FEATURE: The sound engineer as a team player

 Have you ever experienced the legendary feeling of love-hate relationships? There are countless band constellations, especially among musicians, where the relationship between frontman and guitarist in particular has produced both highly creative outpourings and self-destructive trench warfare. Well, apart from different ideas about personal and group dynamic processes, it is usually the more or less pronounced egos that have already destroyed or at least burdened well-known to famous bands. However, if you manage to incorporate some self-reflection into your actions at the crucial moment, it is usually possible to change your actions within the group for the common good, in line with the motto "Together we are strong".

But what happens when an outsider takes on a role that decides the fate of a band? In addition to the overused image of the greedy manager, it is above all the live situation that makes a band 100 percent dependent on a third party and sometimes condemns them to watch the fans cover their ears or leave the hall in horror. This fate is shared by all bands that have left the 2x-2-way-boxes-on-tall-stands league, be it an ambitious cover band or AC/DC stadium rock. In case of doubt, the artist is the fool, because no one in the audience will tell their buddy after the show that the FOH has overdriven the guitars at 3 kHz, but a curt "the-band-was-....." stifles any questions in the core.

Anyone who now thinks that this article is intended as a broadside against the guild of hall and monitor mixers couldn't be further from the mark. On the contrary, there are plenty of ways to generate a good cooperation in order to achieve a maximum sound experience. The guitarists in particular, along with the frontman, like to make pubescent scent marks, which makes cooperation with the technicians more difficult or even brings it to a standstill, so let's get on with it.

Let's first take a look at the two protagonists and their particular idiosyncrasies in order to better understand their very own behavior.

The hall mixer, better known as the front-of-house (FOH):

Even if many musicians keep forgetting it, most FOHs are (have been) musicians themselves and also know the other side of the coin. So, if they want to, they are also able to understand the guitarist's fears and concerns, but they don't always want to, or they prefer their own personal ideas. Depending on the instrument played personally, the live sound is usually also created, i.e. a trained drummer will always focus on kick and snare, which are then usually far ahead in terms of sound and quality at the show.

However, this also has the disadvantage that this instrument is under particular scrutiny and may clash with the musician's personal vision. I've heard FOHs and musicians arguing for 30 minutes about the tuning of the snare, only to have the result drown in an infernal volume later on. That was just ego-wanking, nothing more! This kind of behavior is stupid in many respects, costs time and achieves nothing, but fortunately it is usually the exception.

Applied to guitarists, this would be a discussion about the level of distortion, the stage volume, the amp used, the speaker, the microphone, the sweet spot of the speaker, etc. All of these points can be discussed in advance, but not during the sound check, but more on that later. In general, you should keep in mind that the FOH also has the goal of generating a sound that the audience perceives as clear, good, pleasant, powerful, fat, or whatever, but unfortunately there are sometimes situations that massively prevent this. More on this later.

The monitor mixer:

Let's make this short, if you feel a strong tendency towards masochism and are a regular at the local dominatrix studio, you couldn't ask for a better job. The monitor man is ALWAYS a very poor sod! Why? Well, if he does his job perfectly, nobody notices and everyone assumes that this is the standard. But if even one ping or pong is too loud, quiet, sharp, muffled or whatever, the monitor man gets the whole broadside, often enough without even knowing what for. Matching the personal monitor sound taste of the respective artist is a pure game of chance, so as a monitor man/woman you can only lose. Speaking of women, if you have the chance to get a woman as a monitor mixer, by all means take it. The raving artist is much less likely to shout at a woman than a male colleague.

The guitarist:

Next to the singer, the most annoying element in a band's sound cosmos (I can say that ;-) Logically, he is the one who gets to play a solo in almost every song. Well, in his opinion, the singer has a solo throughout the entire song and in the solo he also distracts from the solo with his grimaces, but in contrast to the poor bass figure, for example, you still look very good. OK, sometimes there's the "rhythm guitarist" who's actually just on stage because he does the booking or has the naming rights to the band, but as soon as the "lead guitarist" starts practicing regularly, it's over. Now it is important to present the laboriously developed passages to the audience in the correct acoustic lighting, i.e. AT LEAST at the volume that the singer would otherwise use for the rest of the song.

Oh yes, it should be clear that all guitarists would prefer to make instrumental music, but unfortunately even fewer visitors would come to the shows if you don't have the status of Jeff Beck or Steve Vai. So you inevitably take the “attention absorption element” on board, or you try to take on this position straight away, which I can only advise against. Note, Ritchie Kotzen is the only guitarist who both plays guitar excellently and sings equally well.

So, now that we've given each of the protagonists a lot of fun, let's focus on squaring the circle, i.e. how do we bring these people together so that not only a good sound is generated, but above all, they're fun thing is not neglected?

1.) Understand each other's situation

Anyone who has ever noticed how much stress a FOH can face, especially in a festival situation, will know the sonic result of the P.A. evaluate it completely differently. Incorrect signal transmission, crashing digital consoles or the classic, incorrectly inserted microphones give the FOH no chance to create a sound, it's a pure fight for survival. If the talkback to the stage fails, nothing works anymore. Here it is absolutely counterproductive to generate additional stress through wild gestures or verbal attacks, especially since the FOH's brain is first busy solving the problem.

The same applies to a monitor man. Even though incompetence ("he wasn't good enough for FOH") can almost bring the show to a standstill, wild screaming or raging won't change the situation other than making the result worse. On the other hand, you have to keep in mind that if the sound is missing or too loud, no musician will be able to perform. Just worrying about sound causes 99 percent of all guitarists to become so tense that their personal performance plummets. The more confidence a technician exudes, the more he ensures relaxation.

