Audio engineers have been lining up behind soundboards for more than fifty years the same way NBA players line up for free throws. Face your target, feet planted shoulder width apart, square your shoulders, bend your knees, take a deep breath, and you’re ready to go. Yet as technology continues to advance rapidly in the AV world, a question comes up more often than ever:
Do audio professionals still need to stand behind a physical board, or can audio mixing jobs be remote the same way many other jobs have become?
Though it’s not quite widespread across the entire industry just yet, early adopters and forward thinkers are already mixing from a distance as long as they meet three primary requirements. In this blog we’ll explore the benefits of remote audio mixing and then outline the essential elements you’ll need to turn remote audio mixing into a side gig or even a full career.
By the end of this article you’ll see why remote audio mixing jobs are not only possible but genuinely worth pursuing.
What Makes Remote Mixing Jobs Ideal
Requirement 1: Digital Equipment
Requirement 2: Zero Latency Control
Requirement 3: Custom Video and Audio Feed
Final Thoughts
Before we get into the “how,” it’s worth spending a moment on the “why” behind pursuing remote audio mixing work. Though there are a range of different advantages to mixing from a distance, three stand out. Having a clear reason to pursue something this cutting edge and innovative will help carry you through the learning curve with energy and momentum.
Imagine this scenario: You leave the house at 8:00am, thirty minutes earlier than normal because of heavy snow. You arrive at the venue at around 9:30am. You finish setting up around 9:40am and then wait for the event to begin at 10:00am. You mix the audio in the booth until the event ends at 11:00am. You pack up and leave at 11:10am and get home at 12:40pm. Although the event lasted only 90 minutes, the logistics required 4 hours and 40 minutes, with more than three of those hours spent not mixing at all.
This is the daily reality for many audio professionals, and has been for a long time. You accept a job that’s an hour away, but because of weather or traffic, you need to leave far earlier. You then spend more time traveling than you do actually working. Most audio engineers can’t bill for travel time, which means that the more you work in person, the harder it becomes to fill your schedule with enough well paid opportunities and still keep room open for other clients and opportunities.
Now consider the same event outlined above but with a remote audio mixing setup. The event begins at 10:00am. You log in at 9:50am to get everything set up, mix until the event ends at 11:30am, and log off right away. You never leave home and you spend a grand total of 100 minutes on the gig, with nearly all of that time focused on mixing the event rather than commuting.
The value is easy to see. If remote mixing is your side hustle, you can pick up several opportunities each week because travel doesn’t get in the way. If you want to pursue this as a full time career, you can finally stop spending full days on the road and instead easily fit multiple live events into a single day while still having time to mow your lawn, cook a healthy meal, or pick your kids up from school.
When your work requires you to stand behind a physical board, your opportunities are limited to the places you can reasonably reach. Traveling 2, 6, or even something like 12 hours to mix a live stream is rarely practical. Once you can mix from anywhere, the entire country and even the world becomes as convenient as your local venue.
Instead of having only a few possibilities to consider each month, you can now accept opportunities from anywhere and fill your calendar with multiple jobs each day. Additionally, you can be more choosy with the work that you agree to take on, since you don’t have to say yes to every opportunity that you come across. Even more, you can do this from a quiet and focused environment, working from your home or any preferred space. This will help reduce burnout which will leave you with more mental capacity to take on additional work. In more ways than one, remote audio mixing transforms the range and volume of work available to audio engineers.
Let’s be real, the benefits of remote mixing aren’t just for audio engineers. Organizations also gain a major advantage when they hire someone who can mix remotely. Many teams rely on volunteers or a limited pool of local professionals who may not be available consistently. When remote options are on the table, these orgs can now choose from a broad range of skilled professionals across the country who are available, reliable, and aligned with their budget.
With a consistent professional mixer on hand, there’s no need to pay for travel and no pressure to rely on a volunteer who may not have the same level of experience for important events. This improves the quality of the live stream and strengthens overall brand presentation and presence.
There are many more benefits, but these 3 highlight why remote audio mixing is worth pursuing. Now that we have explored the why, it is time to dive into the how and look at what you need to make this a reality.
This first requirement is somewhat obvious. To gain remote access to an audio board, it must be a digital mixer. When digital audio workstations became widely used in the 90s, the industry quickly realized that hardware mixers also needed to evolve into digital friendly tools. Jumping ahead 30 years into the present and digital mixers now dominate the market across nearly every major brand.
Because of this, whether your client uses Allen and Heath, Behringer, Mackie, Midas, Yamaha, or anything else, there is a very good chance their board is already digital and ready for remote access. If they want to hire you to mix their live stream audio, the equipment you need is almost certainly in place, but you’ll need to double check just to be sure.
This is where things begin to get more complex. Live streaming always includes some level of latency. Traditional broadcast television has hovered around five to eighteen seconds depending on the event. Modern live streaming can be as short as two seconds, but it often stretches anywhere from several seconds to more than a minute with certain platforms.
For remote audio mixing, this becomes a serious problem. If you’re forced to adjust your mix only after you hear an issue through the delayed live stream, you’re already too late. Imagine your stream has a 30 second delay. A microphone spikes at the 20 minute mark of the event. You will not hear the issue until 20 minutes and 30 seconds, and even if you respond in five seconds, your online audience still hears a painful screech for 35 seconds.
For reference, in the highly sophisticated 1994 film Dumb and Dumber, Jim Carrey's character Lloyd Christmas claims to make the most annoying sound in the world for approximately 6 seconds. Well, hold on Lloyd, we've got you beat at 35 seconds because we were mixing based off of a high latency live stream. Yikes! That’s the danger of mixing from behind a high latency return feed.
To avoid this, you need a system that allows you to react in real time. Tools like Mixing Station or brand specific mixer control apps offer near instant responsiveness when you are physically present on the same network. Remote audio mixing requires that same level of responsiveness, but from a distance. Without true zero latency control, even the most talented audio engineer is powerless to prevent extended bursts of unpleasant sound caused by the delay of the stream itself.
The final piece of successful remote audio mixing involves seeing and hearing the content you’re mixing. Since you can’t rely on the actual live broadcast due to latency, you need an ultra low latency feed that delivers both the audio and the video of the event in near real time. Mixing without seeing what is happening on stage or on camera is far more difficult, especially when quick decisions with visual context matter.
Your feed should ideally stay under one second of delay whenever possible, and only a few seconds at most. This level of visibility lets you respond instantly while also understanding the visual context behind every sound. With a fast video and audio feed in place, you can control the board confidently and know exactly what you are adjusting in the moment
At this point you might be thinking that these three requirements make sense but feel a little intimidating to figure out on your own. Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered. We built a remote audio mixing tool that’s perfect for professionals looking to develop a remote capable audio mixing career called RemoteMix.
We’re a live streaming company that’s broadcast hundreds of thousands of events since our start in 2013. We’ve perfected the video side, yet we continued to see broadcasters struggle to tune their audio in a way that worked both for front of house and for their online audience. That is why we created RemoteMix with instant control of every major digital mixer while also delivering an ultra low latency video and audio feed. This means you can react in the moment without waiting through a 30, 60, or 90 second delay.
Remote audio mixing jobs shouldn’t be a distant idea anymore. Organizations that stream their events deserve access to real audio expertise regardless of where the mixer is located. Our hope is that RemoteMix reshapes the audio space and helps more live online events excel in both picture and sound.