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Originally Posted by treccatrak  when you have 5-6 bands a night and have never heard any of them, you gotta start somewhere. you certainly don't have much time to experiment with the exact point of perfection with preamp and fader and microphone. that's good to know and all, but not very realistic on the fly. i was trying to explain in a general sense. of course you want the best signal possible with each channel, but its good for someone to learn the basics then gain experience. i've seen guys hang themselves doing live sound because they know everything but have no experience. ever heard an engineer make the house feedback? i have. couldn't believe it! i've also seen a studio recording engineer try to mix live in a small venue and get in trouble looking for that "sweet spot" preamp-mic-fader relationship. he couldnt figure out why the monitors were feeding back (mons from house). |
This is where I'm at too, festival style. You are absolutely right - there is typically not enough time to obsess about mic placement/phase relationships/etc, you just place your mics and hope for the best. In time you learn to place mics timely and consistently, and typically get the results you want. But *A LOT* of live sound is all about working with what you've got as quickly and efficiently as possible...and mixing via gain pots is a detriment to this philosophy, especially when you are mixing FOH and wedges from the same console. It might work with DC talk or whatever, but I'd much rather have a bit of headroom on the faders than be forced to push the fader over unity for any extended period of time. *In my humble opinion* gain should be made up only with tools created for that purpose, and nothing else *aka faders above unity*.
Finally, as previously addressed, if you are running most of your faders in the -30 and below range, you need to rework the gain structure for the room. Either the pres are getting slammed, or you grossly overpowered for the room size. In this instance, I would turn down the gain at the graphocs/dsp/amps, or whatever is after the console to better accomodate the board in the chain. Again, its all about gain staging...