I’ve had it up to here* with crappy sound mixing. I know, micing and mixing a live band is hard work. It’s an art, not a science. But you know what? It’s not fucking rocket science! It’s not THAT hard, especially when it’s your fucking job!
Think about it. How many times have you seen a band’s performance destroyed by some yahoo with ten thousand dollars worth of complicated looking rack-mounted black boxes covered in flashing lights and a 36-channel mixing board as big as a 68 Caddie. You’d think all that stuff would help, right? Well, it might help if the monkey behind the board knew what the fuck he was doing! 9 times out of 10, you’d be better off with a simple PA head and some Peavy speakers on a stick.
This weekend, I was at a warehouse party. The band was a simpe three-piece rockabilly unit: standup bass, guitar, drums, two vocals. The most basic sound setup imaginable outside an acoustic coffee house performance. Well, dude at Mission Control back there didn’t have the first clue as to what he was doing. It was, at the same time, too fucking loud and inaudible. The vocals were an inaudible murmer and the guitar was so tinny and piercing that it made my teeth hurt. Yes, rockabilly is supposed to be twangy. There’s a big fucking difference between “twangy” and “ultrasonic”. It’s supposed to be CLEAR so you can hear the twang. And this guy got paid a LOT of money–more money than any of the bands made.
So I’m fucking sick of it. It’s even more aggrivating because there are good sound guys out there working their asses off to make Joe Fratboy and the Cover Band Five’s rendition of “Melt With You” audible to the lubed-up college girls, and they get no love. Soundmen, pay fucking attention! Don’t use those rack-mount compressors unless you acutally know how to operate them! Club owners, don’t settle for shitty sound. Don’t be intimidated by the truckful of high-tech bullshit. Fire that motherfucking drunk behind the sound board and get somebody that knows what a guitar is supposed to sound like.
In conclusion, FUCK!
*I am holding my hand up to my neck in a chopping motion. It’s beautiful. You should see it.
I tend to agree, though there are a couple of mitigating factors…one is that many bands’ stage volume is too loud* and in effect turns that multi-thousand dollar sound board into a kazoo. Secondly, the sound guy has usually never heard the band in question and might not have time to do proper level checking, etc.
I mean to the point of distortion, and not the good kind.
As someone who gets paid on a semi-regular basis to provide audio support for various things, I can say that the most frustrating thing in the world is to have an un-cooperative band.
Maybe they’re nice guys, but if they don’t work with the sound guy, it becomes next to impossible to make a good sound. If the guitar player insists on having his Marshall stack cranked up to “bleeding,” and you’re playing in a small house, I look like an ass because people can’t hear the vocalist.
I jumped in to do sound for a cabaret/talent show thing a few weeks ago, and almost none of the acts were ready or capable of doing a sound check ahead of time. They just got on stage, set their levels to whatever they felt like, and went to it.
There are many many shitty sound people out there. And many many whose mixers and racks stand in for the phallic symbol (guitar) they wish they were playing. However, it’s very easy to get frustrated and uncaring as a sound guy if you don’t have full cooperation of the house/performers.
So everyone said that the “other” songs by Nada Surf were much different from their popular song, called appropriately enough, “Popular”. And hoo boy were they right, and I was surprised at the difference.
Don’t get me wrong: I expected it to be standard mid-90s distortion college rock, and not chock full of novelty goodness like Popular. I also expected to be able to HEAR THE LYRICS TO THE SONGS over the guitars.
Ironically this was produced by Ric Ocasek. You’d think he’d be able to make something where you could hear the lyrics?
I don’t know who is responsible for this, but I hate going to a concert and having it so loud that the sound is distorted, and having the vocals drowned out. We went to see Hall and Oates last year on the strength of Darryl Hall having a fantastic voice, and were quite disappointed when it was mixed so badly that his vocals were drowned. I like my music relatively loud at a concert, but if it actually sounds BETTER when I plug my ears, somebody somewhere is screwing up. I may be too damned old, but there is a point where louder is not better.
Hm, yes, sound guys can be assholes. I know, I lived with one for most of my life - Dad has a degree in that crap, doesn’t make him any easier to deal with. Although, to give him props, he’s a good sound guy.
It depends, as many others have said, on the situation. Sometimes it’s a crappy sound guy, and sometimes it’s a primadonna band that insists that their settings be used. Hey, they’re the client, you just go with it and when it sounds like crap tell them that you used their levels as they said to and didn’t change them as they said to. Then they look like assholes and you’re just the guy taking orders.
Sorry, I have very little respect for Talent nowadays. That’s Talent with a capital T, Prince talent, Evanescence talent (long story, but basically, I hate Amy Lee), the ones who basically think they’re such hot shit that they don’t NEED any freakin’ support staff because God himself should just poof the stage into place. They exist. Oh boy do they exist.
So yeah, could have been a crappy sound guy. Shit happens. Small clubs/basement parties can’t exactly afford to hire an experienced hum-head. But it could have been a Prince wannabe who thinks that the world and laws of sound should bow before his whim.
Ah, behold and pity the poor soundman, either a hero of epic stature or the basest of all villains with no in between. Truly, the field goal kicker of the music industry.
I was a working musician for about a decade, and I can tell you that poor sound is much more often the fault of the musicians than it is the people running sound. And, as has been noted, the most common cause is excessive stage volume—usually from the guitarist.
And those fucking Foley artists!! Dolphins don’t make that fuckin flipper noise!! Where the hell did you assholes ever get that sound clip, and why on Earth do you all use it?!
Who decided that dolphins should make that hyena noise in the first place?
