Sacramento, CA (February 5, 2026)—When do Mandarins abide by Law? When he’s mixing them. The Sacramento Mandarins drum and bugle corps has competed for more than 60 years, earning multiple Drum Corps International Championship Division 2 and 3 wins along the way, and since 2023, engineer Griffin Law has handled the Mandarins’ lead engineering duties and managed the production staff for live performances.
Those performances are complicated, too, with 160 moving performers on a full-length football field, performing choreography and playing songs that Law mixes on an Allen & Heath SQ console, with a CQ-20B as a submixer used for keyboard percussion, which outputs multiple stereo feeds into the SQ and can be controlled remotely through a tablet.
“We don’t use the SQ as most people would, with one main stereo mix to the P.A.,” explained Law. “We use mainly post-fade AUX buses to feed sets of speakers across the field, with the main layer as just a control for all the sends. The customizable fader banks on SQ are also mission critical for what we do.”
Having performers across a wide field is another challenge for Law. “In a traditional live sound performance, you maybe deal with a vocalist moving 10-20 feet across a stage,” he explained. “With a marching band, I have to deal with trumpet players moving distances of over 100 feet on the field.” To account for this, Law’s team makes crucial delay calculations to keep performances sounding tight. “One of the things we really like about the SQ console is the ability to add delays on every input and output channel,” said Law. “Time alignment is very important with moving performers and multiple speaker stacks across the field, and Allen & Heath makes that very simple.”
• Allen & Heath Ready for NAMM Show 2026
The Mandarins’ audio team also pays close attention to the balance of the various acoustic elements and electronic elements. “We have lots of microphones, which are blended with 80-plus brass members at any moment,” said Law. “We also manage the way the brass comes through, since the high and low frequencies interact and it skews brighter, so we mic the tuba players to add some of that depth and keep the brass line balanced.”
Discover more great stories—get a free Mix SmartBrief subscription!
While the musicians practice their routines, Law and the Mandarins’ audio team rehearse their mixes over multiple weeks before heading into competition season. “We fine tune our mic angles and focus on getting the delays right so it sounds better each time,” said Law. “We use about 30 different scenes for a 12-minute performance, trying to get the choreography and time alignment as close as possible to what we need.”
