Sound Engineering at Live Shows

Duke Leonal Felmet

Over the years I have seen countless amateur original bands at live venues (Whelans, Cyprus Avenue and many more) around the country. A few things about the sound is almost always consistently present:

1) The drums are too loud and 'bassy'
2) The lead guitar is too loud and 'trebley'
3) The backing vocals are too low, cannot be heard
4) If a keyboard is present, it cannot be heard
5) Often, the rhythm guitar is also silent

So basically, too much emphasis on lead guitars and drums, and little emphasis given to backing vocals and keys. Good for rock bands with mad solos and big drums, bad for the rest of bands.

Why is this? Is it the bands fault, or the engineers?

off.the.walls

Depends on your engineer, also depends on whether the band has given him enjoy information to do his job properly.

Duke Leonal Felmet

off.the.walls wrote: »

Depends on your engineer, also depends on whether the band has given him enjoy information to do his job properly.

What kind of information do they require?

Are you an engineer?

DamagedTrax

unfortunatly its all too common at live shows.. and its usually a mix of problems culminating in disaster..

a few ive encountered as both an engineer and musician:

1. sound at desk is totally different from sound on floor. some engineers are too bloody lazy to go out and listen to what the crowd is hearing.

2. when crowd fills up the sound changes. again its down to the engineer to keep an eye on this. a lot dont bother.

3. musicians messing with settings after soundcheck.

4. rig is set up wrong, everything starts feeding back, enginner cant deal with it.

4. venue is too small for a mic'd kit. yet the kit is still mic'd leaving no space for anything else... unless you wanna burst ear drums.

5. a mix of all of the above.

madtheory

The trick is to have the band producing a balanced sound without any PA, then you can decide what needs to be reinforced taking audience into account. This is why a PA is actually called a Sound Reinforcement System. In an average sized venue in the PA you need vocal, a bit of kick for welly, and the keys. Everything else can come from the backline.

How do you do it? Go up on stage and listen. Place guitar cabs so they fire at musicians head, like a wedge monitor. Otherwise they have to turn them up to hear them, blowing the heads of the audience who end up in the firing line. Hopefully the drummer is a musician, not a belter. That's basically it...

if6was9

Alot of truth there.

Alot of drummers lay too hard into the cymbals. It's cymbals that really destroy mixes for me. They bleed into everything and really cut into the guitar and vocal space. Often there is simply nothing that can be done about it in a place with a limited stage.
As a result lead vocals are loud, backing vox is turned down a bit lower to help minimise the grating bleed, the low end of the kit is pushed to help balance out the overall mix and guitars have their mids/treble turned up to help them cut through.

It's all about balance and trying to get a nice full, even sounding mix but often the bands work as much against it as the engineer. I've had bassists and guitarists destroy their bands live sound by turning up far too loud after being told they are loud enough out frontand they can get more in the monitors if they need it. Mostly when I tell them afterwards they couldn't give a toss either.

A huge annoyance to me is when a band is sharing monitor mixes and the guitarists insist they need loads of guitar back at them when the singer already can't hear themselves and the monitors are pushed as far as they can go. The singer will not have a good gig and some sensible placement of amps/resetting of levels would remedy the situation but most bands believe the sound guy is out to wreck their gig not help them.

Sometimes I think that bands don't really understand what a soundcheck is actually for. I usually don't spend crazy amounts of time polishing the FOH sound at soundcheck after the individual instruments have been checked. It's pointless fine tuning with faders as the gig will sound a bit different and if there's other bands the faders will all change anyways. The first minute of their set is sufficient time to get their FOH mix to where it needs to be. I use the soundcheck to get the onstage volumes right and get the monitors to a point where the band are happy.
I did sound for a band a few weeks ago who spent the entire sound check playing off the stage in the crowd, but not far out past the stage enough to properly be hearing the PA. First question i asked them was how was the monitors and they said fine, they then spent almost the entire gig asking for changes in their monitors between songs.

madtheory

All good.

