Musicians in a live sound setting

For me, there are two types of musicians.

Those that are so full of themselves and think that whatever you’re trying to do is a horrible job. These artists contantly complain about every aspect of your job. It is impossible to cater to these artists because whatever you do, it’s not good enough.

And then there are the musicians that are so insecure that they won’t tell you if you’re doing what they want you to. If they are unhappy with the sound, they won’t tell you because it’s probably their ears, or their fault it sounds bad.

And every once in a while, you get the third kind.

The professional.

The professional knows what you are doing and knows what you should be doing. They have been to enough sound-checks that they are comfortable with asking for what they want without being assholes about it. They don’t let things slide because they’re afraid of asking questions about but they also don’t bitch and moan when something doesn’t work out.

But there is equal importance in being a sound-tech.

I don’t know how many small gigs I’ve been to that could have been much better if the engineer knew how to do his job properly. I’m not saying that you should have a degree in audio, but a little understanding always helps.

There is also a difference in having the title of a professional and acting professionally. Having an engineering degree or diploma of some sort takes hours and thousands of dollars/euros/pounds. But acting professionally is free.

So the next time you’re acting as a musician or working as a sound-tech in a concert venue, remember to act professionally. Mutual respect between musicians and engineers can do wonders for the vibe of the work setting and will deliver better results to the audience.

Essential equipment for a live sound setting.

Do you have enough tracks?

When preparing for a live sound gig, there are some things you need to be aware of. Some gigs are obviously smaller or larger than others so you need to be sure you have everything you need to make the gig run more smoothly.

When you have the rider and are more or less sure of the lineup, you can more or less gauge what type of equipment you will need.

At every concert, there are different requirements, you may need more of some things and less of others but here below I point out the things that are necessary at every concert.

1. Mixer.

• Obvious right? But what I mean is that you should be aware of how many tracks the band will need and the size of the mixer required for the gig. The size of the mixer varies if you’re mixing a 16 track rock group or a 24 track special show with different line-ups. Also be aware of extra tracks for FX returns or playbacks for example.

2. Enough monitors.

• Make sure that everybody on stage can hear themselves. So be sure to bring enough monitors. It will be a pain both for you and the band if there are monitoring problems. Having a great stage sound will let the gig run more smoothly and the band will appear more confident.

3. Decent enough P.A.

• You won’t need a huge JBL Vertec line-array for a small club so plan accordingly. When talking to the equipment rental make sure you specify the size of the venue and type of the concert. The professionals who work there will usually be able to gauge how big your system will have to be. Sure, they might make it a little bit bigger than they really have to to charge more, but it’s safe to say they’re(usually) trustworthy.

4. Outboard equipment.

• In addition to the mixer, the FOH engineer must have a decent selection of outboard equipment to help him mix. When working with analog mixers, this means having a huge effects rack with compressors, gates and multi-effects. But when working with a digital mixer such as the Yamaha’s or the Roland M-400 all the compressors and effects are built-in making the process of inserting them a breeze.

• For example, working with a rock group and an analog mixer in my opinion you will need at least:
• Compressor/Gate for the kick drum.
• Compressor/Gate for the snare. You can often get dual gate/compressors that you can use and save space in your effect rack.
• Gates for the toms.
• Compressor for the bass.
• Compressors for the vocal, if more than one then use the compressor on the lead vocal.
• 3-4 different types of effects. Drum reverb, plate reverb for vocals and tap-tempo delay are my favorites and the ones I use the most.

5. Extra cables

• Lastly, because with Murphy’s law watching closely everything that goes on in the live sound field, make sure you have backups of everything. And more often than not, that means cables. Bring more cables than you think you will ever need, because you will need them.

So when you’re preparing for your next gig, prepare yourself and make notes of what you will need. Do you have a big enough mixer? Enough monitors? Will your P.A. be enough? Keep all these questions in mind and follow these guidelines and you’ll do great.

What do you guys think? Am I forgetting something? Something I’m not mentioning? Let me know in the comments.

Tips for better live mixing

Live mixing is a bit different than studio mixing. It’s all happening in the now and there’s no undo or a chance to do another take. It’s more stressfull but at the same time can be very rewarding if everything works out.

Some things to keep in mind when working as a live sound technician. Things will inevitably go wrong at some point but some of these tips might scale chance in your favor.

• Be wary of feedback

• I guess this goes without saying but feedback is not a particularly good friend of the sound-tech, nor the rest of the crowd. Be sure your system and microphones can handle the high SPL level you’re going to give them and don’t turn all the gain knobs to the point of feedback. It will leave no headroom if you need to turn things up later.

• Getting the drum sound right live.

• Live drums coming over the P.A. can sound amazing and in my opinion is one of the most important elements of the live sound. Getting the drum sound right can often determine the quality of the rest of the show. Make sure they are tight and punchy and you’ll win the crowd and artists over.

• Over compressing vocals.

