mike257

The support band won't have been mixed by the same engineer, and won't even have been mixed through the same mixing desk. There's so many variables involved in getting a good sound. Taking Brixton as an example - it's a beautiful and storied venue. I was really excited to be mixing in there and ticking it off the list. The advice I got from colleagues that had been through there was that it's a hideous sounding room when it's empty, but more manageable when full, and that the sound at the mix position doesn't reflect how it sounds across most of the rest of the room, especially around the tricky bottom end. So - you're on the back foot with the room before you've started. Then - many venues that size don't have an installed sound system. It's brought in show by show, by the artist or promoter's chosen supplier. The system will depend on the budget, and the headline artist's brand preference. This has to be flown/stacked, configured, time aligned to suit the space. This is largely science with a splash of art, and is a skill set in itself separate from being a mix engineer. A great system tech is a desirable thing. They create the canvas that the FOH has to work with, so is again filled with variables. Soundcheck comes - taking that Brixton gig as an example, the headline band had a closed soundcheck. I didn't even get to walk up to the desk until they were done. They ran an hour over schedule. I raced to FOH with my carefully prepared show file on my USB stick, filled with confidence because I knew I'd prepped the file well and could start quickly. I got to the mix position to find I'd been supplied a completely different desk from the one in the advance, my show file was now useless and I was starting from scratch on am unfamiliar desk over an hour behind schedule. The ten minute rushed soundcheck we had meant I didn't get the opportunity to walk the room enough to get a proper feel for how it sounded away from the mix position, and also meant I didn't have time to do anything but the very quick basics to throw a decent mix together. When it came to show time, I discovered all the little issues that the rushed soundcheck had hidden - like just how over-egged with bass and lacking in mid some of the bass sounds coming from the SansAmp on stage were. Whilst there was plenty of low end, there was next to nothing I could do to dial the clarity back in to the midrange because that detail just wasn't reaching me at the desk. In every song, I had effects changes and constant fader rides to do to suit the arrangement, lift key parts in the important places etc, so trying to firefight sonic imperfections around that. The half our set is over before I know it. Band and management made up with the mix, I know it was ok but would have been much better given more favourable circumstances. [Edit to add: When you're in a full venue, with regular adjustments to make, it's often just not practical to go for a wander to hear how it sounds across the room. In a sold out gig, to get far enough away from the desk to hear the difference, means there's too many people in the way of you getting back quickly to react to something hapening on stage. I don't know many engineer's working directly with a band whose mix stays static throughout a show. If you know the material, you play the mix to suit and it's constantly changing. ] That's a pretty typical day and regular set of challenges on a live show of that scale, and that's barely touching on the amount of things on stage in terms of tone, musical arrangements, performance, stage volume/spill etc that you can't control from behind the FOH desk and just have to deal with as best you can. If it was that easy to make everything sound great in every corner of every venue, anyone could do it. Sometimes it's easy, but sometimes it's really bloody hard. "Turn the kick down" and "tweak the mids" doesn't really cover it!

I was mixing the support band in Brixton. Horrible bottom end in that room, you'd have been calling me all sorts for the way the bass sounded 😂

Was it Brixton by any chance?

Obviously there's stuff on track - there's more keys parts in a typical Faithless song than there are keys players on stage - but she's very much playing live, regardless of what you think you've seen and what you think is plugged in. Arena-scale touring shows often have more playback involved than most people would expect though, that's for sure.

Completely agree here. I don't know of a single WiFi-driven desk where "use an external router" isn't a recommended course of action. There's a reason pro kit just has a hole to plug one in!

The 90s did it already...

A good friend and colleague is their touring keyboard and drum tech. I can very much confirm that she's playing live keys on stage, otherwise he wouldn't have much of a job to do!

I've had hideous reliability issues with the UI range and don't recommend it to anyone. It's great on paper and has a brilliant feature set and I really wanted to be impressed by it but had show-stopping issues that have completely put me off. You'll probably have better results using an external router with it, but even with one of those I was still experiencing complete control lockouts often enough to make me swear off using them. If you are dead set on going back to analogue, I'd suggest looking at an Allen & Heath MixWizard. 16 mic channels, six aux sends, effects on board and fits in a 19" rack mount width. It's the most grown up of the small analogue mixers and will be sonically way better than the Behringer/Alto etc cheap efforts.

Yes, doesn't seem to be a huge difference on paper. I think they're just keeping up appearances because the G3 have been about for so long. There's reasonable deals to be had though. I got four channels of G3 mics/receivers for a cracking price recently from an AV company that were upgrading to the 6000 series stuff.

Is the £400 budget to cover just the wireless equipment, or does that need to cover the actual earpieces too? There's likely to be some good deals to be had on Sennheiser G3 radio equipment soon. The G4 has just launched, so G3 prices should come down for end-of-line stock, and second hand prices will (hopefully, if you're buying) reflect this. This is pro-standard kit and a big step up in quality from the cheap LD/t.bone stuff at the budget end.

Crikey, I didn't realise this was a 'thing'. Been out of originals bands for about 7 years now, but we never made notes and we very very rarely recorded anything in rehearsals. We just played it, then tweaked it, then played it some more, until we all thought it was good enough. Then we remembered it and played it like that the next time. I do wish we'd recorded more stuff in the room, but for the nostalgia value more than anything else!

