Asked to sum up the role of FOH mixer at the Grammy Awards, Mike Abbott, the long-time audio coordinator for the show, characteristically first quantifies it, then wraps it in a neat aphorism. “Twenty-four bands, 24 guest mixers, 24 managers, 24 agents — you have to be the Henry Kissinger of pro audio,” he says. Ron Reaves, who mixed his seventh Grammy Awards show in February, has the innately calm demeanor necessary to let a disparate group of musicians and their entourages feel sufficiently acknowledged even as he makes sure that whatever is coming off the stage works for the room, the first few rows of which are occupied by some of the best ears in the world. This year’s performance benefits from having virtually every component of the PA system almost the same as the previous Grammy show, from the twin Yamaha PM1D FOH and production consoles Reaves and FOH production mixer Mike Stewart use to the PA cabinets supplied by ATK.
What’s hardly ever the same year to year, though, is the amount of music. The 2009 Grammy Awards has 22 acts performing 25 percent more music than the year before.
FOH caught up with Reaves shortly before the Feb. 8 event. Here’s what he had to say:
FOH: How many inputs does this make for?
Ron Reaves: My PM1D is loaded up with a few more input/output buckets than Mike’s. I’m landing about 176 channels.
FOH: And that’s all music.
Ron: Yeah, because we’ve got the A stage, the B stage, the C stage kind of, that little dish out front.
FOH: And how do you split the console and everything else between shows? I mean, what happens when one act finishes and the next act has to go on?
Ron: Monitors are discrete, so there’s a monitor mix position for A, there’s a monitor mix position for B, and my console is the only console that touches everything. So what happens is, I’ll mix a band, and when that band finishes, the next stage, whichever it happens to be, will start their line check. I stand up, say goodbye to the guest mixer that I just dealt with, say hello to the guy who’s coming in. While that’s happening [FOH technician] Fletch does the line check with the guys on headsets, tapping through every line, making sure we’ve all got them. Then he’ll turn around and give me a thumbs up, tell me we’re all good, and then I sit back down and we count back in and off we go.
FOH: Are “guest mixers” actually mixing, or are they consulting?
Ron: They’re consulting. We tell them they’re “producers” on this.
FOH: And do they ask how many points they get?
Ron: Hah! Now, it’s more hands-on up in monitor world because it can be, but if we stopped out front to let every individual guy do his thing we’d be here for a week.
FOH: What about during rehearsals here in the Staples Center? Are they consulting?
Ron: They make suggestions. Some of them, like Joe O’Hurley with U2, he always brings great notes and we need this delay times and this and that, it’s this and it’s that, they’ll make their comments and it’s kind of a consensus between what they say and what Leslie Ann Jones [supervisor of live audio/FOH for the Recording Academy] says, and what [award show co-executive producer] Kenny Ehrlich says, and then a lot of times those guys will sit with me for a couple of passes of the song and then they’ll go off to the truck, because that’s really the money mix out there.
FOH: What are the monitor consoles?
Ron: PM1Ds. PM1Ds everywhere.
FOH: And who are the monitor mixers?
Ron: Tom Pesa is the A stage, which is house left, stage right, and Mike Parker is on the other side. Jeff Peterson and Fletch are front of house system techs.
FOH: Where do you start to encounter problems?
Ron: Everybody wants to be the loudest band on the show, because everybody, including television producers, equates volume with excitement. I think it takes more skill to make it exciting at a lower level of volume personally.
FOH: With more music to mix this year — 24 performances and about 30 songs within those over the course of three-and-a-half hours — it’s the workflow that I wanted to know about. Between everybody who’s with you up at the FOH position.
Ron: Typically, we pound through our line check and I get the sounds, and I’ll turn around and ask them is that okay, how’s the kick drum, do you like this, do you like that? They make their suggestions, we run a pass or two of a song. And then they make more suggestions, and usually at that point Leslie kind of hangs back unless something is just glaringly obvious or really bothering her. I just always try to walk this tightrope between what they want and what I know Kenny Ehrlich wants. Then I store snapshots and that’s our starting point, and because my console is not real-time automation, I’ll still make some analog notes on my run down, you know, “push this at this time” or whatever. They’re also here with me at the actual performance, but unless something goes horribly wrong at the last minute, we’ve already made them happy and satisfied all their requirements and they just kind of watch and observe at that point.
FOH: In this case some performers are doing two songs back to back, so it’s almost like a concert situation there. Do you have all of your patches in each artist’s snapshot?
Ron: It depends. Take Kid Rock for instance, who’s doing a medley of three songs. I would reckon that the general configuration is going to stay the same from song to song and I won’t have to make big changes, but if for some reason I do, then I’ll write a separate snapshot, because one of the beauties of this console is that it’s got instant recall. It doesn’t interrupt the audio, so there’s no audible glitch if I change snapshots.
