hello my name is Dave Rat and I want to share with you today my strategy towards mixing rock
shows, or mixing bands live I'll show you what I do and use the Chili Peppers as an
example I have a couple kick mics it's going to have a snare top, snare bottom, high hat, rack tom,
floor tom, floor tom, ride cymbal, pair of overheads alright so next we got Flea bass and we're going
to run the bass clean DI, a bass dirty DI, clean DI, dirty DI and a bass mic so you have three inputs for him
guitar left, guitar right, guitars center or mono and then go to what we call guitar three which is
the other rig and finally we have vocals where we've got vocal Flea, vocal Anthony and vocal John or
Josh as the case may be nowadays so how do we keep all these things in check here's what I do
I take my vocals and I run them into a stereo subgroup so here we've got some subgroups and
we'll use a vocals subgroup left and right I'll take all my guitars and I'll run those into a
stereo subgroup I'll take my bass I'll run that into a mono group I'll take my kick and snares
those right there and I'll run those into a kick/snare group and then I'll take my toms
rack floor floor and they will come down and hit it group toms left and right and finally
I will take my metal stuff everything made out of metal and those will go into the metal group
left and right okay so now we've got our ten groups here we've got vocals guitar bass kick
snare toms and metal these ten groups are panned out left right left right mono mono
left right left right what I'll do now is I'll put compressors I'll put compressors on each
one of these groups ten compressors I don't link them in the stereo the reason you don't link a
stereo group or let's use a guitars example the reason you don't link guitars is if the guitar
is heavy to one side and say the guitar left is heavier than the guitar right it's louder then it
would be it would come out here if you have your compressors linked it would sum the two left and
rights on the listened part of it and it would turn down both sides so wouldn't rebalance that
ratio the left heavy guitar would stay left heavy, we want these compressors to even
that out, we don't want to fix it but we want it to moderate it all these comps I run at about a 2:1
or 4:1 compression ratio 3:1 is my norm so I'm not using a tremendous
amount of compression which allows when it gets heavier on the left side guitar is heavy to the
left it allows it to be louder but not that much louder it still keeps things in balance
we really don't want half the arena or half the venue to have blasting at or on the other side
not to hear guitar, so that moderates that that's why you don't link compressors when you're doing
stereo. Another reason you don't do that is because if you hit the stereo link button with something
that's stereo that's got some nice stereo dynamics maybe toms and you have got them panned left and right, it tends
to make it sound more mono, it collapses the stereo image, when you unlink them they're
compressing separately so the stereo imaging is maintained so now what we'll do is we'll
go through and set all of these compressors we'll set them all at zero threshold all the way across
and all exactly the same we'll put them let's say at 3:1 compression and then the vocals
will set the threshold let's say plus four so now what will happen is when you drive them
into these compressors all your instruments will try will have a harder time getting louder after
they reached at 0 DB point zero threshold and your vocals will continue to get louder up to
+4 what this does is it forces your vocals to want to be on top so to keep that together so
now what happens is your entire mix regardless of what's going on it wants to stay mixed if you've
got all your meters about zero you've got your level set pretty well you've got your comps all
matched it almost forms an auto mix situation there's some other things that are interesting
about this setup as well if you take a VCA, now all a VCA is, is a remote control anything
assigned to that VCA is remotely controlled by a single fader you can take everything on your
board all your input channels and assign of the VCA one or let's say use VCA 10 if I bring that
VCA out it's exact same thing as being going over and having 24 fingers or whatever and turning all
those up at the same time and keeping the ratio and balances between them so it's a real easy
way to remote control turn up all the faders so we've got VCA 10 is all our inputs now we take
VCA 11 and we assign all of our groups to VCA 11 our group faders this is going to be our group's
this allows you to do something really cool if you bring up VCA 10 you're turning up all your inputs
before the compressor thresholds if you turn up your VCA 11 which is on your groups those faders
are after the compressors if we take VCA 10 and VCA 11 and we turn up 10 and down 11 we can maintain
about the same overall level to the audience but we're pushing everything into compression
so everything your mix becomes more compressed and more contained if you go the other way and
you turn down VCA10 which reduces the amount of compression everything seen and you make up gain
off of VCA 11 everything comes out of compression so your mix becomes more dynamic and more open
sounding this ability to take a fast song and push everything into compression by grabbing
two faders and maintain volume and then reverse that process for a slow song and have everything
be very dynamic and open is extremely powerful and allows you to change the the sonic signature the
way that the band sounds very easily in real-time oh if you have an analog console and you take all
these compressors and you have them all in a rack right next to each other you can look at your rack
you can see what's compressed you can tell that the guitar player turned up instantly by because
you can see that he's more in compression it was before you can see if I mics down if one side of
the venue is not receiving guitar you can see that the left hand guitar group is down or the
or whatever it is so you've got a really good overall indication of what you're presenting
the audience using the stereo subgroup for vocals is not only to have a little bit of panning maybe
on the background but the effects for the vocals the vocal effects Vox effects they also are routed
into that same group and the reason you do that is when these vocal group compresses you want it
to compress the effects as well you don't want the vocals to become more and more compressed and then
have the effects just get louder and louder and relationship so you want and the you know stereo
group to run the stereo effects also you want to be able to control your vocal entity when you
bring down those vocal groups you want the vocal effects to come down with it the same applies with
any rack tom effects you're using or floor tom drum effects they would be routed back into there
if I find myself looking at the board and having to turn something up and down multiple times and set
up scenes to account for all that then I really haven't set this up properly and that's I don't
like to be chasing stuff around I want to look at the overall picture of the show rather than
micromanage the actual volumes I want to listen to the tones of the system I look at the audience
reaction I want to watch the band on stage and be in tune with that I much prefer the guitar player
step on a stomp box and have that guitar jump 10 DB smashing the compression here fattens the
guitar up automatically comes up but still doesn't step on the vocals if I got one person singing
lead vocals singing and then all of a sudden the backgrounds come in the overall vocal mix
compresses and keeps those three vocalists not that much louder than they were with
one singer so the vocal to instrument ratio is maintained keeping those ratios in check keeping
them automatically keeping themselves in check and that's what this setup can do for you alright hope
that helps and if I think of something else to share that's interesting I'll do another video on