Check out live music from Utah at AMR.fm.
The opinions expressed are mine only. These opinions do not necessarily reflect anybody else’s opinions. I do not own, operate, manage, or represent any band, venue, or company that I talk about, unless explicitly noted.
Check out live music from Utah at AMR.fm.
The opinions expressed are mine only. These opinions do not necessarily reflect anybody else’s opinions. I do not own, operate, manage, or represent any band, venue, or company that I talk about, unless explicitly noted.
So…there won’t be a regular post today. It’s another case of “I have something else that I have to do.”
However!
The “something else that I have to do” is an event that you – yes YOU – can be a part of. AMR.fm is going to be doing a series of live broadcasts from Fats Grill in Salt Lake City, and I’m going to be the guy driving the mixing consoles.
That’s not a typo. It really will be “consoles,” the plural form of “console.” I figure things will really work out nicely, or it will all be a hilarious example of what not to do to make a live-broadcast happen.
Anyway.
Even if you can’t make it down to Fats, you can still get on AMR.fm and listen to the live broadcast. In theory, we’ll be kicking things off at 7:00 PM, Mountain Standard Time. This week’s guest is Opal Hill Drive.
If you don’t need it, don’t spend power (or volume) on it.
The opinions expressed are mine only. These opinions do not necessarily reflect anybody else’s opinions. I do not own, operate, manage, or represent any band, venue, or company that I talk about, unless explicitly noted.
For loudspeakers, a crossover is used to separate full-range audio into multiple “passbands,” with each passband being appropriate for a certain enclosure or driver. For instance, there’s no need to send a whole bunch of high-frequency information to a large-diameter speaker if you’ve also got a handy device that’s better for top-end. On the flipside, failing to filter low-frequency information is a good way to wreck a “meant for HF” output transducer.
A beautifully implemented crossover creates a smooth transition from box to box and driver to driver. Crossovers can also help with getting the maximum performance out of an amplifier/ loudspeaker chain – again, because pushing material to a driver that can’t reproduce it is a waste of power.
Most of the time, we think of a crossover as an electrical device. Whether the filter network is a bunch of passive components at the end of a speaker cable, or a DSP sitting in front of the amplifiers, the mental image of a crossover is that of a signal processor.
…but remember how I’ve talked about acoustical resonant circuits? The reality of the pro-audio life, especially in small rooms, is that the behaviors of electrical devices show up in acoustical form all the time. In the past few years, I’ve found that creating acoustical crossovers between the stage wash and the FOH (Front of House) PA can be incredibly useful.
In a small venue, you don’t always have a lot of power to spare. It’s rarely practical to deploy a PA system that can operate at “nothing more than a brisk walk” for most of the show. Instead, you’re probably using a LOT of the audio rig’s capability at any given time.
Even if you have a good deal of power to spare, you often don’t have very much volume to spare. A small venue gets loud in a big hurry – not only because of acoustics, but because the average audience member is “pretty dang close” to the stage and PA.
Taken together, these issues present hat-explodingly good reasons to avoid chewing up your power and/ or SPL budget with audio that you just don’t need. Traditionally, dealing with this has taken the form of not reinforcing entire sources or channels. (This can oftentimes, and unfortunately, be appropriate. I’ve done several shows where one person was so loud that everyone EXCEPT them was in the PA.) An “all-or-nothing per channel” approach is sometimes a bit too much, though. What can be better is to use powerful and dramatic, yet judiciously applied subtractive EQ.
A good way to illustrate what I mean by “powerful and dramatic, yet judiciously applied subtractive EQ” is to show you some analysis traces. For instance, here’s my starting point for a vocal HPF (High Pass Filter):
The filter frequency is 500 Hz. Effectively, I’m chucking out everything at or below about 250 Hz.
“But, doesn’t that sound really thin,” you ask?
Indeed, it does sound a bit thin at times. If I don’t have a lot of monitor wash, or the singer doesn’t have a voice that’s rich in low-mid, or if they just don’t want to get right up on the mic, then I need to roll my filter down. On the other hand, in situations where the monitors were loud, the vocalists had strong voices, and they had their lips stuck to the mics, I’ve had HPF filters up as high as 1 kHz or more.
The point is that the stage-wash often gives me everything I need for low-mid in the vocals, so why duplicate that energy in the FOH PA? If I create a nice transition between the PA and what’s already in the room, I only have to spend power on what I need for clarity.
