@oldghm
Peter Yarrow is a really nice, wonderful human being. But I remember a performance of his many years ago when he was micromanaging the sound guys from the stage over a live mic ("you need a little more at 1.5K**", etc).
Then later at a different festival I witnessed my favorite "sound man" story.
During the singer-songwriter competition partially sponsored by Peter at that folk festival that shall remain unnamed, the sound was excellent until about the 3rd contest performer when Yarrow wandered over to the sound board, played around for 10 seconds with some knobs and turned the sound into UN-listenable mush that no one dared change for a while. 🙂
You would be amazed at how many "professional sound men" (always men) have gotten blank stares when I told them the secret about how I could run sound for 16 acts over an 8 hour period on my 16 channel board (up to 12 live channels of vocals, instruments) at a folk festival (lots of acoustic instruments) without EVER producing feedback.
And no, it wasn't don't turn on the mains.
It was Post-Its.
I carried a pad of the smallest Post-Its. I would cut each in half with my small pocket Swiss Army knife's scissors and write the instrument, vocalist's name/location on each strip and "glue" the strip at the channel that held that signal. Simple.
Therefore, no translation was ever needed to grab the right fader.
Once the mix was settled for a group, I would analyze the stage plot for the next group, determine the microphone/stand moves I would need to do and draw circles and arrows for those moves on the plot and write in which channels the next group's performers would be in and would have the new strips in place on the mixer before the previous group was finished.
And of course, if someone wanted a different microphone or moved their position from the stage plot, I would merely have to move the Post-it strips and VIOLA!
Blank stares (and frequent howls of feedback) from those "pros"...
Before that I used to use strips of tape on mic stands to denote the channels -- and of course the "talent" would switch stands on me -- a'capella groups are notorious for that. After the Post-it trick, no worries any more.
** 1K refers to the region of the sound frequency range where many vocal characteristics and a lot of "ring" typically lives. FYI: Mackie believes that the sweet spot for vocals is 1.5K so that's where they place the mid-point of their Mid range control on many of their boards like the 1204 and 1604, etc that have Lo, Mid, Hi EQ. This is also good information to know if you're working with digital boards which now typically have 4 bands of EQ with boost/cut, center frequency and Q (parametric EQ) and low and high cut/boost.
If I saw a board with every EQ control past the mid-point it would tell me that the operator doesn't know what they're doing. Using subtractive EQ ("left" of the mid point or CUT) for offending characteristics is always the preferred method -- in other words, don't raise the mids and highs to "get rid of the bass", cut the Low!
For a more complete picture of the sound spectrum and EQ impact on various instruments, please enjoy the chart and description from our friends at Sweetwater:
https://www.sweetwater.com/ins...hey-impact-your-mix/
https://www.sweetwater.com/ins...requency-cheatsheet/