Nord User Forum

How you guys manage volume when on stage?

I use two boards (NS3 and Motif XS). During rehearsels and gigs I’m always struggling with the volume balance between the two boards and the general volume. The other bandmembers discuss sometimes to keep my hands off of the volume.
Also the sound guys can’t properly mix during gigs when I always change the volume.

So, how do you manage your volume settings and make sure you dont have to touch it anymore during rehearsels and gigs.

When I had two boards with a lot of different sounds, I used a little submixer: https://mackie.com/products/mix-series-compact-mixers - the Mix5. Sound guy got one signal from me and I could manage balance for myself. Which, of course, is not the best idea to do with abandon on stage. A little tweak here or there is fine and sometimes necessary, but I rarely find myself wanting / needing to change the volume all the time. After a few rehearsals, most levels are set and stay there.

For example, I find a sound to be too soft. What I do is raise the main volume on the board (most of the time, that's easier and quicker than making one sound louder), then play on and try to remember what I just did. Now there are 2 possibilities: either everything else is too loud - then I turn down again and simply beef up the one sound I began with - or everything is alright - done! Same goes for eq issues. Sometimes I don't quite get there the first time around, but as I said, after a few rehearsals everything should be levelled.

matje wrote:… bandmembers discuss sometimes to keep my hands off of the volume….

Hi,

hands? Don‘t you ever use foot pedals for the volume? I have two of them on stage, one for each keyboard, as the challenge is not only having the right mix between the boards but also being able to play softer in verses and louder in solos or whatsoever.

And a good monitoring is one of the tricks.

Cheers from the middle of Germany

Get spare time on soundcheck and go through all songs, verse chorus etc.quickly.
Soundguy will tell which keyboard and patches out of mix. (Especially songs with heavy guitars/ distortion. What sounds ok with pop will not sound at all with rock.)

Then having had good in ear monitor and good balance mix onstage you can spot which presets are louder/quieter then others and make adjustments accordingly .

Remember! Loudness is not only solution but proper EQ of your presets!

P.S.
I was in the same situation for 5 years till i combined all possible tricks:
1. Balancing out volume at home with DAW (Audiipluggers K meter) - Real Metering
2. Soundcheck with sound engineer.
3. In ear monitoring on stage.

All of the above. I also have taken the time to balance the levels of my programs so I don't have any that are substantially lower or higher in volume. A personal mixer for the keyboard(s) with separate monitor out works well. I can send a signal to the sound engineer and use my control pedal and master volume to adjust for passages that need to stand out. I know where those settings need to be from working at home and at soundchecks and they are used consistently. With the monitor send, my monitor volume can be adjusted separately so I'm not changing my level to the sound engineer when it gets loud on stage. Good luck!

Remember that volumes NEED to be different for different songs.

If you play the horns for „Let Me Entertain You“ at the same volume as the intro to „Sledgehammer“, the sound guy will cringe and TURN YOU THE HELL DOWN — and never turn you up again.

The swell pedal is a HUGE part of my organ playing. It sometimes takes sound guys by surprise, because they’re used to people hitting an organ preset and just honking on that. But they tend to get pretty quickly that I’m a very dynamic player.

Initially, I spent months working closely with sound guys to adjust basic patch volumes, asking them to note if anything stuck out or was too quiet — if they had the time.

What I’ve found over time:
Absolute key for me is a good and balanced monitor sound — not necessarily to hear every note the guitar is playing, but to get a sense of where MY sound is in the mix. In-ear monitoring whenever possible.

I’ll usually have my own Stage at 50% output, and adjust myself up or down during Soundcheck to the point where a patch of known volume is about as loud in the band context on my monitor as I feel it ought to be. (Well, usually a little louder than everybody else would probably prefer. ) Everything else follows from there.
Especially organ I will adjust — via drawbars and swell pedal — to sit appropriately in my mix for comping, solo, fills.

And hope that it will work that way in the FoH mix as well.