Using Digital Mix Advantages To Make A Small Controller Feel Bigger....

I have a once-a-year gig coming up again this year in June. There was no gig last year (we all know why not), so it's been a 2-year gap since the last time we did this show. In the interim, I've been focussing on advancing my skills in many facets of audio, with the most recent focus topics being composing for film and live digital mixing. Today I would like to present an idea I've been pondering which takes advantage of one of the basic elements of digital mixers which is not normally possible on analog mixers. That said, yes I've worked on a couple of analog studio desks which *COULD* do this trick, to a certain extent, but this feature is generally not present in any form on most small- or medium-format analog consoles intended for portable live production.

The feature I'm talking about is the ability to arbitrarily assign any physical input to any channel strip the engineer desires.

For most analog consoles, if you plug into input 1, you will find that signal on channel 1 and so forth. One of the features of most digital consoles is the ability to plug into input 1 but internally route that input to channel 4, or 12, or maybe even split-assign it to channels 2, 8, 10, and 24 at the same time. (There are a few digital consoles which embrace the 1-to-1 routing of an analog desk, and those few are not the focus of this discussion.) This feature has been at the heart of several discussions about the differences between analog and digital desks; and generally the take-away is more or less: analog routing is easy, digital routing can be convoluted and confusing.

But I say this ability allows digital desks to offer possibilities which we have always been taught to not even consider, because they "can't" be done. Well, with digital, they *can* be done. Of course, there is the obligatory discussion of *should* they be done, but that's for another time.

I would like to propose one potential use case which takes advantage of digital's ability to arbitrarily assign inputs to channels and couples it with the concept of scenes (another thing analog desks really don't do).

Going back to that gig I mentioned at the beginning of this entry, I have over the last 3-4 years moved almost completely to digital mixing (daw, XR18, M32, M7, ...). I say "almost" because once in a great while I do still use an analog mixer. But most of the time now, I'm firmly in the digital world. Until recently I have mixed from my rack-mount mixer exclusively via tablet, but recently I have added a physical controller (specifically, the Xtouch) to give me a more reliable connection and physical faders, etc. My response: in a word, I should have done this a LONG time ago, but being what it is, now I have.

Given the enormous advantage of physical controllers, there are still a few limitations when you're on a pretty tight budget. The most notable in my case is that my controller only shows 8 channels plus the master at a time. Paging is quick and easy, and motorized faders are pretty ubiquitous these days. But my mixer offers 16 input channels, a stereo aux, 4 FX channels in and out, 6 busses, and 4 DCAs. Depending on what you assign where, there's a lot of paging going on there. What happens when you absolutely without fail must have channels 2 and 16 under your hand at the same time? Can't be done. Here's where my out-of-the-box thinking comes in. What if, for that scene, you temporarily assign input 16 to show up on channel 3? Now the 2 channels you need are side-by-side on the same mixer page! All you'd need to do is set a scene to make that assignment, and configure channel 3 appropriately to use input 16. When you change to another scene, the inputs go back to your normal arrangement. This is a common kind of scenario for the gig I have in June.

Another limitation with my rig is that the controller pages the mixer by bank, not by channel, so while I can see channels 1-8 or 9-16 or the FX ins and outs or the busses, I cannot shift the controller by 2 individual channels in order to see channels 3-10 for example. There are a few channels which I MUST ALWAYS be able to see and adjust, while others are more fluidly needed in one scene but not in another. I am also only allowed to link channels into stereo in adjacent odd-even pairs, not even-odd or random channel pairs. So linking channels 7 and 8 is fine, but linking 8 and 9 is not, nor is linking 3 and 10. Since I have a 2-channel mic setup on the piano and another on the front edge of the deck, and prepared trax stereo playback, that uses 6 of the 8 simultaneously visible channel controls. Add to that the 2 mics which I always need to access, and I'm out of visible channels. Now add to that 2 wireless handheld mics, 3 wireless E6 face mics, a room mic for the feed to video, and a talkback, and it becomes a fader dance throughout the show.

But for this show, I don't ever need all of those active at once. At most, I need any 2 of those handhelds and/or E6s, and the piano and the deck mics are never needed at the same time - but trax almost always has to be available. Once the room mic is set I never have to see it, and the talkback is only used during rehearsals. Okay. How to assign and page to access what I need?

My initial plan was to arrange the channels in a way that I could shift left or right a few channels to expose the channels I'd need at any given time, and I had this working in theory until I applied it to the actual controller and realised that I could only page by bank, not shift by channel. With that realisation, there is no way to arrange the channels I need to always be available when I need them. That's when I got out of the box.

Back to basic structure: what I need at any given moment is: stereo trax, stereo piano or stereo deck, up to any 2 of the 5 wireless, and the two "money channels". That's 8. Cool. So, I'm now configuring and testing (using 2 years' ago multichannel recording) so that scenes will dynamically change the input assignments and (as needed) change appropriate channel strip setups for any given scene. Please note that I elected to try this method only after testing to be sure that on my console inputs with active phantom power will not switch the 48v off/on with such changes. As it turns out, just as I expected, the input -- not the channel -- controls the 48v (this is GOOD). The result is, as long as no re-assignment is also directly told to turn off the phantom power, the inputs keep it active without any regard to that input's channel assignment status at the moment. The meaningful result: no pops or snaps to the FOH or monitor system, and no potentially damaging 48v switching on/off to any device throughout the show.

So I have (I believe) my 8-visible-channels solution to a 15-channel show. Further testing will tell me for sure one way or the other.

Another advantage to all of this is that, if for some reason one of the wireless packs has to be switched out during the show (broken, lost, hasn't come back to the mic office yet, ...), the mic tech only has to get on comms to tell me which pack is really going on deck, and then I can quickly flip the input on the affected channel, and *poof*, we're in business. The rest of the channel setup is already in place per the scene load. In this case, with the 5 wireless being shared among many people, they will all be set with virtually identical gain structure from the transmitter packs through the console input gains, so if any one person grabs any of the mics, it should behave pretty much the same for that person as any other mic from the group would behave for that person (which is the point). Effectively then, settings for monitor sends, EQ, comp, etc. shouldn't need to change for a person just because they're on a different physical mic than they were in rehearsal. Of course we would like everyone on the same mic they used in rehearsal, but in the unexpected case where that doesn't happen, the only variable in the chain is which input I select at FOH - nothing should appear any differently from the performer's perspective.

With digital mixing, this is all amazingly easy to accomplish. But make no mistake, this concept does take a stroll into the deep end and can become very confusing very quickly without good notes in hand and a sharp mind focussed on what you're doing at all times. And things will always - ALWAYS - find a way to do something you don't expect, and you just have to handle those as they come. I would not recommend relying on this level of flexibility your first time out, but I suggest that you do yourself a favor: first make sure your console's inputs handle 48v in a safe way to let you do this, and if it does, take the time to practice flexible input assignments when you're not actually on a live gig. Once you can wrap your head around this concept, I think you'll find some advantages and possibilities you never let yourself consider before.

Peace and Good Mixes....