I was taught how to set up a console a little differently then the way Mac does. I attended a Live Sound school at the University of ? in Anaheim, Ca. It was 7 days 10 hrs a day. Lots of big names there. The mixing classes were given by the head engineer for Garth Brooks, The head Engineer for Showco and the head Engineer for Clair Brothers. There was a stage with a band set up and then there was the standard FOH and Monitor consoles. There were also about six sound isolated booths with duplicate consoles patched into the band for individual instruction.
In a nut shell when the band is cooking along nothing special happening engineer just standing back listening all faders should be at 0. In other words the basic mix is acquired by placing all faders at 0 and then using the trim controls to acquire the nominal mix. The faders are then used for what they called "specials". Solos, drop someone back, special effects etc. When it was time to go back to normal all faders at 0.With faders at 0 you get maximum throw and still have 26 db of gain available.
This procedure can't be followed if you are mixing monitors from the FOH console using a pre fade aux send. Won't be enough gain on some instruments for effective monitors. In this case set the gain to just below clip.

John
ESI Gigaport HD+
Lenovo Turion II /4 Gig Ram/ Win7x64 be
15.6" Monitor
"The only Band is a Real Band"
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