And I’m a guitarist. I’ve never understood how guitarists can be so stupid about good sound. A microphone does a perfectly good job of amplifying the human voice; it also does a perfectly good job of amplifying the sound coming out of a small-to-mid-sized amplifier. The vast majority of guitar players in the world have no need for a 50 watt half-stack, let alone a wall of 100 watt stacks; the most powerful amplifier I have ever used onstage is a Fender Deluxe Reverb (22 watts). More often than not, the people running sound are perfectly competent, but they have to suffer through a lot of ridiculous bullshit from fuckwit musicians who are more interested in displaying themselves and/or their latest sonic toy than they are in working with the sound people in a productive way. And it’s always the sound people who take the shit—from the crowd and from the musicians—and often they’re working for nothing. I always made a point of listening to what they have to say, working with them to make the band sound good, and thanking them afterwards with a beer or any such like.
Amen, brother. Just one thing to add: if so many guitarists (like, say, 99%) didn’t insist on “coupling” their stage amps to the floor (which leaves all that output raging away towards their shinbones, where last time I checked there ain’t no ears), they might be able to actually hear themselves for a change.
Agree with you on the soundman points – musicians absolutely have to take responsibility for facilitating good FOH sound. Most “sound guys” at these crummy bars aren’t anywhere near the abilities of a seasoned engineer – they’ve got to be spoon-fed, carefully. It makes the good ones out there all the more a pleasure – these guys earn their tipout.
As I’m sure you know, guitarists do that because it improves bass response. However, as I’m also sure you know, too much bass from the guitar means that it’s stepping on the actual bass and muddying the mix. And you’re right, it’s pointed at their shins unless it’s a Fender with tilt-back legs or something like that, so they end up turning it up even louder. :smack:
Oh, man, this is a rant that cuts close to home for me.
As a member of a band that tours and plays a lot of shows, I can’t even begin to tell you how many of them have been all-but ruined by horrible, idiot sound guys. What’s even worse is that, in our case, we’re a predominantly electronic band working with a backing track, drum machine, synthesizer parts, etc. and 99.9% of meathead rocker sound guys freak out the second you get on stage with something other than a marshall half-stack. I mean, they just completely go to pieces and can’t deal with it - they’ll mix the vocals in a completely insane way even though we ask them to just mix it like they would any other band, so that everything blends. They’ll throw one of the synth channels up so that it’s EAR-SPLITTING anytime that guy hits a key, but then the other synth channel is at about half of where it needs to be so you can’t even hear the lead lines.
We learned the hard way that with this stuff, you just have to submix yourself live on stage and give them a stereo ouput into the DI’s so that all they really have control over is the total volume of what you’re giving them and the vocals - and they even manage to bungle that half of the time, with the vocals waaaay too loud over what we’re feeding them or way too soft. Idiots!
Even better, when these meatheads see that you’re going to mix yourself, they get all uppity and offended about it and start trying to come over to give you some “tips.” Look, buddy, I recorded these records and I submix all of our signals for practices and shows - I think I know where the theremin needs to be in relation to the beatbox, ok?
Sure, guitar slingers can be assholes. No argument from me. I’ve been playing in clubs since I was 15, and I’ve seen more than my share of them. But the excessive stage volume thing has always had the smell of cop-out to me. For one thing, there are some amps (the aforementioned Marshall stack and its clones, for example) that must be turned up in order to get the desired tone and feedback effects, especially if you’re playing metal, punk, etc. The best soundmen I’ve worked with will just take the guitar out of the mix in a small-to-medium-sized room and let the overpowered guitar amp do the work of filling the room. That way you can just mix the vocals and drums in with the squeal and groan. My point is, dealing with excessive stage volume when it’s appropriate for the style of music should be a life skill for soundmen–as should telling the musicians to turn down when they’re too loud and there’s not a reason for it.
The specific instance I was citing in my OP, however, was not because of excessive stage volume. The guitarist had a small Matchless combo that couldn’t have been 100 watts, and the standup was played through a smaller Ampeg tube amp, not one of those taller-than-the-chick-playing-bass models. They were playing traditional rockabilly, not Sonic Youth. The cluster fuck was squarely on the soundman.
The instances when I’ll usually side with soundmen is when the guys on stage are bitching about the monitor mix. Vocals should take precedence in the monitors. Everybody else is shit out of luck. If you’re going to be in a band, you’re just going to have to figure out how to interpret the chaos you’re hearing on stage into music, and if that means just following the drummer and hoping for the best, then so be it. There’s a sign on the stage at a club in Memphis that says, “If you’re wearing ear plugs, you can’t have any more of yourself in the monitors.”
Well, as a semi-pro, gigging guitarist, I have to agree. I do hate it when the sound ain’t right as a concert-goer, though. I went to see the band Jet at Irving Plaza in NYC and I couldn’t make out much - really disappointing. Then I see Social Distortion - a loud, obnoxious band if there ever was one - and they sounded great.
My drummer is a record producer and basically, we just turn our mix over to him. We all made it clear pretty early on that the music comes first. So if I get told to turn down my amp - I do. Really. It is only a 35-watter anyway, so it is well-sized for the gigs we play. And I put it on a stand and pointing at me, so I can hear myself and am less likely to crank it unnecessarily.
In my experience, band sound mixes are a combo of bad sound guy, clueless or ego-driven musicians and/or a bad space from an acoustic standpoint. What’s most important though is communication - make it clear to all involved during set up that the mix comes first and actively check it out and test alternatives. That’s why its a sound check, right?
I think that is why I empathize with this pitting - a bad mix is often a sign of inattention and/or lack of respect for the audience…
I do hate it when the sound ain’t right as a concert-goer, though. I went to see the band Jet at Irving Plaza in NYC and I couldn’t make out much - really disappointing. Then I see Social Distortion - a loud, obnoxious band if there ever was one - and they sounded great.