Channel Safes & Musical Mixing

Hey! Long time no post -
In the past, I've mixed musicals and plays with a limited number of microphones, characters, and (usually) analog consoles. I'd always wanted to try my hand at line-by-line mixing, but I didn't get a good opportunity to do it until last year when I started working with a high school that has plenty of radio mics to go around and an Allen & Heath SQ-7 mixer.

I spent the first day routing everything and just kind of dialing in gain and eq. The next day was spent programming DCAs (which was actually way easier and quicker than I thought) and in the end I was able to get two solid dress rehearsals running the show. Because of that first day making adjustment to the EQ and gain, I was able to run the show without really calling "hold" and making adjustments - which was great, because I didn't want to eat into the limited time the kids had there at the school.

During the run of the show, though, there were little changes with the EQ that I ended up making on some of the actors each night. In some cases, I was able to quickly overwrite the scene settings throughout the show - in other cases, its stuff I had to adjust on the fly every night.

I didn't think about it until wayyyy afterward, but wouldn't "safe"ing all the input channels have prevented this problem? In other words, I could just make the adjustment any time and it would be made for the entire duration of the show? Weirdly, I don't think I've heard anybody really talk about this being a necessary step in setting your show up for line-by-line mixing, but it would be great to do a sound check each night and not have to worry about my settings changing from mixer scene to scene.

Maybe it's so rudimentary that everyone glosses over it. I'm going to try it out later today - I would love to get this perfect for their upcoming musical.
 
Hey! Long time no post -
In the past, I've mixed musicals and plays with a limited number of microphones, characters, and (usually) analog consoles. I'd always wanted to try my hand at line-by-line mixing, but I didn't get a good opportunity to do it until last year when I started working with a high school that has plenty of radio mics to go around and an Allen & Heath SQ-7 mixer.

I spent the first day routing everything and just kind of dialing in gain and eq. The next day was spent programming DCAs (which was actually way easier and quicker than I thought) and in the end I was able to get two solid dress rehearsals running the show. Because of that first day making adjustment to the EQ and gain, I was able to run the show without really calling "hold" and making adjustments - which was great, because I didn't want to eat into the limited time the kids had there at the school.

During the run of the show, though, there were little changes with the EQ that I ended up making on some of the actors each night. In some cases, I was able to quickly overwrite the scene settings throughout the show - in other cases, its stuff I had to adjust on the fly every night.

I didn't think about it until wayyyy afterward, but wouldn't "safe"ing all the input channels have prevented this problem? In other words, I could just make the adjustment any time and it would be made for the entire duration of the show? Weirdly, I don't think I've heard anybody really talk about this being a necessary step in setting your show up for line-by-line mixing, but it would be great to do a sound check each night and not have to worry about my settings changing from mixer scene to scene.

Maybe it's so rudimentary that everyone glosses over it. I'm going to try it out later today - I would love to get this perfect for their upcoming musical.
When we're done with cue writing, I go back and "recall safe" several channel strip parameters: input patch, gain, EQ, and dynamics. Then, whenever a recall is performed those will not change. Works great when we have a cast substitution (I change input patch to the sub's physical input) or when a cast member is having a "different" kind of performance night.

Avid had a system called "propagate" which LX programmers would call "blind write." You could make changes to any or many parameters and either send the "relative" change (I turned that up 3dB) or absolute (I set that input gain at +32.0) to selected scenes/snapshots, all while passing audio. I found that useful if a change was going to be permanent but less so for cast subs.
 
Yeah; when I'm doing scenes on a musical on a desk where the scene facility is decent (my home LS9 does not qualify), I safe everything except ON and fader.

Except in scene 99 (the one before the top of show)

That's where I park all the actual settings for everything.
 

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