Being ready to solve problems at the last minute is a crucial skill for anyone working in the studio or in live productions. There will always be that one last thing you get asked to do on short notice or a last minute equipment failure that needs to be worked around. For many of those situations I find the solution is some kind of strange mixer that has some uncommon feature you’d otherwise never expect to need.

I was recently working on a musical production and during dress rehearsal the night before the show opened the director came to me and asked for four wired handheld microphones to be setup and left back stage for a scene in the production. The scene involved four ladies on a platform singing background vocals. They would need to grab their mics, in the dark, and climb up onto a raised platform. Because of the set design the closest place I had to plug microphones in was about 50 feet away and I had nothing but a pile of questionable 20′ cables to work with. When that scene happened, two mics worked, one was totally dead and the other just crackled. No amount of cable swapping or poking and prodding would get all four mics working at the same time.

I had the good fortune of having a friend of mine there with a lot of experience in radio broadcasting at the show the next night and I asked him for a hand in getting things working. I thought if we tried to run the cables nice and high where no one could bump them we might get all four working at once for the scene. I explained the issue to him, he thought for a moment and then said ‘I have just the thing, in my car.’

Moments later he returned with a Shure M267 mixer.

We taped the very small unit to the inside wall of the set, plugged four mics into it, plus one line back to the snake and everything worked great. Since we had only one long cable run to deal with we could easily get it out of the way where it couldn’t be disturbed and we could then run short cables from the singers to the mixer. Better still the mixer could be powered by a few 9V batteries so we didn’t need to search for power and make more tripping hazards in the dark back stage.

This little mixer, which Shure no longer makes, is not something I would ever expect to find in the arsenal of a live production. It, and it’s many siblings, were made for field use by broadcast pros doing interviews or other similar duties. After the production finished I did some research on the unit and I discovered a whole host of other similar mixers that Shure made.

Another common problem I find is never being able to get enough headphone mixes out to musicians. Usually your main mixing board has 4-8 aux feeds that need to be used to do the work of dozens. In larger productions you’ll find all kinds of expensive gear to increase the number of headphone and monitoring mixes that can be made. Those are great solutions but money is not always as free flowing as it could be and I often find myself looking for a way to do more with less money. My current goto mixer for this is the aged Tascam M-1b, or the even more aged, though nearly identical, Teac M-1.

These are simple 8 input stereo mixers with two headphone outs and the ability to be chained together to form a larger mixer. The manual lists no hard maximum so you could, if you really wanted to, chain 4 or 8 of these together to get up to 32 or 64 inputs. By that point I suspect the self noise and limited feature set would get in the way. These mixers have no EQs, no insert points and only peak lights for metering. Don’t be put off though, they are magic for one simple reason. In addition to those features the mixer has one ace up its sleeve. Each input is half-normalled to a matching output. That is to say that when you plug something into channel one, that signal is passed through to an output as well as to the mix bus of the M-1b and any change made to the incoming signal on the mixer does not effect that output. You can take one signal from your main mixing board and connect it to the input of 1 Tascam M-1b and then, without changing the source signal, connect it to the next M-1b on down the line until you’ve built as many additional outputs as you need.

I use these in the studio, 5 of them, all connected together to take one set of 8 outputs from my main console and use them to create 5 additional, custom headphone mixes. When the singer needs more reverb I can turn it up for them without also adding more reverb to everyone else’s mix. Additionally, once the recording process is complete and it’s time to mix you can use them to create custom mixes to and from your effect boxes without taking up a lot of space on the main console.

The offer a lot of versatility for short money. When I started buying them on Ebay they would sell for $20-30, though they now seem to only be listed for much higher prices and don’t sell as often. Keep your eyes peeled for them and other similar mixers, like the Fostex 2050 and you’ll be surprised how much these dinosaurs have left to offer.

Robert