One Church · One Audio Culture
Turning knowledgeinto skill.
We develop audio engineers through intentional learning, critical listening, hands-on practice, real-world application, and continuous reflection.
Backstage energy · Front-row excellence
The signal path — every problem lives somewhere on this line
Two seats · One audio culture
One serves the room.
One serves the platform.
One purpose.
the platform.
We empower the musicians with confidence, tone and connection.
Monitor track →The Academy Framework
Knowledge alone is not skill
Five steps, every topic, every time. It is how we turn what somebody knows into something they can do on a Sunday.
START HERE · Turning Knowledge Into Skill
Five minutes on why finishing a module is not the same as being able to do the thing — and how the Framework closes that gap.
The standard
Completion is not competency. The seat is the test.
Our vision
To develop skilled, confident, and continually growing audio engineers who serve worship with excellence.
Program Overview
One foundation.
Two seats.
Everyone builds the same core before choosing a seat. That shared foundation is what lets an engineer move between campuses.
Understand what it is, why it matters, and how to use it.
Train your ears to recognize what you’re learning.
Turn understanding into repeatable action.
Use the skill in a real worship environment.
In the roomEvaluate what happened, identify what needs work, and keep developing.
Every topic in the Academy runs all five, in order. The platform tracks four of them — the fourth happens where we cannot follow you: in the room, on a Sunday. Skip Listen and you build a confident wrong habit. Skip Reflect and you can run forty services while only improving during the first three.
Shared core
What everyone builds first
Audio Foundations
Frequency, level, phase, gain structure, signal flow.
Engineering Fundamentals
Patch, routing, groups, DCAs, snapshots, PA behaviour.
Critical Listening
Frequency, dynamics and fault recognition. Never finished.
Mixing Fundamentals
Balance, hierarchy, tone, dynamics, depth — taught musically.
Live Workflow
Preparation, soundcheck, transitions, communication.
Troubleshooting
Work the chain in order. Calm beats clever.
Why this is not a course
Watch a video.
Take a quiz.
Still can’t run a Sunday.
That is how most production training works, and it is why most of it does not produce engineers. A video is something you watched. A quiz measures whether you can recognise a right answer while sitting still, with time to think and nothing on the line. Neither one has ever been the job.
- Watch the module
- Answer the questions
- Receive the certificate
Measures recall. Produces confidence that has never been tested.
- Learn it, then hear it
- Get reps until it is repeatable
- Use it in a real service
- Come back and say what happened
Measures what you can do when the band is loud and nobody is waiting for you to look something up.
Assessment
Seven dimensions.
A quiz reaches one.
Quizzes are not useless. They are one seventh of the picture, and the only seventh that is easy to score — which is exactly why so much training stops there.
The thing behind the framework
Knowledge is what you have met.
Skill is what you can do on a Sunday.
Knowledge is not skill
You could memorise the manual for a dLive — every menu, every parameter — and still freeze the first time a vocal starts feeding back mid-song. Not because you did not know what to do. Knowing what to do, and doing it under time pressure with a room full of people, are two different capabilities. Only one of them comes from reading.
Skill is built by repetition
The ear that hears 250 Hz instantly was built by someone hearing 250 Hz slowly, hundreds of times, until it stopped requiring thought. That is what the arcade cabinets are for. They are not games we bolted on — they are reps, compressed into sixty seconds so you can get a hundred of them in a week instead of a year.
Skill is never finished
There is no point at which you have arrived. New rooms, new bands, new consoles, new problems — the work keeps handing you things you have not seen. A completed topic is a checkpoint, not a finish line.
Skill decays without maintenance
This is the one people are most surprised by. Frequency recognition, the reflex of reaching for the right control, the calm you had the last time something broke — all of it fades when it is not used. Which is why the cabinets stay open after you have passed them, and why we keep score: so you can see honestly whether what you could do in March you can still do in September.
Turning Knowledge Into Skill
The five-minute version of the above, built as the first module in the Academy — and the one everything else assumes you have read.
Front of House
Create the
Environment.
Every person in the room hears worship through decisions made at your desk. The job is musical before it is technical.
Mixing worship
Faders should move
Worship music is arrangement-driven. Read where the song is going and participate in it — dynamics that breathe, effects that evolve, builds that actually build.
The Awaken sound
Modern & alive
Not stale, not over-processed, not timid.
Musical & human
Connected to what the musicians are actually playing.
Impact & control
Never volume for its own sake. Power is balance and transients.
Sonic target
| Element | Target | |
|---|---|---|
| Vocals | Present | Intimate, clear, highly intelligible. Authority without detaching from the band. |
| Drums | Punchy | Energetic and dynamic, transients intact. |
| Bass | Controlled | Powerful and connected to the kick, not competing with it. |
| Elec. gtr | Wide | Exciting without masking the vocal. |
| Keys | Atmospheric | Width and depth that support rather than swallow. |
| Tracks | Supporting | Never make live musicians secondary. |
| FX | Intentional | Depth, space, movement, emotion — never simply wet. |
Monitors
Empower the
Platform.
When a vocalist hears themselves the way they need to, they stop managing their own sound and start leading people.
The discipline
Not FOH from stage left
A monitor mix serves one person's job. Getting that right for twelve people at once, live, is a different skill from mixing a room.
Practice
Build a mix
before Sunday
The IEM Mix Room is a 29-channel in-ear mix simulator — the same input list you'll find on the S7000. It opens on four group wheels, not a wall of faders, and the full board is one click away when you want it.
Mix as someone
Pick the drummer, the worship leader, the bassist or a BGV and the board loads what that person actually needs to hear.
Four wheels, or 29 faders
Groups you name yourself for the simple view. Every input, with pan and a bass and treble shelf, for the full one.
Pan, L to R
Our mixes are stereo, and overheads are split. Two sources fighting in the centre stop fighting when one of them moves.
Opens in the site — your mix and your assignments are remembered on this device.
In-ears or headphones required · works on desktop, tablet and phone
Core values
Trust
They believe you understand what they need before they explain it twice.
Speed
Changes happen mid-song without breaking the moment.
Consistency
The same request gets the same result every week, at every campus.
Remove the technical distractions so musicians can lead.
Critical Listening · Module 01
Hear it before
you touch it.
Meters tell you what happened. Ears tell you what to do. The Arcade is a browser-based ear trainer built on real Awaken multitracks — EQ and compression, taught then drilled, ten minutes a day. It runs right here on this site.
Headphones or studio monitors required · desktop recommended
Learn · Listen · Arcade
Learn
Five lessons — Gain Structure, EQ, Compression, Time & Space and Feedback. Preamp, trim and fader; nine band cards; a compressor faceplate; the dry → early reflections → tail model of reverb; and the loop that closes when a system starts listening to itself.
Listen
Four unscored labs. Set a channel level on the Signal Machine GS-01, A/B any band against flat, run a live compressor on a stem, or put one through the Space Machine R-84 one control at a time.
Arcade
Six cabinets. Five are live; the last one is being built.
Frequency Frenzy
Sixty seconds, three lives. Name the boosted band on a log spectrum strip. Each wave drops the boost — 12 dB down to 1.5 dB.
EQ Match
Rebuild a hidden EQ curve by ear. Draggable filter nodes, five stages, scored against the real filter response.
Reverb Raider
Name the space by ear, time the tail, hear where the reverb starts, rebuild a hidden verb from scratch — then rescue a worship mix somebody drowned in reverb.
