After 20+ years in professional audio: live sound engineering, studio technical direction (Deep Forest, Pierre Jacquot), head of digital marketing at Playback.fr. A first-hand witness to the analog-to-digital shift, I track the whole audio landscape and break it down here — no fluff.
An aux send is a copy of a channel’s signal, tapped before or after the fader. The full mechanism, the pre/post decision that governs everything, and how digital consoles redistributed the vocabulary.
Assigning channels to a master takes thirty seconds; building a VCA plan that actually serves you during a show is another matter. Grouping method, stacked offsets, live traps and three working plans.
A console is sized from the rider of the stage you serve, not from the catalogue. Counting inputs with the right margin, counting buses — the number everyone forgets — and choosing the format afterwards.
The complete wiring diagram for a stage monitor: which bus to start from, which cable to use, and why the main output will not do. Powered and passive cabinets covered.
In-ears or wedges? The call is made position by position, never for the whole band. Where in-ears clearly win, where the wedge stays ahead, and the two inputs that decide whether the switch works.
A monitor mix is not built like a house mix. The method that starts from silence, what each position actually needs, and why a drummer asking for more drums needs more bass.