It's really wonderful how the quality of sound reinforcement gear has progressed over the past few years. Last week, I mixed a show at the House of Blues in Atlantic City where the installed system is based around a JBL VerTec rig with enough horsepower to blow-dry your sister's hair, a 56-input Yamaha PM5000 console and some serious processing at FOH, a Midas monitor desk and Clair Brothers stage wedges. The house crew was great, both in terms of their technical ability and their hospitality. The mic locker at HOB has a lot of depth: In addition to the typical suspects, there are other less-common-but-equally-useful mics like beyerdynamic M88s, Shure KSM32s and KSM44s–the last of which brought up an interesting topic of conversation. To refresh your memory, the KSM32 and KSM44 are high-quality, large-diaphragm condenser microphones with side-address capsules. The key element of that last phrase is side address–meaning that the .front. of the directional pattern (0º on-axis) is actually side of the microphone. As we placed these mics on stands, some of the guys were trying to pull a joke on a stagehand by telling him that the top was the front. He knew better, which is more than I can say for about eight engineers I worked with last summer.
My first encounter with microphone incompetence came when a systems engineer placed a pair of AKG C414s overhead on a drum kit for me. From my mix position 75 feet away in the screaming Montana sun, it appeared the 414s were placed roughly where I'd have put them myself: about 6 feet high, 5 feet apart, facing and angled slightly inward towards the cymbals. When I brought up these mics on the desk, I couldn't believe how dull they sounded. I wasn't familiar with these particular 414s, the desk or the rest of the system, so I went along with it, intending to check the position on stage after I ran down the drum channels.
Once all of the drum channels were tested, I went up to the stage to adjust the 414s. Lo and behold, they were set to cardioid, with the front of the cardioid pattern facing the sky. The rejection point of the cardioid pattern was facing the cymbals. No wonder they sounded dull–almost as dull as that systems engineer. I laughed to myself as I turned and rotated them so that the fronts of the mics faced the cymbals.
Initially, I thought this was a rare error or perhaps due to an inexperienced engineer. Over the next few weeks, my drum tech Eric "GMan" Gormley and I laughed as we watched engineer after engineer misplace 414s, Shure KSM27/32/44s and Audio-Technica AT4050s over the drum kit. The most common mistake was that the mics were upside down (0º on axis facing the sky), closely followed by placement such that the top of the mic was facing the cymbals–leaving the pickup pattern facing the audience or the side-fills–not my favorite placement for overhead mics.
These are not cheap mics: Street prices range from $300 up to $1,000 each, yet people don't know how to use them. How many engineers listened to these mics and thought, "These mics suck," simply because they were not placed correctly? The point is that yes, we have great tools with which to do our job, and as they become more sophisticated, so must we. A little studying may be in order, or perhaps a visit back to your notes from Audio 101.
There are other recurring gear abuse nightmares that haunt me every time I fall asleep on a plane. Some of them go like this:
• I watch an engineer assign channels to VCA faders. He assigns each input channel to two VCAs because he wants the drums in stereo. Hello…a VCA is not an audio path! It's a control path and you don't need two VCAs to route audio channels in stereo.
• Direct boxes are not for microphones. A direct box takes an instrument level signal, drops it down to microphone level and balances it so that you can connect that signal into a microphone input.
• All sends are not created equally. Please remember that when a send is set prefader, and you pull the fader down, the signal at the send remains the same. I'm sure that Mark Amundson has told you this a hundred times. If you're sending a vocal delay pre-fader and you make the vocal fader lower, the delay does NOT also get lower. It stays at the same level, throwing it out of proportion and making the delay sound too loud.
• When using a delay or reverb as a 'side chain' effect–i.e., you use an aux send to get signal in, and an effect return to get the effect back into the desk–set the mix control to 100% wet. There's no need for a reverb to return more dry signal back into the mix. You already have a fader for making the dry signal louder, and you'll get an annoying flange on the dry sound due to the processing delay of most digital effect units.
• Microphones don't have phantom power, but some of them require phantom power. If your locker includes a pair of $700 multi-pattern mics, you should know if they need phantom power to operate. It's gear abuse, I tell you, and it's immoral.
Yes, our tools are getting better and better every day. Make sure you know how to use them.
In addition to being the Front of House engineer and tour manager for Blue Öyster Cult, Steve "Woody" La Cerra teaches aspiring audio minds at Mercy College in White Plains, N.Y. He can be reached via e-mail at Woody@fohonline.com.
