20/20 Hindsight

I take pride in my engineering skills, and after many years of honing my craft, I think that I have become adequately competent at my trade. I feel very confident in my mastery of the basics of live audio engineering and that I have an artistic and musical approach to the job. I know my strengths and my weaknesses and try to use this knowledge to my advantage when mixing a concert or event. I feel that I put a lot of thought and effort into what I do as an engineer, and I approach each band or event in a way that is most suitable to the situation. While the mechanics of sound (i.e. speaker placement, gain structure, power requirements, etc.) are fairly consistent, it is the unknown variables that truly test our mettle when we find ourselves on the battlefield of live sound. Based upon experience, we all bring our wisdom, knowledge and a personal bag of tricks to each gig. From there, we stand ready to improvise around the challenges that will be presented. Our attitudes and preconceived notions of what sounds good is also a factor in this equation. While we may be experienced, every fresh situation provides an engineer with an opportunity to learn something new.

Like everyone else, I learn as much from my successes as I do from my mistakes. The only difference is that after a gig that everyone raves about, I usually do not spend much time thinking about what I did right. I know that I went in and did my job, and despite the challenges presented to me, everything worked the way it was intended. It is the forgettable gigs that I just can't seem to let go.

Even if my next 10 shows are stellar audio performances, the one less-than-brilliant show stays with me as I ruminate on how it could have been different. Wringing my hands, I go over it in my mind step-by-step, frequency-by-frequency, channel-by-channel. What would I do differently the next time knowing what I know now about the room, the gear and the band? I burn incense and candles, I pray, I lose sleep and my appetite and I watch motivational tapes. Lastly, I read from cover to cover my Yamaha audio guide book. Again.

In short, I obsess over my lack of judgment, my stupidity and my failure at reaching perfection. I do this until my hair turns gray and I am but a shell of the man I used to be. I become morose and inconsolable, and feel that I am the unwitting hero of an Edgar Allen Poe novella. Angles become skewed, and my fragile reality is challenged by a dark, ubiquitous force that waits patiently in the fathoms of some unmentionable pit to devour my spirit and consume my soul.

But I am getting ahead of myself.

It all began when I walked into the venue and met the band for the first time. They informed me that they needed six mixes on stage plus two mixes of mono ears. I was to mix Front of House and monitors from the Soundcraft MH-3 console 75 feet back from the stage at the other end of the club. All seemed fine as we started to set the stage. The FOH rig was two EAW KF650s over two EAW SB250s per side with the ceiling only eight feet high. On stage were three EAW LA215 wedges, four EAW LA212s and one EAW LA325 monitor, all passive wedges. All things considered, it was a fairly decent club rig.

I would have preferred active wedges and a higher ceiling, but I've overcome larger obstacles in the past. Despite the cramped quarters (the stage was only about 18×20 between the stacks), I went to work fully confident in my ability to control the situation. The house engineer was very helpful and knowledgeable, and we had everything up and ready to go in about an hour and a half.

The band was running four backing tracks and a click track from the stage, and everyone was fairly particular regarding their monitor mixes. Considering my setup, I decided to run my input gain low because I had six open vocal mics on stage. I opted to push the output of each mix and individual sends as this would enable me to control any errant frequencies, which might start to take off under the low ceiling. I also chose to run my mixes post fader because I was not doing a fader mix and had set all faders to unity. Then I rang out the system and the monitors, and everything was sounding right with the high-mid and low-mid Crown amplifiers notched back about three clicks each. I thought about splitting the lead vocal channel so that I could separate the FOH vocal from the monitors, but upon hearing the band, it seemed as though there was no need to do so. The vocals were cutting through and staying on top of a full-sounding band.

Right from downbeat, I knew there was a problem. The lead singer's vocal came across as choked, and though it wasn't buried, it wasn't as "in your face" as it should have been. Because I had changed nothing since soundcheck, I immediately turned to my dbx 160 compressor that I had inserted on her channel. I was barely hitting it, but I opened it fully and turned the output up a notch to no avail. I listened on my headphones and her vocals, though a bit wispy, were right there in the mix where they belonged. At that point, I knew the problem had to be after the console.

I slowly turned up the high-mid amp. Though it helped a bit, it did not solve the problem. My house equalizer was notched only slightly at the usual places–2.5k, 6.3k, 160hz and a bit at 3.15hz–but nothing drastic. The house engineer assured me that there wasn't a limiter across the system, but I wouldn't have hit it anyway because of my gain structure. I tried to lower the band in the house, and while it helped a little bit, it began to compromise the integrity of the mix. I switched all the lead singer's monitor sends to pre-fader and boosted the fader on her channel, but by that time, the gig was over. It was just a six-song showcase.

It was an OK show, but not great. The manager did tell me that the singer admitted to choking on nerves and singing off mic, but that did not help soothe my rustled feathers. Even though I am fully aware of the phrase "Crap in, crap out," it was my job as the soundman to make the band sound great, and I had failed. If I were to do it over again, I would set my gain structure differently, but this was a one-off and there were no second chances. Unlike a tour where I could adjust after a gig or two, this show was done, finished, kaput! The lights were out and the P.A. was silent, leaving me to obsess about my shortcomings. Though I have moved on with my audio life, I still wonder what went wrong, what did I miss, what hidden horror had foiled me in my efforts?

Be that word our sign of parting, bird or fiend!" I shrieked upstarting-

– "The Raven" by Edgar Allan Poe