Ep20 Building a FOH Mix Pt 5: Groups, VCAs and Stems

Welcome to another episode of "Live Sound Boot Camp" where we cover all aspects of "Live Sound" in detail. I'm Brendan Draper, here is always with my co-host, Joe Santarpia, and Brian John. Oh, boy. Hello. I kind of missed the really sarcastic intro where every one of us says something really stupid. No, this is the pause right here for you guys to do after I say your names, you guys can say something stupid or burp or something. You mean like the whole podcast basically? Yeah. Ready? Go. Perfect, perfect. Now that we've done the intro, we can be stupid. So there's two things I do want to point out though before we get really deep into this. Brendan's facial hair. Well, yeah. First of all, Brendan's got a beard and it actually looks really good. You look like you're pretty into a lumberjack. Can you hear it? Yeah. Can you hear it? Yeah, your sounds a little bit hairy. Yeah. Man, of course, these jokes had to come along. I might have to edit a little bit more because my mustache and my beard, my brush against. Yeah. Yeah, you get a nice, like, yeah, it's like the snare, snare brush sound. I can't do it. I just shaved. You can just rub your face against the microphone. It's weirdly. It weirdly doesn't have a lot of noise. It's pure 40, man. Tell you. Mine sounds like a, oh my gosh, what do you call it, Velcro. I hear that. I can hear that. I can hear that. It sounds gnarly. Yeah, it's nice. You got the scratch going on. You got the nice Velcro sound over there. This is the ASMR podcast where actually what is your face sound like? So no, no, but the two things I wanted to point out, one, Joe, tell me about the contraption you made to mute your mouse. Oh, yeah. So I moved and I'm in a new little spot, you know, little studio thing that I have set up in my new apartment. And yeah, it's a, it's a Jamco box and a small cardboard box with a towel and a t-shirt draped over it with little openings so that I can stick my hand in to prevent the sound of the click. I cannot hear it. I know. You can't hear it at all. You're machine and your thing is so good that I can't hear the clicking your mouse. Right. And I did crash my Pro Tools by the end of that, however. I'm recording it, guys. Sorry about that. Cool. So just for a recap, everybody that is, you know, listening to this, Joe clicked his mouse in his amazing muting mouse box. Soundproof box. And it crashed everything. It crashed everything. It was so soundproof that it said, you may not record sound. Truthfully, I'm on a jank rig right now like, I don't even know if this version of Pro Tools like is like matched up with the OS, it might be all kinds of, it works most of the time. And I did test this earlier, but of course, you know, it's a good thing that this podcast isn't about recording from your house or like, right, your home studio set up. Yeah. Well, definitely want to listen to us. Here's the important question, Joe. Would you use this rig to record a live show as it is set up now? Um, I have, but not in instances where it, like, not in instances where it mattered. You know, it's just like, oh, yeah, you know, I've got multi-tracks and you're kind of threw it up. I'll throw it up. Yeah. Yeah. And you know what? I'll tell you what, about 40 to 60% of the time it did fucks up. So that just goes to show you, it's time, it's time for a new rig, guys. I know. Okay. Please don't shame me. All right. Appreciate it. Yeah, well, you know, I, I just switched to a different rig. I mean, every time we were recording this podcast before, I had my mic running through my S6L console here in the house and that whole rig on just to record this one mic for the podcast. It was a little unreasonable. Was your like, Bill, uh, yeah, they probably don't even draw that much, but no, no, no, I mean, because I have stage racks in here, too, it's ridiculous. So I, yeah, it was, it definitely affected my electric bill, but more so than that, the room would hit like 85 degrees in like five minutes and just stay that way. It was rough. It was rough. Yeah. I sweated it out with you guys, you know? Yeah. Yeah, you did. That's dedication. It's a good way to podcast. Yeah. Well, you know, it's a live sound podcast, right? You got to use live console to record the podcast. Yeah. I usually sweat when I'm at a show, you know, running around, we're gonna keep it real. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, you have to put yourself in that environment to be able to talk about it, you know? Yeah. So, you know, we posted podcasts recently, but it's been a while since we've recorded one. So Brandon, tell me what you've been up to the past X amount of time. I'm gonna say X amount of time because nobody is listening to this actually knows how much time it's been between our recording and podcasts, so we won't let them know. Well, it's a dirty secret. What have I been doing? I've been, oh, I went to a cabin and recorded an album with a band, so that was super fun. Cool. You brought a personal rig up there. Yeah. I brought my Midas and I've been actually volunteering at this church doing their like live streams for the Sunday services, but they have a ton of nice mics and preamps and cables and anything you could want for like a little studio, so they let me borrow that. I took it up to a cabin in Guilalla and me in this like nine-piece band recorded like eight songs and then a few like video shoot things. Very cool. Yeah, super fun. They come out. So far, so good. They're doing overdubs at home and then I'm gonna mix it. But yeah, they all tracked live and they're really solid like neosol band. They're called a "Speak Easy" if you want to look it up. Just with a "No Why at the End" just to any "Speak Easy." Did you find any aspects of doing that remote recording, like particular challenging? Did like anything stand out as like this is tough or different or weird? Not really, I mean, getting people's headphones right was like the most, I guess, first setup. Just like I didn't have like a headphones system that's super easy to just like run one cable in between every single one. So we kinda like, I asked them to bring their own like mixers if they have them, like little tiny ones and then just RAN XLRs from my console. So you were doing monitors on top of them? