Jeffrey "Raz" Rasmussen has heard all the Doobie Brothers records a million times in the dozen years he's been FOH mixer for Michael McDonald, the band's leading crooner. But he doesn't need them to recreate the dense and exuberantly sophisticated sound of those records when McDonald plays in concert.
"If you miss even a little trick, people will come up and tell you about it," says Raz. "Those records are everywhere–on the radio, in elevators. The fans know exactly how they sound. And that's what you have to do on stage–get those sounds and those moves down." Raz has a few tricks to do exactly that– get the Doobies' thick, percussion-laden sound across supporting McDonald's unique vocals. The huge snare sounds of the 1980s, when the Doobies dominated radio, were the work of multiple reverbs and triggered gates. Raz approximates the sound using the onboard reverb on the Yamaha PM-5DRH FOH console he uses on the tour. "I use a lot of a very short reverb setting, putting it on heavy on the snare," which is miked top and bottom with Shure SM-58s, he says. "It makes the drum sound very fat and gives it a gated-reverb sound effect."
Interestingly, McDonald's drums on the tour are tuned by a drum tech who was highly in demand in Los Angeles studios. Matt Luneau came to McDonald's attention when he tuned the recording kit for the vocalist's duet tracks with Kenny Loggins on the Live at Redwoods LP. Augmenting that, Raz uses a studio miking technique for the drum overheads, setting up a pair of Shure KSM-32s equidistant from the kit and each other,
Studio background vocals are routinely doubled and tripled, and the Doobies were no exception. Raz uses an Eventide H-3000's "rich chorus" patch. "It really makes them sound like those records," he says. (And if you're curious, that famous Fender Rhodes "suitcase" sound comes from a Yamaha Motif ES-8 sampling keyboard.)
"How Do You MicA Dining Room Table?" Getting the effect of the record across live is more important now then ever: music on demand and the vastly increased ubiquitousness of music in general means people know the way things sound, knowledge reinforced subliminally in elevators daily. And even the elevators sound better–digital has raised music fans' expectations of what music should sound like across the board.
The eclectic nature of Beck's music shouldn't be taken to suggest that the mayhem that creates it is without control, either in the studio or on stage. "Beck never came right out and said he wants to recreate the records on stage, but that's what I took it on to do and I'm still here, so that tells me that I'm on the right track," says Sean "Scully" Sullivan, who has mixed Beck since January 2005. Sullivan got an idea of what was to come at a rehearsal where Beck was auditioning a guitarist for a tour. "The first thing Beck had him do was play drums," he recalls.
Beck's records have only gotten more complex, which compelled Sullivan to switch to a Digidesign VENUE console this year to handle the almost 90 scenes and the 75 reverb and DSP presets he needs to get through a show. He's using plug-ins, specifically Reverb One, ReviBe, and D-Verb from the VENUE's production pack, and the Eventide Anthology bundle, to generate them. "The new album has some very intense and lush processing on it," he explains. "I used to be able to handle it with outboard effects but it was getting out of hand. Like in the studio, it's a matter of managing the sounds, and this console can do that."
When Sullivan started with Beck, he sat and listened to all of the artist's album work, looking to identify the key elements of the studios records and figure out how to translate them live. He even asked Beck's management for access to some of Beck's studio engineers, or at least to get him some of the presets they used, but like many requests that go down bureaucratic channels, it got a detour into the Twilight Zone. "So I just started listening to the records and dialing stuff in," he says.
There was a lot to dial. Beck brings most of the instruments he uses in the studio on the road, and then some, including an Ikea dining room table with place settings and wine glasses, all of which are "played" during the set. "I sent a list of inputs to Clair Brothers (Beck's touring with an I-3 line array system) with the dining room table on it and lot of question marks where the microphones should be," he says. "How do you mic a dining room table?" (Answer: Shure Beta-91s and some contact mics taped to the stemware.)
