Welcome to Front of House Audio training! This lesson should take you only 30 minutes to read and intake, but treat it like a starting point. We will discuss these concepts in person often as you grow your craft of mixing to lead our gathering on Sundays!
Table of Contents
Review of Skillset 1
Here’s what we expect from a beginner audio mixer:
- Know how to read the service order and be able to communicate with the Producer about it.
- Know how to check gain during sound check for the Producer to adjust.
- Know how to balance faders to create a basic mix, and actively adjust that mix during songs and transitions to execute the service order.
The goals for a new mixer reflected someone fairly new to the idea of mixing and production. Now, we take it up a notch and give you more tools to work with to shape a mix that is clear, compelling, and beautiful.
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⚠️ Note: not that we have to try to somehow make the Word of God more clear, compelling, and beautiful than it already is, but hopefully we can present it more so as a team growing our craft!
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What is Signal Processing?
Signal processing is what happens between the preamp section and the faders: it’s using certain effects to shape a source so it fits in the whole mix better.
On this page, I’m going to give an overview of the most important effects in signal processing, but I’ll link to a more in-depth page for each so you can study more over time.
- Gate (dynamics, also known as a “noise gate”): A gate mutes a source until it is louder than a certain threshold. This is really helpful for noisy sources and especially drums, where there are multiple microphones picking up the same sources.
- Compressor (dynamics): A compressor lowers the level of a source when it is louder than a specified threshold. Compressing a signal makes it more manageable at the faders (because the dynamics between it’s loudest level and its quietest level are smaller) and can affect the tone and characteristics of a source.
- Low-Cut Filter (preamp): A Low-Cut Filter cuts out frequencies of a sound below a specified frequency. This can help clean up a source. [You can also call this a “Hi-Pass” filter because it lets the high frequencies above pass, but it cuts out low frequencies below.]