But I've never seen a soundcheck by someone else where the PA and monitors were actually off while the stage balance was set up.

i57dwun4yb1pt8

i think live sound is far more difficult than studio sound , ive yet to hear a live gig where the sound was good , acceptable maybe but never good .

and yes drummers are half the problem , i was guilty of it in my youth , young drummers tend to treat the gig as a gym work out as well as a gig .

then they wonder why the cymbals and hats dont feature in the mix

Duke Leonal Felmet

Interesting stuff. Do you reckon it is worthwhile for bands to work on levels in rehearsal, or would all the work be for nothing since the engineer controls what the audience hears?

sirgandi

What I've found is that during rehearsals, experimenting with levels isn't a huge amount of use as a band will naturally play louder and with more gusto during the live show than in rehearsals or sound checks. Obviously this affects the levels significantly.
If a little more effort was put into PA selection and initial setup of systems in certain venues, I think it would make a massive difference to common sound problems.

DamagedTrax

sirgandi wrote: »

If a little more effort was put into PA selection and initial setup of systems in certain venues, I think it would make a massive difference to common sound problems.

yup +1

MilanPan!c

In our experience the quality of both PA and engineers here is pretty lacking.

We get a better mix in our rehearsal room, which is kinda sad.

We use backing tracks and have a complex set-up, but the quality of the mix is often SHOCKINGLY bad.

Fairly depressing really.

Looking for a sound guy, but that's not easy either.

Hard to understand really... much better experience in Boston, NYC, London, Ohio... lot's of places... I kinda think people are either under-qualified (I did live sound for a decade, it's NOT that hard to mix a band properly) or don't care (which is what I assume).

Pretty brutal.

MilanPan!c

double post

Duke Leonal Felmet

MilanPan!c wrote: »

or don't care (which is what I assume).

Pretty brutal.

Yeah, thats my hunch. I am currently in rehearsals with a new band and we are adding four-part harmonies and keys, but if they are not heard then I wonder why we are bothering sometimes.

MilanPan!c

Duke Leonal Felmet wrote: »

Yeah, thats my hunch. I am currently in rehearsals with a new band and we are adding four-part harmonies and keys, but if they are not heard then I wonder why we are bothering sometimes.

Our last gig we had:

Two electric guitars
Two Acoustic Guitars
Three Vocals
Drums
Three Keyboards
Backing tracks
Bass

13 "instruments"

What you could hear in the audience:

One Keyboard
Drums
Bass
Two vocals
One Acoustic Guitar
One electric guitar

7 "instruments"

---

But... you have to rock the full set-up, for rehearsal and on the off-chance a sound guy can get everything balanced.

In our rehearsal room, we keep everything quiet and balanced and turn DOWN, not UP... at the gig the sound guy kept asking for us to turn things up on stage...

I kinda think, in that case, he just actually wasn't capable of doing the job...

What a pain.

mkegvn

Not always possible, but do your best to hire your own engineer and bring them on the road with you. Someone who knows what you should sound like, who you could have a good working and personal relationship with.

The thing about live sound is that most house engineers don't know what you sound like, or what you would like to sound like, or where the elements in your mix should lay rather.

It's a tough one. Bringing your own engineer is a solution of sorts, but it's an extra cost.

MilanPan!c

mkegvn wrote: »

Not always possible, but do your best to hire your own engineer and bring them on the road with you. Someone who knows what you should sound like, who you could have a good working and personal relationship with.

The thing about live sound is that most house engineers don't know what you sound like, or what you would like to sound like, or where the elements in your mix should lay rather.

It's a tough one. Bringing your own engineer is a solution of sorts, but it's an extra cost.

At some point it's the only solution... we're gonna be taking our show in the road in a few months and will just have to have an engineer then... I wish I could just do it myself...

mkegvn

MilanPan!c wrote: »

In our rehearsal room, we keep everything quiet and balanced and turn DOWN, not UP... at the gig the sound guy kept asking for us to turn things up on stage...

I kinda think, in that case, he just actually wasn't capable of doing the job...

What a pain.

He was just Gain Staging essentially, to give himself more control of your sound. But if you could only hear 7 of the 13 Instruments, then he probably hadn't a clue.

Also you have to remember, a lot of the audience may not know what they're listening to or for. If you got feedback from them regarding levels, I'd generally disregard it unless they've experience in live music somehow. - A lot of people will disagree with me on this, but for any engineers here, the aul fella coming up to the desk and the "I can't hear his words, turn him up!" or "It's very loud could you turn it down a bit" spiel will be gospel perhaps....

