Like so many folks involved in the live sound business, pMd Productions president Dave Kuhn got his start as a musician. "Back in high school [in La Puente, California, east of Los Angeles] I was in a bunch of garage bands. All my friends were pretty talented and got better at their instruments-and I did not," he laughs. "But I did have an affinity for our sparkly blue [Naugahyde] Kustom Tuck ‘N' Roll PA. So that's partly where I got the taste for live sound and for equipment."
Smooth Groove
More than three decades later, Kuhn is revered for being one of the best live mixers in the business, known for his sterling work with a long succession of top contemporary jazz and "smooth" jazz performers, ranging from Bob James, Lee Ritenour and Earl Klugh to Chris Botti, Fourplay and Dave Koz. For the past five years, too, Kuhn has been the driving force of the Cincinnati-based pMd Productions, which bills itself as "Production, Management and Design [hence the name] for Events and Tours; Tour Logistics and Accounting."
The company has built a healthy base of clients around Kuhn's expertise-and that of seasoned monitor mixer Melissa Britton and tour and event production manager Paul May-but has also grown to include other approved outside freelance mixers and tour personnel. In a "down" economy, pMd has managed to continually show growth, and part of that is a function of Kuhn's decision to rely on equipment rentals on a per-tour or per-event basis, rather than investing in stockpiles of gear of his own.
An Infinite Warehouse
"I realized I did not want to get sucked into the business end of the business," he says. "In other words, leases and always owing money and never being able to pay anything off and ending up with a warehouse full of stuff and becoming a salesman and a bookkeeper, too. I didn't want to do that. There are other guys who are better at that, so let them do it and then just go rent from them. Then, my ‘warehouse' is infinite."
Kuhn cut his teeth working with small bands and in clubs in the Sonoma County (northern California) town of Cotati during the late 1970s and early 1980s, a time when venues like the Inn of the Beginning and the Cotati Cabaret were featuring a nice blend of locals acts and also national groups gigging in the nearby San Francisco Bay area. "There were guys up there who were nice enough to teach me about signal flow and gain structure and crossovers and all that," Kuhn says. "I had good ‘teachers,' though of course most of what you learn comes from just doing it." He worked for a spell mixing for an 11-piece Latin-funk-horn band (variously known as Gitano, Foreign Affair and other names), and in the mid-1980s moved to Philadelphia to mix a popular local band called Jellyroll.
While in Philly, he met and befriended Marty Garcia of the successful regional sound company Crystal-Taylor Systems, and eventually went to work for them as a tech, then a monitor mixer. (Garcia, of course, is now famous for starting the pioneering ear monitor company, Future Sonics.)
"It was a great experience," Kuhn says. "I ended up touring with people like Miles Davis, Joan Jett, the Gregg Allman Band, doing legs of their national tours, and teching for [Philly] groups like The O'Jays and The Whispers. I learned so much during that period."
A tour with Joan Jett led Kuhn to becoming an independent engineer, and other assignments followed with the likes of Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam, the Pointer Sisters, Natalie Cole and a five-year stint (on and off) with rock/R&B eccentrics Was (Not Was). Curiously, that last job led to Kuhn's involvement with contemporary jazz: Don Was' manager was married to Bob James' manager, and when James went out on tour to support his Grand Piano Canyon album in Japan and then other markets, Kuhn got the call to mix the show. "I was a huge fan," he says. "I worked for Bob for 12 years; I haven't worked with him for five. But in that time he led me to Fourplay and to Lee Ritenour, Chris Botti and Dave Koz, so really, a lot of what I do today is because I worked with Bob."
"In the Same Room"
Did working with James and others affect his mixing particularly? "Well, with that style, it was, ‘Let's hear every instrument clearly; let's give every instrument its space. Once we do that, we'll polish it a little bit-a little reverb here and there.' But Bob is the one who taught me: ‘We want the band to all sound like they're in the same room. We don't want a 1.4 second reverb on the snare and a 2.5 second reverb on the horn; that doesn't suit my ear.' The other thing about Bob's audience, and a lot of those jazz audiences, is they're the people who were buying top grade hi-fis; that was their thing. It's a very discerning audience, so I had to try and give them a good, clean experience in the live realm, and I'm certain that made a better mixer."
Jazz artists still make up the bulk of work for pMd, which, besides tours and one-offs, also includes such events as guitar great Earl Klugh's annual weekend festival at the Broadmoor resort in Colorado (with a second "Weekend of Jazz" scheduled for this November in South Carolina) and jazz cruises on both coasts featuring Dave Koz as headliner. Unlike some larger regional SR concerns, Kuhn is content to rent from established companies large and small. Because he has a long relationship with Ralph Mastrangelo of Clair Nashville, for example, he'll often rent from that huge company on the East Coast, and his "good friend" Dave Shadoan of Sound Image in San Diego has helped him equip some western gigs. But in between, he often works with smaller regionals who, he says "are sometimes more willing to work within a client's budget" than the giants. For instance, on a forthcoming Koz cruise to Alaska, he's enlisting Carlson Audio Systems out of Seattle.
"In the end, though," Kuhn adds, "black boxes are black boxes; at a certain point gear is gear. It's the people who maintain it and take it out and set it up for you that make or break whether you have a great gig and whether you want to use somebody again, or not."
Relationship-Driven
Meanwhile, Kuhn continues to build pMd the way he grew his independent engineering business-through longstanding relationships and word-of-mouth recommendations from satisfied customers. As a self-admitted "people person," Kuhn wouldn't have it any other way. Even so, he's constantly challenging himself and his co-workers to stay on the cutting edge technologically. For instance, working with Koz at the Long Beach Jazz festival in early August, "We didn't carry a console and we didn't have a soundcheck; nothing. We had a simple line check and I had 43 inputs with Dave Koz and Shiela E. and Jonathan Butler and percussion, and the guys at Flag Sound Systems [Santa Ana, Calif.] were kind enough to take files I emailed to them and Melissa's monitor files and loaded the desk. We showed up when it was time to do our set change and bing we were ready to go. That was one time I was really happy we went digital," he laughs.
As a traveling mixer himself, Kuhn knows markets and gear well. "I've done a lot of PAs-du-jour, where we didn't get to pick the gear," he says with a chuckle. "So now I'm out there looking at each project: How many bands are we going to have? Do we need digital? Who are the engineers involved and what do they like and not like? Is it an analog guy? If so, I might suggest a Midas 3K, but I'll also ask him, ‘Do you know the [Soundcraft] VI6? Do you know the [Avid] Profile? What do you like?' And then we'll outsource it-we'll find somebody who's got it. ‘Do you need a bus? A mixer? How big is your show? Are you going to be outdoors? Do you need a stage, generators?' Then we come together and talk about it amongst us and say, ‘Okay, we're in this town-who's local that's got the stuff we need? What's our budget? Let's make it happen for these people!'"