Ryan Greene has been spending the past 15 years or so working on his studio tan, helping an assortment of punk rock bands such as NOFX, Lagwagon, No Use for a Name, and Me First and the Gimme Gimmes record their best offerings.
Before that run of studio work, Greene learned about audio by standing in front of bands at the front of house position with a mixing board under his hands. His first FOH gigs came in Los Angeles during the ‘80s, and he worked with such bands as Poison and Warrant, as well as a handful of local bands at venues like The Troubadour, The Roxy and The Whisky.
A couple of years ago, Greene moved to Scottsdale, Ariz., and opened Crush Recording. There, he continued to work with dozens of rock bands willing to travel to his studio. After one session, a band that he worked with was about to hit the stage and was looking for someone to mix a live show. Greene jumped at the chance.
FOH: So, what brought you back to FOH?
Ryan Greene: Yeah, it was the excitement of doing it. It’s great to sit in a studio for 15 years and get used to this end of it, but there is some-thing exciting about doing front of house that I missed. I did it and got rave reviews, so I figured I’d keep on doing it.
It wasn’t the money?
(Laughs) No, I don’t even charge them. I don’t charge any of the bands that I do in town. I just go out to do it because it’s fun, and it gets me out of the studio. There’s something to be said about walking into a club and doing it festival style with no sound check. I have a whole system that I use, so I don’t need the whole band to play together. As I’m getting my kick drum sound and the snare drum sound, I watch my meters. I know I need the drums to hit at a certain level, my bass guitar should be at another level and then as the band starts to play, it’s balanced right out of the gate. It’s a weird thing, but it works.
What were some of the lessons you learned early in your FOH career?
Start off as quiet as possible. I was taught to use the sound system as reinforcement to what’s coming off the stage. So, let’s say I was getting a kick drum sound, and as soon as I was able to feel and hear it through the front of house, that would be as loud as I would go. Ob-viously, when you start getting into the show, and people start filling the room, you could start turning up the volume a little bit, but at sound check, I would always keep things as low as possible. That’s why my mixes ended up sounding more like a record.
You were doing FOH gigs and working in a studio when you started out. How did your FOH work influence your studio work?
Just knowing frequencies and what things should sound like were probably the most beneficial parts of doing live sound. I learned fre-quencies because I didn’t have a choice. I had to know what frequency did what, because if something fed back during a show, I had to know where to go to fix it. I didn’t have a whole lot of time to guess, so if I got in the studio and heard something that wasn’t pleasing to the ear, I didn’t have to fish for it; I knew right where to go to fix it.
There’s also that sense of urgency during FOH gigs when a band is coming out on stage, and you have to be ready.
(Laughs) Yeah, you are doing it for the moment. That’s the whole thing about live. Whatever happens, it happens, and you have to go for it. To this day, when I do front of house, I’ll get a little nervous. I don’t even know how bands do it, getting in front of thousands of people and rock. I’m behind the board, and it’s like I get little butterflies, thinking, “Oh, my God, I hope this sounds great.” I have about 30 sec-onds to get my mix exactly where it should be, because people aren’t paying money to hear a bad-sounding band.
When you started to record bands in the studio, did you have an ear for how it would sound live?
Oh, absolutely. That’s the best thing about it. If I bring out delays and reverbs, I know exactly where to add the effects. I know the tempos of the songs, so I already have my delay times predetermined. When it’s a ballad, I go to my ballad setting on the delays and re-verbs and have that all set. I try to duplicate what we did on the record, which is what I just did for Authority Zero when they played out here at the Marquee Theatre. I knew every song that they did, so getting the reverbs and delays exactly like we had it on the record was a piece of cake. I remember back in the day, going into band rehearsals, and a lot of bands didn’t play with click tracks back then, so I would have a stop watch and I would time out the songs to get a rough idea. They would be playing between 120 and 124 beats per min-ute, so I’d set my delay times right in between, like at 122 or 123. At least that way I had an idea about every song, where the tempos are, where to set my delay time, where to set my predelay echoes and reverbs. Again, they come out of the gate. and it already sounds like the record.
Do you bring anything from the studio into the clubs?
Yeah, if I’m doing the headlining band, then I’ll bring out my own gates, just so I have them set and nobody messes with them. My fa-vorite unit for live gigs is a Yamaha Rev 7. I won’t go to a show without it. I have my drum verbs all loaded in there. I’ve had this unit for 15 years now, and it has all my drum rooms and gated rooms for ballads. Also, for the punk rock style, I have special gated verbs that I’ve altered. So, I have all of my settings inside this box, and it makes it really easy. A lot of times for local shows, I don’t think a lot of people pay attention to those details, and I think that’s what I’m used to — where everything is very detailed oriented. Most clubs nor-mally end up having some good delays, so I don’t have to pull those in. I might not use my drum reverbs on the drums, but more for rein-forcing the sound a little bit, depending on how tight I have the reverb time, how much predelay I have or how much I’ve adjusted the early reflections. You may not hear the reverb, but it’s there. The bigger the better.
Do you bring out microphones?
I will typically use what the club has, just to make it easier. The only thing I will do is use a Sennheiser 441 on a guitar and mix that in with a Shure SM57. If they have a 409, then I would obviously love to use that as well, but to me if I have a 441 mixed with something else, it works perfect for me. Guitars for me are one of the hardest things to get right in a live mix. While I’m doing records, the bottom end is always the toughest thing to nail, but live guitars are hard. Guitar players play with way too much gain, and when you bring that up through the P.A., which is already super bright, it sounds like a razor. So, anything I can do to trim that down a little bit.
Is there a Ryan Greene live sound and a Ryan Greene studio sound?
That’s interesting. If I do a metal band, they are going to sound like a metal band. I’ll run volumes differently. If I’m mixing a pop band, I wouldn’t mix as loud as if I would mix a metal band. That part of it is going to be different. The things that people consistently ask about my live mixes are how I get the drums to sound like they were in the studio, and how I get it to sound crystal clear. There’s never a time that I mix front of house that it’s not a super clear sound. So, bringing in the Ryan Greene sound? I just do what I do. I think everybody has a style in the way that they do things, and I think that I have one as well.
