Today I facilitated our pre-tech mixer training with my sound crew students at Rolling Meadows High School. I am the resident Sound Designer for the Theatre program there, where I help out with two or three shows a year, depending. Though I produce the sound effects, build an initial QLab workspace, and help set up their mixer and wireless mics, I tell you that, once we're in tech week, the students execute the show themselves and I make a point to keep my interventions to a minimum. So naturally, them having a firm understanding of their equipment is pivotal.

Today's training got to be a little more in-depth than ones I've done with them previously. Of late I've been mixing some shows for Metropolis Performing Arts Center just down the road a ways, where they use a Yamaha CL5. With a newly-obtained license for Dante Virtual Soundcard, I was able to multitrack the performances right into Studio One and save a copy of my board confirguration via CL Editor on my laptop, which I do as a matter of habit. I loaded up both the recording session and config file onto the high school's QL5, brought in some studio monitors so we could hear things, and spent the afternoon with the students going over Dante routing, features of the board, basic dynamic and EQ processes, and how I'll use them all in my mix.

This is how I've wanted this training day to look for a while now, and I'm very pleased that I did the legwork needed to pull it together. For shows prior, we've sat down at the board and I've explained all these features verbally, and the students have done a very admirable job of understanding them, but these are such obscure concepts if you're not hearing them, and engaging with them kinesthetically. We've set up a talkback mic or ran some music through the board to demonstrate some things, but such examples are, of course, so removed from reality. I was thrilled, then, to have an actual, live-fire mix that I worked on to share with the young learners. We listened to gating on a snare, and how the wrong attack or release settings can give it an entirely different profile. We listened to compression on the lead singers voice, and how too much of it made the vibrant vocalist sound flat and inanimate. We listened to EQ on the kick, and how without it, there was a lot coming through its mic that didn't have anything to do with the kick drum. One student asked, simply, "But what's the point of EQ?" which is when I realized the explanation I was giving wasn't the one they needed. The one I found for her, instead, was that, "We use EQ- when appropriate- to make things sound more like themselves. We make the kick sound kick-ly, and the piano sound pian-olly, and Tina sound Tinally," and I think I saw the lightbulb flip on. (That explanation is, of course, a bit overly-simple, but it's one that's appropriate for high school theatre, I believe.)

Lastly, we revisited the mix sends and routing features of the board. I showed them the DCAs I used for my show (Drums, Instruments, Vocals), and the vocal bus where I compressed the three singers together using Yamaha's COMP260 virtual rack on an insert, and- even to my surprise- how rich and musical one of the "fancy" compressors made the harmony parts sound when they really drove the input. And last but not least, we looked at routing signals to an effect using a mix bus and a stereo return, as so many digital consoles do. I finally cut the students loose to mess with the effects rack plug-ins, because playtime is always good for the soul. They spent the last 30 minutes or so getting weird with the Flanger effect, being startled by their voice going through the Amp Sim, and giggling about the dual-pitch generator. That's important, you know?

I can never overstate how proud-of and impressed-with these students I am, so I say it again. I surely don't envy anyone in high school, and these budding humans are brilliant and fearless, despite all of it. For my stake in them, they latch onto mixing concepts and best-practices in Theatre with unbelievable acuity, and in five years of working with the program, I have never seen them back down from a challenge. Working with them is absolutely one of the most fulfilling things I get to do in my career.

Come see them mix the fright out of Addams Family, April 28th - 30th.