People get set in their ways, and becoming set in those ways happens pretty quickly.

It didn’t take long in my time as an audio human to establish my “flow of setup.” For years, I took the approach of getting all the gear into the room, then setting up the console, then setting up the mics, and then setting up everything else.

But I’ve changed recently.

These days, my approach is to get the console and loudspeakers going first, and then working on the mics and DI boxes.

Why?

Because I had a realization.

I was hit with this epiphany that the critical path to live-audio viability – the shortest distance to a PA setup that you can do any kind of soundcheck with – is power, console, loudspeakers, and THEN everything else. Before this revelation I had several instances of discomfort where I had all the mics ready, but the band rolled up and had to wait while I got loudspeakers patched in. This never turned into a huge problem, but it wasn’t the best situation to be in.

Of course, the preference is to have the whole system ready to make noise, mics and all, before the band arrives. Sometimes you can’t do that, though, and in such a case you’re much better served by having the output side of the rig ready. This is because you can always set and rough-in one mic at a time if FOH and monitor world can produce sound, but not the other way around. If you have all the mics ready, but the loudspeakers are lagging, you’re stuck with no progress until the loudspeakers catch up. Do things the other way, and you can at least have some forward motion on soundcheck as soon as someone is ready to get settled in.

This matters a lot when the schedule is tight, or made tight by some kind of problem with the show. (Even an “extrinsic” problem like bad traffic.) When your soundcheck time is about to run out, you want to be able to make some noise with what you have, because at least then you’ll have a clue about everything else that will have to be done on the fly. Monitor world is very sensitive to this kind of thing; It’s better to have an incomplete set of inputs in a “very correct” state on deck than everything patched but not mixed at all. Every input that’s feeding monitors appropriately is one more thing that you don’t have to scramble around with later at high volume.

I don’t know if anyone has had an experience like mine, but let me tell you, rediscovering your setup sequence is a huge breath of fresh air. Especially when it makes things better.