Back Page: Welcome To The Torture Palace
Changing the mix position can wreck a room
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Every once in a while, I’m reminded that my articles give me a
fairly high profile. A guitarist I work with also plays in a fairly
lucrative cover band. One day a club’s sound guy was setting up
and said, “Pardon me if this isn’t the way ‘The Great Chris Kathman’
does it!” |
The house console was under an extremely low balcony, placed all the way
at the very back, and turned sideways! And, between me and the dance floor
was a stairwell to a lower level that I had to detour around every time
I went to check out what was actually happening in the room.
Afternoon soundcheck started late, and the bandleader had to leave early.
I plead guilty to just muting my desk after he left the stage. My basic
mix was in place, and I’ve had multiple successful shows in that same
room, mixing from a riser on the dance floor (where the mix position used
to be). It’s not the greatest set of mains in the world, but I figured
how bad could it be?
As the support act finished and I headed to the mix position, their FOH
mixer looked more disturbed than I’d ever seen him. “Man, something really
changed since soundcheck, more than just the difference of the crowd coming
in,” he told me. “I almost feel like something about the system changed,
and I know that’s not possible, but I just wanted to warn you.”
If I could go back in time, I’d go up on stage after the bandleader left
soundcheck, pick up his very resonant acoustic guitar, approach his vocal
mic, and have the local tech ring the room out and tune the graphics to
those inputs.
The band started to play, and my jaw dropped. It was night and day from
the afternoon, a very bad dream sodden and masked and really low level.
When I turned up the lead vocal and guitar, they started into howling
feedback, so I cut them back to where they’d been, and began turning everything
else down.
The other guitarist’s girlfriend came running up and announced that she
couldn’t hear him. I told her I was having problems and working as hard
as possible to rectify the situation. I didn’t take the time to point
out that the trumpet player’s and drummer’s wives, as well the bass player’s
girlfriend, wouldn’t have been too happy with me, either!
Lap after lap around the stairwell and onto the dance floor, where audience
members were informing me how bad it sounded, with varying degrees of
politeness, including one guy who literally went into physical convulsions,
shrieking and cussing. I was totally stressing out, and sure did not feel
like ‘The Great Chris Kathman’!
I asked the venue tech what frequencies his mains characteristically fed
back at, as well as what I could hear for myself, and kept laboriously
making small adjustments, each time having to go back out and check the
room for resonances I couldn’t hear under the %#*@ balcony.
On our bus the next day, the band’s monitor mixer commented that the owner
of this particular venue obviously does not care about music or the bands.
And, by extension, the fans who buy the tickets that pay for this guy’s
life. If the mix position had been on the dance floor, and I’d run into
the same problem, I could have addressed it far more rapidly.
It’s very hard to believe that other mixers don’t have similar difficulties
at this venue. I don’t know how many paying customers the owner now fits
into the space on the dance floor where the console used to be, but he’s
taken what used to be an O.K. room to mix in and turned it into a torture
palace.
Check out a host of insightful articles by Chris in the Sound Reinforcement section of ProSoundWeb.com. You can reach him at chris@prosoundweb.com
January 2004 Live Sound International