So last night I brought my new Stagescape mixer to our 7 piece band practice to set up and tweak our sound and record a few songs. We use a Bose L1 model II sound system as our PA, which has incredible sound and serves our small to medium size venues quite well (under 500 people). We decided to insert the Stagescape into the chain and, send the Main mix outputs to the Bose, using it as our P.A., plus we had a few stage monitors, to which we sent a monitor mix out of the Monitor A output on the Stagescap. Ok enough backstory...onto the issue.
The guys were all abuzz with the new toy. I had done a pre-set up before practice to save time, placing each vocal mic and band member's instrument onto the stage and assigning an input on the unit. At practice we plugged everyone in and started with a sound check. There are 6 vocalists in the band so I utilized the auto-trim feature and hit "start analysis" for all 6 vocalists as they sang acapella harmonies into their respective Mics. Levels were set and it all sounded beautiful! Then I muted all the Mics and had the guys all play their instruments and I set all the instrument levels (guitars, bass, mandolin, keys and drums). All sounded great! Then we decided to play and record a song to the 32GB SD card. That's were the issue came into play.
When we started to play, the vocal levels went way down and were almost unheard against the instruments in our PA. We finished the song. I stopped the recording and played it back through the Bose system and all the vocal levels against the instrument levels were fine!! We tried it again, and over and over the same issue: The vocals all dropped down under the instruments during our live playing and recording. But on playback of the recording the levels were good!
I'm sure there is a reason behind this and so I wanted to put this out to all those with more experience that me on the Stagescape. Is there something I don't know about the Trim tracking? Could it be that the instrument outputs from all the amps on stage are bleeding into the microphones, creating hotter levels and thereby causing the Stagescape to use Trim Tracking to compensate by adjusting the MIC input levels down? Why does this only happen on live playing and not on playback then?
Any solutions to how to overcome this? Thanks in advance for your thoughts!
C-Dog, Vancouver Island, BC, Canada