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Each of them had like a little personal mixer that I sent stuff to. So you were basically a monitor engineer that happened to capture the show. Basically, right, yeah. So what you're telling me is you did a gig. I did a gig. I did a f***ing grasp. A four-day gig. Wow, it's like a music festival. Yeah. With one band. One band. In a cabin. That's a great idea actually. That's kind of like one of those little bucket list things, you know, recorded album in a cabin, yeah. Do you have any idea roughly when they're hoping to release it? I think they're gonna, they, I don't think they're gonna put it out as a full album. I think they're gonna like release singles every like few months or something like that. So probably I think sometime mid 2021 they'll start putting stuff out. Very cool, man. I'm looking forward to it. Cool. When it comes out, you know, let me know. I will. We'll, we'll wrap it on the podcast here too. I will. If, if shows start again this year, then I imagine I'll be doing shows with them too. Whenever that. Very cool. That starts going. How about yourself, Joe? Anything exciting going on lately? And, you know, I moved, that's, that's cool. Yeah. My girlfriend and I got a new apartment, continuing my education and electronics at CCSF. That's been a lot of fun. A couple recording mixing projects, me and, my, my partner Roberto, we mixed record by the band. Ton starts bandit, that'll be out on Mexican summer sometimes here. And a couple other smaller recording projects with local bands and, and, uh, things in that nature, but pretty mellow since the last time we spoke. Nice. How about you, all those good, um, in terms of gigs and stuff like that, I had a couple live stream things that, um, that I did, uh, maybe two or three were actually in a venue where they did real-time live streams and out like that. And then, uh, went down to L.A. and did a bunch of private live stream things. Things that went out to corporate, I think I did maybe three of those. I mean, the whole thing is so complicated right now people are still just so unsure how to do it. So, you know, we're getting in and everybody's getting multiple coronavirus tests before being allowed in the building and then once you're in the building, like, you can't really leave because, you know, you're interacting with all those people. Everyone's trying to stay socially distanced. Nobody's allowed to touch microphones that anyone's singing into. You know, it's, it's, it's complicated. But, you know, keeping it to a really limited number of people and limited number of musicians and stuff, everyone's trying to make it work. So, I got to do a couple of those. It's cool. There will be, you know, undoubtedly a whole set of new procedures that we're all, uh, going to be following soon, you know, uh, once gigs, gigs do start to, you know, happen again more and more. Um, and yeah, that's a whole, you know, that's a whole curriculum right there. Um, I know I see really some guidelines on the matter and then various, uh, film commissions and things like that are starting to, uh, produce, you know, uh, documents that outline everything. But, um, yeah, you know, uh, sanitizing mics, we're going to have to be doing all kinds of shit like that. There's a good chance that there will be crew members dedicated, you know, on, on gigs dedicated to COVID compliance for a while. Yeah, there'll be sanitation and compliance crew for sure. Yeah. Yeah, you know, and when I say sanitation, I don't mean janitor's this time. I mean, like, like high level sanitation, straight up people paid to go around with you know, uh, ENJA bacterial and viral cleaners and wipe everything down, you know, high touch points and stuff like that. So that's, uh, that's a whole world we're about to be getting into and maybe we could do an episode on it sometime, you know, yeah, it'll make sense to do that. I mean, even in the context of the, the, the streams I've done that are in venues, the, the procedure for how it's happened is so different than a normal gig. It's not like there's just loading in it happens and everything happens at the same time and then you start the gig. It might be band arrives, no one else is allowed to be there. Stage hands help them get their stuff on stage. Once their stuff's on stage, they leave and then, you know, maybe audio crew comes up, uh, you know, it's, you kind of pre prep everything in separate stages so you can get like lines run, subsnakes and stuff. Then band comes out and does their thing. Then they leave and then you run XLRs and mics and that and then it's more like a minimizing the groups of people interacting with each other because of course, audio needs to work with audio, right? And then, yeah, artists that interacts with it with artists and then other than that, we kind of stay on opposite ends of, you know, electronic connections, you know, right? Right. Right. It's, uh, it's interesting, you know, and separated by testing, you know, like constant testing if it's like a long-term thing, right? Right. Right. So it's, uh, it'll be a new, a new fun reality, you know, um, but at least it's at least some stuff's happening. You know, as much as it's a pain in the ass, it's really interesting to see people interacting with one another again and for the most part, everyone's being pretty amazing to each other. Everyone's just so grateful to be able to do these gigs and everyone is trying so hard to do these gigs and make sure that they can come back safely, that they are spending the extra effort to be really, you know, respectful and work at their best. Yeah. I have a feeling that, that feeling of like gratefulness, like from just music and events in general is kind of going to, it's going to be like really heavy when everything comes back because we're just all going to be so happy to like experience those things as groups again. Yeah. No one's going to be walking around slumped overall, jaded, you know, and cranky for the, at least the first month, you know, I might be, that's just because I'm, that's because you're still doing gigs and you're, yeah, yeah, I never got to stop, I never got to have a break and complain about. Well, right. Yeah. Just kidding. So, so what are we talking about today? All right. So, yeah, we're, we're continuing this, this building in front of house mix. Yeah. You know, this was supposed to be a two-part episode. This whole, the whole building in front of house was supposed to be two parts. I think, I think