LS9 tips: recall safe

I've decided to share a few tips about not so obvious things on the Yamaha LS9, with the hope that they will be useful.

Recall safe is probably the only good thing about the scene recall on the LS9, because otherwise recalling a scene would recall the whole desk, which you very rarely want (I can think of only one occasion: the beginning of a show to reset the desk).

However there are a few things that cannot be "recall safed", and they will bite you. The only way to find out what is actually safe or not is to look at page 256 of the manual, "Mixing parameters operation applicability". You will discover that:

1. Pan cannot be safed unless ALL is selected.
2. To Stereo, To Mono, to MIX pre-post, and many other things such as Mute Assign also cannot be safed unless ALL is selected.
3. You cannot safe Mix to stereo for a MIX unless ALL is selected.

This means that if half way through plotting you decide to send a channel (that you wish to recall) to the mono channel you will have to turn it on for each scene you have already plotted.


Most importantly, and really not obviously:

1. You cannot safe channel link
2. You cannot safe MIX/MATRIX bus settings in the System Setup screen

These two are the most annoying things. It means that you cannot simply create an extra stereo bus on the second night of the show to record, because that setting "stereo bus" will have to be saved in every single scene.

I guess the conclusion is that it is wise to the plotting as late as possible and be careful when designing the signal path to allow for modification that do not require you to replot the whole show.