MilanPan!c

mkegvn wrote: »

He was just Gain Staging essentially, to give himself more control of your sound. But if you could only hear 7 of the 13 Instruments, then he probably hadn't a clue.

Also you have to remember, a lot of the audience may not know what they're listening to or for. If you got feedback from them regarding levels, I'd generally disregard it unless they've experience in live music somehow. - A lot of people will disagree with me on this, but for any engineers here, the aul fella coming up to the desk and the "I can't hear his words, turn him up!" or "It's very loud could you turn it down a bit" spiel will be gospel perhaps....

No, it was professionally filmed and recorded... and had other people who know the live sound of the band v well in the audience... all said the same thing as the video showed... and the pathetic thing IMO is that the mix was almost exactly he same from min one to the last note...

We keep moving venue, hoping for better sound... so far.. it's all pretty shockingly ****e... in fact we pretty much turn down gigs at a few venues, no matter the night... not worth the misery...

And even "big" bands get bad sounds on many nights...

I think it may just be a Dublin thing...

Oh btw: re his gain staging... like I said, I did live sound professionally for years... I completely get the whole thing... this guy was just clueless...

mkegvn

MilanPan!c wrote: »

No, it was professionally filmed and recorded... and had other people who know the live sound of the band v well in the audience... all said the same thing as the video showed... and the pathetic thing IMO is that the mix was almost exactly he same from min one to the last note...

We keep moving venue, hoping for better sound... so far.. it's all pretty shockingly ****e... in fact we pretty much turn down gigs at a few venues, no matter the night... not worth the misery...

And even "big" bands get bad sounds on many nights...

I think it may just be a Dublin thing...

Oh btw: re his gain staging... like I said, I did live sound professionally for years... I completely get the whole thing... this guy was just clueless...

Haha! Sorry, I did a bit of presumption there. Yea that's fair enough so!

As regards Dublin engineers & venues, I totally agree! There's a few that I'd love to name and shame for being completely and utterly useless!

Duke Leonal Felmet

This would also be my first band in Dublin. I recently found out that it is generally the case that a band pays to play a gig? And for this you get **** sound engineering.

Seems like a joke, alright.

MilanPan!c

mkegvn wrote: »

Haha! Sorry, I did a bit of presumption there. Yea that's fair enough so!

As regards Dublin engineers & venues, I totally agree! There's a few that I'd love to name and shame for being completely and utterly useless!

The kinda sad thing is even talking about this openly online will prolly get us an extra ****e mix in the future...

.. the less sad thing is that, and I gotta assume it's from this thread, I've had two different sound engineers approach me via linkedin, in the last few hours... hope springs eternal...

madtheory

mkegvn wrote: »

The thing about live sound is that most house engineers don't know what you sound like

That's because it doesn't occur to most people to turn the PA off for a while and actually listen.

studiorat

Maybe it's because all the good engineers are off working with good bands!

+1 for leaving the PA off for as long as possible. I happened upon a band in Fred Zepplins in Cork a while back. The band had more backline wattage than the PA. I went and gave the engineer the nod as us engineers do, and we had a right laugh at the fact that he had two channels of the PA up and you still couldn't hear a thing. Try telling the lads to turn down? Forget it...

Thing is, you'd be surprised at how many bands don't know what they sound like either.

madtheory

studiorat wrote: »

Thing is, you'd be surprised at how many bands don't know what they sound like either.

LOL yes. One day the drummer can't make rehearsal, and the rest of the band are asking each other "Did you ALWAYS play that???!?".

Duke Leonal Felmet

madtheory wrote: »

LOL yes. One day the drummer can't make rehearsal, and the rest of the band are asking each other "Did you ALWAYS play that???!?".

Very true.

Epicness

DaDumTish wrote: »

i think live sound is far more difficult than studio sound , ive yet to hear a live gig where the sound was good , acceptable maybe but never good .

and yes drummers are half the problem , i was guilty of it in my youth , young drummers tend to treat the gig as a gym work out as well as a gig .

then they wonder why the cymbals and hats dont feature in the mix

Have you been to much gigs? I presume you have if you're posting here. Surely you've at least heard good sound?