NOTE: this blog is no longer active as of 12/07. New one: http://blog.kirchhof.com
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
Sun, 04 Jun 2006
On Being A Sound Guy
I received a really nice note from Jeremy of Turbo 350 over on MySpace
recently that asked an interesting series of simple questions. Questions that
could be answered with a series of books if answered in fullness.
His are basically:
- How can I make life easier for the sound man?
- It sure seems to me like none of them give a sh*t. What should I
expect from them?
- What bugs you about musicians that we can improve?
To those, I'd add:
- What bothers me about sound men in general?
- How can they improve?
Whew. Big series of questions. (And BTW, when I use the term "sound
man" it is gender nonspecific. Women are rare in the field, true, but
some of the best of the breed happen to be sportin' ovaries. And
bad female audio engineers don't exist in my experience. So
they already win on points.)
Okay. To my eye, it takes talent in three broad-brush areas to be
"good" in the craft. Technical, production, and artistic.
And every engineer who reads this is going to agree heartily with
some aspects and disagree vehemently with some. The world will,
nonetheless, keep on turning, and we'll all keep doing what we do.
I already had a good sense of gain structure and signal flow when I
gravitated towards audio engineering, because I was a synthesizer
geek. (The old analog kind, with the patch cords, that played one note
at a time. A great way to learn audio theory.) But this was only
technical knowledge. And technical-knowledge-only often makes for a
very poor sound man.
So let's give some credit where it is due. I had the good fortune
of going to work for a man named Jim Finney at the Armadillo World
Headquarters in the late seventies. He taught me how to roll cords. He
taught me how to advance a show. He taught me how a professional
production happens. He taught me to heed the clock. And he taught me
the pleasure of working my ass off in service, not only of the
musician, but of the Industry and of the Art. Jim is one of two or
three people that I can truly say have influenced my life profoundly
for the better. He's the road manager for Asleep at the Wheel these
days, if you ever want to lay your eyes upon one of the very best of
the best production managers on this planet. He taught me how to
work.
And finally, it takes a good ear. This can't really be taught,
except to oneself. But the point is, you can have it, and it can be
learned and improved. The secret lies in listening to the production
of every piece of music that you hear: radio, live, dance, TV, movies,
etc. Especially commercials, oddly enough. Advertisements are
designed to invoke a feeling. I know; I did 'em.
Listen to the EQ on the instruments; their place in the mix; the
type and settings of the effects used to enhance the recording; the
spacial mix; the tonal quality. The feel. The style. Pretty soon,
you'll begin to realize weird little things. Like Hanna-Barbera
cartoon soundtracks from the sixties were recorded with a very big
band in a very small room, and Pink Floyd liked to track in a very
large one.
If you really want to be excellent at this craft, bite the bullet
and sign on with a good cover band for a while. Make every song sound
exactly like the record when it comes out of the speakers. That
is sound man boot camp, and if you graduate, you can have a career and
never have to work for a cover band again. Unless, of course, you want
to. I sometimes do.
So, regarding the questions at hand.
I don't mean to be denigrating or harsh here, but the fact of the
matter is that most sound men come to be such because they wanted to
be in the music business and drink and get laid, and be near the
creative process, but they couldn't play an instrument. So they got a
job as a roadie and worked their way up the food chain. Some of the
finest I know followed this path. And virtually all of the crummy ones
I know did, too.
It drives me nuts as a musician (I am a keyboard player, too) to
walk into a club and find six almost-broken mic stands, a board with
three bad channels and a surly son of a bitch controlling it all. And,
sadly, this can sometimes be the norm when you're playing small
places. It is not necessarily so, but if a club is watching pennies,
the PA/sound costs are going to be the first pennies that typically
get watched. If the owner can get his unmarried pregnant daughter's
slacker ex-musician boyfriend to "do sound" for $35.00 and free beer,
well... sometimes you're going to see exactly that. But on the whole,
you are going to see someone who is well intentioned, and who is
trying to get better at his craft, just as you are at yours. Which
means "be on the same page."
So here's rule one, the Über-rule, for everyone:
Advance the show. Always. Call the club three days
before the gig and ask for the sound guy. Make them track him down and
call you back. Tell him what your instrumentation is, what your stage
setup is like, your style of music, how many pieces your drum kit has,
and what time you will be there for load-in. Tell him if you jump
around a lot, or if you run out into the crowd a lot and need a long
mic cord. Warn him if your style of music includes a particularly loud
stage volume. Ask him what he needs from you. And if you already know
him, even if you've played there 30 times, advance it anyway. It
establishes a professional bond and gives you a leg up.
If he is a pro, he will be impressed and work his ass off for
you. If he's a slug, he will be intimidated and get off of his
ass for you. It's win-win. Do it.
How can you make his life easier?