we all had a hunch that that, that wasn't going to happen. It was going to be at least three. But the fact that it's five, yeah, you're right. That's, that's a bit much. Well, what, what that said, I mean, maybe this one will be short-ish. I, I, I have the inclination that it will be short. I wouldn't bet, I wouldn't bet on it. All right. All right. All right. Grouping and VCA's. Baby. Okay. So, I guess we need to start with, with explaining what they are, right? Groups, VCA's, you know, they're a manor of getting a bunch of channels through a single channel of sorts, right? Yeah. So, I guess I'll take on groups. So, groups specifically, also called subgroups by some people, also called busing by some people. There's a lot of terms for this kind of thing. Stems. Same kind of idea. The idea is, ultimately, you can take a bunch of input channels and route them through one group, if you will. It's an alternate channel type, wherein, in, in an analog world, actual signal passes through that group. In a digital world, it's seeing a little different, obviously, right? But the idea is that that group, single fader, can control, can control a sum of multiple inputs. And what makes groups different from VCA is that on a group, you can put an EQ on it. You can put a compressor, it will have an insert point. You can actually put a piece of processing there that will change the sound of that sum of all the inputs. Is that, is that kind of cover it? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I'd say so. You know, it's, it's the signal, at least in the analog world, the signal physically passes through it. Yeah. And, you know, I guess in a digital world, you can kind of mentally assume the signal passes through it, right? Right. But the main difference there is that all your channels that are assigned to that group, the audio actually sums and goes through that group. And on that group, you have the option to add things like EQ, compression, effects, whatever it may be. You can actually process the audio as a group. Right. Are there any terms I missed? You know, what did I say? Submit, Stan? I wanted to ask you something about the terminology, actually, for sure. When you call it a bus, can you call like an ox send? Is that also a bus? It is. Yeah, okay. Yeah. Any, anywhere the signal can travel is a bus. So really the only difference between an ox send and a group is that an ox send has a variable level, right? You can turn it from minus infinity up to, I don't know, plus 20, depending on whatever the desk is, right? You have a variable level. Right. A group effectively is an on/off switch. So you turn it on at unity or you turn it off. And both of them can be kind of treated the same way. I mean, you could use a group to send to effects. You could use a group to send to, I don't know, a subwoofer. But the only difference really is that you don't get that variable level. Right. So basically, if you like inserted a reverb effect on a group's insert and you sent everything to that group, it's kind of like your wet signal returning. Yeah. You could totally do that. The only difference is that you don't get to choose how much of any signal you send into it. Right. Instead, it's just either on or off. The fader feeds it rather than an ox knob or something like that. Right. Pretty much. I don't know if there's an alternate to this, but pretty much always post fader. Right. Yeah. I don't know if I can think of a group that is pre-fade. I don't know if I can think of a console that lets you do that. Yeah. Well, I mean, not to get into specifics, but maybe it might, in analog Midas that has like the, the oxes, well, no, the oxes and the groups are like variable. Like you can switch between it for each bus. It'll be like 24 buses, which you make, whichever one's oxes and maybe there would, I don't know if I'm right in this, but maybe there might be possible as long as I'm not even sure if on those, it lets you, once you assign it to group, I think it automatically makes a post fader. Post fader, yeah, you're probably-- But I'm not sure. Either way, though, the gist is the majority of use case here. Its post channel fader is what's feeding to that group. Right. I mean, Joe, what's a group you use in your user show? I like to kind of use groups as stems in general, and kind of route everything through groups, because I'll do a lot of group processing, even if it's just like a hint of EQ, or at least just to have the option, even if I'm on a nice rig and everything's flat on the groups, at least if I need to go just quickly dump a lot of something out of the whole drum kit or something like that, it's like, I have that option. And also parallel compression, I feel like that's a good place for that to happen. And these are both assuming digital, and we had talked maybe a little bit before about this too. But in the analog world, you might be limited by routing options, so you might do something like if you have two kick channels, bust them to a group and have a kick group so you can gate and compress them together, or same thing for snares, or something like that. And then there's the typical effects group, the effects for trends group. I like that a lot, because then I can EQ all the effects together. If I have some big crazy, affected reverb delay thing, some stuff might build up in the low end, low mid range, something like that, and it's nice to just like have, instead of having to EQ five returns or four returns or whatever it is, just go and dump it all on the close. Yeah. So, things like that. I was going to agree, with multi-micro, multi-micro instruments, like kick drum, snare. In both digital and analog, I find that super useful to group them, to just process them as like a single, almost like it's a single channel. Yeah. Especially with dynamics, dynamics on a transient instrument like that, it'll make a big difference. Yeah. Regarding kick and snare, in terms of grouping, I always put kicks, multiple mics into a group, snares, multiple mics into a group. And for me, the reason is, if I want to compress either of those, having a compressor on a kick in and a compressor on a kick out, even if they're on the same setting, they tend to react a little bit differently, just because there is, I don't know, a time differential and just difference in the two signals. And I find that that doesn't sound as cohesive, as tight, as round, if you will, as