064 – #1 Tip for Monitors From FOH
This handy trick has been a life saver when I’m mixing monitors from FOH.
Written by Scott Adamson
During the pandemic that’s forced a shutdown of the live music industry, I’ve been doing a weekly webinar series with touring colleagues to share some experience and expertise.
Last week was a good one — I spoke with my friends CJ Blair and David Williams, who are both excellent FOH engineers. Since we all started our careers on small tours before working up to bigger shows, we decided to share mixing tips for various sizes of venues.
Since the #1 best tip of the entire conversation is one that’s helped me out so many times, I made a more in-depth video about it:
It’s really important to understand some of the signal chain concepts I cover in this video, especially when talking about soft patching. I’ve seen many beginning engineers make bad mistakes by not fully grasping this!
A soft patch means we’re changing the input source of a channel on a digital mixer. On an analog console, if you plug a microphone into input 1, it will always be controlled by channel 1.
But on most digital consoles, you can tell any input to go to any channel. For example, if you want channel 8 to use input 4, or the second channel to use input 16, that’s okay — as long as you understand where the patch is happening!
I explain this more in the video, but a soft patch happens after the microphone preamp (mic pre). This is the circuit that takes a mic-level signal from the microphone, adds gain to that signal (controlled by the gain knob), and outputs a line-level signal which is used by the rest of the audio system.
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This essentially means each physical input to the console is going to have a corresponding mic pre that doesn’t change with a soft patch. So if you change the source on channel 2 from input 2 to input 1, the gain setting for that channel will also change!
It’s just a good idea to fully understand how the signal chain works here. Ultimately, if you want to implement the trick I talk about in this video, it’s best to use an analog y-split.