Now, here’s a trace for a guitar amp:
Of course, you don’t necessarily need something as extreme as this all the time. What’s great about filtering a guitar like this, though, is that you’ve thrown away everything except the “soul” of the instrument – 400 Hz to 2 kHz. Especially with “overly scooped” guitar sounds, what you need for the guitar to actually sit in the live mix is more midrange than what you’re getting. Of course, you could turn up the ENTIRE guitar to get what you need – but why? You’ll be killing the audience. It’s much better to “just turn up the mids” without turning up anything else.
…and even if the guitar is only really in the PA during solos, this kind of filter can still be a good thing to implement. If you have to REALLY get on the gas for a lead part, you can avoid tearing people’s heads off with piercing high end – as well as avoid stomping all over the rhythm player and the bassist.
By combining a highly filtered sound with the stage volume, you effectively get to EQ the guitar without having to completely overwhelm the natural sound from the amp. (This is just an acoustical version of what multiband equalizers do anyway. You select a frequency range to work on, and everything else is left alone. Whether this happens purely with electrical signals or in combination with acoustic events is relevant, but ultimately a secondary issue.)
Now, how about a kick drum?
Again, this kind of thing isn’t appropriate in all contexts. You wouldn’t do this for a jazz gig…but in a LOT of other situations, what you need from the kick drum is “thump” and an appropriately placed “pop” or “click.”
And that’s it.
In a small venue, reproducing much of a rock or pop kick’s midrange is unhelpful. All you do is run over everything else, which makes you turn up everything else, which makes your whole mix REALLY LOUD.
Instead, you can create an acoustical crossover to sweeten the kick “just enough,” without getting any louder than necessary.
Saving power and volume also applies for situations where you want effects to come from the PA. It’s very easy to get too loud when you want to put reverb, delay, or even chorus on something. The reason for this is because these effects have a “dry” (unprocessed) component, that has to be blended properly with the “wet” sound. What can happen, then, is that you end up pushing the entire sound up too far – because you want to hear the effects. The “dry” sound in the signal combines with the “dry” sound in the room, which makes for an acoustical result that isn’t as “wet” as you wanted…so, you push the volume until the “dry” sound through the PA overwhelms the sound in the room.
That can be pretty loud.
Instead of brute force, though, you can just tilt the “wet” ratio much further in favor of the effect.
In fact, I’ve been in some situations where, say, a snare drum was in exactly the right place without any help from the PA. In that case, I set up my routing so that the snare reverb was 100% wet – no “dry” signal at all. I already had all the “dry” sound I needed from the snare in the room, and so I just turned up the “all wet” reverb until the total, acoustical result was what I wanted.
The bottom line with all this is that, in a small space, you can get pretty darn decent sound without a screaming-loud PA. You just have to use the sound that you already have, and very selectively add the bits that need a little help. The more fine-grained you can be with the creation of this acoustic crossover, the more you can bend the total acoustical result to your will…within reason, of course.
A Small Venue Survivalist Saturday Suggestion
The opinions expressed are mine only. These opinions do not necessarily reflect anybody else’s opinions. I do not own, operate, manage, or represent any band, venue, or company that I talk about, unless explicitly noted.
This thing that you’re involved in is called “a band.”
It is not called “the sound of your amp’s power tubes saturating while a few other people hang out on stage for no discernible reason.”
A Small Venue Survivalist Saturday Suggestion
The opinions expressed are mine only. These opinions do not necessarily reflect anybody else’s opinions. I do not own, operate, manage, or represent any band, venue, or company that I talk about, unless explicitly noted.
Shopping for a personal vocal mic?
Forget about how it sounds in a pair of headphones.
Find some monitor wedges, and crank up the mic until it sounds like what you’ll need for your band. If the mic sounds bad, or you’re struggling with feedback, then it’s “no sale.”
The material that’s critical for a mix is between about 200 Hz and 4000 Hz.
The opinions expressed are mine only. These opinions do not necessarily reflect anybody else’s opinions. I do not own, operate, manage, or represent any band, venue, or company that I talk about, unless explicitly noted.
We’ve all seen and heard it, in some way. You know what I mean. The “smiley face” EQ. “Scoop” switches. The midrange all the way down – and, optionally, the bass and treble CRANKED.
“Hi-fi.”
“Bedroom tone.”
Heck, most of us have been practitioners of this very thing. When trying to make something sound impressive, polished, and big, ruthlessly carving out the midrange is like the Dark Side of The Force: Quick, easy, and seductive.
Also, really bad for you in the end.
