A few years ago, I was given tickets to a concert at the local arena. It was a co-headlining show where one act played, then the other, ending with both acts playing together. 

Being the supreme el cheapo, I eagerly accepted the tickets and acted like Romeo when informing my wife that I was taking her out.

We arrived early and naturally I took stock of the audio setup. Each act had its own reinforcement system complete with separate FOH, monitor mix positions, and line arrays du jour. 

Admittedly, one act had larger arrays, but like my dad once told me, when fishing, it’s the wiggle that gets the fish, not the size of the worm.

For a few moments I entertained the thought of going down and schmoozing with the front-of-house engineers, but that would have entailed a lot of smooth talking and/or somehow muscling my way past Butch and Bubba (one of which I’m sure had two x chromosomes) to get to the floor. I abandoned the thought and contented myself with enjoying the show to come.

Unfortunately, the audio for act one was a disappointment. In fact, it was horrible. 

Act two, on the other hand, sounded fantastic. Why? 

Was it because act two had the larger system and thus could put out greater SPL? Nope - I’m too old to fall for that one. When someone declares an immediate and unequivocal improvement in what they’re listening to, I get out my SPL meter and compare the levels. Don’t even try to get that one past me.

Picture A

What I heard was the difference between running a console at unity and running it without headroom. You can tell the difference just by listening? Yes!

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Good unity mixes sound open, alive, immediate and unrestrained while mixes overdriven in the console sound small, closed, lifeless and harsh.

It has been my observation that when the system is properly set up and aligned, and the sound ain’t so great, the console faders tend to look like Picture A. 

Conversely, when it sounds good, the faders look like Picture B. Where the faders are positioned has everything to do with the channel preamp gain setting.

Picture B

When I first got into sound as a wee lad, one of the earliest questions I had was how to properly set the preamp gain on the console.

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The answer, of course, was to turn the knob until the little red light flashed and then back it down until the flashing stopped. Not. This produced maximum signal-to-noise ratio, but there was absolutely no headroom at the mix bus summing amplifier at unity.

Today, I so wish I could slap that person like they deserve, but that’s what I knew and that’s what I did. My mixes looked like Picture A, and most importantly, sounded like it. Something felt audibly wrong, but I couldn’t find a way to hear outside of that paradigm.

Over time, I gradually changed the way I set the preamp gain, evolving to soloing up the channel and adjusting the knob until I saw what I believed I should see on the console meter. Yet my paradigm was still about adjusting by sight - until being confronted by Delwyn Brooks.

Delwyn came up assisting at Little Mountain Sound and has a page full of credits to his name. We met when I was the recording engineer on a session at Imperative Studios and he was coming in to mix the songs. I showed him the system and we brought up the first song.

The first thing that happened was not expected. Delwyn yelled at me. He hurt my feelings. What an unappreciative jerk! So what if I ignorantly made the job of mixing more difficult for him because of my poor preamp gain setting technique! 

At Little Mountain, junior engineers were given the night recording gigs (usually for the local bar bands wanting the Little Mountain name for half price). There was one huge stipulation placed on them: they could use nothing other than the gain knob and console EQ and they absolutely could not use any outboard gear.

When the senior engineer arrived in the morning, all of the console faders had to be at unity. and when he pressed play on the multitrack, there had to be a solid mix already happening. Not a perfect mix, but one where all the elements were in their appropriate places.  If the junior engineer couldn’t learn to get this right, he didn’t continue to work there.

When Delwyn explained this to me, it was like fireworks going off. Wow! This was the answer I had been seeking, and the problem all along was that I did not know how to ask the question!

Finally, I could see and understand a much better way to set gain. My brain did a major paradigm shift, and fortunately, Delwyn eventually forgave me.

The proper way for setting the channel gain on the console is not focusing on each channel itself, but rather, listening to where that channel fits in the mix. 

Ever seen the house console photos in Live Sound magazine taken before the soundcheck, where you can see all of the console faders parked at unity?  Now I know what these guys know.  Dialing in a mix is so much easier when you’ve properly gain matched at the front-end, and it sounds best too.

This is not to say that you mix the whole show from the gain knobs - once they’re in the right position, mixing is properly done at the faders. A side benefit is that those mixing monitors from the main console aux will find it easier to get a quality monitor mix.

So if your mixes look more like Picture A than Picture B, it might be time to re-think your gain structure approach. Put yourself through the exercise of “What if I can’t move the faders from unity?”  I think you’ll like the results.

Author’s Note: My thanks to Ted Brown and the Martin Woldson Theater at the Fox.

Previous articles on PSW by James Cadwallader:
Yes, Virginia, System Gain Structure Matters - Here’s Why
No Slave to Gear: Maximizing What You Get Out Of What You Have