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Post by jackorion on Sept 28, 2018 15:32:32 GMT
Fascinating thread. I've been chasing good sound for years. If I may though, a quick aside... I have some basic skills when it comes to studio and live mixing. That has led to my being called upon to run sound for gigs locally. If fact I've got another one next week. There's no substitute for experience, and that's the one thing that I have too little of. I try to be sensitive to what the musicians want, whilst being considerate of the venue's needs as well. It's a fine balancing act. I just tell myself on the way out that I can only do my best and that helps a little, but I'm certainly not one the experienced kind of guys that can walk around a room and cite frequencies that need adjusting! And on the flipside, we used to have a soundguy that was always stressed and would have a go at me for bringing a preamp out my bag, I mean a real go, like I was trying to make his job difficult! We stopped using that guy and I wound up having to mix a five-piece band from stage whilst playing! That band included a fiddle player who refused to use a fiddle pickup and insisted on using the same mic for vocals and fiddle. The whole band was anti in-ears and the fiddler constantly wanted more of everything in the monitor. All that to say it's a minefield out there! I've still never been truly satisfied with my live guitar tone, but I'm not playing enough right now to justify continuing with the experimentation. Nobody's ever complained about the tone; in fact, I've heard some pretty ropey tone from pros, including Paul Simon of all people! You're probably putting yourself down a bit there though - you don't need to walk around the room citing the frequencies, but I bet you could hear if the guitar was a bit honky in the mids or boomy in the bass or spiky in the treble and would adjust by ear until it sounded better. I think where a lot of inexperienced sound technicians fall down when it comes to acoustic instruments is that, and I'm making a huge generalisation here, is that 9/10 they are 'rock' sound engineers, who seem to hype the low end and treble on everything, turn everything up louder than everything else, and are only used to acoustics sounding like undersaddle pickups, so they don't know what to do when faced with making it sound like an actual acoustic guitar and having to balance that with a voice... As well as making my life easy, I want the sound person's job to be easy as well - i want to present them with a tone that needs little to none 'basic' work and that they can tweak for the sound of the room and all I want is to be able to hear my vocals and guitar in the monitor, it's pretty simple!! When you get someone who gets it it's lovely - I did a festival gig over the summer where we spent about 5 minutes really getting the vocal and guitar balance right in the monitor till I could hear everything fine and it sounded great. After the gig the soundman told me it was his easiest set that day because, once we got it right for me on stage, he basically could let me get on with it as I was balancing myself by playing/singing louder and quieter when I needed to - he was very humble about it but I told him I could only do that because he made the effort to listen during soundcheck and adjust the monitor mix to the point where I didn't need to do anything else but play as I normally would. Sometimes it's true that the problem is you get musicians who don't quite know what they want to hear but they know what they don't want to hear - it's more difficult in bands i think because there's so much stuff to balance...
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Post by soundout on Sept 28, 2018 16:47:43 GMT
Fascinating thread. I've been chasing good sound for years. If I may though, a quick aside... I have some basic skills when it comes to studio and live mixing. That has led to my being called upon to run sound for gigs locally. If fact I've got another one next week. There's no substitute for experience, and that's the one thing that I have too little of. I try to be sensitive to what the musicians want, whilst being considerate of the venue's needs as well. It's a fine balancing act. I just tell myself on the way out that I can only do my best and that helps a little, but I'm certainly not one the experienced kind of guys that can walk around a room and cite frequencies that need adjusting! And on the flipside, we used to have a soundguy that was always stressed and would have a go at me for bringing a preamp out my bag, I mean a real go, like I was trying to make his job difficult! We stopped using that guy and I wound up having to mix a five-piece band from stage whilst playing! That band included a fiddle player who refused to use a fiddle pickup and insisted on using the same mic for vocals and fiddle. The whole band was anti in-ears and the fiddler constantly wanted more of everything in the monitor. All that to say it's a minefield out there! I've still never been truly satisfied with my live guitar tone, but I'm not playing enough right now to justify continuing with the experimentation. Nobody's ever complained about the tone; in fact, I've heard some pretty ropey tone from pros, including Paul Simon of all people! Keep at it Cams! You only get real sound engineering experience by doing it over and over. For what it's worth, I'm useless at identifying frequencies too. I should look at the numbers more as I'm sweeping for good/bad bits of instruments.
We learn from our mistakes. I still wake up in a cold sweat from totally ballsing up the sound for De Dannan and Mary Black in a packed Ulster Hall in Belfast 36 years ago. Ho hum. Plenty of young sound course graduates can wipe the floor with us auld yins, knowledge-wise. But they all need their own Ulster Hall experience to focus their minds, hehe. Slowly the good nights outnumber the bad and then it gets to be fun!
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Post by Cams on Sept 28, 2018 16:57:30 GMT
My 'Ulster Hall' moment was stepping on the power lead to *everything* during the wedding dance. The couple wanted a Queen song played from a laptop, so I put it through the PA then stepped back to do something else and pulled the power right out during the dance. Here's what happened though - the wedding guests, who were circled around the bride and groom, were all singing their hearts out. The music stopped, and they kept on singing with even more gusto. The bride told me after I'd apologised a thousand times that it made the moment all the more memorable for her and not to worry about it. I still do worry about it though!
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leoroberts
C.O.G.
Posts: 24,534
My main instrument is: probably needing new strings
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Post by leoroberts on Sept 28, 2018 17:26:17 GMT
Blimey, I hope it wasn't 'Fat Bottomed Girls'...
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Post by soundout on Sept 28, 2018 17:43:46 GMT
It was probably "Another one bites the dust."
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ocarolan
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CURMUDGEONLY OLD GIT (leader - to join, just ask!)
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Post by ocarolan on Sept 28, 2018 18:24:56 GMT
"I want to ride my bicycle...."
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