When mixing musical theatre, I use a workflow that makes mixing live incredibly enjoyable to get a good sound but is an absolute pain to set up. These suggestions would help make this workflow significantly easier and even possible to do with scenes.
Have a group follow a DCA: Have a button that makes a group have the same channels as a selected DCA. This way, you can get the best of both worlds.
Have recallable “templates” for channels: Some actors may have drastically different singing/speaking voices, meaning that EQ may need to change, compressor, etc. It would be great to have a place to save these changes at the top and recall them with a button or inside a scene. This should also include sends/routing to effects, groups, etc.
I’m not trying to minimize the validity of your request with this next comment. Your request is certainly valid and worthy of A&H consideration….
That being said, you can accomplish the “group follow a DCA” functionality through the use of scenes and scene recall filters right now.
As far as having “recallable templates for channels” that already exists in the form of the Channel Library. If that functionality doesn’t offer all of the flexibility you are looking for, then you can always use the scene and recall filter method to “dial in” things exactly they way you want.
Obviously it would take some time/energy to program all of this out for a theater show, but that process is commonly done for these events.
I completely get that. From what it seems like across the feature requests, people are generally happy with the Dlive, and most of the feature requests are quality of life. You can do practically anything on the console, but it just may not be the easiest to do that.
As for the channel libraries, I literally just didn’t know that existed. If you save a input that has a channel library applied to a scene, do you know if the scene will follow the library or be hardcoded to the values it was recorded at?
When you store a scene, it always saves all applicable settings (you can see which settings are saved in scenes by referencing the DLive’s firmware reference guide section 13.1). Scenes don’t save libraries however (libraries are stored as part of the “Show” file). As such, the scene has no concept of the library and part of what a scene saves is the current processing settings for every channel. This means if you recall a scene it will overwrite every current setting on the console with whatever is stored in the scene (including every channel’s processing settings). Of course you can and should use the Scene and/or Global Recall Filters to narrow what is overwritten/changed when you recall a scene when you only want certain settings to change and not everything. Keep in mind that data is still stored in the scene file, it’s just the recall filter prevents it from overwriting the console’s current setting.
Alternatively, you can use channel libraries and achieve pretty much the same results when it comes to changing a specific channel’s processing settings. A library might be easier to use when you want to save the audio processing for a specific musician/actor and then load those settings on a channel when the channel that this musician/actor is using moves around during the show. You can use Actions (and assign an action to a softkey) to load an input library on a selected channel which one way that you can load a library.
Still, given that the scene system allows you to change so many more settings (like changing the physical layout of the Surface so that it shows all of the channels that you need to access for this scene), I think the scene system (with appropriately programmed scene recall filters) is probably the easier “total solution” when you need the system to change from scene to scene because with one button press, you can have the system totally change (Surface layer elements, what channels are turned up/unmuted, individual channel processing settings, etc, etc, etc). A library can’t change all of those settings.