What a mix (live, studio, monitors, stage-volume, anything) actually stands or falls on is the midrange. Sure, you want the top and bottom octave to be in the right place, but they really aren’t as critical as you may have been led to believe.
So, why do people de-emphasize the midrange so much?
There are all kinds of contexts that drive scooped, sizzle-thump tones. Getting into every detail could make for a very long, barely readable article. I think that you can get a decent picture by generalizing, though:
Midrange is common, unexciting, and – due to its criticality – annoying when it’s wrong.
See, humans hear midrange better than almost anything else. We’re great at detecting and analyzing human speech, because our lives basically depend on it. Human speech is all about midrange, and expressive, detailed vocalization is one of the things that makes humans actually…you know…human. We grow up hearing midrange. We communicate using midrange. We hear midrange all the time, in every possible place, in all kinds of contexts.
Midrange? More like, mundane-range.
When we come across a sound-generating item that can do the bits of the audible spectrum that are outside the boring and everyday, we fall in love pretty fast. “Bass” and “air” are like candy to our common meal of mid. They’re impressive. Fun. Exciting. Everything that those pokey, old-hat mids aren’t.
So, there’s a strong temptation to emphasize the fun bits at the expense of the boring parts.
At the same time, our particular human genius for detecting problems and unnatural weirdness in the mids makes us intolerant. Our brains are also VERY good at synthesizing missing information, especially when a lot of the basic cues are still intact. If your stereo or amplified instrument are in a not-so-acoustically-nice room, a quick fix is to yank out as much of the troublesome midrange as you can. The music still sounds fine, because the mids are still audible enough for you to imagine whatever you’re missing as you revel in the sounds that are emphasized.
The success of this is further enhanced by being alone, which is what leads to “bedroom sound.” With nothing else “in the mix,” you can hear your instrument just fine – and it sounds GREAT! All the midrange problems are sucked out, and the impressive “body” and “top” ends are dialed way up.
Awesome sauce.
Until real-life intervenes, of course.
In the context of modern music, especially in small venues, what you have is an assemblage of amplified sounds that coexist with a lot of acoustical goings-on. For example, take a typical rock band’s rehearsal space. You’re probably going to run into an un-miced drumkit, one or two guitar amps, and a bass rig. The guitar and bass players, through electronics, have very immediate and dramatic control over the timbre of their instruments. Within the limits of their instruments and amplifiers, they can dial up some wild and weird tones.
On the other hand, the drummer can’t go quite as crazy. Sure, there’s a lot of variation to be had from shellpack to shellpack, especially with different heads, tunings, sticks, and everything else, but the reality is that most acoustic drumkits impart a tremendous amount of midrange into the room. If nobody else has much midrange left over, then the kit is going to obliterate the tonal parts of the song arrangements…unless, of course, the guitar and bass rigs are much louder than the drums.
So, here’s the major thing:
Sufficient midrange content is the primary and essential component of a tonal instrument’s place in a mix.
The reality is that, for all the excitement and fun that low and high-frequency information give us, there is very little actual music that occurs far below 200 Hz, or far above 4 kHz. It’s not that there isn’t ANY musical information beyond those areas – of course there is – it’s just that it usually isn’t critical to the actual song.
(Yes, bass guitars produce lots of fundamentals that are around or below 100 Hz, but the reality is that we mostly end up listening to the harmonic content of what the bassist is doing. Seriously – find yourself some songs with prominent, melodic basslines. Load the files into a DAW and filter everything below 200 Hz. I’ll bet that you can still hear the bass-human doing their thing.)
If the midrange content of a given part is de-emphasized in a big way, there is a very good chance that the part will disappear in an ensemble context. The flipside is that allowing everybody to have their own piece of the mids means that you’re much likely to get a better mix…especially when you’re playing live in a small room, where the interplay between purely acoustical sounds and amplified tones can be either beautiful or horrific.
The biggest take-away from this is that everybody – guitar players, bassists, vocalists, monitor guys, FOH (Front Of House) humans, and anybody else that I’ve missed – should resist the urge to “kill the mids.”
I should know, because I’ve had my own “scooping” bite me. Killed-mid vocals sound great in FOH and monitor world, right up until they have to be matched up with an actual band. At that point, you have to get the vocals VERY loud to get audible lyrics, and that can lead harshness, feedback, and an audience that wants to not be in the seats anymore.