- As few surprises as possible. See "Advance the show." Let's just
say that if you are a fourteen piece Earth, Wind, and Fire tribute
band that shows up an hour before stage call, he will
not be predisposed to go the extra mile for you.
- Tell the club's booking person to give your number to the sound
man when you book the gig. It'll impress all concerned, and flag them
that you care about such things. It's perhaps the single most simple
thing that you can do enhance your professional image with the club
owner.
- Try to identify what you need and articulate it to the sound
man. This is a toughy, because it's his job to anticipate your
needs. But if you're not hearing enough drums from the mains, if
you're not getting the "feel" that you need, try to talk to him about
it. Some will be a horse's ass and say "that's my mix, man." Not much
you can do about it. But the good ones will bend over backwards to
make it right for you within reason. Conversely, make sure that your
requests are reasonable and about the music. Make requests of the
sound man, but make them as a musician, not as a rock
star. He'll already know how to deal with rock stars, believe me.
- Do what you say you're going to do. Show up on time, or call if
you're significantly hung up. If you have to cancel, do it at the very
earliest possible moment after you find out. Keep your home life at
home, and your boot out of the sheetrock in the band room. Drop your
ego at the door, and if you like to get drunk, that's fine, but try to
mitigate the process until after your set is complete. Simple
professional courtesy.
- If you need to get offstage to make way for the next band, do it
immediately. Pull everything off the stage and then
disassemble it. That babe that stared at you through the last half of
the set will still be there five minutes from now, and she'll be that
much more creamy because of your professionalism. And when you
do start to chat her up, please take it away from the
stage area, of course. Other people are still on the clock...
- Trust the guy until he proves otherwise. Work with him. The
fact of the matter is, sometimes your guitar is too loud, and
he's having trouble getting your vocal heard above it on the
P.O.S. $800 sound system that the club owner has foisted upon him.
- Work on your stage volume and balance. It is a truism that great
bands mix themselves. Work on your mic technique. Work your volume
controls. Turn up only as loud as is necessary to get the tone that
you are seeking. Some music has to be loud, and that's fine. But
remember that the quieter you are from the stage, the more of a
recording-quality mix he can give you out front. A good sound man will
cover your back, enhance your work and bring out your genius, even if
you're not quite there on your own yet.
The bottom line here, as with all things in life, is "be a
thoroughbred, and you get to hang around with other thoroughbreds." It
really is as simple as that. If doing things right is what you're about,
people who like doing things right are going to gravitate to you, and
doors will open to you everywhere you walk in this world. Especially
in the music industry, because it is rare enough that it will be
immediately noted.
Now. Sound men. Let's all take a deep breath. I want to have a
little chat with you. Come on over here and sit down. Comfy? Good.
First off, if you have no interest in audio engineering, then
step away from the board and become a bartender! You'll make more
money, you get a lot more free alcohol, you get to embezzle
cash, and you get laid far, far more often. People like you can
make my world infinitely more difficult, and I see it almost every day
of my professional life. I have to debrief and rehab the band that you
butchered last night, and it shouldn't be necessary. Fade away from
the faders, my friend. You'll be happier and wealthier and more
sexually fulfilled, and you won't be so cranky. You might actually get
to listen to a good mix of a band playing your club. It's a win-win
for all of us.
Okay. I feel better. Group hug.
I can't teach anyone to have an ear in a blog post. But here are
some other things. On the Technical side:
- Mic everything possible, even if you're in a tiny club. You may
only use a miniscule bit of many of 'em in the final output, but it
will train your ear to hear subtleties and whet your appetite for
detail, and you will learn how to mix. Sometimes,
amazing recording-quality work happens in rooms no bigger than
your average convenience store, but it is only possible if you're set
up to take advantage of it when the stars align. Magic can happen; you
and the musicians can become a single process of creative art. But not
with just a kick, an overhead, and two vocal channels.
- Be wary of compressors. They are a very advanced concept, and
require a deep understanding of gain structure, phase, and amplitude
vs. tone. They're tricky, and can be treacherous. (Look, they used to
be a must. But these days, every amp on the market has overload
protection and they won't put a square wave into your speaker
stack. You are not constrained by the limitations of any recording
medium, and the dynamic range of your PA is quite up to the task. In
many ways, not all mind you, compressors in sound reinforcement are
archaic. And they can exponentially increase the likelihood of
feedback.) If you're the type who has a compressor on every channel,
and one on every sub, and one on the mains, it does two things. It
insures, 95% of the time, that your mix will be uncontrollable, muddy,
and awful. And, generally and light-heartedly speaking, it marks you
as immediately suspect of either being a gain-structure god (5%) or a
hardware nerd who reads too many advertisements (95%). There's a place
for compressors (they're indispensable in the studio) but that place
is not everywhere and it is not
always. If I see a system with no compressors in a sound
reinforcement situation, it bothers me not at all.
