Never been at a studio board. I've only run boards at church.
 
Why is it , when they are playing a tune in a video explaining the recording process of a hit tune or some such, they run the board? The mix is done, shouldn't they just play the song, and pause when they want to comment? If the part is not there yet, what good does it do to have the faders down, and then slide 4 of them up?
It does give them something to do, it just seems silly to this unenlightened one..
 
So, enlighten me, if you please.

pushing faders is the equivalent of saying "uh", JMO

Uh...

Hi,
 
You need to see the DVD about Tom Dowd.
 
It's more about listening to the music, than it is about the knobs ... but nowadays, those who are not musically minded will all know the knobs better than anyone else ... but when it comes to music, they know a lot less ... besides not having any idea what creativity is all about!
 
All depends on your level of appreciation for an art form. Unlike most that you will EVER read about, Tom Dowd came from the time when music was RECORDED LIVE, direct into a disk, and you had to have a good and perceptive ear for music, to "find it" and "save it".
 
Now you know why we have a great moment with Eric and Duane, and not really that many others! Wasted by knob folks that would not know a thing about music ... heck, you can hear thousands of these every day in your local concert halls!

I recall a video featuring Tom Dowd (fantastic engineer), and if I recall correctly, he would have some faders pulled down - and would push them up or solo them to illustrate a point - such as how tight the backing vocals were, followed by pushing them up into the mix.
 
I cannot think of a particularly valid reason for moving faders around in a video clip when simply playing it back and explaining some aspect of it not related to the faders being adjusted.
 
Or, maybe they simply KNOW that the mix isn't quite done....  hee hee
 
Bob Bone
 

The youngsters at the church look at me cross-eyed when I tell them I rode the faders back in the day. When we had "podium" mics, I would follow their head so as to keep it even..... 
Now the mic is plastered to their head and no need.....
 
a free story
I was the first "sound guy"(no pros) at the church who  was able to get the 2nd row choir members to hear themselves, with just 3 mics in front and no monitors...
 

I know Eddie Kramer runs the board when he highlights different aspects of some of Hendrix's songs. Like the fact that the bass and rhythm guitar got bounced down to the same track on "Crosstown Traffic", or to show that Jimi actually played the bass track on "All Along The Watchtower" because Noel refused to play on it. So I think having the engineer running the board on the vids can be useful at times.

Hi,
 
Because too much of the music these days, and in the past 20/25 years, has become so cookie cutter like, I have somehow, always thought that folks like Tom Dowd, George Martin, George Gomelsky, Tony Visconti, and the ECM guy, were people that had what I call a "twisted ear" for music, and for them, to find something new and make changes here and there to help the artists define their own notes, was fun and a neat thing to do.
 
Unfortunately, the music business is run by the money and the fortunes of the richest, and many of these end up hidden and lost, though everyone of these will ALWAYS ... be remembered for having created a force in the music arts, by helping develop their own scene, even. Gomelsky is considered the "father" of Progressive Music, for example!

I love those making-of videos, especially the ones that delve into technical details. I don't give a durn about musicians' social lives or what inspired a song lyric or who didn't get along with whom. Show me the signal path, please. Let me see what kind of acoustic treatments were in the room.
 
One of my favorites is the DSoM documentary, because you get to hear tracks soloed. Listening to David Gilmour in solo makes you appreciate why the album sounds so great: every individual track sounds great. You could make a nice record out of any randomly-selected subset of those tracks.

robert_e_bone
I recall a video featuring Tom Dowd (fantastic engineer), and if I recall correctly, he would have some faders pulled down - and would push them up or solo them to illustrate a point - such as how tight the backing vocals were, followed by pushing them up into the mix.
 
I cannot think of a particularly valid reason for moving faders around in a video clip when simply playing it back and explaining some aspect of it not related to the faders being adjusted.
 
Or, maybe they simply KNOW that the mix isn't quite done....  hee hee
 
Bob Bone

On the cartoon music book, it is stipulated that Leopold Stokowski used to do that to make sure he had the impression and emphasis that he wanted on the music. AND, of course this became even more important and valuable for him, in recordings, where now he could get what he wanted!
 
I don't know, that "modern" musicians, are as good about this ... I can not imagine Bapu, splitting up a whole bunch of parts of the CHB stuff, and see folks clean them up on their own or otherwise ... maybe I'm just naïve! I tend to think that most of their work is you sing along the rest as if it were harmony, and not all "orchestra" material falls into that at all, which is the main reason why this was first seen and appreciated in classical music in the 50's and 60's (the Red Label stuff), because rock music did not get to see this until later still.