Fader Creep

While this term could conceivably be applied to an unsavory recording or live sound engineer, it actually applies to a phenomenon many of us experience while mixing — the tendency to try to make everything louder than everything else, or to solve mix problems by turning up sources that are getting buried in the mix rather than turning down the sources that are burying them. The net result of fader creep is overload of the master output meter and bus. The solution is proper gain staging and the discipline to turn things down as well as turn things up and to use equalization, filtering, panning, and ambience to “sculpt” a mix so that everything can be heard as desired.