Gain Stage
The preamp is a system preset. Find the sweet spot with trim, leave room for the performance, decide trim or fader — and know which problems belong to the System Engineer.
Knee Deep
Match a hidden compressor on the channel you pick — make-up first, then threshold, ratio, attack and release, one stage at a time.
The cabinets keep score, waves and lives because pace and consequence are real FOH skills — not because training should feel like a video game. There's no XP economy and no public leaderboard, best scores never leave your own device, and every miss returns an engineering diagnosis: which control, which direction, where to go drill it.
The nine bands
| Band | Name | What it does in a worship mix |
|---|---|---|
| 60 Hz | Sub | Weight and physical energy. Too much and the room turns to mud; too little and nothing lands. |
| 125 Hz | Boom | Kick and bass body. The most common source of a mix that feels heavy but not powerful. |
| 250 Hz | Mud | Buildup from every source at once. Usually the first cut on acoustic and vocals. |
| 500 Hz | Box | Boxiness on drums and guitars. Removing it opens space without thinning anything. |
| 1 kHz | Honk | Nasal, telephone-like. Small cuts here make vocals sound expensive. |
| 2.5 kHz | Presence | Where intelligibility lives. Push it too far and the vocal turns aggressive. |
| 4 kHz | Bite | Attack and edge. Snare crack, guitar pick, consonants — and listener fatigue. |
| 8 kHz | Sibilance | Ess sounds and cymbal wash. The band that decides whether a vocal is harsh. |
| 12 kHz | Air | Open, expensive top end. Adds size without adding volume. |
The map · 20 Hz – 20 kHz
Awaken Frequency Map
Every source on an Awaken stage occupies a range, and the ranges overlap. This is where the collisions happen — and where the fixes are. Foundation is what gives a source weight, definition is what makes it audible and intelligible, and caution is where that source most often causes a problem for something else.
Compressor and gate settings for every source on this map live on the Processing page. Ranges are practical starting points for live worship sources, not absolutes — the room, the instrument and the player move them. Hover or tap any labelled range to read how to use it in a worship mix. Hover a row to isolate it; tap a zone header for what that region does across the whole stage.
Roadmap
Gain Structure
Understand the preamp, operate the trim, mix with the fader. Lesson, the GS-01 analyser and the Gain Stage cabinet.
EQ
Frequency identification and curve matching. Nine bands, four modes.
Dynamics
Compressor lab plus Knee Deep — threshold, ratio, attack, release and make-up by ear.
Time & Space
Reverb lesson, the Space Machine R-84 lab and the Reverb Raider cabinet — recognise the space, hear the parameters, match the sound, fix the mix. Delay to follow.
Feedback
Learn is live — the loop, gain before feedback, why one frequency takes off, and what to do when it happens. Listen and the Feedback Hunter cabinet to follow.
Processing · Module 01
Turn it down,
or turn it off.
That's it. That's the whole chapter. A compressor turns loud things down. A gate turns quiet things off. Everything else on this page is detail about how fast and how much.
The one-sentence version
An automatic hand on the fader
Imagine someone sitting at the desk whose only job is to pull the vocal fader down the instant the singer belts, and push it back up when they drop to a whisper. Faster than you can move, on every syllable, all night, without getting bored.
That's a compressor. You're not making anything louder. You're making the loud parts quieter so the whole thing can sit at a steadier level.
An automatic hand on the mute
Now imagine someone whose only job is to unmute the tom mic the moment the drummer hits it, and mute it again the moment the hit dies away — so that for the other 99% of the song, that microphone isn't quietly leaking the whole drum kit into your mix.
That's a gate. It doesn't change how anything sounds. It changes when you hear it.
Both are just automation. Neither one is magic, and neither one fixes a bad source. A compressor cannot make a shouty singer sound relaxed, and a gate cannot make a bleeding stage sound tight — they only manage what's already there.
See it move
Watch the hand work
This is a fake vocal take — a quiet verse, a loud chorus, a quiet tail. Grey is what the singer did. Orange is what the room hears after processing. Drag the controls and watch the shape change.
Compressor · the controls
Five knobs, five questions
Bypass it. If the channel doesn't sound better with the compressor in than out, it isn't helping — no matter how correct the numbers look.
Three families
Why two compressors at the same settings sound different
Every compressor on your desk is descended from one of three ways of doing the job. That circuit is where the "character" comes from — and it's why the DEEP models are worth learning once the stock compressor makes sense to you.
Fast, punchy, a little aggressive. Grabs transients hard and colours the sound doing it. Ratio as buttons rather than a knob.
A light shines on a photocell; the cell reacts slowly and unevenly. That laziness is the sound — smooth, forgiving, hard to make ugly. Two knobs: no attack or release controls. It still has both — the cell sets its own timing, and changes it depending on what you feed it. That program dependence is the answer to the question above: give two compressors the same numbers and the opto is the one whose timing moves with the music.
Slow, thick and warm, adding weight as it works. You use it to make something sound bigger, not tighter.
Hover any source above for why that family suits it, the settings to start from, and what it actually does to the sound. These are illustrations of the three circuit topologies, not pictures of any particular manufacturer's box. The Allen & Heath DEEP models are emulations of that family behaviour.
Gate · the mechanism
The door, and how it swings
A gate exists because microphones hear everything. Put a mic on a floor tom and it hears the whole kit. The gate opens that door only when the thing you actually miked is making noise.
Ask whether the problem is bleed or mic placement. A gate is the second answer. Moving the mic, changing the angle, or turning down a wedge is the first — and it fixes the problem instead of hiding it.
Judgment
When to use it. When not to.
Your desk
What you actually have
Every Awaken campus runs Allen & Heath, so the layout and the vocabulary carry between rooms — but the available processing is not identical. Know your desk.
dLive S7000
The most capable desk we run. Gate (or Ducker) and compressor on every channel, the full DEEP model set, Dyn8 dynamic EQ and multiband, and 16 RackExtra FX engines.
Avantis
Same processing family as dLive, same gate and compressor controls, 12 RackExtra FX engines. The DEEP compressor models arrive with the dPack upgrade — check whether ours has it before you go looking for Opto.
SQ5
Smaller desk, same thinking. Gate with sidechain filter and compressor on every channel, DEEP models, 8 RackFX engines. Everything on this page applies — the knobs are in a different place, not a different language.
DEEP compressor models
Which one, and why
Allen & Heath's DEEP models are compressors with a personality baked in — they're emulations of classic hardware, and they behave differently from the plain RMS and Peak compressors even at identical settings. Start with the stock compressor until you can hear what it's doing. Then these are worth your time.
| Model | Character | Reach for it on | Where |
|---|---|---|---|
| Opto | Smooth, slow, forgiving | Lead vocal, BGVs, bass. The most musical starting point and the hardest one to make sound bad. | All three |
| OptTronik | Opto with more colour | Lead vocal when you want the compression to add character, not just control. | dLive · Avantis |
| 16T | Fast, punchy, aggressive | Snare, kick, drum bus. Grabs transients hard — great where you want attitude. | All three |
| 16VU | Vintage, warm, coloured | Bass, vocals, anything you want to sound bigger rather than tighter. | All three |
| Peak Limiter 76 | Very fast, very firm | Catching peaks — a safety net on a loud vocal, or deliberate aggression on drums. | All three |
| Mighty | Heavy, obvious, glue | Drum bus and group processing where you want the compression to be part of the sound. | All three |
| Bus | Gentle glue | Mix bus and groups. Small amounts. This is the one you use 2 dB of and never mention. | dLive · Avantis |
| CompStortion | Compression plus drive | Deliberate colour. Use sparingly and on purpose. | Avantis (dPack) |
On dLive the DEEP set is standard. On Avantis the compressor models come with dPack, and on SQ the DEEP set is Opto, 16T, 16VU, PeakLimiter 76 and Mighty. Confirm what's actually installed at your campus before you build a template around a model that isn't there.
