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Laying The Foundation
Making the mix work no matter what. by Dave Rat
Face it, stuFF happens. sooner or later something stops working during
a show.
Front of house engineers must know the absolute essential components of the
sound mix that are most vital – in other words, the channels that the band must
absolutely have to continue playing. Generally, for a four-piece rock band in a large
venue, these channels are kick, bass, guitar, and lead vocal. Just four inputs, everything
else is pretty much fluff and spares.
a bit extreme? perhaps, but hopefully it clarifies the point.
a good house mix engineer is a prepared one. a well-planned input list allows
any input from stage to go bad without adversely affecting the show. if the snare top
mic goes down, use the bottom one, and maybe bypass a tom gate. Who cares if you
go mono on the guitar, lose the bass mic, or anything else for that matter – nothing
is that big of an issue if you’re prepared.
two hard-earned observations:
1. no matter how much i yell at the crew, it never makes it sound better.
2. if i act like there is a huge problem, people will know there is a huge problem.
say you’re doing a festival gig and the shed sounds terrible (stupid tin roofs), the
system is nowhere near what you wanted, the promoter oversold the venue, half
the people can’t hear the pa, band management is on the mix riser… and you’re up.
What now? panic, complain, blame everyone and lay on a big pile of excuses before
throwing your arms up?
no matter how bad things seem, freaking out only makes it worse. step back, sum
up the situation, and calmly solve the issues. setting realistic goals definitely helps.
Forget about creating the best sound anyone’s ever heard; rather, ask yourself, “what
can i do to create the best sounding show possible with the tools available?”
as a house mix engineer, you are all alone. One of the more difficult concepts of
front of house mixing is that the people who know what it should sound like best
are on stage and can’t hear the mix. i found mixing monitors was challenging, but at
least there was a possibility of a definitive “good” or “bad.”
>>>>>
a house engineer, on the other hand,
is left with management, friends of the
band, and the emotional expressions of
the audience to be the blurry judge of
success or failure. the upside is that you
can get away with some major goof-ups.
the downside is that the most amazing
mix is met with being asked “how was
it?” by the band.
My approach to dealing with this
quandary is to divide the potential “sound
of the show” into these possibilities:
Dave Rat heads up Rat Sound (www.
ratsound.com), based in Southern California, and has also been a mix engineer
for more than 25 years.
