eli5 : What the hell are all those knobs and buttons that you see in professional music studios?

Question

Like seriously there’s hundreds, do artists know exactly what each one of those function as?

I’ve never been inside one but there are of course images online of music artists in these studios etc

In: Technology

Answer 1

If you’re talking about the [mixing board](https://media.sweetwater.com/m/products/image/89763ef42a8Xck6Alq13xgiMKQ2Ud9wwmnPZWgSW.jpg), then it helps to understand that an multichannel mixer has duplicate controls for each channel. (Each instrument and each microphone has its own channel.)

So in a single column for a specific channel there might be a control for gain, another few for tone, some for effects in and out, some for pan (adjusting between the left and right channel) and so on. At the bottom of the column is usually a fader for relative volume. So all that can be fine-tuned for that particular instrument or microphone.

If you look cross the rows of 18 channels or 32 channels or 128 channels or what have you, each control in the same row does the same thing. Getting familiar with all of this controls is much easier than it might seem.