Last night, I was running a show in a very, VERY reflective environment. The whole thing was inarticulate mush, like what you would expect in a stadium/ hockey rink/ basketball arena, even though the place was probably fire-rated for only 200 people.

Listening to the splatter, I had an epiphany. I couldn’t figure out where the FOH PA was with my ears, even though I could see it with my eyes. The wash from the monitors and drums hitting the back wall was overwhelming the “timing information” from the mains. I mentally contrasted this with recent experiences mixing outside, where FOH could easily separate from the monitors due to lack of reflections. You could instantly point to a mid-high and say, “That’s where the singer is coming from.” Not so during my last gig. This crystallized a thought in my mind:

If you think a mix sounds bad, but can’t figure out why, the reason may be that you can’t separate FOH from everything else.

In the case of last-night’s mix, achieving separation would have meant very high volume. With all the blast and smear, though, it was already too loud. As such, I was using FOH to just barely fill in the subwoofer range and information above 1 kHz or so. Doing that wasn’t enough to create a sonic impression that the band was coming from FOH, though. It was a mere blend to make it seem that the reflections had a better magnitude response.

Overall, that was the appropriate choice. We weren’t there to be loud, achieving a great sound in an acoustically hostile space. We were there to play some tunes that people might want to dance to, without being overwhelming. As often happens “best overall show” won out over “best sound.” That’s part of the job…and so too, thankfully, is having a small revelation every so often.