Soundchecking the band

Before we get started with our soundcheck, let’s reset the board to our default settings. Do this by tapping view, scrolling to “RHC Default” and pressing load.

Now that our standard inputs, monitor mixes and output routing are recalled, we can move on to sound-checking the band once everyone on stage is ready.

The basic process to check a single channel looks like this:

  1. First, check if there is a preset for the given instrument or musician and load those settings into the channel.
  2. While the musician plays or sings at performance volume and with the channel muted, select and solo that channel. Turn the gain knob until the input hits the first orange light on the main signal meter (-18).
  3. Verify that the tone of the signal sounds natural. Good EQ starts with approximating the sound of an instrument or voice as if you were listening to it acoustically (without a mic). If the channel doesn’t sound right you’ll need to do a rough pass on the 4-band channel EQ just so we can get it sounding normal enough to send it back to the stage mixes.
  4. Once the signal sounds reasonably close to natural, push the main fader for the channel up until you hear the signal in the house speakers. If you don’t hear anything, verify that the fader for the DCA group the channel is assigned to is up and the channel and DCA groups are unmuted as well.
  5. With the EQ set and the signal fed to the house mix, use the talkback mic to let the stage musicians know that you are about to send that signal back to their monitor mixes. Musicians should point up for more of the signal, down for less and lower their hand when the level is right.

Rinse and repeat! Follow these steps for the rest of the inputs for the band.

Once levels are set for all of the band channels, the band can go ahead with their soundcheck rehearsal. After the band has played through a part of a song together, ask if anyone needs any monitor adjustments.

When requests for monitor adjustments have slowed you can get started on fine-grain EQ adjustments and constructing the house mix.