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A reusable pre-show checklist

The checklist that survives the moment when your mind goes blank thirty seconds before going live.

Every live audio incident has the same shape: someone forgot to check a thing they always check. A pre-show checklist exists to remove that whole class of problem. The trick is making it fast enough that you actually run it.

The version below is the checklist baked into CueLab Monitor. Ten items, four groups, all of them runnable in under 90 seconds.

Hardware (3 items)

Interface connected and recognised. Open Audio MIDI Setup (mac) / Sound Settings (Windows) and confirm your interface is present and selected as default for this app. The number of times the OS silently picked the wrong device is high.
Headphone monitor on, levels comfortable. Anything that goes wrong in monitor is something you can catch immediately. Anything that goes wrong without monitor is something your audience tells you about later.
Mic input flagged at the correct port. With multi-input interfaces, the right port is not always the one you used last time. Verify.

Routing (3 items)

Host mic routed to stream + record. Your audience and your backup. If only one of the two is true, you have a partial show.
Music bed not in headphone monitor. Music in your headphones causes you to talk over it, lean into it, or lose your timing. Music goes to stream only.
Browser source muted unless needed. The most common live-audio incident is a browser tab playing audio that the host forgot about. Default browser sources to muted; unmute deliberately, never permanently.

Levels (2 items)

Mic peaks below -6 dBFS. Headroom for emotion, surprise, and louder words. -6 dBFS is the right ceiling for a calm voice; you’ll want -9 to -12 if your guests are excitable.
Stream loudness target set (-16 LUFS for spoken word, -14 for music shows). Set this once, in your encoder or DAW. Don’t fight your platform’s normalisation.

Stream + backup (2 items)

Stream key entered, encoder ready. Yes, even though you “haven’t changed it.” Verify it twice.
Local recording rolling. Always. Streams drop, encoders die, internet flakes. A local recording is your insurance policy.

What’s deliberately not on the list

“Be hydrated”, “stretch”, “have notes ready” — these are show checks, not audio checks. Different list, different moment.
“Test the music transitions” — that’s a rehearsal step, not a pre-show one.
Mic technique cues — they belong in your script or your producer’s ears, not your checklist.

A checklist that tries to cover everything covers nothing. Ten items. Four groups. 90 seconds. Run it, then go live.