- Feedback is easily controllable. Go into the club when no
one else is there, fire the system up, crank it to levels that you'll
never use in a performance situation, put a mic onstage center and
start making it feed back. Find out where the room rings. Find out
where the monitors ring. Be aware of the magic numbers - virtually
every room in the country has rings around 160Hz, 1.6kHz, and
4.5kHz. Keep a favorite CD with you, one that you know exactly
how it is supposed to sound, and put it on loud, and adjust the mains
EQ until it sounds right with that mic open onstage at the edge
of feedback. You will often end up with a perfectly tuned system. (I
have tuned arena-sized systems perfectly using this technique. It
works.)
- Putting a mic on the the bass cabinet will sound better than a
D.I. 90% of the time. Especially if you have a large diaphragm dynamic
to work with. It makes a big difference in the quality of your mix;
the bass (with the kick) is the foundation of everything. (When the
room has an unusually low resonance, or the bass player has an unusual
no-bottom-end tone or low stage volume, I pull out the D.I.)
- Keep your final-stage EQ's as near to zeroed as is reasonably
feasible. Every time you pull a frequency down, you are causing
phasing anomalies and making your amps work harder. I can't stress
this enough. If you don't believe me, do a simple test. Pull every
other one of the mains EQ gain sliders down to the bottom, a full cut
on alternating bands. Put on a CD and turn the system up. Your amps
will thermal after five minutes of trying to push that mess through at
even a moderate volume. If you have a scope, look at the output
waveform - you will see Very Ugly Voltage Swings around the zero
axis as the varying frequencies and phases cancel and augment one
another, and you will understand. That is the trace of an amp that is
working 16 times as hard to give you 1/4 of the real volume output;
its power supply is not going to like you very much over time, and its
filter capacitors even less. So, get in the habit of zeroing the mains
and monitor EQ's regularly and starting over from scratch. Tread the
mains and monitor EQ's lightly, only enough for feedback and tonal
control. Your entire system will love you and cherish you and make
your life easy, your amps will run cool, your speakers will not be
trying to push near-D.C. voltages, and you'll learn EQ techniques that
will serve you for your entire career.
- Graduate school happens when - and this will happen - the
band's studio engineer who has only peripheral clues about sound
reinforcement brings in $20,000 worth of precision large diaphragm
wide-cardioid German condenser mics and wires your stage with them so
that he can capture the delicate sonic nuances of the 120dB
four-guitar Next Molly Hatchet that he's going to be
mixing. Better be able to tune your system on the fly. Enough said.
On the production side:
- Advance the show. Rule one. You get the same advantages
from it that musicians do. You are flagged as a pro, and they are
already primed to go the extra mile when they load in.
- Make stage plots of every band you work with, and have their
contact numbers, and make technical and qualitative notes regarding
the band on the sheet as well. I have about 250 of these, many from
long-dead bands. Besides the obvious archival value for your memoirs,
they make your professional life infinitely more simple; they say good
things about you, and they impress the ladies. (Well, okay,
technically, no, they don't impress the ladies. They make the ladies
say "dork" and wordlessly turn to talk to the band's roadie in an act
of immediate and irrevocable dismissal.) But stage plots do
impress the
bands when they walk in and see a stage already wired up and
tuned for them. And the bands give you kudos from the stage, and tell
the crowd that you "rock," and the ladies will eventually filter back
over to the sound board with a new and shallow respect for you.
- Mix the show. There's nothing more irritating than a sound
man who spends half of the first song getting levels and then walks
away to go drink at the bar. Every song is different. They each
require different effects, different balances. People do solos. Be
there. Do your job.
- When you have to request something of a musician, explain that you
are doing so in service of giving them the best presentation out
front. Because you are. Everyone gets asked to turn down
occasionally; they rarely get told why, and you'd be amazed how eager
they are to work with you if you articulate the correct reason. This
is their profession and their livelihood, after all.
- You are there in service to the musicians. If that is a problem to
you, then you are in the wrong business. Be a pro, even in the face of
the worst that this industry can throw at you. Look in the mirror
tomorrow morning and smile at the advanced human being that looks
back.
- You are not the "sound man." You are the producer of the
show, You are George Martin. You and you alone determine what comes
out of the speaker in its final presentation. People are entrusting
you with their professional careers, because they have no choice. It
is an awesome responsibility, and you should treat it as such.
I am here to tell you that if you learn to do it right, there is no
respect that surpasses that of a good band for a good sound man. And
vice-versa. It is an incredibly fulfilling profession, if you treat it
as such.
This hardly scratches the surface. I have a quarter century of this
stuff under my belt, and if I were to truly let the chickens run free
here, I'd be writing until December. But this will get things started,
I hope.
Thanks, Jeremy, for jump starting something that I have considered
doing for a while now.
Posted at 12:47 by Randy Kirchhof [Permalink]
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