Small festival sound

[Stuart91]

The problem with "just riding a fader" is that on many digital consoles the fader could be on a different page at the crucial moment. Those extra seconds can feel like an eternity if a new patch has come in 12dB louder than what was soundchecked.

 

I guess the key here is communication - you need to run through all this with the engineer before the show. Whether there's time, or whether the engineer pays any attention or not, is of course a different matter entirely.

 

At a recent gig, the bass player was singing lead on one song, but this hadn't been mentioned beforehand, so I was informed by a combination of frantic hand gestures as the band played the intro. They'd handed me a printed set list with a few other details, but just missed that one.

[paulears]

BUT - that is exactly the problem? You needed a list, so surely when you got treated to harmonies, and no tune - it should have been a simple job to rebalance. This is exactly what I'm banging on about. Set the faders, lean back and ignore visually and aurally what is happening. WHY did you need hand signals? We tried giving out a detailed list, but all that happened is that the song would end, and fader 12 would drop an inch, fader 13 forward an inch - but ignoring there was a person doing a running intro to the song on 12!

 

The absolute worst example of this I ever had was on a TV show I was working on featuring the New Squadronaires and Anne Shelton their rather elderly singer who sang with Glenn Miller in WW2 - An engineer with absolutely no musical history at all. Neumann 87s on every instrument. They'd given him a skeleton score featuring the brass and woodwind pads to 'help' him. It didn't;t because he couldn't follow a score - even though this clearly showed who had the melody lines and where stand up solos would be. The OB truck Director and VM could follow the score fine, so they got their shots, but the audio fella just heard 6 saxes. Some were little ones, some very big, so he mixed them all equal. What a mess. He totally lost the melody lines as they passed from trumpet to clarinet, to alto sax, then to tenor and so on. As soon as he caught somebody standing up, he shoved their fader. A truly bizarre OB - with what sounded like unrecognisable songs. Moon light serenade became a brass piece - with the quiet do-wahs becoming Motown brass stabs.

 

Finding engineers who can mix music from more than a tiny era seems a fruitless thing nowadays. For us - there are 4 voices. All singing lead, or harmony, or fill. With compressors out, and faders in a row, we could move into self-balancing mode, where we all move in or out to create the balance. The keys can drop under the voices or punch through on a pedal stomp. Not with compressors we can't. We put NO COMPRESSORS in the rider, we all mention nicely to the sound folk that "there won't be compressors, will there?" and on strange looks, we'll even explain that if they don't know the music, just let us do it - but they don't. It often offends some - casting doubt on their proficiency. Then the facebook comments say - great gig shame we couldn't hear the drummer singing the tune - because they didn't notice.

 

We do try to talk too the engineers, but they usually know best and you get the "it will be fine" slap down. Our best engineer was the old bass player I replaced - he knew all the songs, and when they gave him control of even just 6 faders, he could make us sound as we should.

[sunray]

At a recent gig, the bass player was singing lead on one song, but this hadn't been mentioned beforehand, so I was informed by a combination of frantic hand gestures as the band played the intro. They'd handed me a printed set list with a few other details, but just missed that one.

That's an absolute classic, band PA is not my bag but I do get involved, usually as labour/re-micing between acts etc and have often held that piece of paper.We had one such 8 piece band in the middle of the day at a local event where they performed free with minimal expenses. The capacity of the system was sent out in advance with a request for information if the required anything in addition, on the day they supplied the piece of paper which showed a ridiculous number of instruments (something like 40) and 2 vocals. We set up with the knowledge we would be re-plugging during the set due to a 24 channel snake, soundchecked and introduced them then they asked where the other 6 mics are. And during the set they played a different order, without announcement to their piece of paper so the replugging was all over the place. Of course, all the way through their set they publically slagged the techs.

 

The event usually offered  automatic invitation for the following year, they failed to get theirs but turned up anyway and kicked up merry hell. The event ran for some 20 years with up to 4 sound stages and about 15 sets per stage.

Of course we had the odd hiccup here and there but they were the only band that that caused us real problems in all that time.

[Stuart91]

The hand gestures came before the vocals came in - essentially the band started on the tune, and as they embarked on the intro it occurred to everyone that they hadn't told me about the change of vocalist. I'd like to think I'd have caught it pretty quickly, if I didn't have the heads-up, but at least this way the vocal came straight in rather than the audience missing the start.

