Let me preface this by pointing out that a large portion of live sound and mixing is user preference (and designer preference) so there is no right or wrong way to mix it all comes down to a
system that works for you.
So that being said...
When I mix I like to start with a good
sound check. I try adjust the faders to 0 and work with my
gain as much as possible. The reason for this is if you look at the numbers next to the faders the levels decrease exponentially. The numbers right around zero usually increase or decrease by about 5 and then 10 thus making it possible to make slight changes during your show. Bringing the
fader all the way down doesn't bring the sound
level to zero it actually brings it to negative infinity and if you look closely you'll see that it jumps in increments of as much as 20 30 or more (depending on the board) dB, making very sharp cuts to and from your audio
One thing I found effective in cases like you're describing where the pianist wants their volume to go louder is to just bring up their
monitor level so that they can hear themselves more (if you do this a couple times during rehearsal and bring it enough that it feeds back for a second you then have some
ground to stand on when you tell them you can't go any louder or it will
feedback, MOST of the time the people will pull back and stop asking you to bring Their volume up louder because they don't want to hear the annoying
feedback, if they still want to bring it up well just stop listening to them because they have no idea what they're talking about anyways) your job is not to please the pianist as much as it as it is to make sure that everyone in your audience can hear EVERYTHING that's going on and make it sound good try and listen for a good balance so that everything sounds about the same. you may want to bring you piano up little
bit just so that it's over the vocals but you still don't want the Piano blasting through all of the vocals so that you can't hear what's being sung.
I would try and stay out of the yellow range on your
meter as much as possible and I try and never have red appear.
Occasionally I have been in a situation where I'm getting too much signal from the
microphone. if that starts happening you may have to bring your
gain down a
bit and go up on your
fader but in most cases this is a rare occurrence for me.
I hope this will help you to solve some of your problems let me know if you have anymore questions
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