• Some like to over-compress vocals in a live setting. They make sure the singer can be heard at all times and in itself is a valid technique. However, it can de-emphasize the feel and natural quality of the vocal. It all depends on the genre, so decide on this one yourselves.

• Monitor positioning.

• Good monitor positioning is critical to avoid feedback and making sure the band can hear themselves. If they are too close to the artist the sound waves just travel around their feet, never reaching their ears. And if they are too far away, the sound of the monitors will get buried and masked by the stage sound.

• Too loud amplifiers

• In a small to medium concert venue, having the guitarists turn their amplifiers up too loud will compromise an otherwise great live sound. Good monitor positioning and semi-quiet amplifiers will help fix any problems artist have with their stage sound.
• But if guitarist insist on cranking their amplifiers up to eleven just because they only sound good that way, try turning the away from the audience. That way they don’t bleed as much into the P.A.

• Don’t think you need to fiddle with the knobs and ride the faders all the time.

• If you had a great sound-check and everything sounds good together, don’t think that you should be moving faders and changing EQ setting every second. When the mix sticks together just be on the lookout for odd things that need fixing here and there during the songs. Also, when you have a band sounding good you can focus on the creative part of the show, putting effects, delays and reverbs every once in a while. Especially if you know the band and their material you can be a major influence in how they sound live.

• Some bands mix themselves.

• Follwing up on the last statement, some band just mix themselves. Once you have the sound up and running, some bands are just so good and tight live that you don’t have to worry about them. And that’s great, because that makes you look good as well.

I hope you can use some of these tips when you later go out and work at your next gig. If you have any good mixing tips or advice on handling a live sound situation, please share it in the comments.

How to monitor mix a rock group with a brass band

So yesterday was a tiny tip for guitars. Today I’m going to make it up to you with some pretty useful monitor mixing tips.

In my head Thursdays are Live Sound days so I’ll try to deliver useful or interesting tips or techniques every Thursday. When I was beginning to work as a sound-tech I used to mix every Thursday random underground bands, so in a way I’m still trying to work in live sound on these days. Although it’s only trying to help you guys out. How’s that for personal.

Back to monitor mixing.

There is a lot more to monitor mixing than just making sure the singer hears himself and the guitarist hears his outro-solo. There are also quite a few different states of monitor mixing, being it conducted from the FOH(Front of house) position by the sole sound engineer or from a special monitor mixing station by the side of the stage with a dedicated monitor mixing engineer taking care of the stage sound.

From a 4 AUX FOH position to a 10+ AUX dedicated monitor mixer with outboard effects, every concert is different in both band lineup and rider requirements.

I had the pleasure to set up a sound system a while back designed for a rock show with an additional big band brass orchestra, the band 200.000 Naglbítar and Lúðrasveit Verkalýðsins(Brass band of the working class).

The results were 3 monitor wedges, 2 dual mono sidefills and 3 in-ear systems. As seen in the diagram below the monitors were set up as follows:

5 level platform stage to fit everyone

• Aux 1 – Monitor wedge directed at the singer
• Aux 2 – Monitor wedge directed at the bassist
• Aux 3 - Monitor wedge directed at the drummer
• Aux 4 - Lower mono side fill designed for the brass orchestra to hear the rock band through their very loud instruments.
• Aux 5 – Higher mono side fill designed so that the percussion instruments at the top of the stage could hear and keep time with the drummer on the lowest platform.

In addition to these assortments of wedges and sidefills, the band also used dedicated in-ear mixes using auxes from 6 to 8.

Here is another picture so that you can get a better perception of the size of the stage and positions of the monitors.

Empty stage waiting for Rock 'n' Brass

This mid-sized setup proved quite good for the project at hand, allowing everyone to hear both themselves and whatever they needed to hear.

• The rock band had a powerful monitoring system as they had both wedges and in-ear monitoring at their disposal.

• The orchestra, although not having themselves in monitors could hear themselves quite nicely and had a very powerful presence of the rock band to follow through the sidefills.

• And lastly, the percussion at the top could easily hear the drummer at bottom from their own side fills, as well as a little bleed of the rest of the band, for added ambiance.

Have any of you sound techs out there had the pleasure of working with something similar? Any of you had to monitor mix a symphony? All stories and thoughts are welcome in the comments. I’d love to hear them.

Sound-man vs Hum

I have been a sound-tech for a few years. I have lifted many amplifiers and speakers and put them in their right position. I have miked a drum-kit and plugged cables into snakes and into mixers. I would even say I am quite experienced when it comes to live sound.

But there is one thing that really kills a show.

Hum.

That’s right. Hum is one of the things that really gets on my nerves. Just try sustaining the word hum for a while.

Hummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

Annoying isn’t it?

True story. I was working on my own as a sound-tech one night. The band had called me at 2 pm and the sound-check was at 5. I also had to put the sound-system up. No problem, I can do that.

