Driving can be a dangerous thing. Not only for the obvious "the guy in the other car may be drunk, or an idiot, or both" reasons, but because long drives can lead to thinking–in my case, a very dangerous thing.
In this case, I was headed across Highway 166 from the central coast of California (specifically Pismo Beach) where I had done a weekend as a guitar sub for an '80s tribute act, headed for Bakersfield and then Highway 58 to Barstow and up the 15 home to Las Vegas. I was home for 36 hours before heading south again to the Timeless Communications headquarters for production on the issue you are reading now. This whole deep thought thing (or as deep as it gets for me) started with a conversation I had with the leader of '80z Flashback (www.80zflashback.com) about the difficulty he has had interfacing with house sound systems and techs. His band, like most acts of their ilk, started with MIDI sequences and soon discovered that sequencers tend to crash at inopportune times, so they switched out to prerecorded tracks derived from the sequences. Jerry has actually put all of those tracks on DVD in 5.1, so he gets two stereo backing tracks–one with pre-mixed keys and the other with 'aux" stuff like backing vox–plus a separate track for synth bass and a click track for the drummer. Back when it was all MIDI, the sequencer would change patches on the vocal effects unit (sometimes two or three times in a single song), but since going to tracks, that duty has fallen to him along with singing and playing live keys.
Because he is picky about those vocal FX as he is about his tracks, he insists on making the changes himself and has a policy–on those gigs where he is not providing the P.A.–of giving the house sound guy a premixed left and right signal, counting on the house system and tech merely to reinforce what he normally does. It has not gone very well–noise, problems interfacing systems, the usual crap–and he asked me why and what to do about it. I know the answer, but also know he would not want to hear it from me, so I called another production guy who deals often with bands like this and asked him the same questions. The answers, which Jerry really did not want to hear, came down to what you would expect. Handing a premixed signal, especially one coming from largely MI-grade gear, to a house engineer and expecting it to sound good in the larger system is a recipe for problems. Our production friend said that when confronted with a similar situation, he had a policy of telling the band to give him full control over all system elements or go rent a system somewhere else. His bottom line was that the artist had to have faith in and trust the sound guy.
For artists on the middle and lower ends of the entertainment food chain, this can be a very hard thing to do. Sometimes, you get someone real good who makes life easy and the act sound great, but too often, you get someone who either doesn't know or doesn't care, and it shows in the overall sound. I assume that if you are taking the time to read a magazine like FOH, you are not part of the don't-know-don't-care contingent, but we all know that there are plenty of them out there.
I told him that the bottom line is that he needed to have a sound guy he could trust who knew the band and the material, and who could do those larger gigs with them. Even better, I said to come to terms with the fact that we ain't kids anymore–playing, singing and mixing mains and monitors from the stage is just too damn much work–and that he needed to start thinking of the band as a five-piece, not a four, and let the sound guy deal with setting up and running the system at all shows while he concentrated on the performance part. On some of the gigs they do, that is impossible just due to space constraints, but there are other problems, such as, where do you find this person to trust?
That switched to how do you know WHO to trust, as I reflected on stories I had heard in previous days about a production company getting totally dicked over by a nationally-known FOH guy who should know where the line lies between acceptable tough business practices and sleaze, but who chose to step over it because he thought he could get away with it. Or the local guy who hired some help for a show at a low-but-agreed- upon price, and then found himself as the one hired by the same guy a few gigs later, and at the end of the night, getting less than had been agreed upon because the kid figured that his labor on the first gig was worth more than he got paid, so he was deducting the difference from what was owed for the current gig.
And we are asking the artists to trust us as sound providers? I am starting to really understand Jerry's reluctance to let anyone else man the console.