I once had vocals dialed up in the monitors that sounded “super-studio.” Very hi-fi. It would have been great, except that when the band actually started playing you could barely hear the vocals in the wedges. You’ve gotta let those boxes “bark” a little if people are going to hear themselves sing.
On the flipside, I once worked with a band where one of the guitar players had a serious fascination with HF content. Once the drummer was playing, all you could hear out of that guitar was basically “eeeeeeessshhhh.” He would play these super-fast solos, but you couldn’t hear what he was doing. His actual notes were dialed out so far that, even when he was painfully loud and clearly in front of everybody else’s volume, you still only had a sort of screechy, clicky hiss to listen to.
There’s even a “technologic-economic” side to the whole thing. Making lots of low end and high end are tough things to do with an amplifier or a PA system. Killing the midrange and cranking the ends means that you’re probably wasting a ton of internal headroom and power-stage output on material that might not even be audible. If you want that material to be audible, you need lots of power and lots of speakers – and that’s spendy. Want to get the most out of more affordable gear? Get the midrange in the right place as the first step, and then use what you’ve got left over for the top and bottom.
The mids can be tough to love at first, but it’s a worthwhile relationship.
In a rock mix, you may find yourself “really turnin’ the knobs” when it comes to the drums.
The opinions expressed are mine only. These opinions do not necessarily reflect anybody else’s opinions. I do not own, operate, manage, or represent any band, venue, or company that I talk about, unless explicitly noted.
Making the bass guitar work is as much about the midrange as the low end.
The opinions expressed are mine only. These opinions do not necessarily reflect anybody else’s opinions. I do not own, operate, manage, or represent any band, venue, or company that I talk about, unless explicitly noted.
Polishing your recorded vocals involves a number of different processing steps.
The opinions expressed are mine only. These opinions do not necessarily reflect anybody else’s opinions. I do not own, operate, manage, or represent any band, venue, or company that I talk about, unless explicitly noted.
A PA system can only do so much – the band’s overall volume has to be right, and their proportionality has to be right, too.
The opinions expressed are mine only. These opinions do not necessarily reflect anybody else’s opinions. I do not own, operate, manage, or represent any band, venue, or company that I talk about, unless explicitly noted.
My last article was primarily written to technicians. However, the issue of “only being able to get so much, in comparison to full-tilt boogie” has big implications for musicians playing live. Small venue, big venue, whatever venue, there’s an important reality that has to be faced:
There’s only so much that a PA system or monitor rig can add to the sound of an instrument or vocal.
Now, this certainly holds true in the aesthetic sense. There’s a practical limit to the amount of sweetening that can be applied to any particular sonic event. A drumkit (for example) that sounds truly horrific can’t really be “fixed in the mix,” especially if the tech doesn’t have hours to spend on making it sound like a different, much better drumkit. What really needs to happen is for that set of drums to sound decent, or even amazing, without any outside help. At that point, the PA’s job is to make those drums loud enough for the audience (if the drums aren’t already), and maybe add some “boom” and reverb – if appropriate.
There’s another sense of “what the sound system can add”, though, that’s much easier to quantify. This is the relatively simple reality of how much SPL (Sound Pressure Level) an audio rig can deliver for a given input from a given acoustical source. This “amount of level deliverable” is often less – even a LOT less – than what the rig can do on the spec sheet. (This can often be surprising, especially to musicians and techs who are still working on gaining practical experience with live performance.) The other side of the coin is how much overall level the PA should be adding to the show to have the result sound decent, and be at a comfortable for the audience.
When trying to get a handle on how much the FOH (Front Of House) PA should add to the show, there are a number of things to consider:
It can actually be helpful to work backwards through these points.
In small venues, the amount of tolerable level usually isn’t very high. Although some “pure music” rooms might work with 115+ dBC SPL continuous (decibels Sound Pressure Level, “slow” average), most places that cater to 200 patrons or less will probably see 110 dBC continuous as very, very loud. The problem is that, with a band and monitor rig that are REALLY cookin’, 110 dBC is very easy to achieve – and the PA isn’t even turned on yet!
In general, I recommend an upper limit of 105 dBC continuous for everything when working in a small venue. Band, monitor bleed, and FOH. Even that might be too much for some places, but it’s a start.
Once you’ve established how loud the whole show ought to be, you can begin figuring out what the PA’s contribution should entail. The handy rule of thumb here is that, for a given maximum volume, greater PA contribution requires you to keep a tighter rein on the stage volume.
