Dave Rat is sipping on a red wine while absent-mindedly holding a cigarette more like a prop than an outright addiction. He's wearing a rumpled pair of shorts emblazoned with the Union Jack that are tailored more with Benny Hill in mind than the Tour de France. All in all, it could be a relaxing evening almost anywhere. That is, except for the fact that at the moment he happens to be in the center of an FOH and lighting fort in the middle of the Earl's Court venue in London, surrounded by 10,000 screaming fans halfway through a set by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, on the first and ostensibly most nerve-wracking night of a four-show stand. He turns to a visitor and winks, saying in a voice practiced at cutting through the crowd noise without seeming to strain, "I try very had to find ways not to have to really exert myself at a show." Dave Rat's tranquility is, of course, an illusion. He has been the band's FOH mixer for 16 years, and his Santa Barbara-based SR rental and service company, Rat Sound, has had them as clients for two decades, one of a host of artists, including Pearl Jam, Black Flag and Sonic Youth, that Dave Rat and/or Rat Sound has been there for as that increasingly rare species: the independent owner-operator sound provider working in a business landscape increasingly dominated by a handful of large corporations. Rat makes the mixing seem effortless, like flying a well-trimmed aircraft. But as any veteran pilot or live sound mixer can tell you, the effort required at crunch time is directly disproportional to how much work goes into the preparation. In Rat's case, that's plenty.
Dave Rat says he never wanted to be a soud engineer. He just wanted to satisfy a youthful fascination with wires and flashing diodes. He managed to get some of that out of his system, in the early 1980s, when he took a short-lived job at Hughes Aircraft where he worked testing the robustness of various missile components, while still mixing sound for punk bands around the Los Angeles area. By 1983, Rat Sound had worked its way up to a gig at a sideshow during the U.S. Festival in San Bernadino, Calif. using the company's entire system at the time: four single-18 cabinets, eight 2×12 enclosures and four horns.
Two, Two, Two PAs In One
That's a far cry from the complex system he designed and cobbled together for this year's Chili Peppers' tour. There are two main line arrays on either side of the stage. The simplified assignment of output to each is, from left to right: guitar and bass, kick and vocal, kick and vocal, guitar and bass. If the venue calls for it, there are two wraps on either wing of the stage that split the outputs similarly.
The concept for the PA came to Rat after a conversation with the band's management, who told him and the rest of the production designers that they wanted a unique and memorable experience for the tour. The video projections can place the band at any point in the picture, literally moving them around on stage.
"I thought to myself, what could the sound do to match that?" Rat recalls. "I had just been to a Green Day show at the Home Depot Center and the lights were all over the place, the video was all over the place, but I remember thinking that the sound was always blasting from the same spot. Concert sound in general tends to be very uni-dimensional, and as the lighting and the video get more complex and movable, it just makes the audio seem that much more rooted. Sound is still stuck in that stereo paradigm while everything else has evolved."
Rat toyed with the idea of moving speakers that would mimic the location of the band members on stage. One idea was to have smaller speakers suspended above the stage for an acoustic number that would descend to join the rest of the rig for a louder song. It would be a logistical and operational nightmare –just the sort of challenge he likes. But the ultimate solution was no less innovative and iconoclastic: dual PA systems.
"Dave does things his own way, always has," comments Nick Brisbois, the Rat Sound system tech. A disdain for convention– and a sharp sense of humor– is evident on his mix set up. Where others would list instrumentation, he has the faders grouped by whimsical yet logical terminology such as "Twisty things," "Glowey things" and "Noisey things."
"The first thing they'll tell you is never to put two line arrays side by side; multiple sound sources in close proximity reproducing the same signal creates comb filtering," he explains. "But I've got very different things going into each stack on either side. It's actually two separate [V-DOSC] line array systems operating together and linked via a non-standard matrixing system on the Heritage 2000] console. The distance between the clusters –it started at eight feet but has been cut to around six feet, with horizontal bars linking them to fight natural torquing–"will allow me to alter the acoustic source of any instrument or vocal by sliding it from one system to the other.
