Theory and Practice

Feedback occurs when the output of a device is fed to its own input. An example that most of us have heard is guitar feedback. Let’s say an electric guitar player turns his amp up loud and faces his guitar toward the amplifier. Sound from the speakers excites the strings, causing them to vibrate. The pickups change the string motion into an electrical signal, and send the signal back to the guitar amp. The guitar amp magnifies this sound and sends it to the speakers — so the process repeats.

Club touring presents many difficulties, one of which is the possibility that you can’t travel with your own P.A. system. Couple that with the fact that when the venue changes every day, mixing on a different sound system every night becomes a huge challenge. Your mix can sound totally different from show to show, and it’s tough to pinpoint the reasons why. Is it the console? The system processing? The speaker arrays? Here are some tips to help you stay out of the loony bin.

Last month, we began discussing ideas on how to get a great electric bass sound onstage. If you missed it, you can check it out here: fohonline.me/1laHdMc. We examined how the sound of an electric bass can be seriously influenced by the phase relationship between the DI and the bass amp, and we looked at possible solutions.

It’s a sad fact of life that getting a great bass tone through a P.A. system starts with a great bassist playing a good instrument. On second thought maybe that’s a happy fact of life. Given that starting point (or something close to it) it’s your responsibility as an engineer not to screw it up. While you can’t polish the proverbial turd, there’s a lot you can do to make the most of what you’ve been given, and these days there are plenty of tools to help you in the process. Beware: we’re about to open up a can of worms!

Whether you’re a musician, a sound engineer or a major league baseball player, everyone has a bad day once in a while. But in these twenty-teens, technology has reached the point where there’s little excuse for bad sound. I just mixed a show at a major casino stop on the East Coast. Names and locations are withheld to prevent the guilty from personal injury and humiliation.

Death, taxes and monitors are three things that will never go away. Unfortunately, we can’t help you with the first two, but we do have some ideas on how you can create better monitor mixes.

Instructions:

Leave this issue of FOH open to this page. Place it on a coffee table, nightstand, desk, (bathroom!) or other place your significant other can easily find it. This opening paragraph is printed with disappearing ink. After you read these instructions, rub them with a stage towel and they will disappear — leaving only the remainder of the page. Happy Holidays!

Officer: Excuse me sir, do you have any idea how fast you were driving?

Me: Officer, I swear I didn’t know I was speeding.

Officer: The neighbors can hear you seven miles away, and that’s across two rivers, a Christmas tree farm, a football stadium and an asylum for unstable musicians. I’ll have to take you in.

Me: Please officer, don’t take me in. I need this gig. So… exactly how fast was I going?

Officer: 118

Me: 118??!!! That’s impossible. This thing can’t even squawk out a hundred.

Officer: Sir, you’ll have to come with me…

In the June and July 2013 issues of FOH, Steve LaCerra presented a two-part mini-series on the art and science of being both FOH mixer and tour manager. After an overwhelmingly positive response from readers, we asked him to add some more tips on the topic, so here we have the latest installment in our series on the adventures in tour managing. —ed.

As the old saying goes, sometimes you’re the windshield… and sometimes you’re the bug. In other words, sometimes you’re the headliner and sometimes you’re support. Regardless of which, please play nicely in the sandbox. It’s an unfortunate fact of life that when you’re a support act, you’re often at the mercy of the headliner.

If you are reading FRONT of HOUSE, there’s a pretty good chance that you — like me — take audio production pretty seriously. When no one cares about time alignment, we still delay the balcony fills to the main stacks. When no one cares about polar patterns, we’re moving the snare mic to reject the hi-hat. When people start to accept MP3s as an audio format, we yell and scream that such crappy sound is unacceptable.

Did you ever play the video game Tetris? Tetris was released in the mid-1980s and is reportedly the first video game ever to be exported from what was then the Soviet Union to the United States. It’s one of the most popular video games of all time (even I’ve played it), and has been ported to game consoles ranging from the Commodore 64 computer to Game Boy to the iPhone.