the subtleties between different instruments, the main question I try to keep my focus on is “What can I turn down?”  It’s not that I don’t want anything to be loud, I still appreciate the quantity at times (and I’m not 30 yet).  But the most common mistake when mixing is to turn channels up when something isn’t right.  For example, the band is picking up volume and it’s hard to hear the singer, so you go and turn up the microphone volume.  But then the guitar is getting lost in the background and you turn it up.  Before you know it, your volume has increased too much for the room size or possibly distorting.

So instead, try to keep things at your target volume, and when you think the vocals or a certain instrument is being lost or drowned out…ask yourself what can be turned down to fix this mix.   That way you keep your overall volume consistent, and you can highlight the quality of the mix without faking it with quantity.

As I think about it, this principle is a main focus for a lot of audio engineering aspects, not just the house mix.  I apply the same principle when trying to use the equalizer to fix the tone of a channel or mix.  When a channel doesn’t sound right and the EQ needs to be modified, I think of which frequencies can be cut and do so, only increasing on the rare exceptions when too many cuts have already happened or there really is a need for boosting just a single frequency by a small amount.

This principle is especially important when mixing monitors and even in ears.  The biggest trap you can fall into is turning up instruments or microphones when a musician asks you to.  This is especially problematic when a single monitor speaker is shared between two or more musicians.  For example, the lead singer says they need more vocal and you turn it up, then the guitarist says he needs more.  As soon as you turn the guitar up, the vocalist again says he needs more.  Neither realize that the vocal range and guitar range are close in frequency range and are literally drowning each other out, competing for which input has more dominance in the monitor.  And you become stuck with this really loud monitor that is competing with and possibly overpowering the FOH (Front of House) speakers.

With dedicated monitors or in-ears, you can evaluate which instrument or channel is most important to the musician and make sure the mix reflects that, turning down other channels until the instrument they want is at the forefront (which 99 out of 100 times is their own instrument or vocal).  With shared monitors, you will have to communicate with the musicians to work out a compromise, or try to arrange the stage so that complimentary (instead of competing) instruments are sharing the monitor feed.  When the guitarist is asking for more volume, you can tell him or her that the monitor is as loud as you can allow it and ask if other instruments can be turned down instead.  Usually the people sharing the monitor can agree to some kind of compromise.