Dummies guide question on faders!

uncledick

So, we use an X-Air and I have the FOH balance pretty much right but some of the channel faders are almost maxed out.  I don't have the ability to rig it all up before our next gig so have - hopefully - a simple question:  If I go into the snapshot, I want to reduce everyone's fader by (audibly) the same amount so that the FOH mix sounds the same - and I just turn up the master.  I'm fine with input gains etc. but what scale do I use to bring everything down?  Is it XdB or a linear amount on each slider (say, on an arbitrary scale of 1-10, drop them all by 20%)?   I'm assuming the former but wanted to ask people who know before I mess it up.

TIA
Dick

andy_k

I'm not familiar with the Xair, but I have something similar from RCF.
If I was in your position, I would make the changes and save the settings as a new session, reduce all channels by, say -6db, and push master up by same amount. To be clear, make a copy of original session before making changes, make changes on new copy.
It would be doing no harm to your original session, and if the results were not as expected, the NEW version could be modified - while still having original as ultimate backup.

uncledick

I opted to take everything down by 5dB which 'looked' more normal across the faders and everything seemed fine.  It was a big marquee so the DXR10s were working hard.  Fortunately we had taken a sub - which we wouldn't normally use - and ran it from a monitor channel with just the bass guitar and kick drum feeding in.