FOH: The other thing that occurs to me too is that when you do have an artist that is doing two, or in the case of Kid Rock, three songs in a row, that’s when you’ve got that potential for the volume to begin to get out of hand because it’s like a concert.
Ron: Yeah. I’ll drag it down if it gets out of hand. I mean we just don’t let this show get that loud. Like I said, it’s kind of a tightrope between what the executive producer wants and what NARAS wants, and knowing who your audience is important, and mine, at least on the floor, those guys are all recording engineers, and they don’t want to be abused.
FOH: Is there any of your signal going out to broadcast?
Ron: Not usually, but it’s provided as a back-up if there was some catastrophic failure with say the Effanel truck [where the live broadcast mix is done]. If they go down then my mix becomes the broadcast music mix. That’s never good.
FOH: Has it ever happened?
Ron: We’ve come real close. There was one time they had some kind of problem — there was a potential imminent failure. I remember it was back before they went to ProTools, when they had that Neve Capricorn out here. I remember Fletch turning around and telling me, “You’re going to be on the air in 5, 4, 3, 2…
He had been listening on the intercom in between acts, which I don’t do because I have a steady stream of people in and out of the booth as the show goes on. He did it to wind me up but honestly it doesn’t wind me up because I’m not going to change anything because of that. [The signal to the broadcast truck is] just another output on my desk. They got back online and I never did end up going on the air. But Michael Stewart provides redundant mixes to the truck in case something was to happen, and we provide redundant music mixes to the truck as well in case there’s a failure there.
FOH: So that’s yet another snake coming off of your position.
Ron: Yeah, and then also Mike Stewart’s console is the master console out front, but if his console crashed we’d have to do some physical patching, because my console would then become the master console.
FOH: Explain that to me. I thought yours was the master.
Ron: I run into him. I send him left, right, subwoofers, separate stem, and a vocal buss. And the reason we do a separate vocal buss is because for instance down in the front fill, when you’re right in front of the stage and you’re hearing a lot of the monitors and stuff like that you want your balance to be a little different than maybe you had it in the main PA. So if they need to add a little vocal to the front fills to get up over the roar of the monitors, they have that separately. Also, in every snapshot I have video tape, audio tape, and a dialog buss that all comes from the TV truck, so if Mike’s console were to go down, we’d move his output mult over to my console and suddenly I’m doing the whole show until we get him fixed.
FOH: So this is kind of a NASA-level redundancy proposition.
Ron: Indeed, that’s right. We check the O rings frequently.
FOH: The Staples Center is kind of notorious as a venue, acoustically speaking; there are VIP boxes up there, then there’s like a blank wall, then there’s more seating above it. It really wasn’t put together with music in mind.
Ron: Not at all. But we have a huge advantage over your typical touring act that comes in here in that we have three days or so to get our stuff together, plus they carpet for us, they drape areas that aren’t being seated. If this was a typical tour, you come in, you hang your left, your right, you’re pretty much done. We’ve got left, right, sides, delay clusters, we’ve got a ring of small signal point clusters in front of those luxury boxes, and also there’s a lot of care taken with the little laser pointers on top of the PA to make sure that we’re not shooting into those bare walls.
FOH: How do you prep for this? Every year you’re going to have different artists.
Ron: Well, they send me a CD of all music and I listen to music at home and put it on my phone and carry it around with me, get familiar with it. Some of the stuff I’ve heard on radio, just like everybody else has.
FOH: When you listen to those CDs or those MP3s, what are you listening for? How do you listen to it?
Ron: I’m listening for any cues that I might need, any effects like wild little delay things or something, or anything that’s a signature part of the song — what’s the hook here? Just like any mixer would. You listen to the song, you figure out what am I going to push and what are we selling, how am I going to do that, and also I like to listen to the song while I’m programming the snapshot into the console because it will tell me where to lay things out on the console, like how I’m going to be riding this a lot during this song. I like to listen to the song while I’m looking at the desk and figuring out where am I going to lay their inputs out, because that determines a lot. If there’s a guitar solo obviously I want that guitar somewhere where I can reach it easy, and obviously I’m going to put the lead vocal down there where I can reach it, the same with EFX, and that’s pretty much it as far as preparation.
FOH: What they’re sending you is generally their records; does anyone ever send you live performances?
Ron: Yeah, they do actually. This year Paul McCartney sent us the track from some live performance, and occasionally we’ll get rehearsal recordings. If it’s something that’s not their record, like these medleys and stuff like that, and then sometimes the people in the production office will just do the best they can, they’ll chop three MP3s together, run them together and send the them to me and tell me it’s going to be something like this.
FOH: Have you ever had a situation where you said, okay, I’ve listened to this five or six times, I’ve got my snapshot all set up, we’ve done the rehearsal, and then you had a curve thrown at you during the real thing?
