Back in the days when I got to work with Floyd Show, I always preferred it when the night would start with “Shine On You Crazy Diamond.” Even when we’d had time to do extensive work on the show’s audio during the day, the luxury of “easing in” to the actual performance was something I savored.

Sure, nothing quite compares with the rush of, say, having the first set be “Dark Side Of The Moon.” The intro plays, building to a feverish peak, and then “shwOOM!” The guitars take you into “Breathe.” It’s really cool when it works, but there’s always that nagging fear in the back of your mind: “What if something doesn’t quite happen correctly?” Anything short of a catastrophic failure is insufficient to allow the show to stop, so a problem means that the impact of the show-open is wrecked…AND you’re going to have to fix things in a big hurry.

Anyway.

“Shine On You Crazy Diamond” is, in my opinion, THE template for a “soundcheck” song. Soundcheck songs are fantastic tools to have handy, because (let’s face it), the small-venue world is full of scenarios where the only option is grab-n-go. Combining an actual first song with a soundcheck lets you keep the show moving, maximizing your play time and audience engagement while getting things sorted out on deck. Not all soundcheck tunes are created equal, though, so learning the lessons available from “Shine On” is a Very Good Idea™ when it comes time to craft your own “multitasker’s minuet.”

Take Your Time

Because soundcheck songs naturally happen at the top of a set, the instinct is to start off with a bang. This is unhelpful. A fast tune means that the time available for an audio-human to catch, analyze, act on, and re-evaluate any particular problem is hugely compressed. Several musical phrases can go by while a tech tries to get sorted out during a lively song. The more phrases that go by without a fix, the more “wrong” the show seems to sound. A fast song, then, tends to push the show opening towards sounding bad. (You don’t want your show-open to sound bad.)

“Shine On,” of course, answers this issue in exactly the right way. It’s a leisurely piece – downright dreamy, actually – which means that the person managing the PA noises doesn’t have to rush around. They can focus, listen, and act deliberately. If something is wrong, it’s entirely possible to get a handle on the issue within a couple of musical phrases. Even very sticky problems can usually be wrangled by the end of the song, which allows the show to continue smoothly without stopping.

If you want to come out of the gate like a racecar, you need a proper soundcheck. If you’re going to do things on the fly, please fly slowly.

Everything Has Its Own Space

Another excellent feature of “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” is that it spends a long time being a series of solos. You get to hear the keys, then a guitar chimes in up front, then the other guitar plays for a bit, then you get some more keys, and then everything fires together with the drums. After that, you get some uncluttered drums along with another guitar solo, and then some vocals that happen over some subdued backing from the band. Next, you get a chance to hear the vocals against the higher-intensity version of the band, and finally, you get some saxophone over both gentle and more “wound-up” backgrounds.

Everything has a time (and quite a lot of it, due to the song being slow) where it is the front-and-center element. For an audio-human, this is tremendous. It gives a very clear indication of whether or not the basic level of the part is in a reasonable place, and it also still manages to say a lot about whether the part’s tonality is going to work in context. Further, this kind of song structure allows us to get as close as possible to a “check everything individually” situation without actually having that option available. The audio human gets time to think about each instrument separately, even though other parts are still playing in the background.

The antithesis of this is the soundcheck song where everything starts playing at once, usually with everybody trying to be louder than everybody else. The tech ends up losing precious time while trying to simply make sense of the howling vortex of noise that just hit them in the face. With nothing “presorted,” the only option is to struggle to pick things out either by luck or by force.

Again, if you want to start at a full roar, you should do that at the shows where you have the opportunity to get the roar figured out in advance. If you don’t have time to take turns getting sorted before the show, then you have to use the show to do that.

Waste Nothing

Some folks treat their soundcheck song as a bit of worthless rubbish. They toss it out to the audience as though it has no value, seemingly in the hopes that the showgoers will ignore it. It’s as though the band is saying “this isn’t real, so don’t pay attention yet.”

But it IS real, and the audience IS paying attention. A soundcheck tune is part of the actual show, and should NOT be a throwaway. It should be a “first-class” song that’s done as well as is possible.

Of course, because it is a soundcheck song, it probably shouldn’t be the tune that relies most on everything going perfectly. Songs used to get around production issues are tools, and you have to use the correct tool for any given job.

“Shine On” is a real song. It’s a very important part of Pink Floyd’s catalog, and was crafted with care. Floyd Show never (when I worked with them) played the tune with the idea of taking a mulligan afterwards, which is also what I would expect from the actual Pink Floyd. If the show was opened with “Shine On You Crazy Diamond,” the show was OPENED. We were not casually testing anything; we were going for it, even as remaining technical issues got sorted out.

You should care about your soundcheck song. It’s a real part of your show, a part that should be intentionally crafted to meet a specific need: Connecting with your audience while a mix comes together.