putting one compressor on the group instead. It just reacts better in my opinion, same for a snare. I would say it reacts more consistently, you know what I mean? You're having two different dynamics processes on two different sources, and all the changes that can occur within that, whereas when you put them together, it kind of, you know, they kind of will balance each other out, so to speak, if I don't know. Although I will say, in the analog world, though, I would insert, you know, kick in, kick out gate on a two channel unit and hit the stereo link button, so that my left channel, my kick in, would be the one opening both or compressing both, so at least the response was identical with that. Right. And on a digital console, you could key the gate of one of them to the other one. Right. Right. Yeah, I mean, I guess regarding gating, I always gait on individual channels, but I will compress on groups. And that might just be because I might want a longer release, let's say, for snare bottom, then snare top or kick out, versus kicking that kind of stuff. It's really just a tonal thing, but yeah, I still use the heck out of groups there. I mean, as you said, Joe, I use groups on almost everything. Yeah. It's actually more than just using them on everything, because I like reducing the number of faders under my finger, because obviously that's nice. But also, I record stems of my groups a lot. So I'll have my whole drum kit go to the recorder as well, like post processing, my whole base, go to the recorder, my guitar stem, keys stem, just in case someone ever wants it. I have it. I mean, we're in a world now where, like, it's so easy to record this stuff and hard drive space is not expensive. I might as well capture that stuff as well. So I mean, I think it's only come up a handful of times ever where someone's needed it. Like maybe we had a fill-in keys player for one gig, I just sent him a key stem, or sent him a stem of the whole band minus keys so he can kind of jam along to learn, you know. That's cool. That kind of stuff. I got a question for you guys. If you're limited on the number of groups you have the capability of doing, what's your like first, second choice? Quit the gig and get a gig that's not limited. Band vocal compressor, like parallel and effects. Those are my four. Can I get four? Is that enough? Is that too much? You got four? Four mono. Four mono, yeah. Four mono, oh shit. Okay. So it's just vocal, vocal comp, and then we're going mono effects that day. All right. Right. Okay. I could see that. Main vocal, vocal compress, so you can get a parallel compress there, right. And then you said mono effects. Yeah. But that was-- So you still have one more. What's your fourth? No. I guess, you know, it would be something I was going to process together, you know. It would be like, yeah, kicks or snares or something. Yeah. I figure if that's what I add, I'd probably also take a kick snare, double bust, compress this knot out of it and blend that in on the last group, you know. You know, the kick snare move is a good move because, you know, 90% of the time, they're not hitting both at the same time. Right. So you can find and like, you know, those are kind of like the two big drums, you know, so you can kind of find a spot a lot of times with the threshold where it's like, kind of works with both. Right. So that's not a bad move either. I mean, Brandon, what about you? If you had four comps or sorry, four groups, what would you do with them? And the past, what I've done is I'll do a, like a stereo vocal group. And I'll actually some, I'll send the effects that the vocals are going to, their returns to that group with the vocal. So I'll send them all to there. And then I'll kind of use the main left right as like my band group, if you will. And then maybe I'll do like just drums to like another stereo group or kick on one and snare on the other, or like all the guitars to like a stereo group or something like that. And then just use the main left right for everything else. Yeah. I feel like if you're doing, if you were, you know, actually limited to four groups, then you have, you pretty much have to be on like a mixed wizard or something analog. Well, you'd be on something small. So like, okay, this is getting really good. I'm kind of, but I'm kind of like the scenario is like you're mixing monitors from front of house. And you've got like a small, like digital desk or something like that. So also it's like the place is tiny and like, maybe there's no guitars in the PA, you know, right? Yeah. So it really depends, it depends on the PA, the room, blah, blah, blah. You know, if I look back to when I was doing gigs on like the Mackie CRs and, and, and a mixed wizard, I don't even, I'm not even sure it was out at the time. But anyways, when I was doing the gigs on those kind of things, we did only have four groups on, on the desks output, right? And I remember I would take group one and two as kick snare because I only had a two channel compressor slash gate. And I would put it on group one, two, and then another compressor gate was on group three, four. Those are the two units we had where two, two channel compressor gates. And rather than having to unplug them under the desk and kind of like do this, they would just, they just lived on group one, two, three, four, right? So then you just routed whatever you needed to those, whatever you did to those. So right, I would use, I don't know, kick to group one so I could, you know, gate it nicely, snare to group two. So I don't know, maybe I'd gate it, but I definitely put a compressor on it. And then three was kind of like the man, I don't know what I'm going to do. Four was always a double bus vocal, right? And it's because when you're talking something like that, usually you're in a room that's small. Usually you're in a room with not enough PA. And usually you're trying to find a way to get your vocal over a band, right? So I had my vocal routed left right, and then I'd also routed to group four, and sometimes also group three. And those were kind of like my extra gas vocal, right? And you know, they might be compressed, they might not, but it all kind of depends on what you needed at the time. It's like, if you're in a spot where you just really need to get that vocal over a bunch of noise in the room, I always check it in all the parts. Yeah. Checking in all of them and like do something a little bit different with them so that's not literally just volume increase, but maybe density increase or whatever you know. But yeah, groups, the good old days, the good old days, it's funny because like I don't even think about things like being limited to groups anymore because nowadays with digital systems, it's you, you're pretty, I just want to make sure our podcast was still relating to, you know, the people that everyone that's in the, in the bar venue and you know, all that. Are you saying not everybody has 256 here every tower that the years are? Every six L towers. Right. I will say I have maxed out the buses on my desk before, but it's kind of because you can rather than because you need to like a lot of this stuff, man, it's because you can rather than you need to, right? Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah, maybe that's, that's an important conversation too, just like, because it's there, doesn't mean you have to use it. That's totally true, right? I mean, in the context of me saying I can so I do, it's because I also have a rig here and I can test out a million different ideas, try stuff, see if it works or whatever and find what does and actually find what does find what doesn't. And also I'm in a scenario where I'm able to go, well, for this song, I want it to sound like a vintage Motown snare for this song. I wanted to sound like this for this song. I want to sound like this and I'll use a bunch of groups and things like that to achieve completely different tones for different songs. It's not relevant to 99.9 percent of people. In fact, it probably shouldn't even be relevant to me, but I'm doing it because I had to do that. I'm going to edit it out. I'm going to edit it out of this podcast. I don't want anyone to even know that you've pulled anyone that. No, yeah, it makes perfect sense. In a recording, in a mix for a recording, you automate the shit out of it. There's different tracks for different textures. We're getting to the point now with live sound technology where you can kind of execute shit like that, you know, and with the automation component too, snapshots like that. I hear that at great shows too. I heard I was at a show where they played their first album from 20 years ago and it sounded like that. But then when they got to the modern songs, the sound had totally shifted throughout the show. Yeah, and to be honest, when people do this on records, you know, you can automate plugins, you can automate levels, pans and stuff. When you're doing it live, it's a lot harder to do those detailed things with automation. But if you duplicate channels and put them on other channels or other groups, you just mute on mute and you can effectively get the same kind of automation you've done in, you know, a studio recording. But you've just done it by using more channels or using more groups because it's way easier for us to manage on-offs or faders than it is to manage like getting to redoing a whole EQ or something. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Just have it set on, yeah, exactly. Like you said, three different channels on the same source, you know, and use one at a time as needed kind of thing. Right. Yeah. I mean, I toured with Mayor Hawthorne for a bit. Mayor Hawthorne does a lot of like very motown sounding stuff. And then in addition to that, he's got kind of like 90s R&B sounding stuff and kind of modern R&B sounding stuff. And when I did that gig, I remember we had multiple kick mics, multiple snare mics. And for certain songs, we used these super dirty old snare mics. Yeah. And for other songs, we used the kind of modern sounding stuff because we didn't have the option to like switch out snare in between songs. I mean, I guess technically we could have, but it was just complicated, you know, it's more stuff to carry. Especially if you're doing flydates, you can't rent five snares and hope that they all actually achieve the sound you want, you know. But yeah, multiple channels, multiple groups, that kind of thing. So Brennan, what's a VCF? That was a good, that was a, you turn, you turn the car, transition like we're going off of the plane. We're right about to thumb and leave it. That's, it was all necessary. We didn't get into unnecessary work. That's why we need to add sponsors to just like have a clean break, you know, what? Yeah. That break right now is going to be like, I was about to just like drop a brand name. Yeah. Okay. VCA is voltage controlled amplifiers. And what they do, do you guys want to talk about you? Want me to kick it off a little bit? Kick it off. Everything. Teach me, man. Well, rather than a group where you send things to it, voltage controlled amplifier controls multiple faders on your desk. So let's say you assign all of your drums to VCA one, when you move that VCA fader up and down, it's controlling the level of all your drum faders. And it's keeping their relative positions too. So like, if your high hat mic is all the way down and your VCA fader is at unity, no high hat mic is coming through or if your high hat mic is all the way up and your VCA is all the way down, then no high hat mic is coming through. If that makes, I don't know why I use that as an example. It does make sense, but that was just a terrible, terrible example. These are the two ways you can make no sound. Thanks, Brendan. But actually, that brings me to a point that I did want to bring up because. Don't forget to turn your VCA on. Make sure it's not muted. No, if things are assigned to it because sometimes it's not 100% obvious, especially, I mean, on digital consoles, sometimes you can actually see, like, LED reading on the meters. But sounds not getting out because of VCA, it might be down and you're like, "Oh my God, what's going on?" Before you go jack in the preamp, gain up to, you know, frigging four o'clock or whatever it is and just check your VCA. So now that we've talked about all the things that are bad about VCA's, why don't you tell me what they're actually useful for? Oh, man. These terrible things. No, they're great. VCA's are awesome because you can basically control a bunch of faders with one. So, you know, you don't want to, if you don't want to, like, run around your desk, if it's a big desk going from one side to the other, especially, you can, like, be standing right in the center of your desk, which is usually where the VCA's are and just be, like, moving