 One night at the Beacon theater in nyc, I found out what a difference a righteous sound man made when we played out. We were opening for Styx, an unlikely pairing. But this sound man had us pumping – I mean I could feel the whole building shaking. And it wasn’t just that we were loud; we were really loud, and it sounded really good. This guy had the balance between the stage monitors and the house set just right, so we could still hear ourselves over the enormous volume of the mains. I could hear each voice. I could hear the blend. It wasn’t muddy. It was sharp as a shiv, and it was freakin’ loud.
Before that night, we had seen a wobbly procession of mixers, ranging from spectacularly awful to barely sentient. We were, in a way, neglecting a very important, if temporary, group member, since the very soul of the band is in this person’s hands during a concert. If you pissed him off at sound check, he might hit the ‘suck’ button on the mixing console during your solo.
Ok, so there is no ‘suck’ button, per se, but there are all those other buttons and sliders and knobs that can create havoc in the hands of the disaffected or the merely incompetent, and hoo boy are there lots of those. The incompetents break down into two categories - the criminally incompetent and the clueless disasters.
The criminally incompetent are usually the most entertaining, but the clueless disasters are the most fun to watch when things go wrong.
Criminal incompetence can be disguised as helplessness. The classic was the asshat who showed up with a truck full of gear, most of it broken or damaged, and claimed it was because the night before he had to do a reggae show and the performers ‘broke his gear’. Uh, yeah, right. Somehow that crappy excuse was supposed to make it all right for him to pimp our gig with busted speakers, fried mixing boards and malfunctioning mics. We were supposed to feel sorry for him, I think, and shrug our shoulders and stumble through a crummy sounding concert full of pops, buzzes, and anemic mixes. My solution was to not pay him. Of course he wasn’t happy. He’d been ‘doing his best,’ but his best sucked, and cheated both our audience and us. He had to share the pain.
The difference between criminally incompetent and clueless disaster is, more than anything, a matter of attitude. A criminally incompetent soundman is really just a clueless disaster with a bad attitude.
Under the heading of clueless disasters are all those faux sound people who don’t know what to do with a stage full of open microphones. Until in-ear systems evolved, everyone was stuck with monitors, and mixing was, and in many cases still is a high wire act in which one must balance the monitors, the mics, and the house speakers, trying for maximum volume and clarity without feedback. Good mixers can do it. Clueless disasters are not only unprepared for feedback, but they don’t know how to eliminate it and panic when it occurs. The worst are immobilized, like deer in headlights. I hit a deer on the road last week – unavoidable accident – but in the moment before my bumper made contact with deer hide, I caught for one terrible moment the look in the deer’s eyes, and it reminded me of a really, really bad sound man we once used, and it took all my willpower to jam on the brakes. The sound person in question was, like the deer (who survived), frozen in panic as we were all lashed with vicious feedback. I had to go over to his mixing board and pull down the faders myself, after which I had to struggle against the mighty urge to club him senseless with my mic.
I know that I’ve used this forum as a bully pulpit to lash out at crummy sound people before, and I apologize for boring you and repeating myself. But it’s really tough when you’ve been working like crazy to polish your act only to have it sabotaged by a moron at the controls. You work too hard to allow that to happen. Sometimes there’s no choice.
Television shows, especially network TV, can be great exposure, but the control rooms of many of those shows are infested with ‘lifers’, tenured, un-fireable union hands whose technical abilities are, shall we say, questionable. They are therefore extremely protective of their turf. No one can touch their boards or their gear, and most of them don’t take kindly to being watched, monitored, or approached with suggestions or requests. Our soundman was routinely kicked out of TV mixing booths, shoved, yelled at, belittled, and otherwise abused for his attempts to make us sound good on air. Many times we listened helplessly to playback that singled out one voice – never the lead – and drowned out the others. When we asked our sound guy what the hell happened, he would shrug and tell us that they made him stand in the corner and shut up, or leave the booth altogether. He’d whisper that the man at the board had only ten percent of his hearing left, and only in one ear, plus a bad case of the shakes that prevented him from moving faders smoothly or depressing the correct button at the correct time. He’d go for a mute button, but his shaky finger would find the ‘suck’ button every time. Our sound guy occasionally offered to help, until the time that he was grabbed by the shirt and threatened with sexual mutilation by a studio tech who couldn’t figure out how to set up a mix and didn’t want to be coached. But hey, at least our soundman tried!
When you find a good sound person, treat him or her well!! You’ll be glad you did. Like it or not, your sound tech is the most important member of your band come show time.
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