Resetting mix buttons

[MikeShand]

One of the commonest ways for volunteers in our church to shoot themselves in the foot is to leave a mix button set! They neither know, nor need to know in many cases, about sends on faders, but it is easy enough to accidentally press a mix button when aiming for sel or pfl. Education is one solution (ALWAYS check the current mix in the status bar, if in doubt press the LR mix button), and hiding all mix busses except LR is another. But there is always the possibility that a previous more sophisticated user left a mix selected. We tell them that if all else fails, press the friendly soft key marked “panic”, which will reset everything to known defaults for that service type (by loading an appropriate scene). But it doesn’t reset the selected mix button, nor does there seem to be a way to achieve this.

Experiment shows that re-booting, DOES reset mix to LR, but neither scene nor show recall does. It would be nice if there was an option to have mix selection be “unsafe” on scene recall. I can see that you wouldn’t always want this behaviour, but the option would be handy.

Or does anyone have any better solutions, other than education, education, education?

Mike

p.s. It has taken me the best part of an hour, elapsed, to login and post this. This is such a great resource which is going to waste because of the appalling response times. Sometimes I will go for 15 minutes making multiple failed attempts before I can even get connected to a page, and then it takes another couple of minutes to load. If I didn’t think the GLD was such a great product I would have walked away long ago!

[cornelius78]

According to Editor 1.4, there’s an option to set a softkey to “Sel Mix PAFL Scene.”

Choose a softkey, set Function to “Sel Mix PAFL Scene,” Channel Type to “Main(LR),” Channel Number to “1”(LR), Type to “Sel Mix PAFL,” and Scene to whatever your default scene is. This will load your default scene, and the LR bus will be selected for processing (equivalent of pressing the “Sel” button on LR, the active mix will be LR (equivalent of pressing the “Mix” button on LR,) and LR will be coming through the cans (equivalent of pressing the “PAFL” button on LR.)

[GCumbee]

Running digital consoles is not for the faint of heart. It solves a lot of problems and creates a whole new set of them. I try to teach people that the blue Mix buttons are the most important buttons on the console. You always have to know where you are and what you are seeing and hearing. If folks cannot grasp that concept likely they just don’t need to be running sound. The very first dig console I installed years ago resulted in the lead sound person quitting and leaving the church after his first Sunday solo. He said his nerves could not handle it. I remember then how after 40 years of analog consoles even I was a little intimidated. Now I don’t think anything about it. But I do have to THINK more. The beauty of analog was nothing was hidden. It was all right there in front of you. No longer the case.

But you just have to spend time drilling the concept into their heads. I would caution to having too many ‘escape’ buttons since that can get you into a big change in things maybe unwanted. Like on a service recently. The operator thought by hitting the scene soft key he could revert back. Well he did. He had not saved anything and the total console mix functions reverted changing everything they had worked on. Levels jumped all over the place. Now you don’t want that happening in a service with a crowd of people.

Be careful.

[MikeShand]

Thanks, Cornelius, that certainly does the trick.

Wise words George, and I totally agree. But for some (e.g. early morning) services we have no option but to present people with a VERY simple interface which only operates the speech mics.

Thanks to both of you.

[pblosser03]

I quickly found that the Soft keys are lifesavers for this. You can program a softkey to select a mix bus, and while it is selected that softkey lights up. So I setup a softkey that selects the Main LR bus and labeled it as such. I tell volunteers that if that button is not lit up you are on the wrong mix, so I teach them to check it often.

Also, I set up all our stage monitor aux busses on softkeys as well so they can easily select and de-select busses without having them hidden under layers.

Also I have a scene safe on our softkeys so they are never changed by scene recalls, this keeps the operation consistent.

Hope that helps.

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