"The idea that evolved was based on knowledge I acquired designing the MicroWedge monitors. I had done quite a bit of research, and was able to recreate and prove that speakers have reduced clarity as you increase the complexity of the signal sent to them. It's fairly easy to demonstrate: just listen to a vocal mic through two speakers at a mid to high volume and then add in a 50Hz tone at high volume. It blurs the vocals. Now use two speakers with the vocal in one and the tone in the other and the vocal will stay clear. There are several issues, but I believe the main one has to do with the speaker efficiency while the voice coil is centered in the gap. The speaker is less efficient when the voice coil is at its extremes; the 50-Hz tone reduces the time that the voice coil is centered. Some monitor engineers run separate instrument and vocal wedges for this reason. I wondered, what if I applied that setup on a grand scale? Two PAs, and it works wonderfully."
The system's subwoofer array, lined up three deep, is equally innovative. The resulting "sub cannon" acts like a trio of shotguns triggered dominos style, with delays of 3ms and 6 ms between them coordinated by the XTA DP-428 digital system controller that also manages and processes all the other speakers in the system.
A Changing Business
It's not surprising that Dave Rat likes to be different. He's a throwback to (but certainly no relic of ) the days when the mixer and the system were pretty much cut from the same cloth. "When I started in this business 20 years ago, most of the major touring rigs were homemade," he says. "Nothing existed from major manufacturers that was worth anything. Now, we're one of the few companies left that can do a major world tour with a homemade system."
However, he acknowledges that there is handwriting on the wall. "The quality of the manufactured systems has been increasing, to the point where a lot of it is very, very good," he says. While Rat Sound will continue to develop new systems, its president says it will work increasingly in a consulting relationship with some of those manufacturers, such as the venture in which Radian Audio manufacturers his MicroWedge monitor design. "I expect to be doing more of that when this tour ends," he says, though he declined to specify which other manufacturers he may work with.
Rat's famously opinionated pronouncements have tempered with time. "I used to be very possessive, in the sense that I felt that the [PA] system represented me," he says. "I would take comments on the system personally. But over time I've come to realize that PAs are like cars–there never will be a perfect one for all applications. A Ford or a Ferrari are just different tools for different jobs. Fifteen years ago people would say that a system is just a bunch of boxes and I would take offense at that. Now I realize they were right. What you have to also realize, then, though, is that it's the people using those boxes that make all the difference."
He's not a huge fan of digital consoles; he feels that the multiple page overlays that characterize those desks impede the flow of a live mix, particularly his style of mixing. (See sidebar: Mixing In The Dark.) "I'm not a big fan of the latest-thing craze," he says. "If Ramsa still made mixing consoles that's what I'd be using."
But there is newer equipment he swears by, such as the XTA DP series controllers. "I'm cautious by nature–I used to do shock and drop tests on missiles," he says dryly. "I still apply that mentality when I test out gear. I took a whole bunch of controllers home once and did a lengthy shoot-out between them. The XTA DP-428 won that hands down, followed closely by the DP-226. So we've standardized our systems now around the DP series controllers."
Meanwhile, Rat amuses himself on tour by tweaking the system and regularly experimenting with a few "don't try this at home" low-tech exercises. For instance, during the run-up to the world tour, he brought a Midas Sienna mixer to mix a show at the Irvine Meadows venue, and an even smaller Midas Verona for the European tour promo show. "I did it to prove that it's not the gear, it's the guy," he says. "There is a correlation between engineers who demand the most amount of equipment and who then have less-than-optimum shows," he states. "It's not necessary to have a ton of gear to do a rock show." He's proud that the Chili Peppers' show has all of 25 outputs from the stage. "And I could get away with just 18 of them if I had to," he adds.
Dave Rat wonders if the age of the entrepreneurial sound company owner/mixer is nearing an end. "It's not a very profitable business, and it's getting less so," he says. On the other hand, though, he's happy to see more emphasis being placed on live music in general as the music industry transforms itself in the digital era. "We're going to see live and recorded music merge in a way we never have before," he believes. "We travel with a 32-track Pro Tools system and we can record, mix and release out of two road cases, and we've done it. Expect to see a lot of that going on from now on."
