{"id":52,"date":"2016-03-23T16:21:22","date_gmt":"2016-03-23T16:21:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.qsc.com\/live-sound\/?p=52"},"modified":"2016-03-25T00:49:03","modified_gmt":"2016-03-25T00:49:03","slug":"qsc-touchmix-16-my-first-gig","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.qsc.com\/live-sound\/es\/qsc-touchmix-16-my-first-gig\/","title":{"rendered":"QSC TouchMix-16: My First Gig"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u2018One If By Land\u2019<\/em><\/p>\n

Before the Revolutionary War, The Bull Run on Route 2A in Shirley, MA was called \u2018Stagecoach Inn\u2019 as it was the first stagecoach stop on the Boston to Albany route. According to the last couplet in Longfellow\u2019s poem \u2018Paul Revere\u2019s Ride<\/em>,\u2019 \u201cThrough every Middlesex village and farm, for the country folk to be up and to arm.\u201d Legend has it Paul Revere\u2019s last stop on April 18, 1775 was here. There\u2019s also a great story about the Bull Run getting its name following that Civil War battle after a drunken brawl, as well as a mural painted by Ben Affleck\u2019s grandparents. Needless to say, The Bull Run is old. So is its sound system. Scary old.<\/p>\n

Every New England band has played at The Bull Run at least once. Its \u2018big room\u2019 holds 300 and Steve Gaetz is the sound guy. We headlined a parking lot festival in Philly the day before, where they had a Yamaha M7. When I got a description of the PA that included only 6 mixes (we use 8) from a 24-channel Allen & Heath GL 2200, I knew it was time to put my new TouchMix-16 in the game<\/strong>. Bull Run\u2019s house monitor desk lives on stage right, which is always the wrong side when your artist is a piano player.<\/p>\n

\"Frink-mixing-400\"The TouchMix Control iOS App is one of TouchMix’s many great features, allowing the engineer the freedom to be anywhere on stage or in the venue and I used it on my first gig. TouchMix comes with a little USB WiFi dongle that works on a single channel at 2.4 GHz, so I didn\u2019t even need a router. Placing TouchMix on top of the stage left house monitor desk and simply plugging in the 16 inputs from the split and 8 monitor amp sends, I was up and running. Since pianos nearly always face stage left and the band\u2019s MD is on that side of the stage, I just had to spend the night on that side of the stage with iPad in hand. I never missed a cue.<\/p>\n

I was immediately impressed with TouchMix\u2019s sound quality<\/strong>. I\u2019ve used everything from Peavey to DiGiCo over the years and TouchMix has that \u2018big desk\u2019 sound. Accurate, clean, open and transparent. The (non-recallable) analog gain knobs on TouchMix\u00a0are its main initial fear factor, especially when I\u2019m about to spend the night on an iPad across the stage from the TouchMix. It does however have a +\/- 6 dB digital trim for each channel.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m fanatic about setting preamp gain precisely in 5 dB steps and I simply plugged an SM58 into a channel and kept bumping the channel fader down 5 dB and boosting the preamp gain to see what TouchMix\u2019s 5 dB gain positions look like, putting hash marks on a piece of white tape beside the micpre knob. There\u2019s 45 dB of gain in the full clockwise (5 o\u2019clock) position. Shure Beta58 vocal mics sit nicely with their pre-amp gain at ’12 o\u2019clock\u2019 while SM58s might need to be about ‘2 o\u2019clock.\u2019 Though I\u2019d like to see 5 dB hash marks around each gain knob, I eventually put them there \u2018in my mind\u2019 after a week.<\/p>\n

As is often the case in smaller clubs, Bull Run\u2019s wedges weren\u2019t exactly matched, nor were the amps powering them, but that\u2019s OK, as I\u2019ve spent a lifetime with \u2018wedge du jour<\/em>\u2019 and my method is quickly homogenizing them using \u2018Smaart\u2019, by simply \u2018chopping off mountain tops, while leaving valleys alone.\u2019 With Studio Six Digital\u2019s Smaart Tools on my iPhone, I can quickly do this with the wedges in place on stage, walking from one mix to the next and just using TouchMix\u2019s graphic EQ on the TouchMix\u00a0Control App while monitoring Smaart on my iPhone, followed by checking each wedge\u2019s EQ by turning on the vocal mic at that position. Anything drastic, especially if it\u2019s not on one of the GEQ\u2019s 28 ISO frequencies is easily addressed using one of each GEQ\u2019s notch filters.<\/p>\n

Since setting preamp gain for each channel, I haven\u2019t touched the TouchMix, nor will I for the remainder of the night until I pack it up. I eventually spent the entire tour only using my iPad, except for utilities, such as adding my own dual band WiFi router. More on that next time.<\/p>\n

The requirements for a monitor desk aren\u2019t quite as stringent as for a FOH mixer, but TouchMix\u00a0has it all: gate and compression on every channel, plus four sweet-sounding FX engines with dedicated sends and returns. Besides TouchMix-16\u2019s eight XLR outputs (L+R plus 6x auxiliary) it also has two stereo auxiliaries on TRS. Our substitute drummer was using his IEMs as earplugs. I just had to plug in a 20-foot headphone extension and voila: hard-wired IEMs.<\/p>\n

TouchMix also has full 4-band EQ plus both HPF y<\/em> LPF. Low pass filters used to only be found on high-end analog desks, but once you get used to them for toning down brightness in channels that don\u2019t need to sit on top of a mix, it\u2019s hard to give up the HF filter of your 4-band PEQ just to roll off sheen and spit.<\/p>\n

TouchMix ships in a cloth-covered zippered case made of closed cell foam, which may be all that\u2019s needed for weekend warriors. Though I eventually got the SKB case that\u2019s tailor made for TouchMix with space for an iPad underneath, I took it on tour throughout New England and then on to Europe after our Newport Jazz Fest gig, which the band made it to with five minutes to spare, but that\u2019s another story.<\/p>\n

Mark Frink works at the Jacksonville Symphony and is available to mix monitors this summer.<\/em><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u2018One If By Land\u2019 Before the Revolutionary War, The Bull Run on Route 2A in Shirley, MA was called \u2018Stagecoach Inn\u2019 as it was the first stagecoach stop on the Boston to Albany route. According to the last couplet in Longfellow\u2019s poem \u2018Paul Revere\u2019s Ride,\u2019 \u201cThrough every Middlesex village and farm, for the country folk … Read More<\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-52","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-touchmix","category-user-stories"],"yoast_head":"\nQSC TouchMix-16: My First Gig - Blog | Resources<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/blogs.qsc.com\/live-sound\/es\/qsc-touchmix-16-my-first-gig\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"es_MX\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"QSC TouchMix-16: My First Gig - Blog | Resources\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"\u2018One If By Land\u2019 Before the Revolutionary War, The Bull Run on Route 2A in Shirley, MA was called \u2018Stagecoach Inn\u2019 as it was the first stagecoach stop on the Boston to Albany route. 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