Ron: Oh yeah, all the time. I’ll give you a great example. Last year — Herbie Hancock and Lang Lang, “Rhapsody in Blue.” They didn’t send me that on the CD, so I went to iTunes to download it. Well, if you type in “Rhapsody in Blue” on iTunes you’ve got 50 versions. So I bought a few of them a listened, got kind of a consensus. The problem was I didn’t know this particular arrangement because I don’t come out early and go to the rehearsals or anything like that. So Leslie basically stood behind me and called out the arrangement. I just mixed, she stood right there and she’d say “Lang Lang!” and I’d push him up, then “Herbie!” “Trumpet!” “First trombone!” She knew the arrangement, that’s her forte, she does orchestral music and stuff. So yeah, things like that. Also, the lists that they send us tend to be touring input lists and will often include a lot of stuff that we don’t need for one song. Most of the time it’s deletions. They’re not using this instrument today, the trumpet player’s not here, whatever, so we just turns things off. But occasionally they’ll come in and really change things, and then I have to reprogram and they have to wait.
FOH: The script calls for more performing artists to make more transition announcements from the stage this year. That means the same microphone goes from being a vocal microphone to being a production audio microphone.
Ron: Right. And we have to talk about that a lot in between, this year for instance there’s quite a few little areas where like the artist will do their song and then they’re going to introduce the next bit on the vocal mic. So Mike and I will sit down and go through the rundown and say okay, I’ll take this and you take that.
FOH: And does it move in the signal flowchart?
Ron: No, the only thing that will happen is Michael Stewart and will talk about it and I’ll say okay, right here where Bob’s going to introduce so-and-so, leave me open and I’ll put that through the PA, and what I’ll do is I’ll mute the instrument inputs, leave up only the vocal mic, turn off the effects and dry it up.
FOH: Do you have to change the EQ at all?
Ron: No.
FOH: Speaking of processing, what do you use?
Ron: I use all the inboard stuff on the Yamaha. I’ve got seven effects programmed into the desk: two delays, long, short, a play-to-room, a vocal-play-to-chorus, and a pitch shifter, little doubling thing.
FOH: Now that this is becoming a more prevalent thing, has anyone ever asked to have AutoTune, any kind of a pitch correction?
Ron: Well, if they ask that they’re typically going to ask it of the truck, and if we get into a situation like that the truck will send that to me. When we do Beyoncé she always wants a long delay on her vocal, and they want it to be the same everywhere so John Harris usually triggers that out in his truck and just sends a return of that out to front of house and I mix it in with my stuff. And as far as the auto tune thing, that question actually came up this year because there’s a lot of these vocals, like TI, that are using AutoTune as an effect. I’m not sure how we’re going to handle that. I asked that question, is there going to be an AutoTune return from the truck to me, and everyone said no. So we’ll see.
FOH: How can you be TI and not have AutoTune?
Ron: They’re probably going to be on the track. That’s what I’m hoping. Because yeah, that’s the hook, isn’t it?
FOH: When you do use backing tracks, what’s their source and how many tracks do you usually get?
Ron: Pro Tools, and we limit them to ten tracks on this show. Everybody has to conform their ProTools session to ten, they give it to Pablo who is the show’s ProTools operator, and he formats it into ten tracks and tells us what they are and sends them out to us.
FOH: Who starts? Who hits play?
Ron: Pablo, who is on headset with the director, so they can call that cue. You know, a lot of the artists want to do that from the stage, but it’s just really cumbersome to do that. They’re not attuned to listening to a television director and an AD and everybody else in their ear, and it just doesn’t work out well. I’m sure there are some of them that are quite capable of it, but we’d rather have control of that ourselves.
FOH: Anything interesting or remarkable or out of the ordinary or out of what has been ordinary for this show when it comes to microphones?
Ron: John Harris mentioned we got some new Audio Technica stereo microphones this year I guess we’re going to use on some stuff. The truck guys choose the mics and obviously in collaboration with the artists, whatever endorsement deals they might happen to have or preferences that they have. Pab, for instance, Paul McCartney’s guy, wants to use his particular mics and stuff on the drums. So as long as they’re of good quality and John Harris and Eric approve them, that’s no problem. Other than that, John Harris will pick the microphones. And if I have any objections or problems, I can voice an opinion, but at the end of the day it’s his call.
FOH: Anything particularly remarkable about the wireless?
Ron: We’re using more hard wired stuff this year. Anybody that’s willing to, or that’s in a fixed spot that’s willing to, we’re putting them on hard-wired mics to try to minimize some of the RF stuff. I noticed on my input list this year there’s many more hard wired lead vocals than we would have maybe had in the past. There’s a few artists that prefer a wire. The old school folks and stuff. McCartney, if he’s going to stand in one place and sing — he comes to mind because I just wrote his snapshot — he’s on a wired.
FOH: Does anybody ever say “good job” when it’s done?
Ron: Absolutely. There are compliments. The two I always look for are Leslie Ann and Phil Ramone. If I hear good things from them, that’s all I need to know. I just want to get invited back next year.
