I’ve both heard of and seen on documentaries mixing desks with automated “flying” faders that automatically shift the faders. I’m confused as to what the purpose of the automation is – is it when switching between different songs, or is it picking up a certain sound that requires particular mixing too complicated to do manually?
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It is very common to have multiple audio channels for every “instrument”. For example the drums, choir or the ambiant sounds ar obviously using multiple microphones each. But even guitars might have mulitple pickups or have effects in their seperate channels. This setup allows for a lot of flexibility by the audio engineer allowing him to mix the sound just like he wants without having to run around and adjust the mix at the sources. However it means he have to move a lot of sliders to change the mix. A good principle is to only enable the channels that is actually in use. This way a guitar in the background that is not played will not cause any noise as the strings vibrate to the sound from the monitors. It also allows the artists to speak to each other and the crew when not singing as well as tuning their instruments. Before flying faders you had to have multiple sound engineers to be able to move all the faders whenever someone is about to play or are just done playing. There are also examples of special tools being made allowing a single engineer to move a set of faders together as one. The flying faders do exactly this. The engineer would program the faders to move together as one or move opposite of each other. This means that he have fewer faders to work with live as the others are programmed to follow the pre-programmed profile that he have set. It is also possible to program them in time as well, this is mostly used for recording and mixing but it can be used in live shows as well allowing the engineer to focus on more dynamic tasks.
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