mike257

Lovely stuff! Plenty of nice new Yammies. I've mostly been tour managing and guitar wrangling recently, but I did get to give a dLive a little run out in the real world at last before Christmas and it's a VERY impressive piece of kit.

My mate Ali bought a keytar. He seems quite pleased with it.... https://youtu.be/ulDZdUzn7EY

I wasn't blaming the sound guy. I am the sound guy!

This is about right though, because, unless I hear something that obviously and immediately requires some remedial tweaking, I want to quickly flash through all inputs to make sure I've got a good clean signal I can work with, then hear things in context with the band playing together before I make any serious sonic decisions and start to tweak. No use me arsing about with things in isolation if it isn't going to sit in the mix right when the rest of the band start.

It's really never going to be the kit. It's all in the players own technique and touch, how hard/soft they play, the angle they attack from - spent two weeks teching for a great session player who stood in on a tour I was looking after, I knew the lines as well as he did having worked with the band for ages, but when I line checked his bass, I sounded almost exactly like I sound playing through my own kit. He sounded completely different. I was lucky enough to work for Victor Wooten for a couple of shows. I can 100% confirm that having his actual bass in your hands and pedals at your feet in no way makes you sound or play anything like him 🤣

Better?

I have it on authority from mutual acquaintances that this was a fully unprovoked attack, and that the singer gave the offender a well deserved pasting.

Although the inputs have an instrument level, the outputs will be at line level, so a lot hotter than the front end of a bass amp is expecting to see - I'd bear that in mind when you're hooking it all up.

As much as the first three records are still my go-to more often than not, I think (especially if you dig in to albums/b-sides/live shows, rather than just the singles) they're one of the few bands that have managed to nail down a more broadly appealing songwriting approach whilst keeping a lot of what made them exciting in their early days. It's still full of musically clever bits, unusual time signatures squeezed in to the context of a catchy song, and little bits of weirdness amongst the more polished sound. They're still absurdly great live too. Albums 2 and 3 are probably my faves, but there's gold on every record.

At the bare minimum, I'd be looking at Sennheiser G3. You should be looking at a Channel 38 (Sennheiser GB band, 606-648) unit, although these come with the obligation to buy an annual license from OFCOM for about £75/year. If you have a tour manager or FOH engineer who is advancing the show (and for a show of that scale, someone should be advancing it properly - happy to chat about this if it's not something you're familiar with) you can ask them to put your wireless requirements in to the production rider and see if it can be supplied by the visiting production company. If you are carrying your own, include details of it in your production advance so that the person from the sound company doing the RF co-ordination can include it in their frequency plan.

I don't think I particularly looked like one, but the smoke machine definitely helped!

Got a three pack of these for an absurd £54 a couple of years ago on Amazon. Normal price is about double that but still a good deal for what you get. Definitely punch above their weight for cheap mics. I find they work well on brass too.

No, I'm saying that it's an overly simplistic reduction of a complex set of factors, some within your control, some that aren't. I'm certainly not disputing that there's people out there who are putting together overly kick-heavy mixes, but that big waffling post was me trying to give an insight into why getting a great mix, even in a prestigious venue with a quality sound system brought in, is not as straightforward as people might assume.

It's a tough one to judge in soundcheck as the low end is the thing that changes most drastically when a room is filled with bodies. When I've done time as a house tech in a venue, I've got a feeling over time for how that room changes when it's full, so a soundcheck that might sound bassy and muddy can be down to reflections from a bare floor and walls that won't happen at showtime because of all the meat-based acoustic absorption units milling around the room. A good tech will be well aware of this and how the room can change, so will have that in mind during soundcheck.

The AKG D5 is my regular go-to. Better off axis rejection than a 58 and nicer response around the high mids to my ears. Suits most vocalists I point it at. Occasionally find a voice that doesn't suit them that well, at which point I tend to reach for a Beta 58a or a Beta 57a. The Sennheiser stuff is also great, and I'm more than happy to use it when provided, but I've got five D5 in my personal kit now.

The RAH doesn't have an in-house sound man, every show bring it's own system and crew in. It's a bugger of a room to get right, but when it's right it's brilliant. The last show I was on in there, the whole soundcheck was hours behind because it didn't sound quite right and the headliner's FOH guy had the audio crew drop down the centre hang of PA and reconfigure it. It's a right pain in the derrière! ^ this is great advice. You keep turning things up, you just end up in a mess. The best way is to cut holes for things to fit in, give everything space. If you boost 80Hz on bass and do the same on kick, they'll get in each other's way even more.

