Understanding Your Mixer
It's A Mystery
Making Music has a great article that explains the basic controls and functionality of a mixing board. The details get fairly technical without getting too far over your head (well my head, anyways), and I found there were a few pieces of the mixer puzzle that I had a little backwards.
For instance, I had always thought of the trim and volume knobs as being a kind of “big stick/little stick” combo where the trim knob made large adjustments and the volume was a fine control. After reading, I’m thinking completely differently. A volume fader all the way down will be silent no matter what the trim knob is set to. But if your trim knob is at the max adjustment, the volume fader will start pushing that channel into the mix much more quickly than a channel with a very tight trim. With the volume faders maxed on both channels, they’ll be equally loud, but at medium volumes the channel with the wide open trim will sound much louder.
The net result is the same either way, until you find yourself trying to push two channels to max volume and wondering why they’re both the same volume.
Understanding your gear takes a little time, but it’s always worth the investment.
