1. Staying invisible 5 min
Say: Our job is that nobody notices the sound, only the message. Turn down before up.
What breaks it: The obvious ones, like feedback or a mic not working, but also too loud or too quiet. If someone in the back can't hear, they're thinking something's wrong with the sound system. If it's too loud, they're wishing they could turn it down. Goal: just the right balance, where nobody thinks about the fact that there is a volume.
Tone: Make each voice sound like that person is talking to you, not like they're on a telephone, or worse, a tin-can intercom.
Check: "What do you do first when something's too loud?"
2. Running fader mixes — faders & mutes 30 min
Say: The goal is to get the mix right as an instrument. We're the arranger, composing a symphony out of all these different instruments. It's our job to decide which instrument is carrying the energy.
Follow the energy: Following the energy level of what's happening is part of mixing. We have high-energy songs, low-energy songs, and then the transition to a low-energy sermon that we have to balance and account for.
Mute vs. down: Everything we do can affect the musicians and their in-ears. Just like we don't want the audience to notice what we're doing, we don't want to mess up what the musicians are doing either. There are a lot of changes we have to be careful with so we don't throw a musician off.
Move slowly: Even if something's wrong with the mix, people are more sensitive to a change than to the way things already are. So when we're fixing a bad mix, we still make the changes slowly, so that when we're done, we're still invisible.
Also: Spoken word first.
Check: A volunteer brings up a mix from all-down.
3. Running monitor mixes — the monitor ask 30 min
Say: Musicians ask, we make one change at a time. In-ears via personal mixer or Mixing Station.
On the Avantis: Use the output buttons on the far right to choose a mix. Then you're controlling that person's mix.
Always: Don't stay on an individual mix, or you might forget you're not controlling the house.
Two ways, same goal: To give someone more guitar, go to that person's mix and turn up the guitar. Or go to the guitar, open its sends, and adjust everybody's mix from there.
Check: Role-play a "more me" request.
4. EQ and gain — gain staging 30 min
Say: Gain first, at performance level: green to low yellow, never red. EQ: cut before boost, HPF on vocals.
Recap: Gain changes not only the in-ear mixes but everything else down the chain of the audio flow. That's the kind of change we make very reluctantly.
When: In general, gain only gets touched during soundcheck, and in theory only at the very beginning of soundcheck.
Err low: Musicians will always lie to you in rehearsal about how loud they'll be in the service. So err on the side of a little too low. Once the service starts they'll sing and play louder, and erring low gives you the perfect gain during the service.
Filters: Discuss when and where to use the high-pass filter (cuts lows: vocals, speech, guitars, anything that isn't bass or kick) and the low-pass filter (cuts highs: bass, kick, anything with hiss or harshness up top).
Default: Go down instead of up. Cut before you boost.
Side note: EQ affects gain too, and it affects the person's in-ears. Boost a bunch of frequencies and the channel gets more energy, as if you'd turned up the gain. Cut too much and you take energy away, as if you'd turned the gain down.
Check: A volunteer gains a channel.
5. Live demo / run-through 30 min
Say: Virtual SoundCheck playback. Everyone takes a turn.
Check: Each person runs a song start to finish.
Reminder: I/O > Virtual SoundCheck. Set back to Inactive after.
Also see the training outline.