Sub Gigs, Mic Mutes & the Art of Mixing Live with Jesus Hernandez
Gig Gab - The Working Musician's PodcastShow Notes
This week you start things off digging into the craft that separates good gigs from great ones. You’ll get the playbook for prepping and surviving sub gigs, learn (again!) why a splitter snake earns its place in your rig, and sort through the real options when you need a mic mute switch that actually works. Then you wrestle with a question every working band faces today: are fan-posted videos helping your brand or hurting it? It’s the kind of practical, in-the-trenches breakdown that reminds you to Always Be Performing, whether the camera’s rolling or not.
Then guest co-host Jesus Hernandez joins, and you trace his path from a Portastudio kid to the engineer bands trust with their sound, along with the philosophy he’s built along the way: you’re serving people’s ears, and the console is your instrument. You’ll hear why you should ask a band what they want to sound like before you touch a fader, why learning to mix yourself turns your engineer into a producer, and how routing a digital mixer keeps everything simple when the power flickers. He shares the gear that’s earned his trust, hard-won war stories from the road, his time subbing as a bass player in Nashville, and life on tour with a Phil Collins and Genesis tribute. By the end you’ll be listening to your own gigs with sharper ears and a hungrier inner critic.
00:00:00 Gig Gab 539 – Monday, June 22nd, 2026
June 22nd: National Chocolate Éclair Day
Guest co-host: Jesus Hernandez
00:01:32 Prepping for and playing Sub Gigs
Ultimate-Guitar’s Pro Charts…now with lyrics!
00:04:25 The benefits of splitter snake
Listener Questions
00:09:55 Mark-What’s the best MD Mic Switch?
D’Addario Mic Mute Infrared Mic Sensor
Optogate
Radial HotShot DM-1 or HotShot MD
LILYP4D Mic Mute
00:20:25 Mark-Are fan-posted videos good or bad?
00:24:36 SPONSOR: OneSkin. Get 15% off OneSkin with the code GIGGAB at https://www.oneskin.co/GIGGAB #oneskinpod
00:26:54 Guest Co-host: Jesus Hernandez
00:28:20 Lady and the Tramp Start taught him to record multi-track
Then the Portastudio
Tascam Multitrack Recorder
Jesus became the go-to guy for recording bands and fixing sounds
00:34:27 A2 at a local theater
Then the A1 went on vacation, and Jesus became the A1
00:35:38 Then a jazz club
Sound reinforcement at the most basic level
Ultimately what you’re trying to serve is people’s ears.
Use your eyes to serve that purpose.
00:37:38 Recording was rough at first, but you learn!
Making recordings with a live performance in mind
Let it Be…Naked
00:41:24 Ask the band: what do you guys want to sound like on the recording?
“Take a picture of the band, then paint on top of it!”
00:32:36 For live sound: how do you find out what the band sounds like?
Before arriving: listen to the band’s records (or the band they’re covering)
00:47:26 When doing sound, consider yourself a band member
“Playing the console” – The mixer is an instrument
I’m controlling the arrangement
00:48:50 Singing the praises of bands that can set levels on stage
00:49:20 A band whose levels are ALL over the place
So bad the band was sent home after the first set.
You have to be your hardest critic
00:53:25 Learn to mix yourself, then your engineer can go from problem-solver to producer!
00:55:26 “If the power goes out at the mixer, you’ll still sound good”
Fixing it at the source
The night the power-flickered and factory reset the mixer!
PreSonus StudioLive
01:00:19 Keeping it as simple as possible
Soft-patching, routing, matrixes, oh my!
Learn how to route a digital mixer
01:06:39 The downsides of strictly analog
But you learn how to ring out frequencies
Fix low-end feedback by popping in/out the polarity button
Rick Carmona (From “No Peace At All”), the engineer who mentored Jesus
Every business is in the customer service
Davis Thurston on Gig Gab
The engineer has multiple customers: the band, the audience, and the staff at the venue
01:13:38 Bands vs. Reunion Gigs
01:18:25 Bringing an analog mixe
More from Gig Gab - The Working Musician's Podcast
Your fellow working musicians just handed you a year’s worth of gig hacks, and this week Gig Gab pulls the best listener tips from Instagram and Facebook into one episode. You’ll get a hand-raise monitor check that knocks out soundcheck in minutes, a dedicated soundcheck song for when the room’s already full, and the mixing moves pros swear by: high-pass the bass at 80 Hz, sidechain it to the kick, and carve 2.5 kHz out of everything else so the vocals cut through. Then you’ll build a smarter set list. Space out the songs that wreck your singer, keep a back-pocket list of crowd-grabbers, mark who sings lead for the sound person, and track song lengths so you never blow past curfew.
Megan Ihnen and Alan Theisen of Neonautica went from contemporary classical recitals to headlining dubstep parties in New Orleans, and they brought a theater kid’s discipline with them. You’ll hear how they split band duties so nobody has to wonder who’s handling what, why the only correct response to a note is thank you, and why there’s no such thing as a good or bad sound, only the sound you meant to make and the one you didn’t. They also explain why they wrote an hour-long set the way a composer writes a symphony, and what it means to control the room instead of just reading it.
Chris Cron posted what he thought was a one-off video about how to sound like the Beach Boys, set his phone down, and came back to 10,000 views. A few days later it was near a million. A few years later, he’s a touring member of the actual Beach Boys. Chris joins Dave to show you what was underneath that “overnight” success: a full-time session vocalist gig since 2018, years of throwing content at the wall, and the social media lessons that made one video stick: Frame your post as a question, reply to every comment, and treat the haters as fodder for a lesson or a laugh. From there, the path runs through a John Stamos follow, a coffee with the band’s musical director, a one-off Post Malone fill-in, and a phone call you don’t say no to. When the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity shows up, you throw the door open wide.
Every club at SXSW sounds good, every night, all week, and we’ve often wondered how they maintain that consistency. This week Dave finally gets the answer from Nate Cross, SXSW’s Director of Production, who went from intern to Assistant Production Manager to running the whole show. You’ll hear how his team builds out 55 to 60 venues (down from 100+ before the pandemic), why they mic everything even when it looks like overkill, and how 20-minute changeovers actually run on time with bands who’ve never met. Then there’s the backline story: trading the free band beer for a drum kit and amps at every venue, which enhanced everything.
Skylar Hamilton is back by popular demand for round two of your questions, recorded across an Airbnb kitchen table in New York City where a roll of paper towels doubles as a mic stand, because it’s the right height and it kills table rumble.