all your guitars up and down with the song. So it allows you a lot more control with what's happening. So, I mean, you know, like you said, the relative level is kept there, right? So if you've got, let's say a drum kit, it's an easy example. You've got a drum kit and you kicks it, you need to, you're snares of plus one, you're high hats at minus five, right? I want the whole drum kit to be louder. Rather than trying to, like, get my fingers on all the channels that are the drum kit and move them up at exactly the same relative level, you know, because faders aren't linear anyways, you know, as you're close to unity, you move them in inch, they only do, I don't know, five, 10 dB. But once you're low, they're doing way more than that. So your VCA then gives you one fader, you can push up, take the entire drum kit up or down or whatever and maintain its relative level, like, you're, like, you're kicked to snare at a high hat and all that, and just turn up the whole thing. Can you do that with a group? Yeah, you could. So what's the purpose in using one verse the other? Joe, why don't you take that part? Well, I guess I can. Oh, no, man. I guess it just mutes things. The way I differentiated is, you know, with a group, you know, again, digital consoles, what's actually happening, maybe it's a little bit blurred here, but essentially, you know, with a group, the signal is actually routing from your fader to the group and the group fader and then, you know, on from there, wherever you're assigning it, whereas a VCA, the signal isn't actually passing through it. It's just controlling what's already going on and adding to or taking away from your fader position. So you don't get something like an insert on a VCA. You can't put an EQ on a VCA, you can't put, you know, things like that. So that's the difference. Yeah, I like to describe a VCA as a remote control. That's basically what it is, right? So, you know, for an analog, you know, it is a remote control that is controlling other faders on the desk, right? Those other faders, they don't physically move on most analog desks, but as I move my VCA up and down, it it's effectively under the hood, remote controlling that fader, turning it up and down. When you go to, you know, analog studio world, yeah, there are VCA's on SSL's that physically move other faders and on knee desks, you move them up and down, the other faders actually move, you can see what it's doing. But VCA is effectively remote control. So when it comes to using it, I find it the most useful for controlling stuff that's not on my top layer on my digital desk. So I might have four background vocalists and they're singing or whatever during bits of songs here and there. They're not actually on my top level of my console because I have so many other channels that I need to pay attention to. Instead, I have this one VCA fader that I can kind of push up and down with all the background vocalists. And it maintains the blend and is beautiful and don't need an insert on that. And I don't need an insert on it, right? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I guess that's the big difference, right? VCA is the remote control for other channels, and the group is actually a pass through for audio. Audio actually goes through it. So what do you put on a VCA, Joe? Oh, just things that I need to control it, I don't have groups for, you know? And would you otherwise put it on a group if you just had enough groups? Yeah, you know, like I just, just to keep it consistent, you know, I just kind of operate in that world. Sometimes I'll use VCA groups as mute groups because sometimes like on some analog consoles, you know, there might be an option to like link that, you know, or where the mute group is essentially just a VCA. So yeah, you could, you know, like you said, if you didn't want to go picking around through layers and so like that, you could do like, if you, if you have a bunch of effects returns, but you don't necessarily use them all at the same time, you know, you could have VCA's for groups of them for different, you know, applications, you know, one, one song, the vocal has a big, big delay, big reverb, you know, big dramatic thing and then another song it's kind of dry and just has a little room or something to, to fill it out. You know, you can just pop those two settings on with, you know, with one, one button push rather than, you know, again, muted and unmuting with how many returns. But for the most part, you're not really much of a VCA user, huh? Not much, man. Again, depending on the scenario, you know, analog desks, they come into play a lot more, I feel like, because, you know, your options are limited and, you know, yeah, just depending on the workflow on an analog show, I'd probably put my effects on a VCA, you know, just all of them, you know. Right. Well, the other thing, the other point of note though is that, okay, on groups on an analog desk, yes, you can put, you know, compressors, gates, EQs. But on an analog desk, often the desk doesn't actually have it there. You need to use an external hardware device for that. Yeah. So if you want to put an EQ on a group, you might have to use an outboard EQ. If you want to put a gate on a group, a compressor, it's all going to be outboard. So yeah, it can be more complicated for sure. Yeah. Absolutely. And also, you know, stupid things, again, this is more of the analog thing, but a lot of times a group master on an analog desk is kind of small, you know, the group master fader, you know, it's kind of, it's up in the master section and it's not the same, exactly. It's not the size of a channel fader, but then the VCA's will be, you know, in the middle in the bank, you know, just under the master section and that's a whole, so you have that whole, this is a rangel word granularity. So that's, that's something to consider, you know, totally, totally, Brennan, do you use VCA's more? I do. I use them a ton. I mean, I'll try and put, try and be able to control my whole mix from VCA's usually. I mean, essentially what I want to have on there is usually my returns for my delay and my reverb separately. So that in between songs, I can like bring it up and bring it down. And is that, is that ultimately about getting that fader into the middle of the desk physically near you? Yeah. For sure. Especially on an analog desk. I mean, and, and then like also on smaller digital