Cheap Advice On Music

Here’s an easy way to put some “zing” into your live shows and to make your band stand out from the crowd.  Liven things up and create a cool mood with sound effects! All you need is a spare mixer input, a portable mp3 player loaded with sound-effect files, and a sound man (or at least a sound effects man) to work the player for you, and you’re ready to go.

By the way, when I say “sound effects,” I am not limiting myself to sounds like doors creaking or alarm clocks going off, as cool as these can be.  In the live-sound context, a “sound effect” could also be an ambient recording of a city street.  It could be a spoken-word mashup of some kind.  It could even be music!  Maybe I should call them “auxiliary sounds” or something.  But now you know what I’m talking about.

There are three main aspects to this idea: (1) What sound effects should we use, and when? (2) Where do we get these sound effect files? and (3) How do we hook up the mp3 player to the mixer?  Let’s take these questions on one at a time.

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In the band I run sound for, Rusty Strings, there are three singers and two lead instruments, namely guitar and keyboard (the keyboard player also plays flute on some songs). Each different combination of lead vocalist, harmony vocalist, backup singers, and lead part(s) calls for a slightly different mixer setup: turn Singer 1 up and Singer 2 down for this song, get ready to bring up the keyboard solo in the middle, and so on.

For me, it is vital to at least know what the next song is so that I can preset the mixer appropriately for it during the prolonged applause for the song the band just finished playing. Having a simple list of songs may be enough if the sound man really, really knows the band’s songs and arrangements. But even then, it’s nice to have something beyond just a list of titles to go on. If the sound man is unfamiliar with the band, it’s even more important to provide a proper set list. OK, what would be a proper set list look like? I’m glad you asked!

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The best place for a band’s sound man (or woman) to sit is right in the middle of the audience. (That’s where you see them at Rolling Stones concerts and the like.) If the sound man hears exactly what the audience is hearing, he can adjust the sound until it sounds good to him, confident that it will sound good to the audience as well. But how often does the sound man sit with the audience?

From my experience as the sound man for Rusty Strings, the answer is “hardly never.” I have been way off to the side. I have been right up front, right next to one of the main speakers. I have even been onstage with the band! None of these are optimal positions for creating the best sound for the people who are actually listening to the music.

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Here’s a mixing tip that applies to both home recording and live sound. With both types of mixing, your mission is to establish and maintain a balance of levels for the various instruments and vocals, while keeping the mixer controls set somewhere close to their “normal” positions. Specifically, the volume faders should never end up all toward the bottom or all toward the top of their range, as this indicates a problem with gain structure, which can result in noise and/or distortion in your final output.

Why would this happen? In a typical scenario, you start out with all the mixer faders at the default “0″ point, i.e. about 3/4 of the way up. (This is accomplished by adjusting the mixer’s Input Trim controls for each channel so that each input produces a “0″ peak reading on the output meter with its channel fader set to the “0″ point.) Then you set the mixer’s Master Volume control to produce a suitable sound level through the onstage speakers (or through your home-studio monitors). Everything looks great. Then the music starts.

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We’ve all gotten used to hearing recorded music in stereo by now. Only real old-timers (like me) can remember when all records were mono and a “hi-fi” system only needed one speaker. Stereo arrived in the mid-60s, and following a brief period when each record was available in separate mono and stereo versions, often with very different mixes (see Pepper, Sgt.), we finally reached the point where all records, all cassettes, all CDs are now in stereo.

Lots of bands that play live have PA systems with two main speakers. Since home stereo systems also have two speakers on the left and right, the question arises, should we create a stereo mix of the PA signals to play through the “stereo” PA speakers? My answer is basically no, but before I go into why, let’s quickly review exactly what stereo is in the first place. (Audio engineers can skip the next section.)

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Whether your band uses a standard mixer feeding a power amp or an “all in one” powered mixer as your PA system, you have a fair amount of control over the sound that emerges from the unit. The most powerful of the mixer controls (besides the gain!) are undoubtedly the EQ knobs. Every PA system has at least “bass” and “treble” controls, and many add a third “mid-range” knob. In a few cases, the frequency that the mid-range control boosts or cuts is even settable!

In my work with Rusty Strings, I use the mixer EQ knobs for two main purposes. The first is to compensate for the bass boost that occurs due to the “proximity effect” when a singer gets very close to the microphone. When I see that this is about to happen, I drop the bass EQ for the appropriate channel, and the vocal sounds normal. Later, when the singer backs off, I restore the flat bass setting.

The second, and perhaps more important, purpose for my use of EQ is to make sure that the lyrics are clearly intelligible. Depending on the microphone and the singer’s distance or angle, the resulting vocals sometimes become a bit “muddy,” making the lyrics difficult to pick out. In this case, a slight boost in the treble EQ, or at the high end of the mid-range control, puts that “snap” back into the sound - and I can hear all the words!

[An expanded version of this Mini-Tip appears in my eBook Cheap Advice On Live Sound.]

If you’re the sound man for a band, the tendency is to relax a bit after the first song or two. After all, it sounds balanced, the overall level is OK, nobody seems upset. You may find yourself kicking back, having a few fries, scoping out the crowd, maybe even wool-gathering, whatever that is. What, me worry? The fact is, maybe you should.

There are a lot of things that can happen onstage that can upset the sound of the band. If you spot these events right away, you can usually compensate for them before they happen. But spotting them means watching, really watching, everything going on up on the bandstand.

In my work with Rusty Strings, the main sound-changing event I worry about is one of the singers suddenly starting to sing up close to the microphone having previously been farther away, or vice versa. When I see this happening I can quickly set the vocal fader to the right position for the singer’s current microphone distance.

Other events are microphones being bumped or moved or drooping in their mounts, a guitar or keyboard player resetting his or her own volume too far up or down, or a harmonica or cowbell part unexpectedly played into a vocal mike. Be ready for anything!

[An expanded version of this tip appears in my eBook, Cheap Advice On Live Sound.]

Two things always seem to happen when an artist or band plays a bunch of songs at a gig:

I’m not exactly sure why these things happen, but I have observed them at many gigs. The tempo increase is a strictly musical matter, but if you are the sound man for the band you need to anticipate increasing volume and take it into account in your initial PA settings.

If you are lucky enough to have full metering on your mixer channels, you can adjust where the peaks of the signal on each channel fall with respect to the 0 dB reference point to provide yourself a little extra headroom. (Headroom is a measure of how much louder a signal can get at a given gain setting before clipping or distorting, not to be confused with Max Headroom, the fictional artificial intelligence.)

Normally, you would set the trim control for each channel so that the signal almost reaches 0 dB on the peaks with the main channel fader in the “0″ position. But, if you do this during a soundcheck (or more likely, during the first song), you will end up with a signal that will be too hot after a few songs, due to the inevitable increase in volume. So, my advice would be to set the trim control to provide somewhat lower peaks, perhaps -6 dB or so. You will still have to adjust the fader when the volume goes up, but at least the signal won’t clip.

[An expanded version of this Mini-Tip appears in my eBook, Cheap Advice On Live Sound.]