Beyond dynamics
What else is in the rack
Compressors and gates control level. The FX engines do everything else — space, depth, movement and repair. You do not need all of them. You need four or five you know cold.
Reverb
SMR Live, Gated Reverb. Your main worship reverb and the effect that makes a dry stage feel like a room.
Delay
Stereo Tap Delay, 2 Tap Delay, Echo, Bucket Brigade. Depth and movement on vocals without washing the words out.
Modulation
ADT Doubler, Chorus, Symphonic and Dimension Chorus, Flanger, Phaser, Rotator. Thickening and character.
Corrective
De-Esser, Dynamic EQ, MultiBD3 and MultiBD4, Transient Controller, Hypabass. Problem solvers, not decoration.
dLive runs 16 RackExtra engines, Avantis 12, SQ5 8. Exact unit availability differs slightly by desk and firmware — the FX rack on your console is the authority, not this list.
Starting points
Every source on our stage
↑Try any of these on the visualiserThe same fourteen sources as the Frequency Map, so the two pages line up. Copy these in, then listen and move them — a number that works on one singer is wrong for the next. Gain reduction is what you watch, and you want that much on the loudest part of the song, not the quiet verse.
Slow enough to let the beater click through — that click is what carries the kick to the back row. Release fast enough to reset before the next beat.
A fast attack kills the crack, which is the one thing you are trying to keep. Let the transient out, then clamp the ring.
Toms are mostly a gate problem, not a compression problem. Sort the bleed first, then add a little compression for evenness.
Compressing overheads pulls the whole kit's bleed up between hits, so the drums get louder and less punchy at the same time. High-pass and ride the fader instead.
The steadiest channel in the mix, and the one holding the kick relationship together. This is the one source where fairly obvious compression is correct.
The amp already compressed it. Add some only if the player's dynamics are genuinely unmanageable — otherwise this channel needs EQ, not dynamics.
Strum dynamics swing hard, but push past 4 dB and it turns plasticky and starts pumping against the vocal. Gentle, always.
Wide dynamic range on purpose. Compress for consistency in a full band, but remember you are flattening someone's playing when you do.
Already flat as a board. Compression adds nothing but noise floor. What pads actually need is a high-pass filter and a fader.
Worship vocals swing 20 dB between a whispered verse and a belted chorus. Soft knee. Aim for the GR on the chorus, not the verse. A second stage catching 1–2 dB of peaks is a DEVELOP-stage upgrade.
Compress the group, not each voice — individual compressors move the blend around every time someone leans in.
People move on and off a mic constantly while speaking. Consistency outranks character here — nobody should have to lean forward to follow the message. Soft knee.
Mixed and mastered before it reached you. Compressing it again just squashes it. A safety limiter on the output is the only thing worth adding.
Congregation and room mics for IEMs and capture. Compress firmly — the level swing between quiet prayer and full-voice singing is enormous and you want a steady bed under everything.
Gate starting points
| Gate | Threshold | Depth | Attack | Hold | Release | Sidechain listens to |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Rack tom | -22 to -16 dBu | 15–20 dB | Fastest | 100–200 ms | 200–300 ms | 150–400 Hz |
| Floor tom | -22 to -16 dBu | 15–20 dB | Fastest | 150–250 ms | 300–500 ms | 80–300 Hz |
| Kick | -20 to -14 dBu | 10–15 dB | Fastest | 50–100 ms | 150–250 ms | 50–200 Hz |
| Snare | -18 to -12 dBu | 10–15 dB | Fastest | 50–100 ms | 150–250 ms | 150–800 Hz |
Every other number on this page travels between campuses. Threshold does not. It depends on your gain structure, that microphone, that drummer's touch and how loud the stage is that morning — so a number typed in from a web page is a guess, and the column above is only there to stop you starting from zero. Threshold is set, not copied.
How to actually set it — 90 seconds per channel
That is not a gap in the table. Knowing which channels to leave alone is the skill — a new engineer compresses everything, and a mix where every channel is squeezed has no dynamics left for the song to use.
Prove it
You don't know this yet
Reading this page took ten minutes and taught you nothing you can be trusted with. Learn is step one of five. Here is the rest of it.
Awaken Audio Labs
Where it's safe
to be wrong.
Development outside Sunday pressure — virtual soundcheck, multitrack mixing, console workflow, failure simulation.
Mix Labs
One tool unlocked at a time
Failure Labs
Break it on purpose
A mentor breaks something before you arrive — a muted DCA, a wrong patch, a dead DI, an RF drop. You find it by working the chain in order.
We are not training people who have seen every fault. We are training people who stay calm and do not randomly change things.
Certification
Trusted
in the seat.
A mentor putting their name to a statement: this engineer can run this seat, on a Sunday, without supervision.
Live development
Reps, in order
Nobody skips a step, and each one is signed off by a mentor who was in the room.
Destinations
Certified FOH
The room, for a full service.
Certified Monitors
The platform, for a full service.
Dual-Certified
Both seats — after real mastery of one.
Audio Mentor
You were developed. Develop another.
A certified engineer is not finished. They're ready to develop someone else.
Engineer sign in
Pick up
where you left off.
Your progress, your arcade scores, your live reps and your mentor's notes — in one place.
New here?
Zero experience is a starting point
You don't need to have touched a console. Care about music, be willing to be coached, show up. Talk to your campus audio lead — or start today. The training is open to anyone and costs nothing but headphones.
Come and watch
Sit with an engineer through a service. No jargon test.
Foundations
Signal flow and gain structure.
Ears on
Ten minutes a day in the Arcade.
Hands on
Your first lab, with a mentor beside you.
Before anything else
How much sound
have you run?
One question, and it only decides where you start. Nothing is locked either way — you can go anywhere on the site from the first minute, and you can change this later on your profile.
Welcome back
Engineer
Awaken Audio — overall
Your trainer is being assigned
Your campus director connects every engineer to a trainer by hand, so it can take a few days. Nothing is stopping you in the meantime — start anywhere below and your progress is saved to your account. Your trainer will see all of it when they are connected.
—
START HERE · Turning Knowledge Into Skill
Five minutes on why finishing a module is not the same as being able to do the thing — and how the Framework closes that gap.
Training topics
Reflect
The step people skip, and the reason somebody can run forty services and only improve during the first three. Your reflections live on their own page now, so you can look back at what you wrote after every service rather than only the last one.
Additional courses
Progress saves to your account as you go, so you can start on the booth laptop and pick it up on your phone.
Your account
My Reflections
One entry per service. Write it while it is fresh, then read them back in a row — the pattern across six weeks is the thing worth seeing, and it is invisible if you only ever keep the latest one.
New reflection
The step people skip, and the reason somebody can run forty services and only improve during the first three. Pick a topic you have actually used, and be honest — this goes to whoever is developing you, not to a leaderboard.