desks, I don't want to be banking. Like I, I don't want to be banking. I can do it, but like it's so much easier just to have it there. But I'll try and, I'll try and have one for like, I mean, if, depending on how many I have, drums, bass, all guitars, background vocals, lead vocals is important to me too, because I'll kind of like ride, I'll ride the lead vocal VCA. And then the, the effects returns too, so that I can kind of be like controlling that at all times with my ears. And yeah, I was going to say something else at, I was wondering, do you guys use what I've heard from, from other people about VCA's is they'd be able to like put like kind of your, like ride your channels into compression on their groups. So people will like push with the VCA's. So that it'll push their channels into their groups where they have compressors. That is exactly what I'm using for. Okay. Yeah. I think Dave, that's like Dave Ratzhole thing too, I mean, I don't know if you guys have seen this. Probably, but I started doing it, I don't know who said it or what or how it came up. But if you go back to the Heritage and Legend desks, right, the Myr, Mydesks, you had the groups on a row right above your VCA's, right? And on the desk I'm thinking, they were one right above another, basically. So I might have a drum VCA that controls my drum inputs. My drum inputs then fed into a drum group. And that group had a compressor on it, right? So if I took my VCA and pushed it up, it would just be pushing my drums harder into the compressors. The compressor would be hitting it, right? But if I wanted my drums actually to get louder, I could take the group and move the group up. So I learned to use that as a dynamic to kind of change what was the intensity of the show. If I wanted it to feel more intense, and like we're not talking about changing the volume of the drums, we're talking just about feeling of intensity. If I wanted it to feel more intense, I'd take the VCA, push it up, so that it's hitting the compressor harder, and I'd take the groups and pull the group down so that the total volume didn't change, but it's getting compressed real hard, so it feels intense. If I wanted it to feel less intense, I'd do exactly the opposite. I'd take the VCA, pull it back so it's no longer being compressed, and take the group and push it up, so that we'd end up with this like more open sound. And that's something was totally analog. I totally stole that from the analog world, but I pulled it into my digital. That's how I work in digital now, too. So I have a VCA that is my drum inputs that feed into a drum group that has compression on it. So it's like your threshold knob? Kind of. Yeah. It's like your gain knob, too. It's like on an 1176 or something where you have an in and an out, and it's just like this invisible threshold. It's like that. You're turning those two at the same time to choose to make it feel more compressed or feel less compressed. Right. Yeah. That's a good metaphor, yeah. It's the 1176 workflow, essentially. Yeah. Pretty much. And any compressor within an out, no threshold. Right. And no threshold. Exactly. I mean, it worked really well for me. I mean, there's a couple other spots where I use VCA's, but for the most part, they're kind of like digital-only workflows. So for example, my PA might be left, right, sub, fill, out, fill, mono, fill, bar, fill. I don't know how many there is, right? I want one fader that takes my whole PA up and down. So I'll take a VCA, assign it to all my output matrixes. And you can do that on the digital world. You can take a VCA and assign it to outputs or groups or things like that. You can't do that in a lot of other places, of analog world. Without just checking up your master fader. Well, my master fader is not actually my master mix. I've got, you know, as Brendan mentioned, this is something I've been doing for years. I've got band going into there and then separately, vocal goes in and they all sum at the matrix. Right. Right. But also, if I apply that, but also, if I jack my master fader, I fuck my recording. My recording is postmaster fader. Sure. So if I move that, I've now screwed up the whole recording. And what I'm trying to do is just make the PA louder, quieter. So I keep a PA VCA and I usually keep it on like a layer two or somewhere else. But the idea is that if I want the whole thing a little bit louder, a little quieter. Yeah, I mean, I should probably go to systems and go, hey, can you trim this up a bit? But sometimes I'm just like, shit, I need this right now. You know, like on the downbeat of the start of the show and like the crowd's going wild and you're like, they hit the first note and you're like, oh God, this is too quieter. This is too loud. You just need to be able to trim it up without asking somebody else to do it and taking those, you know, extra minutes. True. True. That's cool. You can just bump it up to DB or whatever and then as the crowd kind of starts to settle I can pull it back down, you know, nice. And then so you're recording your left right though, like all your groups are going to the left right. And that's just like what you're using to record. No. Because my record is still built the same way as my matrices where it's like band bus, which is my left right and the vocals that meet there. But if I've got a record matrix that's filled of, you know, left right plus group 1 plus group 2 plus group 3, if I take my left right and turn it up, I, my record's a mess. Right. Gotcha. Gotcha. But even if I was just recording basically my left right, if I push my left right up and down, I screw up my record, I'm changing the volume of the recording, right? So the one other spot where I'm hooked on VCA's is effects and I don't mean effects returns. I mean effects sense. So I don't put my returns on a VCA because usually I want the tails of my effects to keep happening. So I put the effects send masters into an effects VCA. And when it goes to, I don't know, a song ends or something, I pull that down. You still hear the tails of the reverbs. You still hear the tails of the delay. But then when you know my singer or whatever says something again, you don't hear all that stuff. And that has to be a VCA. I can't do that with a group because it's the sends that are getting remotely controlled at that point, not the returns. Right. I mean, really that's, I think those are the only two places where