 

Paul, sounds like you're doing everything you can on the rider/communication front. It's a pity that engineers are so dismissive. It really sounds like you need to tour your own engineer, but I appreciate the constraints that work against you.

 

Just out of curiosity, do you bring your own vocal mics with you? I'd imagine that if you find yourselves in front of Audix OM7s, it could cause some problems.

[themadhippy]

. We set up with the knowledge we would be re-plugging during the set due to a 24 channel snake,

sorry but if we turn at a gig to be told theres only 24 channels the reply would be,and has been,best find another 8 channels then,youve had and accepted our rider and youve failed to meet it,either meet our requirments or were off.

However we tour our own desk now so that rarely becomes a problem anymore unless of course the sound company only run 1 cat 5 ,its buried and theirs no way of adding a second.

[sunray]

. We set up with the knowledge we would be re-plugging during the set due to a 24 channel snake,

sorry but if we turn at a gig to be told theres only 24 channels the reply would be,and has been,best find another 8 channels then,youve had and accepted our rider and youve failed to meet it,either meet our requirments or were off.However we tour our own desk now so that rarely becomes a problem anymore unless of course the sound company only run 1 cat 5 ,its buried and theirs no way of adding a second.

but this was the other way around,

The predicted capacity of the system was sent out in advance with a request for information if they required anything in addition

We had nothing back from them, like most of the bands, so nothing additional was supplied.

 

Then they turned up on the day at the nominated time and expected us to magic up twice as many channels.

 

The document they supplied allowed us to come up with a solution as the various instruments were easily assigned to each song and us replugging worked well until they went off plan and sang their set in a different order to the document they had supplied.

 

We had accommodated their failure to sent their requirements/rider.

 

They were out of order to publically criticise us.

[dbuckley]

For us - there are 4 voices. All singing lead, or harmony, or fill.

 

I clearly remember reading an article in a publication from a few decades back, an interview with the monitor tech for the Beach Boys. He was describing how he did monitors for their vocals. He did a mix of the vocals to a subgroup, and then fed that subgroup to each singer's wedge. That way every vocalist got to hear the same thing, and they would self-adjust their relative levels by moving further away from the mic or whatever so the vocals sounded right.

 

He didn't state it, but the implication I received was that FOH thus didn't need to balance the vocals, they came ready balanced by the vocalists sorting it themselves.

 

I think the monitor tech called this thing a "vocal ring".

[paulears]

One of the band did like that, but that was also in the days before technology made volumes a lot louder - the others wanted their own mixes, and by the time our band leader's brother joined the Beach Boys, everyone was firmly needing quite specific mixes - especially one you move to IEMS, as two of us use. In my case - I don't want ANY of the guitarists vocal in my ears because in lots of songs - we start a line in unison, then split, and we find that we hit the first note and it needs to be solid - if I cannot tell which of us is me, I can't pitch. It's quite funny sometimes when we get rotten monitors, because hearing somebody else you don't normally hear makes you jump. I said to the drummer the other day "I didn't know you sang that, but it explains why I sing what I do, which musically in isolation is a bit odd - it isn't with the drummers line making it work. Brian Wilson was extremely clever. I suspect we probably are a bit insular. When I joined 7 years ago, I got the bass players voice and vocals on the left, and the rest on the right, so all I had to do was learn both in total isolation.

 

At the risk of boring people - it means that in Good Vibrations, we will have good, good, good good, vi...... with somebody else singing 'rations.....', which gives a breathing space for the next bit. Same thing in Sloop John B, where some of the lines I sing make absolutely no sense until one of the others suddenly stops revealing the very end of my nonsense sentence - the first few words are harmony the remainder an exposed melody. If you look at our individual P16 mixers, the variation in what we all have is pretty obvious. Oddly, we can play all our songs acoustically, and we do in rehearsals if we have to change or add a song - but on stage, as soon as one of us loses the link with another, it falls apart. It's probably because I'm playing one 'tune' on the bass, singing something else in a different rhythm and I need the keyboard as a kind of glue.

 

The pull off technique works for the examples above, but I can't play properly in some circumstances - perhaps it's lack of talent?