Earlier entries for this topic
Everything you have written
Service Companion
Every minute and every note counts
Sign in to start a saved run. You can walk a preview pass first — nothing is saved.
Select work date
Choose operational seat
Courses
One church.
One production culture.
Audio is live now. The rest of the paths are being written the same way — learn it, hear it, then prove it.
Your account
My profile
A square photo works best. It is resized on your device before it is uploaded, so it stays small.
Your place on the team
Your progress and what you write in a reflection are visible to your trainer and to your Campus Production Director. Other trainers at your campus can see how far along you are, but not what you wrote.
Admin
Your engineers
Also at your campus View only
Engineers at your campus who are not on your team. You can see how they are progressing; what they write in a reflection stays between them, their own trainer and the Campus Production Director.
—
—
Awaken Audio
Progress by topic
Reflections
Recent arcade runs
Campus Production Director
Campus Performance
Where the campus is stalling
Everyone at this campus
Practice · the cabinets
Recent reflections
Master Admin
Manage people
Campus Production Directors
Two per campus, and the database will not accept a third. A director keeps their own engineers and their own dashboard — leading a campus is added on top.
IEM Mix Room — in-ear mix simulator
My Mix
Worship Leader
Learn
Pick the seat you actually play, then read the five.
My Mix
You’re mixing as: Worship Leader
Your four groups
One wheel each. Turn it up to hear more of that part of the stage, down to get it out of your way. Nothing else to think about.
Assign Groups
Pick a group, then tap the channels that belong in it. Rename any group by typing over it.
Mixes
Saved on this device. Use a code to send a mix to someone else.
Save this mix
Your saved mixes
Send this mix to someone
Load a mix from a code
Load Stems
Awaken Audio Arcade — ear training
NINE BANDS.
KNOW THEM BY NAME.
Before you can hear a frequency you have to know what it does to a worship mix. Read the band, then audition it — boost it, cut it, hear what changes. This is vocabulary, not trivia: these are the words you will use at FOH and in Monitor World.
TURN IT DOWN,
OR TURN IT OFF.
That is the whole of dynamics in six words. A compressor turns things down when they get too loud. A gate turns them off when they get too quiet. Everything else is detail.
A compressor is an automatic hand on the fader — someone whose only job is to pull the vocal down when the singer belts and push it back up when they whisper. Faster than you can move, on every syllable, all night. Once you see it that way, every knob is just a question about how that hand behaves.
FIVE KNOBS, FIVE QUESTIONS
A compressor faceplate. Every desk arranges these differently — the questions are the same on all of them.
Bypass it. If the channel does not sound better with the compressor in than out, it is not helping — no matter how correct the numbers look.
A gate is an automatic hand on the mute — it unmutes the tom mic when the tom is hit and mutes it the rest of the song, so that mic is not leaking the whole kit into your mix. Before you reach for one, ask whether the problem is actually mic placement.
Ready to hear it? Listen → Compressor puts these five knobs on a real Awaken stem so you can hear each one move. Then Arcade → Knee Deep tests whether you can hear them without looking.
MAKE A ROOM.
WITHOUT BUILDING ONE.
EQ decides what a source sounds like. Compression decides how steady it is. Reverb decides where it is — how big the space around it feels, how far back it sits, and how long the room keeps talking after the singer stops. You are not adding an effect. You are answering the question what room is this happening in, and the congregation hears the answer whether you meant to give one or not.
Every reverb — every plug-in, every rack unit, every real room — is three events in a row. Learn the three and every knob on every unit stops being mysterious.
The sound itself, straight off the platform. It arrives first because it took the shortest path. This is what carries the words.
A handful of distinct bounces off the nearest surfaces. Few enough to count. These are what tell your ear how big the space is and how far away the source is.
Thousands of reflections collapsing into one smooth cloud that fades away. This is what tells your ear how live the space is.
Three things reverb changes, and they are the three things to listen for: how large the space feels (early reflections and size), how far forward or back the source sits (wet level), and how separate the source stays from the space (pre-delay), and how long the room keeps ringing after the source stops (decay). Everything else is detail.
FOUR ALGORITHMS
YOU WILL ACTUALLY USE
Every desk names these differently. The four below are the ones that cover ninety per cent of what happens on an Awaken Sunday. Audition each one on the stem selected above — dry first, then wet, then dry again.
These three are effects before they are spaces. They do not make a source sound like it is in a room — they make it sound processed, which is sometimes exactly what a moment wants. Reach for them deliberately and rarely.
EIGHT CONTROLS,
EIGHT QUESTIONS
Our rooms already have reverb — the building came with it. You are adding to a space that is already reflecting, so the question is never how much reverb sounds nice on this vocal in headphones. It is how much this room can take before the words stop landing. Walk the room. What sounds lush at the desk is often a wash at the back.
A little reverb in a vocalist's in-ears helps them relax and stops the mix feeling clinical. A lot makes them sing late, because they are hearing a tail instead of their own voice. Start at nothing, add until they stop asking, and stop there.
Ready to hear it? Listen → Reverb Lab puts all eight controls on a real Awaken stem in the Space Machine R-84, with a focused-listening mode that changes one parameter at a time. Nothing there is scored — that is the point.
KNOWLEDGE IS NOT
THE SAME THING
AS SKILL.
You can read every word on this platform and still not be able to run a Sunday. That is not a failure of the material and it is not a failure of you — it is what knowledge is. This module is five minutes on the difference, and on how the Academy closes it. Everything else here assumes you have read it.
THIS IS TRUE
Nobody learns to drive by reading about driving.
You could memorise the manual for a dLive — every menu, every parameter, every routing option — and still freeze the first time a vocal starts feeding back mid-song. Not because you did not know what to do. Because knowing what to do and doing it, under time pressure, with a room full of people are two different capabilities, and only one of them comes from reading.
This is worth saying out loud because it is easy to mistake progress on a screen for progress in the booth. A completed module means you have met an idea. It does not yet mean you own it.
REPETITION AND
APPLICATION
The gap between knowing and doing is closed by reps. There is no shortcut.
Every engineer you admire got there the same way: they did the thing badly, noticed, adjusted, and did it again. Hundreds of times. The ear that hears 250 Hz instantly was built by someone hearing 250 Hz slowly, over and over, until it stopped requiring thought.
That is what the arcade cabinets are for. They are not tests and they are not games we bolted on for fun — they are reps, compressed into sixty seconds so you can get a hundred of them in a week instead of a year.
FINISHED
There is no point at which you have arrived.
The engineers who are hardest to replace are not the ones who stopped learning because they got good. They are the ones who stayed curious after they got good. New rooms, new bands, new consoles, new problems — the work keeps handing you things you have not seen.
So a completed topic on your dashboard is a checkpoint, not a finish line. It means: you have been through this once, properly. Come back.
WITHOUT
MAINTENANCE
Take three months off and your ears will tell on you.
This is the part people are most surprised by. Ear training in particular is a maintained ability, not a permanent one. Frequency recognition, the reflex of reaching for the right control, the calm you had the last time something broke — all of it fades when it is not used.
Which is why the cabinets stay open after you have passed them, and why we keep score. Not to rank anybody. So you can see, honestly, whether the thing you could do in March you can still do in September.
FRAMEWORK
This is how we turn knowledge into skill, every time, on every topic.
Five steps, in order. Four of them happen here. The fourth happens where no website can follow you.
Understand what it is, why it matters, and how to use it.
Train your ears to recognize what you’re learning.