I like absolutely have to have it. Hi, I need my VCA's here. You know, it is funny though. I mean, I find it hard to explain to people when to use a group and when to use a VCA. I think you just did it pretty well. Yeah. I mean, I think it's, well, I gave you examples, but it's a bit of, it's not really a why, you know? Well, there's a lot of, there's a lot of things that aren't, you know, based on why in this. And, you know, there's some creativity here where there's, where the rules are malleable, you know, and then on the rules. So Brendan, you were going to say something. I mean, I was just going to say it's based on preference too. I mean, obviously if you have a good flow with the VCA's and it's like making your mixes sound better to you and to the band and to the audience, then like, yeah, if you're using them. Right. That's the cool thing about this podcast and this profession because you can, you know, you can almost never be wrong. It's always just like, it depends, man. You don't know Ryan, sometimes you're just wrong. I feel like Brendan was about to rip me on that one. No, I just saw it coming from a mile away. I was like, Ryan's about to like go in on this right now. Ryan's about to say, no, you're just wrong. I'm about to go, phase is not polarity. That's, that's the one that Brendan's seen me kind of like blow up on. I wouldn't say blow up, but all right, it's a perfect, but you know, if I, if I had to define when I'd use one verse, the other grouping, I'd use when I want to actually affect the audio of the group, VCA is I want to use when I want remote control of that fader. And at the end of the day, if your desk lets you put eight VCA's in front of you and not some VCA, some groups or something like that, then you're probably going to want to use VCA's for more stuff because it's about access at the end of the day, right? We want to put as many kind of things on as few faders so that we have the most control with our eight fingers. Right. Yeah, you only got two hands. Thumbs don't count, but does anyone mix with their thumbs, push pushing a fader with your thumb? That's, that's creepy. That's like a weird move. You know, I don't know. I don't know. I feel about that, guys. I don't know if I've ever done this. Now that I'm thinking about it. Now that you've said it, I'm thinking about it and as I'm thinking about it, it's something about it. I think we, yeah, we need to like patent some thumb extenders. So your thumb is like at the same length as your other fingers. So when you're like, oh my god, you can get 10 faders in. What would you call that? If you made that product, what would you call it? Oh, God. The finger on, give this guy the finger. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So all right. We've kind of defined groups VCA's. You've even touched a bit on this, but like what are the major differences here in workflow between digital and analog regarding groups and VCA's? You know, we went over a lot of them, but just to kind of like put it all in one place. You know, I guess it's a lot of times the analog world, it's, it has to do with your, your limitation of your limitations essentially and kind of making things more convenient ergonomically, getting all the faders in one place, you know, limitations in the sense that, you know, you might have only this much outboard gear. So you're grouping things together to get, you know, multiple sources into a single insert, you know, at the same time, things like that, I think. Yeah. I think so too. I feel like, yeah, I feel like there's more similarities than differences because I feel like in both worlds, you're using it to simplify your work. Yeah. Yeah. I agree with you. And ultimately, right, the idea is that we got a heap of inputs. We only have a handful of fingers and, you know, we want to take that large amount of inputs and reduce it down to manageable sizes, right? And if we reduce it down in groups of things that make sense, then we can kind of reduce it down and down and down, right? So you might take kick and in, kick out, you might send that to kick group, and then you might group that with the whole rest of the drum kit, and now you've taken things down from a larger amount of faders to a smaller to an even smaller, right? Yeah. I just remembered that there's one cool workflow that I've heard from somebody, and it is using both groups and VCA's, wherein you use groups for groups of instrument types, things like, I don't know, keys or guitar or drums or whatever. And then use VCA's for the player specifically, the actual player on stage. So you might have Jim's VCA, Bob's VCA, Robbie's VCA. So when Robbie comes up to the front of the stage and starts kicking off the solo, all you got to do is grab Robbie's VCA, it doesn't matter if he picked up the ukulele or the mandolin or the guitar or the whatever it is. When you see him come up there, you push him up and it kind of, you know, pulls it together. That's a pretty cool way to use it. Yeah. Yeah. Kind of differentiate it that way. Yeah. But anyways, I mean, I feel like we went probably way more in depth than we should have on groups in VCA's and now. I would say it's closer to the perfect amount as well, yes. Everything we do is perfect, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah. Flawless. Including recording audio, which we are supposedly professional. No, no, no, we're just flawless at blowing computers up. Right. Just destroy your computer podcast. Flawless victory. Oh my God. We're going way back. All right. So, catch us on the next episode. The next episode is actually going to be pretty cool. There's a lot of fun stuff in there. We keep calling it basic front-of-house workflows, but it's not. This is going to be some deep stuff. It's going to be good. Nice. Looking forward to catching you guys next week, month, year, whatever it is that we actually release the next podcast. Find us on that Facebook group we set up and if you guys want to email us, questions, comments, whatever. Let's feed back at liveSoundBooCamp.com. Yeah. Give us some feedback. We're curious. We're curious to hear what anyone listening, you know, give us what you got. Rate and review on Apple. All those things. It can only be good things, too. Don't tell us anything bad. If you say anything bad, send it directly to Brendan. Yeah. All right. Well, thanks for listening, guys. Take it easy. And, girls. [APPLAUSE]