Cheap Advice On Music

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.]

We all remember hapless 60s TV detective Maxwell Smart, also known as Agent 86. (He was the one with a phone in his shoe.) Poor Max bumbled through caper after caper, making it out alive only through the dumbest of dumb luck, and a little help from Agent 99.

When you set up the mixer for your next live gig, don’t be like Agent 86! Some of the choices you make regarding the channel assignments, connection points, etc., that you use can have a big effect on the ease with which you can get a good sound and then keep it that way through the show. Why count on dumb luck when you can “get smart” instead?

Here are five specific tips that will make life easier for the sound man, who just might be you!

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I recently came across an article on the Web whose author argued that it is inappropriate to expect to transfer mixing skills and practices developed in a home studio to the world of live mixing with a PA system. His thesis was that live mixing is not really even “mixing” and is strictly a matter of sound reinforcement.

Well yes, in the case where you are running live sound for a rock band with unmiked drums and with none of the instruments running through the PA, you’re not really mixing the whole band, since you can’t “turn down” the drums or any of the instruments, so much of the resulting sound balance (or lack thereof) is beyond your control. But even then, if there are two or more vocals, you will surely find yourself tweaking their levels to keep them in balance. Isn’t that “mixing”?

Ever since I upgraded my home recording studio to a 4-track (cassette) recorder in the early 90s, and particularly since I upgraded to 8 tracks in the late 90s, I have gotten used to the idea of balancing sounds against each other, setting vocal levels with respect to each other and to the instruments, and making various moves during a mix to re-balance an errant vocal level or pump up a lead.

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Those of us who record and mix music in our home studios have become quite familiar with the use of effects like reverb and delay, usually applied during mixing, to enhance the sound of the basic recorded tracks and to help the pieces of the mix “fit together” properly. But what if the band is playing live, using a PA system, instead of laying down tracks in the studio? Do we really need to bring along our whole arsenal of studio effects?

A key difference between the live situation and the studio situation is that a PA system, where the live effects would be added, is generally used mostly or entirely for vocals (see my article Using Onstage Amps vs. Playing Through the PA for some thoughts about using the PA for instruments as well as vocals), whereas in the studio, every instrument and vocal, even the drums, can have effects added.

Another reason to focus primarily on vocal effects in a live situation is that the instruments typically have effects added to them before they get to the PA. I am thinking of the “stomp boxes” or multi-effect units that guitarists often insert between the guitar and the amp, and the built-in effects that most keyboards make available. All this means that when we talk about PA effects, we are basically talking about vocal effects.

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I started going out to see bands when I was about 16. The very first rock band I ever saw play right up close was an outfit called Kicks, Inc. They never made it big, but they’ll always be special to me! One thing that disappointed me was that I could barely hear the singing, even though I was near the front of the crowd. The instruments were good and loud but no vocals. I figured it was a fluke.

Imagine my further disappointment as I went to see other bands and came to realize the simple fact that when you watch a live band, you can’t make out the words. It was always that way! It was as sure as the show starting late. What shocks me is how often this still happens today, even after all these years of playing rock music live. What gives?

Maybe the gear is set up wrong and there would be feedback if they turned the vocals up to the right level. Maybe they don’t have a sound man and they just don’t realize how they sound. But if you are the sound man, do the audience a favor and follow a simple rule when setting the vocal levels: make sure you can understand the words. If you can’t, turn up the vocals a bit, or give them more “presence” EQ, turn down an instrument, move the speakers - do something until you (and the audience) can make out the lyrics! And keep checking this during the show.

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

I have been running sound for a mostly-acoustic oldies band known as Rusty Strings since the band’s inception in 2005. At a gig, typically in a club or restaurant, the first part of my job consists of setting up the mixer, power amp, and effects boxes, running the snake to the playing area, and hooking up the instruments and vocal microphones to the snake. During the show, I adjust the mixer faders as needed to keep the sound balanced and respond to requests from the band for level changes in the monitors. Afterwards, I detach and stow all the cables and disconnect and pack up all the PA stuff before heading for home.

Obviously, all of the really big bands have a “sound man,” usually several. Sometimes there is even a separate person and mixing position just for the (individual) monitors! At the other extreme, an individual person singing and playing an electrified acoustic guitar in a small club could get by with an onstage amp and a small mini-mixer that he or she could adjust as needed right from the playing position. (I have also seen this kind of arrangement used by duos.) In between these opposite poles is a large gray area where having a sound man would be nice, but may or may not be necessary.

Of course, sometimes the venue has a built-in sound system and will provide someone to set it up for you. I will tell you, though, that in all of the dozens of places we have played in these three years, there has been exactly one club with a sound system already installed and someone to help us set up. So, we never assume that this will be the case. Read the rest…

For the last several years I have been running sound for a central Ohio two-guitars-and-keyboard oldies band known as Rusty Strings. We started out using a Kustom KPM8420 powered mixer and have recently upgraded to a setup with a separate mixer, effects unit, and power amp. One of the issues we have had to deal with is whether to run the guitars and keyboard through the PA along with the vocals, or leave them out of the PA and rely on onstage amps for the instrument sound.

The main guitars are acoustics with pickups. We decided to use the pickups rather than miking the guitars themselves in order to avoid problems with feedback and leakage. (The tradeoff is that the pickup sound can be somewhat different from the actual sound of the guitar, but unless you are Andrés Segovia this probably doesn’t matter.)

When we first started playing, typically in restaurants and at parties, we ran everything through the PA - the two guitars, the keyboard, and three vocals. On some songs, one of the guitarists switches to bass, so we ran that through the PA as well. The onstage amps (small “combo” type units) were putting out some sound, but the audience was basically hearing everything through the PA.

The connections themselves were straightforward. One of the guitar amps has a direct output in the back, so we ran that straight to the PA. For the other guitar, we put a DI (direct input) box between the effects unit and the amp and ran its output to the PA. The keyboard was sent to the PA through another DI box and also separately to an onstage amp, using the L and R keyboard outputs. (Make sure all the keyboard voices are mono if you do this!)

One of the main problems with this whole approach, it turns out, is that it uses up a lot of PA power. When everyone was playing and everyone was singing, the PA was really straining. When the bass was in there, the Kustom really just couldn’t handle it. I remember one gig where a guy who “knew about sound” came up to me during a set to report that one of our main speakers had a “tear” in it and was sounding really bad. Panicked, we checked it out at the next break, but it was fine. What our knowledgable friend was actually hearing was good old PA overload distortion, plain and simple. Read the rest…