To help illustrate this point (and others), I’ve prepared some audio samples in OGG format. I’ve used a live recording of a drum kit from Fats Grill, along with a reverb processor, to roughly simulate three conditions:
Of course, this is an imperfect representation. Although most PA loudspeakers are designed to be somewhat directional, they still excite the reverberant field – they often don’t “dry out” the sound quite as much as these samples do.
Still, these clips give you an idea of what happens as more PA is applied. The overall level goes up, the PA sound starts to overcome the stage volume, and the transients get more defined. Putting more direct sound, with clean transient response into the audience is usually a good thing – but notice how much volume the PA had to add before the drumkit really “cleaned up.”
On a discussion forum, I believe that Mark from audiopile.net made a simple, profound, and very true statement with important implications: “Audio engineers don’t feel like they have control until they are 10 dB louder than everything else in the room.” With this guideline in mind, the issue crosses into the first point:
If you want the PA to really define how your band is heard by the audience, then the band’s stage volume should be about 10 dB below the PA. If the maximum volume for a small venue is about 105 dBC SPL continuous, this means that the band and monitor rig need to stay in the close vicinity of 94.5 dBC SPL continuous.
I’m not gonna lie – squishing a rock band into a box smaller than 95 – 100 dBC SPL is tricky. It can be done, but not everybody is willing to take on the challenge and make the decisions involved.
This is why, most of the time, small venue sound involves careful compromises. The PA is often used only to “fill spaces.” That is, the guitar amps might carry the room with only occasional reinforcement for solos, while the midrange and high-end from the drums is stage volume with a bit of “kick” from the subs. The vocals will be getting pretty much constant attention from the FOH rig, of course. In the end, the contribution from the FOH PA is minimal…or at least kept under tight control.
Beyond the issue of raw volume, though, is the conundrum of how much an audio reproduction system (be it an FOH PA or a monitor rig) can add to a given acoustical event on stage. This is where “sounding like a band without the PA” becomes really critical.
Here’s why.
For most audio rigs that are even half-decent, gain-before-feedback is at least as critical, if not more, than total output power. That is, a loudspeaker might be physically capable of creating earth-shattering SPL, but the squeals and howls of feedback will prevent you from actually getting there. Either the overall differentiation between the stage volume and the PA volume is too great, or the differentiation between on-stage sources is too great.
This is a little abstract, so here’s an object example.
Every so often, I’ll run into a group that has a proportionality problem. They’re not too loud for the room by any means – they might be an acoustic duo, for instance. The issue is that one person is vigorously strumming a big-body guitar, using a pick. Another person is playing a different guitar, with a much smaller body.
…and they’re playing fingerstyle.
Delicately.
Hoo, boy.
Depending on the players, that big guitar might already be a LOT louder than the small guitar – and then, the player of the big guitar decides that they want a pretty healthy amount of monitor level. No problem for the big guitar, especially if the instrument is free of resonance problems and includes a decent pickup. The small guitar? Well – it doesn’t have a pickup installed, so we had to mic it. We were only able to get “so” close, and the player’s not making a whole lot of level anyway.
The chances are that feedback issues will prevent even the most competent monitor operator from making that fingerstyle guitar compete with the big boy.
It’s not the absolute volume that’s the problem. It’s the proportionality. The massive level differential between the two instruments just can’t be dealt with in a live situation. In the studio, where feedback is basically non-existent, it’s another story. Here, though, getting through the set will be a struggle.
As a generality, I would propose the following guidelines for the feasibility of what a small-venue audio system can add to an onstage source’s volume – especially when talking about monitors on deck:
The way to get around these issues is to fix them before you arrive at the venue. If somebody is getting positively drowned during rehearsals, it’s simply not a safe assumption that a PA system (even a professionally operated one) will fix the issue. If everybody is clearly audible in rehearsal, on the other hand, then your proportionalities are either right on the money or “plenty close enough.”
This may sound a bit preachy, but I want to assure you that there are big benefits to “sounding like a band” before a PA system is added to the equation. If you’ve done the hard work of being balanced without outside help, then you have a much better shot at sounding killer with PA and monitor rigs that are only minimally adequate – or operated by a minimally competent audio human. Even better, when you get to work with great gear and great techs, they’ll be able to put their maximum effort towards presenting a flat-out amazing sonic experience for your fans. They’ll be able to do this because they won’t have to make the compromises necessary to fix big imbalances amongst instruments, or between the instruments and the vocals.
Bottom line? Being at the right volume, both in terms of absolute levels and relative balance, is a huge part of creating a brilliant stage show.