Solely Responsible : Mixing my First Gig.

During my third shift at the Black Box, I was given the opportunity to mix my first live gig. This was an incredibly useful learning experience. During this blog post I am going to use Gibbs’ Reflective Cycle[1] to recount this experience.

Upon arrival I set up the light show, choosing a pallet of blue and red to backlight the stage, with soft white profile lights illuminating the performers faces. Although the software was difficult to use, I had previously read about performance lighting which aided me in learning this new software[2]. I then assisted in setting the stage for the headline act. After shadowing their soundcheck, I started to set up for the support act Laytha. At the start of my shift, I felt excited, however by the end of the first soundcheck I felt extremely anxious.

My anxiety only increased as I watched the sound engineer leave the mixing booth and the realisation set in that I was going to be solely responsible for the mix. I went over to greet the artists and check what equipment they needed. They required two vocal mics and one DI box for acoustic guitar. After I set up two SM58 microphones for the singers, the artists realised they forgot a jack lead, so I grabbed one from our stock; a simple thing that ended up being one of the scariest parts of the night. After everything was plugged in, I returned to the mix booth and asked that we check the guitar first- only for no sound to come out. I immediately started to panic but tried my best to hide my fear as I asked the girls to check that the guitar was definitely turned on. After establishing that the problem wasn’t the guitar, I grabbed a second jack lead and heading over to the stage to try and fix the problem. After checking that no buttons had accidentally been pressed on the DI box, I swapped the jack cables and thankfully discovered that it had just been a faulty cable. Feeling a mixture of panicked and confident after having been able to fix the problem I was finally able to begin the soundcheck.

I set the level for the guitar in the FOH mix, added some EQ mainly rolling off the high end to reduce the risk of feedback and rolled off some of the low end, before adding some light compression. I then checked each vocal mic individually, again starting by levelling them, then adding EQ. This time I rolled off a lot of the low end as their voices did not use it and therefore reduced the room noise slightly. I reduced the higher frequencies slightly, enough to minimise the risk of feedback while remaining mindful that the singers’ voices made use of these frequencies. To improve the sound in the room I boosted the mid frequencies slightly, before adding some very light compression. Following this I set up the monitor mix sending some of everything, working to find a nice guitar heavy balance that left the vocals still clearly audible[3]. For the final part of their soundcheck I asked the girls to run through a song so I could properly assess the balance of all the sound sources. I ended up changing the EQ on the guitar to boost the low mid frequencies. I did this as there was a slight lack of low end, due to the artists voices sitting in the high mid frequencies, as well as the guitar being most prominent in the same frequencies. During this song I blended in some reverb which I had on an auxiliary send, as this would allow me to mute the effect when the artists were speaking to the audience in between songs.

Having completed the soundcheck I felt much calmer and finally allowed myself to feel excited for the show! I had completed what I find to be the hardest part of the live engineering process- soundcheck. I successfully solved problems when they arose instead of freaking out and I did it all by myself! This was a major accomplishment for me and gave me a lot of confidence going into the actual performance. I find soundcheck to be the hardest part of live engineering as you have a short period of time to get everything setup- the whole soundcheck only lasted for 20 minutes.

During the actual performance I made subtle adjustments to the mix I had prepared during soundcheck and watched the girls in case they wanted adjustments made during their performance. I also made sure to keep an eye on when the end of the song was coming so that I could quickly trigger the mute group for the effects. After Laytha had finished I turned round to the sound engineer who had stood to one side during the performance, to see how he thought it went. When he said that the performance had sounded really good, I audibly breathed a sigh of relief.

The whole night was an incredible learning experience that gave me confidence that this is something I can do as a career. Although in the moment the sound engineer leaving me to work independently terrified me, it was actually an incredibly beneficial learning experience that I am thankful to have had, as it forced me to figure things out for myself rather than relying on other people. In hindsight I should have researched the lighting software in advance, as it would have enabled me to create a more complex light show. In preparation for my next shift, I am going to research how to use the lighting software as well as researching popular light shows. I have also learnt from this experience to check that all the cables and microphones I wish to use work ahead of the band’s arrival.

[1] Gibbs, Graham. Learning By Doing: A Guide To Teaching And Learning Methods. Oxford Further Education Unit, 1988.

[2] Hopgood, Jeromy. “QLab 4, 2nd Edition.” O’Reilly Online Learning, Routledge, https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/qlab-4-2nd/9781351713719/.

[3] Štefančič, Aleš. “Live Sound February 2020 Page 20.” Live Sound February 2020 Page 20, Electronic House, 5 Feb. 2020, http://digital.livesoundint.com/publication/?m=24712&i=649266&p=22&pp=1&ver=html5.