Turn understanding into repeatable action.
Use the skill in a real worship environment.
In the roomEvaluate what happened, identify what needs work, and keep developing.
Why the order matters. Practising something you cannot yet hear just builds a confident wrong habit. Applying something you have never practised is how a service gets away from you. And skipping Reflect is how somebody does forty services and improves for the first three of them.
Apply is the one we cannot track. Everything else on this platform we can see: you opened it, you played it, you scored this. Whether you actually used a high-pass filter on a Sunday is between you, your team and the room. It is also the step that matters most — the other four exist to make it go well.
KNOWLEDGE IS
WHAT YOU HAVE MET.
SKILL IS WHAT YOU
CAN DO ON A SUNDAY.
Nothing on this platform is locked. You could go straight to the arcade right now and start playing. But the volunteers who develop fastest are the ones who run the whole framework on one topic before moving to the next — and the ones who come back to Reflect after they have actually used it.
EVERY MIX
STARTS WITH A
HEALTHY SIGNAL.
Before EQ. Before compression. Before effects. Before you touch a single fader. A healthy signal has to be entering the system first — everything you do after that is built on top of it, and none of it can rescue a signal that arrived broken.
The path · click a stage
Three controls, three different jobs. Knowing which one to reach for is the whole skill.
OPERATE THE TRIM.
MIX WITH THE FADER.
Sets how healthy the incoming analog signal is. At Awaken this is established by the System Engineer — you need to understand it, not adjust it.
Your digital input-level adjustment on the channel. This is the control you will actually reach for, and it happens after the preamp.
Where this channel sits against everything else. Nothing to do with signal health — this is the mix, and you move it all service long.
TRIM adjusts your channel's input level.
FADER builds your mix.
SETS THE FOUNDATION.
How healthy is the signal arriving?
A microphone puts out a tiny voltage. The preamp is the analog stage that raises it to a level the console can work with, and it is the only place in the chain where that can be done without also raising the noise the desk makes on its own. Everything downstream — your trim, your EQ, your compressor, your fader — is working with whatever the preamp handed it.
There are four conditions worth recognising on sight.
At Awaken, preamp gain is established by the System Engineer and is not something an operator routinely changes. It is shared — on a dLive or Avantis the same analog preamp feeds FOH, monitors and broadcast at once, so moving it changes somebody else's mix without warning. Understand it. Do not reach for it. If the preamp itself looks wrong, that is an upstream problem to raise, not one to fix from your surface.
Headroom is the space left between where the signal normally sits and the point where it overloads. It is not wasted room — it is where the next peak lands. The meter below runs a real dynamic envelope, so you can watch how far above the average the peaks actually reach.
The goal is a healthy signal with room for peaks. Different sources need different amounts of that room — a snare is almost all transient and its peaks sit far above its average, while a bass barely moves. Watch the crest row above as you switch sources: same meter, different correct answer.
YOUR INPUT ADJUSTMENT.
Is this channel entering my console at a good level?
Once the System Engineer has set a healthy preamp, trim is how you nudge that channel's level on your own surface. It is digital, it happens after the analog preamp, and — this is the part that matters — it belongs to your channel. Moving it does not reach back and change the analog gain everyone else is sharing.
That is why trim is the control an operator actually uses. Small moves, a few dB at a time, to get a channel sitting where the rest of your work expects it.
Trim happens after the preamp. That single fact explains everything it can do — and the one thing it cannot.
YOU CAN'T UNCLIP
WITH TRIM.
If the analog preamp has already been overloaded, the tops of that waveform are gone. They were never converted. Turning trim down afterwards does not put them back — it just makes the broken signal quieter.
QUIETER CLIPPING
IS STILL CLIPPING.
Trim controls level after the preamp, so it cannot restore information that was already lost. If a channel is clipping before your trim, that is an upstream problem — a preamp set too hot, a source far louder than it was at soundcheck, a bad DI. The right operator move is to say something, not to keep pulling trim down until it stops looking bad on your meter.
BUILD THE MIX.
Where should this channel sit in my mix?
That is the whole job. Two questions, two controls, and they never overlap:
The BGV input meter is healthy, but the BGVs are too loud against the lead vocal. Fader down. Not trim down — nothing is wrong with how that channel is arriving, it is simply too far up in your mix. Reaching for trim here would be fixing a balance problem in the wrong place.
OPERATE THE TRIM.
MIX WITH THE FADER.
RECOGNIZE WHEN TO ESCALATE.
System Engineer.
Your input level.
Your mix.
Not yours to fix.
Ready to hear it? Listen → Signal Machine gives you a locked preamp, a live trim and a fader on a real Awaken stem, with four experiments — including the one where trim cannot save you. Then Arcade → Gain Stage asks the only question that matters under pressure: do you know what to touch?
WHEN THE SYSTEM
STARTS LISTENING
TO ITSELF.
Feedback is not bad luck and it is not the room being difficult. It is a loop that closed. A microphone hears something, the console amplifies it, the PA plays it, and some of that sound arrives back at the same microphone — and goes round again. Most of the time that loop loses energy on every lap and you never notice it. When it stops losing energy, you hear it.
Most feedback training is written around a wedge pointed at a vocal mic. We do not use wedges — monitors are in-ears only. Everything that reaches a microphone acoustically at Awaken comes from the main PA, the subs and the fills. So the loop you are learning to break is the one between the platform microphones and the boxes covering the room, and the questions you ask when it rings are different ones.
What is actually happening?
Four stages, and then it starts again. The microphone picks up sound. The console amplifies it. The PA and fills reproduce it into the room. Some of that energy travels back to the microphone — off a wall, off the ceiling, off the platform, or straight from a fill — and the cycle repeats.
Every lap, the sound arriving back at the mic is normally quieter than the lap before, so the loop dies out and you never hear it. Turn the system up, or move the mic into more PA energy, and eventually a lap arrives back as loud as it left. That is the moment it stops decaying and starts sustaining. Drag the loop gain below and watch what happens.
Feedback is not random. Something completed the loop. A mic moved, a level went up, a fill started covering a part of the platform it did not cover before, somebody walked into the coverage of a box. There is always a reason, and the reason is more useful to you than the frequency.
How loud can this microphone get?
Every open microphone has a ceiling: the point where making it any louder in the room closes the loop. That ceiling is gain before feedback — how much level you can get out of that mic, through that PA, in that room, in that position, before the system becomes unstable.
It is not one number you can look up. It changes with the microphone, the box covering that part of the platform, where the person is standing, what is reflecting, and what you have done with EQ. And it moves during the service.
Get the level you need without crossing the line. Not as much level as the system will physically give you — the level the moment actually needs, with room left over. An engineer running every open mic at the edge of its ceiling has no margin for a person who leans in, a fill that gets turned up, or a room that fills with people and changes.
Why does it ring instead of just getting loud?
Because the loop is not equally efficient at every frequency. The microphone is more sensitive at some frequencies than others. The PA is louder at some than others. The room reinforces some and absorbs others. The person's position changes all of it. Stack those together and a handful of frequencies are travelling round the loop more easily than the rest.
Whichever one reaches the threshold first is the one you hear. Not the whole spectrum — one narrow, specific, identifiable pitch. Move the factors below and watch the winner change.
Those are the same bands you drill in Frequency Frenzy and the EQ lab — 250, 500, 1 k, 2.5 k, 4 k. An engineer who can name a boosted band on a music loop in a second can name a ringing frequency in a second, and that is the entire difference between fixing feedback in one move and hunting for it in front of the congregation.
