Mackie 1402 VLZ Pro: For When Your FOH Mixer Ain't Gotta Whole Lotta Channels
A FOH mix engineer can only do so much. When you bring as many instruments to a gig as Sones de México typically does, you should expect to be be to pick up some of the slack. Juan Díes employs a Mackie 1402 VLZ Pro for just this reason. You might want to consider the same solution if you also happen to double, triple, quadruple or quintuple on different instruments during a live set. Live engineers everywhere will thank you.
[SONES DE MEXICO PERFORMING]
JUAN DIES: My name is Juan Dies. I’m a musician in the group Sones de Mexico Ensemble. We specialize in Mexican traditional music.
[SONES DE MEXICO PERFORMING]
JUAN DIES: One of the challenges we have at doing our shows with as many instruments as we have is that we run out of channels in a lot of places where we play, so we have to recourse to a few different tricks. One of them is sub-mixing, and as long as you’re sub-mixing one person’s instrument through a board, the sound engineer can always control your output.
In this case, I have this Mackie 1402 VLZ Pro, and I have all the instruments that I play going through this. We get a nice balance, and it goes out on a stereo signal to the sound engineer, and he just controls my instruments as a unit. I never play more than one simultaneously so it’s okay.
Another thing that we’ve done is we’ve started traveling with a sound engineer because the sound engineer needs to know our repertoire because when you have so many open channels on stage, the tendency is to try and mute whatever is not being used to avoid feedback, but sometimes, if they don’t know the song, they might not that in the middle of a song we make an instrument change and then we come in with a part and it’s not coming through because it’s muted, and that just sends us through the roof because it messes up the song. So, the sound engineer has to know the songs and come with us so they know what’s going on.
[SONES DE MEXICO PERFORMING LED ZEPPELIN’S “FOUR STICKS”]
JUAN DIES: Playing “Four Sticks” live is a challenge because it requires that we add more channels than we usually have, and there’s channels that are only used for that one particular song like the delay on the microphone is not used for any other song or some of these guitars with the octave divider and the drums are only used for that one song. So, it’s sort of a special thing when we play it.
[SONES DE MEXICO PERFORMING LED ZEPPELIN’S “FOUR STICKS”]
JUAN DIES: We’ve toyed with it. We’ve played it in the middle. Sometimes we use it at the beginning to start a show so that we can be done with that and move forward, but it’s also a very powerful song so we sometimes put it toward the second half of the show where it can really bring everything up and notice that.
People get a kick out of it, you know. They listen to -- They -- Sometimes they don’t recognize it until like halfway through the song, and that’s not one of Led Zeppelin’s best known songs either so if you know it, it’s probably because you know Led Zeppelin pretty well.
[SONES DE MEXICO PERFORMING LED ZEPPELIN’S “FOUR STICKS”]
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