All of this was worked out in rehearsals, which lasted six weeks for two to three weeks' worth of shows, reminiscent of the kinds of extended preproduction that precedes major recording sessions. Sullivan doesn't disagree. "We spent the rehearsals in the kind of mode you would when getting sounds in the studio," he says. "What you learn about Beck records is that they're made up of sounds that might not stand alone all that well– he plays a Sears Silvertone guitar through a Silvertone amp that most guitarists think sounds pretty bad by itself–but which make an amazing sound when you put them together. Beck's M.O. is to make sounds with things that you don't expect to make sounds with, or at least to make good sounds with. It's the same on stage as it is in the studio."
One common Beck trick is the overdriven vocal. Sullivan had tried that a few times using a stomp box but got more feedback than vibe. The solution turned out to be using a combination of the Line 6 Amp Farm and Tech 21 SansAmp plug-ins, with the background vocals doused with a chorus and Micro-Shift effects from the Eventide H-3000 plug-in, all inserted into channels and adjusted with the processors' mix controls. This lets the vocals ride above the music, as it does on the records, says Sullivan.
The mixes are a combination of studiolike precision and live-concert unpredictability. "The sounds are source-driven; they come from the stage," says Sullivan. "I'm not optimizing any one instrument but rather the whole mix, carving out spaces for each instrument using EQ and dynamics. Having the Clair line array helps–it has 140 degrees of horizontal coverage, so I can pan like a record and not have half the audience miss half the sound.
"It's like being the secretary in a doctor's office," he concludes. "You're not doing the surgery but you do have to organize it."
Ambient Drums Robert Scovill has mixed live sound for artists including Tom Petty, Prince, Def Lepard and Rush, as well as having spent plenty of time in recording studios. A true student of drum sounds, he has become proficient with an ambient drum-miking technique that many credit to U.K. recording engineer Andy Johns (Led Zeppelin, KISS). The technique mandates that the recording of the kit is done with no close-in microphones.
"The technique centers around three Neumann U67s and a Sennheiser 421," Scovill explains. "I'm not sure this is how Andy did it, but when I have employed it in the studio I try to get one mic in front of the kit on plane with the bass drum and the other two 67s overhead, but try to get them all as close as possible to the same distance from the snare drum, which is easier said than done depending on the kit. The 421 just kind of hangs out on the floor somewhere around the snare drum. Once done a judicious amount of compression is used to glue the whole thing together. I have used this technique in the studio with great success, and it's very powerful when it's all working."
When Scovill went out with Matchbox Twenty as their FOH mixer, drummer Paul Ducette asked him to recreate this sound effect for the song "You Won't Be Mine." The song has a very ambient drum recording on it from (the late, great) Bearsville Studios, "which has a killer sounding drum room by the way," says Scovill. "Given that I was not really willing to take a set of rare and coveted U67s on the road, I decided to give it a try with three Stephen Paul-modified U87s, in which solid state U87i's are converted to tube circuitry. I had previous recording experience with them and noted that they carried a number of the characteristics of the U67s.
"After a fair amount of trial and error I was positively amazed how well it worked. A couple of things were really working in my favor to accomplish this, though. First, a completely separate drum kit was used for the song, which rolled out during a set change. This allowed Paul's drum tech, Tony Adams, to really refine the tuning of the kit to help the whole process. Secondly, given that all the guys in the band were using PMs, I did not really have to worry about back line spill into the ambient drum microphones, so I was able to be pretty aggressive with my compression. In the end, I was amazed at how well it all worked and it fit beautifully in the song. Hard work, but it made for a great moment of contrast in the set. Not for the faint-hearted, though!"
There will always be a substantial divide between music played live and done in recording studios. The stage is where musicians can stretch the notions they developed in the studios and see what else they might become. But as every artist with a hit has learned, fans want those hits to be true to what they hear in their heads. When the artist's music is complex, creating fidelity to the studio version is a challenge. But as these mixers have learned, it can be done.
