Monitor Workflows — Control Groups and Aux Sends

As most engineers will tell you, mixing monitors is all about speed. The faster you can make the changes necessary to get as close to the end goal as possible, the better your day will be. I want to show you a quick tip on how to accomplish that when you’re in the heat of the moment.

When I am mixing monitors on DiGiCo consoles, I highly recommend using the Aux Sends feature on control groups. What this does is allow you to control all the aux sends assigned to that control group at once to any selected aux. Normally, the control group would “remotely control” solely the channel fader like any traditional VCA. However, when you are in sends-on-fader mode, as most people tend to be when mixing monitors, the control groups with Aux Send enabled will jump to the halfway point of the fader throw (similar to when you control a graphic EQ from the faders). From here, you can increase or decrease the send of every channel assigned to that control group in tandem.

In this screenshot of the offline editor, you can see the faders are at the halfway point of the fader throw, not -10dB. This is because the fader movement is relative when an Aux is soloed and the Aux Sends button is enabled.

Lets say for example, someone asks for “all the drums up”. Normally, you would need to individually increase every drum channel. You could painstakingly do this one by one to make sure the relative volume between the drum channels stays the same. Due to the logarithmic nature of channel faders, this can be tedious and usually ignored if the send levels are pretty different. However, if you have a ‘Drums’ control group set up with all the drum inputs assigned to it, all you would need to do is raise that control group so all the faders will increase by however much you raise the control group.

The best part, and critical to understand, is that this control group change is just like if you were to change all the sends individually. It DOES NOT add another gain stage that you have to worry about. When you un-solo and solo that same aux, you will see the control group resets to the halfway point of the channel fader. This way you do not have to remember a hidden VCA value controlling your aux sends. This is hugely helpful, especially when building mixes and trying to move quickly.