The vocals in The Circus in Winter were like Sondheim from a mixer’s perspective: lots of people and groups of people speaking and overlapping within a page. It would have been difficult to consistently mix vocals for the complex sequences on input faders, and there was a bluegrass/rock band onstage with several musicians doubling instruments to add to the workload. The DM2000 posed some particular challenges.
With most modern theatre consoles we would have assigned vocals or groups of vocals to VCA masters on a cue-by-cue basis, but the automation on the DM2000 made this difficult: we couldn’t recall just the VCA assignments in a snapshot. The VCA assignments on the DM2000 are considered part of the fader, so using VCAs would mean recalling every fader’s level in every cue. This wouldn’t work because if we adjusted a band level in one song, for instance, the adjustment would be overwritten when we recalled the next cue.
Instead, we used the console’s eight buses to mix vocals, automating just the routing on a cue-by-cue basis, and sending all of the buses to a vocal matrix. Band routing never changed much, so tracking changes through wasn’t an issue, and aux assignments were still recall-safe.
I made four remote layers, each of which had the same faders on the right: buses 1-7 for mixing vocals, bus 8 for vocal reverb, a group fader that controlled band outputs, and a vocal reverb return. I made the 12 faders on the left different in each layer: band on layers 1 and 2, vocals on 3 and 4, so that I could access any input I need quickly without losing my master faders on the right.
