If you recall last year’s posts about mixing Percy Jackson (hard to forget, I know how infrequently I update) you may recall just how obnoxious I found the experience. From being called in last minute, to working off a borrowed analog mixer (which was Frankenstein-ed into a second borrowed analog mixer), to trying to use my laptop as an FX module capable of putting reverb and multi-band compression on 22 different channels of audio: It was just never going to work out.

So I made a decision, then and there: I’m not going to run sound like this again. I mean, honestly, I tried to convince them to rent a digital console last year, but the price couldn’t be justified over “we can borrow this one for free.”

But, I digress: I bought one of my own. Through a perfect storm of obsessing over the idea, poor impulse control, and PayPal Credit approving me for the purchase, I hopped up on ebay and picked myself a “Used: Like New” Allen & Heath GLD-80. After spending a while thinking about the different options, including considering the Behringer x32 (or Midas m32, they’re the same thing anyway), and the A&H SQ series, really all I cared about was “I need to go digital” for my board. But I settled on the GLD for a few reasons:

1. Allen & Heath is the superior brand¹
2. I use Allen & Heath constantly at the theater, being that we run a dLive over there (my main theater). Because of that, I’m so much more comfortable working through the A&H user interface and menus
3. The GLD series is sort of the “junior” version of the old iLive system, which itself is the predecessor of the dLive system, which means a lot of my experience can be transferred to this setup
4. I actually had to go and help some people learn the quick basics of the x32 their school had just bought, and I swear I sat there for 30 minutes staring at different pages before I figured out how to link a channel to a DCA, which is something I can do without thinking about on A&H surfaces
5. Perhaps most importantly, aside from “my brand is the best, your brand sucks” tribal posturing, the A&H boards (specifically the GLD and iLive/dLive) do two super important things for the context of Live Theater, which is what I’m primarily mixing: AMM (Auto Mic Mixer) and Scenes

Board Features

Auto Mic Mixer

The GLD was the first board, as far as I can tell, in the Allen & Heath stables to include AMM, which is something I’ve grown to rely on in live theater. Traditionally, dialogue would be mixed on a “line-by-line” basis: Right before Person A speaks, they’ll be brought up on the board and everyone else will be brought down. As they finish speaking, Person B will be brought up on the board, and eventually Person A will be brought down. Rinse and repeat for every line by every actor. And it’s pretty critical to the overall sound of the show, since having multiple microphones open can catch a lot of the room noise and other acoustic spill. It also makes it easy for feedback to find its way into the mix, and nobody wants that.

However, thanks to the fact that The Opera House (my main theater) has 24 body mics available, and the fact that Dr. Jones loves to mix loudly, he tends to use a mic plot that every director always asks for (before being told “No” by sound engineers who know better): Put a microphone on literally every person on stage, no matter how many lines that person has, or if they sing in the ensemble. I swear, where most other theaters would settle for an offstage ensemble microphone and some area mics for coverage, he prefers to just mic every person in the cast, up to the physical limit². This means, especially in shows with a live band or other things that need to occupy surface space, I don’t always have enough faders on a page to have quick access to everyone (keep this in mind, it’s also important for the use of scenes, which is the next section), or I don’t have the speed to bring up and down so many mics across the board in time to catch any weirdness.

Enter the “Automixer” - In short, it’s a way of automating the main behavior of line-by-line mixing. Basically, the dLive uses a gain-tracking algorithm to manage which microphone should receive priorty in the mix. It’s as simple as setting up the inputs, tweaking “priority” values, and letting it run. When a channel sees higher input levels than the others, the other channels are automatically ducked in mix, and when the levels in another channel overtake the current one, that channel becomes prioritized and the previous one gets ducked. This is especially useful when many ensemble members are on stage for large group scenes, and managing the background noise in Percy Jackson last year was one of the trickiest bits. Luckily for me, the GLD was updated to include an identical AMM module to the one I’m used to on the dLive (technically, it only has one module while the dLive has 2, but that’s fine by me).

Scenes/Shows

The second most important feature that Allen & Heath, specifically the GLD (I don’t think the SQ series offers it), brings to me is the ability to save show files and scenes. This lets me program the console a lot like how one would program a lighting console or other cue-based software. Essentially: I can store pretty much every tweakable parameter in a “scene” and then skip through them using a single “GO” button. Then those parameters are loaded back to the state they were saved in. For instance, I could have a scene with 2 people speaking to each other immediately followed by a large ensemble musical number. For this, I could have one scene with the 2 people unmuted on the surface (or on the “working” page of the surface), and when it comes time for the group number, all I have to do is press “GO” and it loads the next scene. This scene could have ALL of the cast unmuted, physically group the featured vocalists on the “working” page for easy access, automatically assign the backup vocalists to a DCA for quick rebalancing, put that DCA on the “working” page too, and all with one touch.

If I really wanted to get fancy with my scenes, I could even program them to be one-per-line, and with a bit of extra cross-fade timing, fully automate a line-by-line mix… but that’s a little tedious and overcomplicated when I’m usually perfectly fine with having the relevant people on the surface to mix manually. These scenes just allow me to keep a “working” page clean that always displays only the actors that I will need for that immediate section of the script. You can think of it as front-loading the line-by-line effort into the tech process rather than the run: more time is spent at the theater during tech week programming these scenes and optimizing the flow rather than having to memorize which page certain actors are on and when I need to move pages to get to them.

There’s also saving a whole show, which is just a useful way of saving the list of scenes into a single file on the board. This means I can set up the basic routing for two different shows, save one for someone else to mix (the Junior Division show) and then come in the following week, load up my pre-saved Senior Division show file, and be good to go.

This is pretty good as an introduction, and I plan to write a bit more about this, the process of setting it up, and my experiences as a new owner as I get around to playing more and more with this board. But I’ll cover a lot of that in a part 2 follow-up article. Along with the list of “other things I had to buy” because: on its own, this board only has, like, 8 inputs and 4 outputs, which is pretty far from the 48 (I think) that it can handle.

There were also some idiosyncrasies with getting the board set up that I wasn’t ready for from my experience with the dLive. I’ll also probably talk about getting the Dante card installed and operating (thanks to Dr. Jones and The Opera House for letting me borrow this stupidly expensive accesory since they weren’t using it. Really saved me a lot of money on buying one for myself).