2.) Talk to each other in advance

If you don't communicate with each other, you can't know what the other person wants. I know FOHs who used to work with the Bundesliga der Künstler and complement their basic latent arrogance with complete resistance to advice. Here you should briefly remind yourself who the employer and who the employee is, if you continue the ego trip, separate yourself from the same. But I also know FOHs who sit with you before the show and work out as many parallels as possible in terms of sound and listen to the band's special features.

Only if you exchange ideas in advance can you minimize misunderstandings. It helps enormously if you have a basic knowledge of sound engineering Latin and, as a guitarist, you don't just express yourself in emotional helplessness jargon in the style of "must press". Of course, it is not the guitarist's job to tell the FOH the quality value of the fully parametric mid-range filter, but it helps a lot if you are familiar with frequencies so that you can tell the technician your preferred peaks. Exchange creates trust on both sides and helps the subsequent show immensely.


3.) Volume

The most important point of all! AT ALL!!! Ma can't mention it often enough, but guitarists in particular have an unrivaled hearing threshold that is almost implanted in the brain with the instrument. “Our amps shoot sharply and forward.” Loud, louder, loudest and then with the wrong speaker setup. Well, now everyone has calmed down again and we're getting to the bottom of the problem, both for the men and women on the 6-8 strings, as well as for the men at the mixer. Yes, they also often have a tough time when it comes to volume.

First of all, nothing, really nothing, can be compared to the adrenaline rush when you stand in front of a torn full stack in heavy crunch mode and emit AC/DC-like riff material in a state of potency. A fantastic experience, which was a necessary evil from the Sixties up to the late seventies. Due to the lack of powerful P.A. systems, a lot of sound had to be provided from the stage, with the result that you had a great guitar sound on stage and were deaf after 10 years at the latest. But it wasn't so bad, because very few rock stars at that time didn't even live to see their 50th birthday, so at least they had a great sound up to that point.

Nobody, not even the writer of these lines, can claim freedom from this body feeling, although nowadays nobody is willing to accept the inevitable loss of hearing. In addition, in times of in-ear systems, stage volumes beyond the “I can still create feedback with this” threshold have become obsolete. If you now place the cabinets straight forward, the backline will already generate so much sound pressure from the stage that the FOH can overpower the P.A. has to tear up too much to get over it. He has to do this in order to be able to level the instruments independently, or he leaves the sound on one side of the hall to the backline and just turns the guitar a little towards the other side, which always leads to an unbalanced sound.

The solution lies in the stage construction. If you need a minimum volume for your sound that, according to FOH, is above the acceptable limit and have reliable musicians, you should set up your backline at a 90 degree angle to the front of the stage. This has the advantage that all the energy radiates onto the stage and you hardly need the guitar in the monitor anymore. The disadvantage is that you now have to adjust your volume to the wishes of your colleagues. If you can't find a suitable solution here, you resort to the most unusual solution: you use your cabinets as wedges. With a 412 you need a photo pit plus a flight case, but with a 212 you can also achieve good things on a normal stage.

And now to the FOH in terms of volume! In short, these guys aren't any better than guitarists. Here too, most sound drivers define themselves by an extremely pressing kick and a banging snare, which means that the final volume in the hall is too high in 90% of all cases.

Thanks to Class D technology, countless kilowatts are available today, which requires almost all concertgoers to come to the concert with hearing protection. Conclusion: some FOHs also mix for hearing protection, which means an additional increase in volume. The result is unbearable. Any subtleties in guitar playing, nothing remains of sound aspects such as pickups or amplifiers, you can be grateful if you can even hear what the musicians are playing. When was the last time you heard what the bassist was playing in a band context at a rock/metal concert?

The solution is so incredibly simple that you can barely say it, just turn it down. Even at a rock concert, even at a metal concert. Just because one drunk fan shouts for more noise and the one drunk writer during the concert later writes in the review that the volume was too low, it is not the job of the hall mixer to throw the remaining music fans their expensively purchased audiofil card into the trash can.

4.) Sound Live / Rehearsal Room / Studio

As a guitarist, you go through a development process regarding your sound that lasts your entire life. First of all, it takes years to find your sound and match it with your technical skills. From this point on, the rehearsal room sound is the measure of all things, not to be surpassed in terms of naturalness (unless you are already contaminated with Kemper). Then comes the first shock during demo recordings, where you realize that the guitar sounds completely different on studio monitors in the control room than in the rehearsal room. There is a lack of pressure, interaction with the loudspeaker and everything seems much less pressured. Only through a lot of persuasion does the sound engineer finally manage to get the guitarist to realize that a microphone that is stuck to the speaker works differently than the ear, etc.

The second shock hits the musician on stage when he hears his sound through a monitor box. Sharp, pointed (if only you could disconnect the tweeter...) and then the FOH tells you that the guitar sound isn't good. The FOH can influence some frequencies through microphone selection and positioning, but what it cannot change is the level of distortion. Remember, the less gain, the better your sound can be mixed in the end. Your playing becomes more dynamic, clearer, more direct, more transparent, even seemingly louder. For the solo sound you can add another channel or the ominous overdrive, but for the rhythm sound you should only use the level of distortion that you absolutely have to have, no more. Less feedback and a “widened sound” will thank you.

Conclusion

Communication, volume, relaxation, fun! Off and done!