Why cut instead of just turning it down?
If 630 Hz is ringing, pulling the whole vocal down stops the ring — and takes everything else with it. The words get quieter too, and you are back in a minute when the singer leans in again.
A narrow cut at the frequency that is ringing takes energy out of the one lap that was sustaining and leaves the rest of the voice where it was. You have not just stopped the ring; you have bought back gain before feedback — the mic can now go louder than it could before you touched it.
Three or four dB in the right place beats twelve in roughly the right place. A deep wide cut will stop the ring and leave the vocal sounding hollow for the rest of the service — you fixed one problem by creating another, and nobody will tell you.
And never go hunting with a boost. Sweeping a big boost around the spectrum to make something ring is how you find a frequency in a studio. In a full room it is how you cause the feedback you were looking for. Listen first, then cut.
VS PERMANENT FIX
It just took off. What do you do first?
STOP FIRST.
DIAGNOSE SECOND.
When feedback takes off in a full room, you are not solving an engineering problem — you are protecting the congregation's ears and the moment. Pull the level down. The offending channel if you know it, the output if you do not. That is the correct first move and it is not a failure; hunting for the right EQ band while a room is howling is the failure.
Then, once it is quiet and the service has carried on, do the actual work:
Which microphone is it? Mute candidates one at a time if you have to — the one that kills it is the one.
Name the pitch you heard. This is the ear-training skill, used in anger.
Something changed. Until you know what, any fix you make is a guess that will not hold.
EQ, level, mic position, coverage — whichever one actually addresses the cause.
Put the channel back where the mix needs it. A fix that leaves the vocal buried is not finished.
AN EQ PROBLEM
Did you fix it, or did you hide it?
EQ genuinely buys gain before feedback, and it is often the right answer. But EQ treats the loop — it does not ask what closed it. If a microphone ended up somewhere it should not be, cutting 1.6 kHz makes the ring stop and leaves the actual problem in place, waiting for the next service.
Before you reach for the EQ, ask these:
DON'T JUST FIND THE FREQUENCY.
FIND OUT WHY IT STARTED.
The whole thing, in order
Protect the room first. Level down — channel if you know it, output if you do not.
Which microphone or signal is feeding back?
What frequency are you actually hearing?
EQ, level, microphone position, system coverage — or whatever the real cause turns out to be.
Listen again. Ring gone, and the source still sounds like itself.
Coming next in this module: Listen — recognising ringing frequencies by ear, on our own PA and rooms. Then Arcade → Feedback Hunter, where you have to find and kill the frequency before it takes the room.
MOST OF THE LOW END
ON YOUR CONSOLE
ISN'T MUSIC.
It is stage rumble, air conditioning, feet on a riser, handling noise, wind on a headset, and the bottom octave of instruments that have nothing useful to say down there. None of it is audible on its own — and all of it adds up. A high-pass filter is how you get rid of what was never music in the first place, and it is the single cheapest thing you can do to make a worship mix clearer.
FILTER ACTUALLY DOES
Let the highs pass. Take the lows away.
The name is the whole description: frequencies above the corner pass through, frequencies below it are progressively removed. On a dLive, an Avantis or an SQ it is the first thing in the channel — before the EQ, before the compressor, before anything else you do.
Two things define it. The corner frequency is where the filter starts working. The slope is how hard it works below that — 12 dB per octave is gentle and natural, 24 dB per octave is a wall. And note what it is not: it is not a switch. At the corner frequency the signal is only down about 3 dB. The filter reaches full strength an octave or two below where you set it, which is why setting it "at 100 Hz" does not mean everything below 100 Hz has gone.
The dashed line is where the filter is set. The shaded area is what it is taking out. Notice how far below the corner the filter has to go before it has removed everything — and how much gentler 12 dB per octave is than 24.
AND WHAT DOESN'T
Does this source actually make music down here?
That is the only question. A kick drum and a bass guitar have their fundamentals in the bottom two octaves — that is the instrument. A lead vocal's lowest fundamental is somewhere around 90 to 120 Hz, so everything under it is noise the microphone picked up on the way past. An overhead microphone is there for cymbals; every bit of low end it hears is the rest of the kit leaking in.
- KickThe fundamental lives at 50–90 Hz. Filter under it, not into it.
- BassSame. Its lowest note is around 41 Hz on a four-string.
- TomsReal body down to 70–100 Hz depending on the drum.
- TracksAlready mixed and mastered. Whoever built them already made these decisions.
- PianoIf it is genuinely carrying the bottom of the song. In a full band, usually not.
- Lead vocalNothing below the singer's lowest fundamental is voice.
- BGVsSame, and there are three or four of them stacking up.
- Speech micsPastor, host, lapel, headset. Proximity buildup and handling noise.
- Acoustic gtrBoomy DI and body resonance the room does not need.
- Electric gtrThe amp does not produce anything useful under 80–100 Hz.
- Overheads / hatsThey are there for cymbals. Everything low is bleed.
- Ambience micsAir handling, footsteps, and the whole low end of the room.
IT ALL ADDS UP
One channel is nothing. Twenty channels is a wall.
Here is the part that catches people out. Solo a single vocal mic and the rumble under it is inaudible — you would never call it a problem. But you do not run one channel. You run a stage, and every open microphone is contributing its own quiet, useless low end into the same mix at the same time.
Low frequencies also carry the most energy of anything in your mix. Add twenty inaudible rumbles together and you get something very audible: a mix that sounds thick, tired and unclear, where the kick has no punch and the vocal never quite cuts through — and nothing you solo sounds wrong.
The bottom of your mix has a fixed amount of space in it — in the PA, in the amplifiers, and in what a human ear can follow. Every dB of that space taken up by rumble from a vocal mic is a dB the kick and bass do not get. High-passing everything that is not those two instruments does not make the mix thinner. It hands the low end back to the things that are supposed to own it.
Sweep up until it hurts. Then back it down.
Do not type in a number from a chart — including this one. Every voice, instrument, microphone and room is different, and the only reliable way to find the right corner is to listen to the source while you move it.
Going too far on purpose is the important part. If you only ever creep upward you will stop early, leave rumble behind and never learn what the edge sounds like. Push past it until the source audibly loses weight — a vocal gets thin and papery, an acoustic loses its body, a tom stops sounding like a drum — then come back down until it returns. That point, minus a little, is your answer.
A channel soloed will always sound better with more low end in it — of course it does, there is nothing else competing. Set the filter roughly in solo if it helps you hear the source, but confirm it in the mix, because that is the only place the decision actually matters.
FOR OUR STAGE
Where to begin, before you use your ears
These are starting points, not settings — somewhere to put the filter before you sweep it. The voice rows are split because the difference is not cosmetic: a male lead's lowest fundamental often sits between 80 and 100 Hz, so a filter at 110 is already cutting the note rather than the rumble underneath it. Find the singer's bottom note and work down from there. A boomy room needs more than a dead one. Move them.
Two things worth noticing in that table. Kick and bass get a filter too — just a low one, under the instrument, to remove sub rumble the PA would otherwise have to reproduce. And overheads go far higher than people expect, because they are there for cymbals and everything below is the rest of the kit arriving late.
