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Not for the first time, I recently found myself at Ireland's 32, an Irish pub in San Francisco, lugging in mains, monitors, a mixer, a rack full of equalizers, a reverb, and a compressor, multiple mic stands and cables, and a padded bag full of live sound microphones. And you think the drummer has it bad.
The usual late-afternoon drinking crowd was there. Ay, the Irish...they're a good bunch, and such happy bar patrons. Ever notice how Irish bars don't go out of business? This one has been around for years; it offers live music four or five nights a week, and has Boddingtons on tap. How can you go wrong with that?
What they don't have is a PA system, and that's where I come in. The band I'm working for tonight has been hiring me over the past year-and-a-half, as they got tired of doing something they don't know a lot about: live sound projection. They're a five-piece with drums, bass, guitar, keyboards, and sax. It's a good lineup, and easy enough to work with; they play mostly covers with an original thrown in now and then. I have to put up three vocal mics, though the main vocalist is also the keyboard player.
One of the main tools of a good live sound engineer is an EQ to properly attenuate room frequencies that muddy the sound. Unless you're in a multi-million dollar facility built with sound in mind, the space is going to have some strange inconsistencies with amplified sound. I wouldn't be caught at any live sound event without at least one good dual-channel, 31-band graphic EQ. This helps to manage the bizarre frequencies that resonate in rooms with a square shape and have a lot of hard (reflective) surfaces. (See sidebar for more tips on live sound EQ.)
When most people hook up a five-band EQ to their home or car stereos, the settings usually look like a smiley face, with the high- and low-end faders boosted and the volume reduced in the midrange. Human hearing is naturally attuned to midrange frequencies, so we like more emphasis on the lows and highs. But for live sound, this type of EQ setting is disastrous — so don't make a smiley face on your live sound EQ!
Speakers must
be elevated
above the heads
of the crowd
to be heard properly. |
It takes me about an hour to set everything up. The only thing I can't do alone is hoist the speakers over my head onto the speaker stands, so I always ask for a hand. Speakers must be elevated above the heads of the crowd to be heard properly, so don't forget the speaker stands! There really is no substitute: for example, putting the speakers on chairs on each side of the stage means that only the people directly in front of the speakers can hear them, and it'll probably wipe out their hearing for the night. The only thing the rest of the crowd will hear is muffled pillow music. (The same principle applies to your rehearsal space, by the way — so be sure to elevate those speakers!)
In a place like this, I rely on my Mackie SRM450 powered main speakers. You just can't go wrong with these babies. They have an excellent full sound, with plenty of power to project to an audience of up to 300, and they put out a nice round low-end, so you don't feel like the bass and kick are suffering if you don't have a subwoofer. I've also used them as monitors for bands (makes the singer really happy), and I've even hung an iPod off them at a backyard party and had the place rockin'. They are magnifico!
Once everything is in place, I plug in a mic (or my iPod) and check that the connections to the main speakers and the monitors work. I turn up one at a time: left house, right house, monitor mix 1, monitor mix 2. The rest can wait for the band's arrival and sound check.
Back to the bar: The band arrives, drummer first (always a good idea), and they all set up. I quickly check their mic lines as they tune and thump around on their instruments. For small gigs like this, I have the band do half a song so I can adjust levels, prep a mix for the audience, and make sure they can hear what they need in their monitors. This is not the time to have the drummer repeatedly smash the snare drum while you're trying to get a "sound." The bar will clear out, the band will end up in a bad mood, and you'll have a headache. If the gig is at a huge arena, you need to have every instrument plucked, struck, and rapped upon to get a "sound" — but for heaven's sake, this is not necessary at a small bar gig.
As the band begins playing, I sit at the board happily making the mix sound as good as I can, raising the levels for the solos, and so forth. I am a very active mixer. Truly, it's the only way to be. Sound is dynamic and constantly changing. It's good to have your hands on the faders and knobs to make the mix move. Those set-it-and-forget-it types ought to get a job at the DMV. As a band, you work hard on your material. You want it to sound incredible when you have the opportunity to play live. If there's a paid engineer standing behind the mixing board, their hands had better not be in their pockets!
The band plays a few sets to a crowd of 100 or so, which is pretty packed for a small place like this. The only disconcerting moments for me are when the bar goes back to playing some screechy Irish music between sets from the funky lil' house speakers hanging on the wall near the jukebox. I usually like to control the music between sets, but at this bar they start to blast their music the minute the band is done, as though they need to remind you that you are in the company of the Irish. Each time the band is ready to begin another set, I have to walk over to the bartender to remind him to turn off the house music. Oooof.
Next topic to tackle: Microphones. Which are the best to use for live sound, especially when the singer always has to ask for "more me in the monitors, please?" Check one, two...stand by!
Posted August 2006
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boya84 commented, on September 3, 2006 at 4:33 p.m.:
Dana ROCKS (she jazzs, metals, latins, alternatives, folks, acoustics, electrics, celtics, and any other music style that's out there... but mostly, she rocks!)