A Listening Habit for Live Mixers: ZOOMING

Those who have attended any mixing or listening workshop I’ve presented or participated in have probably heard me chat about this before.  It’s essential.   It often happens automatically and subconsciously for me these days, but it hasn’t always been that way.   Years of practice and repetition have resulted in it becoming automatic.   As I sit here updating my console between soundcheck and doors for an evening worship event, I’m thinking a lot about this listening technique.    Here are some thoughts that I believe are applicable to all live music mixers from beginners to seasoned pros…

A mixer might listen intently to one source – say, the bass guitar – while working on its EQ, dynamics, or some other processing.  We sometimes must focus on such things.  That’s good and should be practiced often and performed on any audio source as needed.   We can do this mentally by focusing our mind’s ear, or technically by using the solo bus on our console (no Solo-In-Place with a live audience!).   But in a live mix, what’s going on at the exact same time?    Full band?  Leading and backing vocals?  What else?

A successful live mix does require this mental “isolating” of individual sources for a moment as we work on them, but also constantly remembering to the listen to the big picture and how that source sits in the final mix.    This must become habit.   I think of it as “zooming”: we must zoom in aurally to think about (and listen to) individual sounds, and groups of sounds, but also quickly zoom out to judge the big picture.  Back and forth.   Both are essential.  This a case of a technique that requires extensive woodshedding and gets easier with repetition.    The good news is that it can be done away from the job, by listening to live or recorded music in almost any situation.

So, as we music mixers dial things in we should always remember the big picture: the final mix is all our audiences ever hear or care about.