The support band won't have been mixed by the same engineer, and won't even have been mixed through the same mixing desk. There's so many variables involved in getting a good sound. Taking Brixton as an example - it's a beautiful and storied venue. I was really excited to be mixing in there and ticking it off the list. The advice I got from colleagues that had been through there was that it's a hideous sounding room when it's empty, but more manageable when full, and that the sound at the mix position doesn't reflect how it sounds across most of the rest of the room, especially around the tricky bottom end. So - you're on the back foot with the room before you've started. Then - many venues that size don't have an installed sound system. It's brought in show by show, by the artist or promoter's chosen supplier. The system will depend on the budget, and the headline artist's brand preference. This has to be flown/stacked, configured, time aligned to suit the space. This is largely science with a splash of art, and is a skill set in itself separate from being a mix engineer. A great system tech is a desirable thing. They create the canvas that the FOH has to work with, so is again filled with variables. Soundcheck comes - taking that Brixton gig as an example, the headline band had a closed soundcheck. I didn't even get to walk up to the desk until they were done. They ran an hour over schedule. I raced to FOH with my carefully prepared show file on my USB stick, filled with confidence because I knew I'd prepped the file well and could start quickly. I got to the mix position to find I'd been supplied a completely different desk from the one in the advance, my show file was now useless and I was starting from scratch on am unfamiliar desk over an hour behind schedule. The ten minute rushed soundcheck we had meant I didn't get the opportunity to walk the room enough to get a proper feel for how it sounded away from the mix position, and also meant I didn't have time to do anything but the very quick basics to throw a decent mix together. When it came to show time, I discovered all the little issues that the rushed soundcheck had hidden - like just how over-egged with bass and lacking in mid some of the bass sounds coming from the SansAmp on stage were. Whilst there was plenty of low end, there was next to nothing I could do to dial the clarity back in to the midrange because that detail just wasn't reaching me at the desk. In every song, I had effects changes and constant fader rides to do to suit the arrangement, lift key parts in the important places etc, so trying to firefight sonic imperfections around that. The half our set is over before I know it. Band and management made up with the mix, I know it was ok but would have been much better given more favourable circumstances. [Edit to add: When you're in a full venue, with regular adjustments to make, it's often just not practical to go for a wander to hear how it sounds across the room. In a sold out gig, to get far enough away from the desk to hear the difference, means there's too many people in the way of you getting back quickly to react to something hapening on stage. I don't know many engineer's working directly with a band whose mix stays static throughout a show. If you know the material, you play the mix to suit and it's constantly changing. ] That's a pretty typical day and regular set of challenges on a live show of that scale, and that's barely touching on the amount of things on stage in terms of tone, musical arrangements, performance, stage volume/spill etc that you can't control from behind the FOH desk and just have to deal with as best you can. If it was that easy to make everything sound great in every corner of every venue, anyone could do it. Sometimes it's easy, but sometimes it's really bloody hard. "Turn the kick down" and "tweak the mids" doesn't really cover it!

I was mixing the support band in Brixton. Horrible bottom end in that room, you'd have been calling me all sorts for the way the bass sounded 😂

Was it Brixton by any chance?

Obviously there's stuff on track - there's more keys parts in a typical Faithless song than there are keys players on stage - but she's very much playing live, regardless of what you think you've seen and what you think is plugged in. Arena-scale touring shows often have more playback involved than most people would expect though, that's for sure.

Completely agree here. I don't know of a single WiFi-driven desk where "use an external router" isn't a recommended course of action. There's a reason pro kit just has a hole to plug one in!

The 90s did it already...

A good friend and colleague is their touring keyboard and drum tech. I can very much confirm that she's playing live keys on stage, otherwise he wouldn't have much of a job to do!

I've had hideous reliability issues with the UI range and don't recommend it to anyone. It's great on paper and has a brilliant feature set and I really wanted to be impressed by it but had show-stopping issues that have completely put me off. You'll probably have better results using an external router with it, but even with one of those I was still experiencing complete control lockouts often enough to make me swear off using them. If you are dead set on going back to analogue, I'd suggest looking at an Allen & Heath MixWizard. 16 mic channels, six aux sends, effects on board and fits in a 19" rack mount width. It's the most grown up of the small analogue mixers and will be sonically way better than the Behringer/Alto etc cheap efforts.