TOO FAR
A filter can absolutely make things worse
High-passing is not free and it is not automatically good. Set too high, a filter takes the chest out of a voice, the body out of an acoustic, the weight out of a tom and the authority out of a speaking mic. The mix gets clear and lifeless at the same time — a very specific sound, and one you will recognise the moment you have heard it on purpose.
Ready to hear all of it? Listen → HPF Lab puts a real filter on real Awaken stems — sweep it yourself, A/B it level-matched, hear too little against too much, and then stack eight channels together to hear what the buildup actually costs you.
NOT EVERYTHING
UP TOP IS AIR.
Some of it is amp fizz, modeller hash, string squeak, cymbal wash arriving in a microphone that was never pointed at a cymbal, and the top octave of instruments that have nothing to say up there. A low-pass filter takes the ceiling off a channel that does not need one — and used well it is the difference between a mix that is bright and a mix that is harsh. Used badly it is the fastest way to make a good source sound like it is playing through a wall.
FILTER ACTUALLY DOES
Let the lows pass. Take the highs away.
It is the high-pass filter turned upside down, and the name is again the whole description: frequencies below the cutoff pass through, frequencies above it are progressively reduced. On a dLive or an Avantis it sits in the same place as the HPF — first in the channel, before the EQ and the compressor.
Two things define it, and they are the same two. The cutoff frequency is where the filter starts working. The slope is how hard it works above that — 12 dB per octave is a gentle darkening, 24 dB per octave is a lid. And it is not a switch either: at the cutoff the signal is only down about 3 dB, and the filter does not reach full strength until an octave or two above where you set it. Setting it "at 8 kHz" does not mean everything above 8 kHz has gone.
The dashed line is where the filter is set. The shaded area is what it is taking out. Notice how far above the cutoff the filter has to reach before it has removed everything — and that 12 dB per octave still leaves plenty of top on the source.
AND WHAT DOESN'T
Does this source actually make music up here?
Same question as the HPF, asked at the other end. A cymbal, a hi-hat and a shaker are top end — that is the instrument, and filtering them is throwing away the thing you miked. A guitar cabinet, on the other hand, physically stops producing useful output somewhere around 5 kHz. Everything a modeller or an amp sim puts above that is distortion artefact, not guitar, and a real speaker in a real room would never have handed it to you.
- Lead vocalConsonants, breath and air. This is the channel that has to cut, and the top is how it does it.
- Overheads / hatsCymbals are high-frequency content. Filtering them is filtering the instrument.
- SnareThe crack and the wires live between 5 and 12 kHz.
- Acoustic gtrPick attack and string detail. It is most of what makes it read as acoustic.
- TracksAlready mixed and mastered. Somebody made these decisions with better monitoring than you have.
- Electric gtrA guitar cabinet rolls off around 5 kHz. Modeller fizz above it is an artefact, not a guitar.
- Bass DIFret noise, string squeak and preamp hiss. The instrument stopped long before this.
- Pads / synth keysOften bright by design and stacked three deep. Darkening them is how they sit under a vocal instead of fighting it.
- Loops / stemsFizzy hats and shaker layers duplicating the kit already on your stage.
- FX / reverb returnsA bright tail smears every consonant in the room. Almost every return wants a lid on it.
- Ambience micsThey are there for congregation, not for detail.
THE TOP IS SHARED TOO
Everything competing for the same air.
The low end is a shared space, and so is the top. Consonants, cymbals, pick attack, air — all of it arrives in the same octave, out of the same handful of high-frequency drivers, into the same pair of ears. Every channel throwing unnecessary hash up there is one more thing the vocal has to be heard through.
And unlike mud, this one is physically tiring. Harshness is what makes a congregation stop singing and start enduring, what makes the person at the desk creep the master fader down through the second song, and what people mean when they say a mix is loud when it is not actually loud at all.
The top of your mix is where intelligibility lives. Every dB of it spent on modeller fizz and pad shimmer is a dB the lead vocal does not get — and the usual fix, pushing the vocal harder, only makes the whole thing louder and harsher. Low-passing what does not belong up there is the version of that fix that does not cost you anything.
Sweep down until it hurts. Then back it up.
The technique is the HPF's, in reverse, and for the same reason: numbers from a chart do not know what cabinet, modeller or patch you are listening to. Start with the filter out of the way and bring it down while the source plays.
Going too far on purpose is again the important part. Come down until the source audibly loses its edge — the guitar stops speaking, the pad turns to mush, the loop loses its hats — then bring it back up until the character returns. That point, plus a little, is your answer. You are looking for the lowest cutoff that costs you nothing, not the highest one you can get away with.
A soloed channel almost always sounds better bright — there is nothing else competing for the air. A guitar that sounds gorgeous and detailed on its own can be the exact thing sanding the top off your vocal. The mix is the only place this decision is real.
FOR OUR STAGE
Where to begin, before you use your ears
These are starting points, not settings. Notice how many rows say leave it off — that is the honest answer more often with an LPF than it ever is with an HPF, and it is the whole point of the section that follows.
The pattern worth taking away: electrics, bass, pads and FX returns are where a low-pass earns its keep, and vocals, cymbals and acoustic instruments are where it usually costs you. If you cannot say out loud what you are removing, you are not removing anything — you are just turning the lights down.
TOO FAR
Don't low-pass just because you can
An LPF is a much easier filter to overuse than an HPF, because taking the top off anything makes it instantly smoother and less fatiguing — and smoother sounds like better for about ninety seconds. Then the mix is dull, the words stop being clear, the band stops sounding like it is in the room, and the only fix anybody reaches for is more level.
Remove only what the source doesn't need. Not what you can get away with removing. If you cannot hear what went, put it back.
Ready to hear it? Listen → LPF Lab puts a real low-pass on real Awaken stems — sweep it yourself, A/B it level-matched, hear too little against too much, and then stack the band together to hear what the fizz actually costs your vocal. Then Arcade → Roll Off tests whether you can find the edge without being told where it is.
GUIDED LISTENING.
NO SCORE.
Pick a band. Toggle flat against boosted until the change is obvious, then drop the boost amount and do it again. Nothing is counted here — build the reference in your ears before you get tested on it. Switch sources as you go: 250 Hz on a bass guitar is a different animal from 250 Hz on the full mix.
THE COMPRESSOR LAB
A real compressor on a real Awaken stem. Every knob below is live — turn it and the audio changes as you listen. Nothing is scored here. Move one knob at a time, keep the gain-reduction meter in view, and A/B against the bypassed channel constantly.
THE REVERB LAB
A real convolution reverb on a real Awaken stem. Every control below is live — turn it and the space changes while the loop keeps running. Nothing is scored here. The job is not to memorise a setting; it is to build the link between a control you turned and a change you heard. Move one thing at a time, A/B constantly, and match the level before you decide anything sounds better.
Focused listening holds every other control still and moves one. That is the only way to learn what a knob does — if two things change at once you have learned nothing except that something changed. The loop never restarts, so click straight between settings and listen to the seam.
THE SIGNAL MACHINE
One channel, on a real Awaken stem. The preamp is already set for you — the way it is on a Sunday — and the controls in your hands are the two you actually operate: trim and the fader. The corridor is the signal getting from the source to your mix: the ceiling is clipping, the floor is the noise. Nothing here is scored.
The filters are shown because they live on the strip. Neither is applied here — set them in the HPF Lab.
The noise floor here is exaggerated so you can hear it on laptop speakers — a real dLive is far quieter. Everything else behaves the way the console does: trim moves your channel meter, the fader does not, and the preamp is somebody else's control.
