![\"Griffin](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/2026-02-05-ah.jpeg\")
Griffin Law (right) handles the Mandarins\u2019 lead engineering duties and manages the production staff for live performances.<\/p>\nEngineer\/production manager Griffin Law discusses mixing the massive Sacramento Mandarins competitive drum and bugle corp.<\/p>\n
\t\tGriffin Law (right) handles the Mandarins\u2019 lead engineering duties and manages the production staff for live performances.<\/p>\n
Sacramento, CA (February 5, 2026)\u2014When do Mandarins abide by Law? When he\u2019s mixing them. The Sacramento Mandarins<\/a> 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\u2019 lead engineering duties and managed the production staff for live performances.<\/p>\n 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<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n \u201cWe don\u2019t use the SQ as most people would, with one main stereo mix to the P.A.,\u201d explained Law. \u201cWe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n Having performers across a wide field is another challenge for Law. \u201cIn a traditional live sound performance, you maybe deal with a vocalist moving 10-20 feet across a stage,\u201d he explained. \u201cWith a marching band, I have to deal with trumpet players moving distances of over 100 feet on the field.\u201d To account for this, Law\u2019s team makes crucial delay calculations to keep performances sounding tight. \u201cOne of the things we really like about the SQ console is the ability to add delays on every input and output channel,\u201d said Law. \u201cTime alignment is very important with moving performers and multiple speaker stacks across the field, and Allen & Heath makes that very simple.\u201d<\/p>\n