Not realizing these bands had around 24 tracks each and every band had a different line-up. Synths, computers, Glockenspiels, pianos, you name it. Everything that drives a sound-tech crazy when he’s trying to sound-check.

Finally I had the sound-system up and running and we were going through the sound-checks as normal. Everything seemed fine and we were kind of able to make these bands sound. I had no experience in sounding them before and their peculiar lineup made them it all the more harder.

When came show-time things started to go wrong. DI boxes stopped working, feedback liked to join the party way too often and although the bands sounded all right and I could more or less fix what went wrong on the way there was one thing that reared it’s ugly head that just would not go away.

Hum.

While frantically changing DI boxes and re-miking instruments on stage(all this while the show was going on, I’m fast….and invisible) something I did made the PA hum. And when you are mixing a concert with 24+ tracks you can’t go muting one and one to see which one is the problem. Luckily this happened before the third band went on so I could give a quick mute-run through the tracks to see which one it was.

Of course, it was one of the DI boxes.

You see, in this case I was suffering from a particularly bad case of ground hum. Ground loop hum is usually generated by a 50 Hz wave(60 if you live in the U.S.). In my case one of my DI boxes was somehow receiving it’s ground(or earth) from somewhere else causing a difference in voltage, resulting in the hum I heard.

Oh, please that’s always happening to me! Tell me the solution!

Oh, it is quite simple. When I finally figured out which DI box was generating said hum, I just went and flicked it’s ground lift switch. That way I disconnected it’s connection to the ground and thus eliminating the hum.

So next time you are frantically running around the stage figuring out where that hum is coming from, try checking if one of your DI boxes is causing it.

It may save your reputation.

The difference between Gated Reverb and Gate Reverb?

Gated reverb is an effect that was used a lot in the eighties, and is still used sparely today. Phil Collins the artist usually recognized for his super-sounding snare drum with gated reverb. His snare sound still echoes in many tracks today, and audio schools teach Gated Reverb to their students.

What is gated reverb?

Gated reverb is when you feed a snare sound to a big hall reverb but gate it so it only sounds when the snare drum is hit. This is achieved by side-chaining the gate to the snare. And by fiddling with the parameters you can manipulate the attack and character of the reverb.

Phil Collins’s track I wish it would rain down is a good example of the snare reverb sounding only when the snare is hit and then hearing the gate kind of sucking the reverb back into it’s pocket.

But what about this Gate Reverb?

Reverb Gate is used in sound-reinforcement, or live sound. It is when you have a big reverb on the vocals for instance, and you don’t want the drums bleeding into the reverb and bringing muddiness to the FOH sound.

But you still don’t want to cut the microphone out of the mix because it adds to the overrall sound of the stage. Then you gate the aux send so nothing passes except when the signal gets strong enough to go over the threshold. The microphone is still picking up the sound of the stage but it is not being sent to the reverb.

Two almost exact names that name two completely different things?

Yeah, I know it’s a bit complicated. The thing to remember is that with gated reverb you are doing excatly that, you’re gating the reverb, or the output of the reverb. But with gate reverb you are putting a gate before the reverb, essentially the input of the reverb. So that’s basically the difference, whether you put the gate before or after.

One is an effect, the other is a kind of clean-up.

5 ways to make your next monitor mixing gig run more smoothly

Being a monitor mixer can be a stressful occupation and usually involves a lot of different mixes as each artist requires a special mix of their own. In a way, it’s more complicated than running FOH(front of house) where you only have one mix to deal with.

So next time you find yourselves at the side of the stage, running 10 different mixes with 5 different bands, keep these simple things in mind and you can make your job so much easier.

Give enough time for sound-check

• By just making sure you have enough time to cater to each artist’s special need you make your job exponentially easier. Going into a gig that you are sure everybody is happy from the get-go is much easier than constantly being on the look-out for somebody’s signal to put their guitar up in the monitors.

Mark everything on the mixer

• Bring your favorite gaffer tape and make sure you know what every knob does. Turning up the guitar in the drummers monitors instead of the bassists is a sign of amateurish work and will easily piss of a group.

Mark every cable and every microphone.

• If you are working in a concert that has a lot of different acts with different instruments you can save yourself a lot of hassle by also marking all the microphones. That way, you know which microphones to move when the rock band with the three vocalists is succeeded by the choir act that only needed the stage condensers.

From FOH, make sure the auxes are pre-fader.

• If you are mixing the monitors from the FOH posiiton as well, make sure you have the aux knobs set to pre-fader. That way, if you think the singers needs a little less level, you don’t take his signal out of his own monitor by reducing his volume in the PA.

Introduce yourself and get to know the acts.

• Running sound, in a way is a service industry and you should treat your artists as customers. Making sure they know your name and can call on you when they need something is a great plus. It creates a good atmosphere when you have a made a friendly connection, especially if the acts are young or inexperienced.

I hope these tips help when you find yourselves servicing artists by the side of the stage. Being a monitor mixer is an important job and sometimes the one that gets you closer to the band than any other.