A fellow sound techy I work with has a set of the Bose ones (not for anything work related, just for tuning the rest of us out on long van drives!) and I couldn't believe how well they blocked out background noise. Just switching them on without any music playing was instantly near-silence, I was well impressed.

Also, if it's genuinely taking from 5pm to 8:30 from starting load in to being ready, that's insane. One of our regular clients is a soul band that goes out as anything from a five to a ten piece. That usually has subs, tops, three ways of wedges plus IEM mixes, everything miked, and a bit of basic stage lighting, and goes out with one tech. Once the gear is loaded in to the room, that setup is built, cabled up and soundchecked in under an hour every time. You definitely shouldn't need 3.5 hours build time to make a pub gig happen!

This, right here, is going to be your problem, as I suspected. The drummer can't deal with not having the vibe and the volume of a real kit. Seen it with loads of people who try to move to "silent stage" setups. You should be aiming for a lush full sound at FOH for your punters, yes. He's aiming for one right in his ears so he can enjoy sounding like a rock god. I'd be putting the Yamaha rig, tops and sub, up front, ditching the Mackies and running wedge mixes for you all. Much quieter stage, same big full sound for your punters, you don't go home with sore heads. Quicker to set up and less to carry. Only person who "loses" is your drummer, because he's more interested in how it sounds to him on stage than how it sounds to your audience, and how practical it is. I think that's your biggest problem. Half decent IEMs and a Porter & Davies throne setup would possibly help him get over it, but he'd have to put his hand in his pocket!

The more I learn about this band, the more it just sounds like a musical nightmare full of people indulging their inner rockstar daydreams. None of those songs have got any business being double-kick fests either. I feel you may be on a hiding to nothing trying to get sensible behaviour from this lot!

If you want to let me know what kit you've got, I'd be more than happy to advise on how to get the best out of it without blowing your head off on stage - running it at full tilt right behind you is definitely not the way!

I'm a touring sound engineer and also run a production company that supplies fancy-pants function band agencies with systems and engineers, and I can confirm that this is an utterly daft setup you're running. If the only reason he can manage is that you don't have enough monitor mixes on your desk, sell one of the two pairs of tops and your current desk, buy one of the raft of relatively inexpensive tablet-based digital mixers that are now available and have plenty aux outs (or a used Allen & Heath MixWizard, if you're of the strictly old-school analogue persuasion, as that'll fit in a standard 19" rack width and do six aux outs). Ten years of band-leading doesn't automatically mean he's got any idea at all about sound reinforcement.

Hadn't been on BC yet, but saw this sad news the other day. Big influence on my playing and writing. Jupiter and Antenna were both massive records for me. There's a fundraiser online for his family here: https://www.youcaring.com/jenscofield-1149130?fb_action_ids=10155967805242928 Appears to have been set up by a family friend with a target of $1000 dollars to try and help them out with immediate costs. Has raised about $90k now, which is incredible. Doesn't replace a husband and a father but at least helps them get by for the time being.

I don't have first hand experience of them but came across them when I was looking in to replacement Wide Range buckers for a Tele Deluxe RI I used to have. Have heard nothing but good things about both the products and the service. There's lots of happy customers floating around the internet.

I know people who do nothing but play bass, but I probably know as many people who have a diverse skill set and do bits and pieces of different things to keep themselves busy/earning. I definitely fall in to the latter. I do plenty of work as a bassist (and occasionally a guitarist), and fix a few function bands from time to time, but I also tour manage bands, sound engineer and backline tech for various artists, operate a splitter van, run a small production/hire company providing sound, lighting etc for events, and do some freelance work for other production companies too. I often wonder if I'd have been better off specialising more, but I enjoy all of what I do, and if one thing has a quiet patch I've got other things to fall back on. I actually feel like it frees me up more too, because a couple of weeks touring work takes the financial pressure off for the rest of the month so I can spend some of my weekends at home with the kids, and sending stuff out through the production company means I've got the option of sending another tech on the gig instead of being obligated to constantly be out all hours. Nice to have choices. Make no mistake, I'm still doing the majority of it myself, but if I was focused solely on bass I'd likely be gigging every single Friday and Saturday with a few midweeks thrown in, and probably be divorced by now! Cultivating some sort of income that doesn't strictly depend on me physically being on every gig means I can do what I love but try and keep some work/life balance, and have one eye on how I wind down as I get older.

On balance, I probably earn more of my living as a tour manager, sound guy and backline tech than I do as a bassist (in the last couple of years, anyway, although it seems to swing back and forth) - am I a pro because I make my living fully from gig-related shenanigans, or a semi-pro because half of it is on the other side of the sound desk? It's a puzzler! I don't use a compressor pedal, but I do compress in the mix, if that makes any difference to the outcome 🤣

Fixed that for you.

Fixed that for you

These aren't line arrays. The term has somehow slipped in because it makes for sexy marketing, but it actually describes a very specific way of boxes/drivers interacting that even the "big boy" systems only really start to do when you couple about 8 boxes in a hang. I've yet to hear one of these column systems sound as weighty and convincing as a traditional "subs with mid/hi boxes" set up in a live band situation. Great for little acoustic gigs, but wouldn't take one for a band.

Having worked as part of the technical team in a venue that was independent, then part of the MAMA group and eventually changed hands to AMG (the Academy overlords), I'm afraid the reality is that the big regular club nights keep the lights on and the doors open at these places and without them, the gigs alone often wouldn't sustain the place financially.