Live Mixing with Mr Conor Roberts

The pressure of mixing a live venue at a fast pace.

For the last month, we've been learning how a professional live sound engineer operates in a live venue and the different terminologies we are expected to learn to keep the show moving at a smooth running pace during a live performance.

For example:

FOH - (front of house)

DSC - (down stage centre)

OSL - (off stage left)

USR - (up stage right)

Mr Roberts explained what equipment was used and how and where it was positioned. He told us all the basic information so we had a better idea of live sound audio engineering.

Live mixing signal routing.

A basic live rig signal routing setup:

The microphone signal goes into dropboxes.

The dropboxes carry the signal into a splitter box.

The signal gets split and depending on how many outputs the signal split box has, this may vary, but they usually have 2 or 3 multicore outlets.

If there are 2 multicore outputs, one multicore lead will route the signal to the monitor mixer and the other multicore will carry the signal to the front of house (FOH) console.

From the (FOH) console, the signal flow goes into the driver rack and back into the console.

From the (FOH) console, the signal flow goes back down the multicore, and back into the splitter box.

Then from the splitter box it goes to the crossovers and the signal get split into 3 frequency ranges high, medium and low. All the signals get busted by their separates amplifiers. The high frequency goes to the tweeters, the medium goes through the speakers and the low frequencies go into the subwoofers.