I used to shy away from shelving filters. I mean, why sledgehammer away at something when you can perform parametric surgery? It’s better, right?

As I’ve done more and more work with system tuning, though, I’ve started to become better at imagining the filters that will produce a desired response. It’s a bit like those characters in The Matrix that could “see the code.” You begin to recognize that, oh yeah, an octave-wide parametric at 1250 Hz could get that peak under control.

I’ve also become better at understanding how obsessive microsurgery is rarely a good place for an audio human to start. The broad-brush response is far more important as a launch point.

And I’m noticing more and more, especially with powered loudspeakers that are well-tuned at the factory, that a bit of opposed “tilt” in the lows and highs does A LOT. With two filters and a few seconds, a great deal of garble goes away – and a pleasant clarity also becomes noticeable. I’ve used the method at FOH and in monitor world, and it has made me smile in both places.

It’s not that peaking filters are now useless to me, either. I still love them. They’re very handy for fixing spot problems, like a raspy peak in the highs. That’s the thing, though:  I get to reserve them for fine-grained tweaks, rather than pressing them into a kind of service that a different filter is better for. Why approximate a shelving EQ with a peaking filter? Why not just use the shelving filter?

If you have the inclination, and flexible shelving filters you can apply to an output, try this yourself: Run a quick measurement of a system, and then try to find the spot in the trace that the response seems to “hinge” around. The place where, if you applied opposed shelving EQs, the resulting response would be essentially aligned throughout the loudspeaker’s normally usable range. Statistically flat; Balanced peaks and valleys in both the low-end and high-end. (When you see the traces and hear the results, you’ll know what I mean.)

People get set in their ways, and becoming set in those ways happens pretty quickly.

It didn’t take long in my time as an audio human to establish my “flow of setup.” For years, I took the approach of getting all the gear into the room, then setting up the console, then setting up the mics, and then setting up everything else.

But I’ve changed recently.

These days, my approach is to get the console and loudspeakers going first, and then working on the mics and DI boxes.

Why?

Because I had a realization.

I was hit with this epiphany that the critical path to live-audio viability – the shortest distance to a PA setup that you can do any kind of soundcheck with – is power, console, loudspeakers, and THEN everything else. Before this revelation I had several instances of discomfort where I had all the mics ready, but the band rolled up and had to wait while I got loudspeakers patched in. This never turned into a huge problem, but it wasn’t the best situation to be in.

Of course, the preference is to have the whole system ready to make noise, mics and all, before the band arrives. Sometimes you can’t do that, though, and in such a case you’re much better served by having the output side of the rig ready. This is because you can always set and rough-in one mic at a time if FOH and monitor world can produce sound, but not the other way around. If you have all the mics ready, but the loudspeakers are lagging, you’re stuck with no progress until the loudspeakers catch up. Do things the other way, and you can at least have some forward motion on soundcheck as soon as someone is ready to get settled in.

This matters a lot when the schedule is tight, or made tight by some kind of problem with the show. (Even an “extrinsic” problem like bad traffic.) When your soundcheck time is about to run out, you want to be able to make some noise with what you have, because at least then you’ll have a clue about everything else that will have to be done on the fly. Monitor world is very sensitive to this kind of thing; It’s better to have an incomplete set of inputs in a “very correct” state on deck than everything patched but not mixed at all. Every input that’s feeding monitors appropriately is one more thing that you don’t have to scramble around with later at high volume.

I don’t know if anyone has had an experience like mine, but let me tell you, rediscovering your setup sequence is a huge breath of fresh air. Especially when it makes things better.

I think it makes a lot of sense to go through each channel in a show and take a detailed look at it during soundcheck.

For monitor world.

In monitor world, I feel that there’s a real call to examine each input in turn, getting a tone that the players prefer on deck and spreading things around as needed. Doing things one at a time is especially helpful when running in high-gain situations, where feedback problems have to be tamed. Step-by-step strategies make those situations much more manageable, because it’s easier to pinpoint what’s ringing.

At FOH, though, I feel that channel-per-channel microscopy is rarely warranted.

It’s not that hearing things in isolation isn’t helpful to determine if a channel is way off in the sonic weeds. That’s quite sensible. What I don’t see, though, is the need to agonize over every single input for minutes at a time, simply as a matter of course. What counts is context, and over the years I’ve come to recognize that the perfect [insert instrument here] sound in isolation is often NOT the perfect sound for the whole band in the room. When checking drumkits, I like to hear the drummer play like they’re going to play, as opposed to “KICK KICK KICK KICK…” for an extended period. I find it rather more productive to slide the kick up over a regular rhythm, hearing how it works when emphasized and then dropped back into position. Maybe I don’t need that much clickiness in the top end…or maybe I need more, but that’s the kind of call that’s easier to make when there are other drums to compare with. Even better – when there’s a whole band to compare with.

It’s the same for guitar/ bass/ keys/ vocals/ whatever. With the musicians running a tune, I can get a sense of what’s going to work in a holistic way. If I gun the channel and something isn’t quite right, I’m still going to hear it if it actually matters.

And, to reiterate, I can always stop and ask to isolate something If I can’t figure out what’s bugging me.

My gentle suggestion, then, is to try an approach where monitor world gets dialed up, and the band can play together. As they do so, take that time to get FOH tones and blends. You may be surprised at how much more fun it is, and how informative it is, when you’re listening to actual music.

Tomorrow morning will begin the process of The Great Gig playing a show we’ve been preparing for over the course of months. It’s an epic-scale undertaking involving a grundle of moving parts. Many of those moving parts are human. Many others are electronic. There are lots of ways for things to go wrong.

On The Great Gig, I’m variously listed as a technical director, producer, and FOH engineer. However you look at it, it’s my job to prevent things from going wrong in the first place, and if that fails, to un-wrong the things that have gone wrong, all with a view to making sure everyone else can do their job. That’s plenty to do.

I’m not nervous about it.

The reason I’m not nervous about it is because I feel a deeply rooted sense of knowing exactly how the show is supposed to work, and knowing how we get it all to work. I understand our audio and lighting signal flow, and how to get around failures. I can easily conceive of ways that we can route around problems or “degrade gracefully” otherwise. I’ve already troubleshot some problems in rehearsal.