THE HPF LAB
A real high-pass filter on a real Awaken stem. Sweep it while it plays, A/B it against bypass, and hear the difference between not enough, right, and too far. Then open the whole band at once and hear what eight channels of unfiltered low end actually costs you. The A/B is level-matched, because a filter always makes a channel quieter and quieter is not the same as better.
One thing to know about the audio. Our stems are finished multitracks — whoever mixed the record already high-passed them, so there is almost nothing left in the files to remove (a lead vocal here measures 56 dB down below 100 Hz). So the lab rebuilds the low end a real microphone on our stage would actually hand you: HVAC and building rumble, foot and riser thump, and proximity buildup. It is modelled, not recorded — but it sits at the level a real open channel does, and it behaves the same way: nearly harmless on one channel, impossible to ignore across eight.
MATCH LEVEL renders both versions and trims the filtered one to the same loudness, so what you hear is the filter and not the level. Use it before you decide anything — a bypassed channel is always a little louder, and louder always wins an unfair comparison.
THE LPF LAB
A real low-pass filter on a real Awaken stem. Sweep it down while it plays, A/B it against bypass, and hear the difference between not enough, right, and too far. Then put the band together and hear what four fizzy channels cost the vocal. The A/B is level-matched, because a filter always makes a channel quieter and quieter is not the same as better.
One thing to know about the audio. Most of these stems have their real top end intact — a lead vocal here carries its energy above 6 kHz at −15 dB, drums at −18, and the filter is genuinely removing recorded content. The exceptions are the electrics and the bass: whoever mixed the record already tamed them, so our lead guitar measures 43 dB down above 6 kHz and there is almost no fizz left to find. On those channels the lab adds the artefact back — modeller rasp and preamp hash at the level a real amp sim hands you. It is modelled, not recorded, and it is marked on screen wherever it is running.
MATCH LEVEL renders both versions and trims the filtered one to the same loudness, so what you hear is the filter and not the level. It matters even more here than it does on the HPF — brighter reads as louder to a human ear, so an unmatched bypass will win every time and teach you the wrong thing.
ROLL OFF
The drill. A channel arrives with something above it that should not be there — modeller fizz, preamp hash, a bright tail, a shimmer layer. You get one control: the low-pass cutoff. Find the lowest cutoff that removes the junk without taking the character of the source with it, and submit.
Why lowest. Anyone can park a filter at 18 kHz and call it safe — it also does nothing. Anyone can drag it to 3 kHz and kill the fizz — along with the instrument. The skill is the edge between them, and that is the only place this scores well.
It moves every round. How much junk there is, and how high the source's own useful content reaches, change from round to round — so a number that worked last round will not work this one. There is nothing to memorise here. Listen, then commit.
Five rounds, three lives. A/B against the raw channel as often as you like. Reveal shows you the junk on its own so you can hear exactly what you are hunting — twice on Rookie, once on Pro, never on Certified, and the round then scores half.
THE ARCADE
Six cabinets, each drilling one thing an Awaken engineer has to hear. Two are live; the rest are being built. Everything you pick up in Learn and Listen is what these test — the cabinets do not teach, they measure.
Best scores are kept on this device only, so a volunteer can chase their own number without it turning into a leaderboard. Nothing is sent anywhere.
FREQUENCY FRENZY
One band is boosted on a real Awaken loop. Name it before the clock runs out — and every wave, the boost gets quieter.
The drill. One of the nine bands is boosted on the loop that is playing. The board below is the spectrum, low on the left and high on the right, split into those nine bands — hover a zone to see its frequency and name, and click the one you think is lifted. Correct answers build a streak and score more; a wrong answer costs a life and shows you what the band actually was.
The pressure. Sixty seconds and three lives. Every four correct answers advances a wave and the boost gets quieter — 12 dB is obvious, 1.5 dB is a real engineer's ear. Pick your start level below; the ladder climbs from wherever you begin.
If you are stuck. Eliminate knocks two wrong bands off the board so you can work by process of elimination — three on Rookie, two on Pro, none on Certified. The round then scores half, so use it to rescue a guess, not to coast.
Why it is timed. At FOH you do not get to deliberate. You hear mud and your hand is already on the right band. Speed is the skill, not a gimmick — but build recognition in Listen first, then come here for speed.
KNEE DEEP
The drill. A channel has been run through a compressor whose settings you cannot see. You get the same compressor, doing nothing. Rebuild the processing by ear until yours sounds like the original.
One setting, five stages. The compressor is chosen to suit the channel you pick, and it does not change for the whole run. Stage one gives you only make-up gain; then threshold, ratio, attack and release unlock one at a time. Everything you have already dialled stays exactly where you put it, so you are building toward a single setting rather than chasing a new one every stage.
Level first. Compression turns loud parts down, so make-up comes first — get the two versions to the same loudness before anything else. Until they match in level you cannot honestly hear anything else, and that is just as true at the desk.
You are told which way to move. After every submit, the row under the desk shows each knob you have unlocked and whether it needs to go higher or lower. Three lives, and a stage passes when every unlocked knob is inside tolerance.
GAIN STAGE
The question. Do you know what to touch? Every channel in this cabinet arrives with its preamp already set by the System Engineer. What is being tested is whether you can keep a healthy level with room to spare, and whether you reach for the right control when something is wrong.
Five rounds. Find the sweet spot with trim. Leave room for a performance you have not heard yet. Trim or fader. Trim, fader or escalate. Then run a live service.
Scoring. There is no magic number — every source has its own healthy window. You are scored on signal health, headroom, the control you chose and the problems you escalated. Running hot is never rewarded, and neither is quietly trimming down a preamp problem that somebody upstream needs to know about.
REVERB RAIDER
The drill. Five rounds that go where the Reverb Lab stops. Name the space by ear, guess how long the tail is, hear where the reverb starts, rebuild a hidden verb from scratch — then take a worship mix somebody has ruined with reverb and make it right.
The progression. What is it? → How long is it? → When does it start? → Can you recreate it? → Can you actually mix with it?
Scoring. Rounds two, three and four score on proximity, not exact numbers — close counts, closer counts more, and the estimate rounds cannot end your run. Lives are spent where there is a call to get wrong: naming the space, rebuilding it, and the boss. The boss does not score against one hidden preset at all — there is a range of good answers, and it grades the decision you made.
EQ MATCH
The drill. A channel has been processed with filter moves you cannot see. You get the same filters, all flat. Rebuild the processing by ear until yours sounds like the original.
How to play it. Toggle Original against Yours constantly — that comparison is the whole game. Drag a node left and right for frequency, up and down for gain, and use the Q slider for width. The original's curve stays hidden while you work, so the picture cannot give you the answer; it appears as a dashed line only when you submit.
Scoring. Accuracy is how closely your curve matches across the whole spectrum. Five stages, three lives, and a filter is added as you climb — one bell, then two, then a low cut, then a high shelf. Pick a difficulty below: it sets how close you have to get, and whether hints are available.
Source audio. Every drill runs on real Awaken multitracks — a sixteen-bar chorus at 134 BPM from “Open Heaven,” eight stems plus a summed full mix, dry and unprocessed, normalised to −6 dBFS so a +12 dB boost never clips. Pink noise is included as a monitoring reference. Use headphones or the training-room monitors — laptop speakers cannot reproduce 60 Hz or 125 Hz and will teach you the wrong thing.