G’day,

This week at SAE we performed our solo 20-minute live mix. Each of us was given a live multitrack recording of a band to mix on the Avid S3 system. Just the one song, but from a cold start and no longer than 20 minutes to build the mix. This was very challenging and as I discovered it was just enough time to get things working without doing anything too fancy. In a typical gig environment you would have a bit of time before the show to get things patched and then add more elements as things progress, but it was a good exercise to see what the critical steps are and how quickly you need to move sometimes. I was last in my group to step up and was confident that there was plenty of time to do things I had planned. However, once actually at the desk the time seemed to go by very quickly indeed. I was quite happy overall with my mix, and I think that setting up the sub groups was a good move as it kept all the pieces in place for the duration of the song even though it took up a chunk of time at the beginning. I had a couple of obstacles with the S3 system – one was quickly navigating through the mix layers to get to the parts I wanted, and the other was keeping on top of the Aux send masters. I found that because they were ‘buried’ and defaulted to off, I didn’t get my effects returns happening in time. The benefit here of an analogue desk (or a larger surface) is that these controls are all on the top layer and more easily navigated for troubleshooting. It’s also a bit faster to assign channels when they’re all in a row. I’m sure that this all comes down to familiarity with the system, and if I was really organised I could have built a template beforehand and uploaded it on the day. Maybe next time!

Thanks for reading!