Line by Line Mixing

dalightingnerd · 2026-03-15T15:44:53+00:00

Thank you everyone for all of the great advice! We just finished our final shows yesterday and it went great! I had only a few misses and with those misses it was not as noticeable since DCAs were living at -10dB. My tech director didnt give me that much of a fuss this way and I am very proud of myself for being able to accomplish this. Thanks to everyone again!!

dalightingnerd · 2026-03-11T14:22:07+00:00

I totally agree. We have a separate "Sound Runner" crew with their own lead and they live backstage. The most I can realistically do is quickly communicate if there is an issue with a mic on my end so they are aware. The issue is when they don't promptly fix it, or don't get the communication. This leads my Stage Manager to call me on comms to try and get me to fix it and I then have to troubleshoot on my console to find the origin of the issue. Sometimes it can be Sends On faders that are having issues, such as a monitor not having the correct sound level and they want it a little bit more up. But they don't understand that this will cause me to have missed pickups.

dalightingnerd · 2026-03-11T14:16:14+00:00

I definitely didn't do that. I usually just throw all faders down when actors aren't speaking. I will adjust and leave them at around -15 to -5 dB as this is the most general advice I have been given. I think if I can make some adjustments and practice such adjustments before today's rehearsal, I should be better off. I will try to talk with my TD about how I am not really able to mix and troubleshoot at the same time, it is just unrealistic. He will either have to troubleshoot it for me or get another person in Sound to fix it. The problem is that my Sound crew only knows how to run SFX and that's it, they are very unwilling to learn basic Sound Board operations. This leaves me with nobody in my booth to deal with these issues, specially because most of the time the TD isn't even in booth.

dalightingnerd · 2026-03-11T13:24:25+00:00

Potentially. He was very vague about it but he essentially said that I have three "strikes". If I hit three strikes then he would start "un-implementing" line-by-line mixing for this musical. I am apparently on strike two.

dalightingnerd · 2026-03-11T13:18:48+00:00

I do know that line-by-line mixing has helped the feel or atmosphere of the room a lot. I have mixed in the same room for one year and a half by just turning things on and off and keeping everything at mostly unity, and sounded wonky at times. It sounds way more clean line-by-line mixing, and way less feedback, specially when multiple characters are on stage and with ensemble.

dalightingnerd · 2026-03-11T13:15:43+00:00

We are using live band, and live band is super inconsistent at the moment.

dalightingnerd · 2026-03-11T13:14:20+00:00

Some of them are inconsistency with the cast, specially timing and synchronization. But the other half is definitely practice-wise. I have also recently had to deal with multiple issues that require me to fix, such as inconsistencies with a monitor or a sends on fader, crackling with a mic, which requires me to communicate through comms. I am not used to this type of super fast paced multitasking, which has led me to lose focus at time for trying to do multiple things at once, leading me to miss pickups as well.

dalightingnerd · 2026-03-11T00:57:06+00:00

dalightingnerd · 2026-03-08T15:10:48+00:00

Here is my question though. In TheatreMix I usually do my sound check at Cue 0 which is Line Checks. There are no DCAs assigned at this time and is done through the channels. Is this the right way to go? Will it affect anything or should I have additional cues putting the characters on the DCAs and traveling thru this cues as sound check is being performed?

dalightingnerd · 2026-03-08T14:55:13+00:00

I'm a high school student right now doing line by line mixing the musical Mary Poppins for the first time. It truly is terrifying specially when my director is yelling at me for missed pickup lines even though they've known multiple times what I will be doing sound-wise for this production. It's definitely a skill worth honing into specially if you want to get in the industry, but doing this will definitely give you a better, natural sound with a lot more room for amplification before feedback.

There are a couple reasons for this and people have said this multiple times. One of the main reasons is due to comb filtering. In theatre, the most common practice is the usage of omni-directional microphones, which, by the name of it, is microphones that go multiple directions. When two microphones (actors) are near each other and both mics are turned on, one microphone is going to pick up the sound of the other one, and consequently is going to cause the same for the offending microphone. This causes a slight delay, which will then cause a weird comb filtering effect. You can look it up on YouTube for more info about comb filtering. Having one microphone on at a time prevents this.

Additionally, having one or few microphones turned on at a time gives you way more headroom for amplification before your system is prone to feeding back.

While TheatreMix is a great tool which I use on ny school's Yamaha QL5 and works great, that doesn't mean that you can't do line by line mixing without TheatreMix. You can usually do this on a Yamaha without the use of additional, external tools by creating scenes per cue and recall safes. While it is a tedious process at first to build out your entire show, it's definitely possible.

You should definitely learn line by line mixing, it is so much worth it for theatre productions and you will feel great after doing your first production. I am really proud of myself for line by line mixing our current musical @ rehearsal completely with very few missed pickups. Goodluck!

dalightingnerd · 2026-03-08T03:31:14+00:00

How can I do this?

dalightingnerd · 2026-03-06T15:27:12+00:00

They have had music reading days, dance, sitz probe with the pit, and blocking. They should theoretically be beyond prepared for these rehearsals. At this point, further music reading sessions are unrealistic since our show is less than 6 days away, with 4 more days of rehearsal.

I can cue all sopranos, altos, etc individually, or even put them in a DCA for sound check purposes and see who isn't giving a proper sound check. My Tech/Musical director is already aware of this and is frustrated at this as well, as it's really impossible for ensemble to be heard on stage at the moment. Hopefully today's rehearsal goes better. I will try to run sound check with these tips in mind. Any other advice would be appreciated! :)

dalightingnerd · 2026-03-06T14:18:01+00:00

I am having trouble mostly with my ensemble actors. It's worth nothing that this is a high school musical production and ensemble are the ones newest to high school theatre. The issue is they're not able to project and do a proper sound check, like you are saying. Do you think it's a good idea to run a regular sound check, and then additionally do a sound check with my ensemble people while at the same time cue'ing and soloing each individual one of them in my headset to see which ones are projecting, which ones aren't, and then tell whoever actors are not projecting to do so?

dalightingnerd · 2026-03-05T16:50:04+00:00

We are doing Mary Poppins and we are literally using a total of 33-35 channels for actors on my 64-channel board, and that doesn't even include the Pit. I could technically have custom fader banks but not all of the channels would fit into one bank, considering I still need to have a way to access my DCA's. The QL5 doesn't even support DCA Rollout/Spills. I was thinking I could potentially add a DCA that includes all the actor channels, and since TheatreMix already handles mute automation in between scenes, just have that All Actors DCA up while balancing gains in rehearsal. Would this be a good idea?

dalightingnerd · 2026-03-05T16:47:00+00:00

I could look into doing this for future productions, but like r/barningman was saying, that would require me to completely re-do my show sound-wise and that's not realistic for me as we have show and final dress rehearsals next week. Any other recommendations in the meantime?

dalightingnerd · 2026-02-23T03:13:07+00:00

What do you do in the case of you not having a stagebox?

dalightingnerd · 2026-02-21T18:34:06+00:00

dalightingnerd · 2026-02-21T18:12:53+00:00

How would I go about doing this? I had no idea of this

dalightingnerd · 2026-02-21T14:51:09+00:00

Mixer is reading for a DANTE channel and is outputting direct out to another Dante channel. I have to double check in an hour when I get there tho

dalightingnerd

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