Five & Dime. L-R: Odgie Aldridge, Phil Ball, Claire Furley, Ian Pearce & Mark Cunningham
BIG SOUND... SMALL VENUE Tips & techniques for live performance
Mark Cunningham draws from the experience of his band’s recent début gig to offer advice for musicians and engineers seeking that elusive audio perfection.
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chieving a good quality sound in a small live venue is a challenge that thousands of musicians around the world face every time they perform. Feedback, chronic monitor mixes and faulty equipment are just some of the elements that can turn a potentially great gig into a living nightmare. And in the case of Five & Dime – the new country rock covers band I recently co-founded – September 30th 2011 was judgement day. Featuring Claire Furley (vocals & acoustic guitar), Phil Ball (vocals & guitars), Odgie Aldridge (drums), guest musicians Ian Pearce (guitar, pedal steel & vocals), Dave Cooke (keyboards & vocals), and yours truly on bass and vocals, after several months of rehearsals we played our début gig at Riga Music Bar, a small venue in Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex, that is popular with tribute bands and also for stellar acts including Andy Fairweather-Low, Gary Brooker, The Hamsters, Glenn Tilbrook and local heroes Wilko Johnson, Eddie & The Hot Rods and the Feelgoods. A disEDGE
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cerning audience is always guaranteed and the regulars are never slow to criticise if a band fails to live up to the pre-gig hype. All of the members of Five & Dime have accumulated a wealth of experience that, for the older lads, goes back to the 1970s. In fact, the night of the début gig coincided with the 35th anniversary of the first band that Odgie and I founded as teenage school mates. Despite our ‘veteran’ status, however, we were facing a challenge that was unusual to most of us. Until the end of September, we had been rehearsing in Phil Ball’s private recording studio — a converted garage, complete with vocal and drum booths, in which we arranged and routined a set with perfectly balanced sound. Now it was time to break out of the comfort zone and attempt to recreate our hi-fi sound in a small live venue. Each member of Five & Dime had played at Riga Music Bar in previous bands, however, Phil’s experience had also extended to mixing bands at FOH, and he was able to explain how he dealt with some of the sonic peculiarities of the room. He said: “The stage is off-centre for a start which 46
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means that anyone standing in the middle of the audience will be facing the left-hand PA stack while the right-hand stack is in the opposite corner. There’s also a difficult bass trap — the length of the room amplifies a sub frequency over and over until it becomes quite boomy, and so the system EQ continues to be a work-in-progress. Despite all this, it’s actually a nice, dry-sounding venue without any nasty reflections or rings, and a good blank canvas for any live music, so long as the bands and engineers co-operate sensibly.” Venue manager and resident sound engineer, Steve Cattermole upgraded the sound system two years ago, choosing to invest in a second-hand RCF Espace 600 Series PA that was refurbished by the manufacturer before installation. Delivering a weighty 5.4kW by way of Studiomaster amps, the system is augmented by 15” Yamaha monitor wedges, an Allen & Heath GL2200 analogue desk at FOH and generous outboard devices including Yamaha SX1000 multi-effects processors, an Alesis Midiverb 4, Peavey graphic EQs and Samson compressor/limiter/gates. The PA stacks at Riga are far enough forward of the stage to not become a problem for spillage. “Not that I
think that you should necessarily go all out to minimise spillage,” said Phil, “after all it’s a natural part of live music and adds to the overall ambience. It’s all about on-stage volume levels and being able to hear the band naturally without relying too much on the monitors. A good monitor mix is a wonderful asset but, in reality, the mix you are given often bears little resemblance to what you want to hear. In a situation like this, where the band is an unknown quantity and doesn’t have the luxury of a dedicated monitor engineer [everything was mixed from FOH], the best approach is to treat the wedges as an add-on. “It is very difficult to mix monitor from FOH even if you are the venue’s resident engineer and totally familiar with the installed PA. Although they can get in the ballpark, they can never accurately predict what is required by the musicians because all bands are different. At Riga, there isn’t even a listening wedge at FOH to switch between the monitors and gauge what’s actually going on up there. “It’s really all about damage limitation and the best way forward is to play a couple of numbers in soundcheck and instead of asking the engineer for specific monitor mix requests, take a moment to detect what it is you really can’t hear and ask yourself if that’s going to be vital to your own performance.”
Only vocals and unamplified instruments are likely to struggle in this scenario, and in the case of Five & Dime all we had going through the frontline wedges were vocals and a little acoustic guitar and piano. The rest of the instrumentation took care of itself because it was a fairly small stage, and the guitar and bass rigs were set at ‘friendly’ levels. Even the drum fill had a similar mix because Odgie was able to ‘read’ the bass naturally due to the close proximity of my Trace Elliot 1215 combo. As well as being a performing musician, Phil is often found working as a live sound engineer, mixing gigs of varying sizes. “Every instrument has its place in the audio spectrum,” he said. “The aim is to place everything correctly to achieve the best possible musical result. It’s vital to keep listening to what’s happening acoustically on stage and literally reinforce what is already there, rather than invent new sounds that have no place.” PERCUSSIVE ISSUES Drums are naturally loud and this is particularly evident in a small venue. Unlike guitar amps, they do not have a volume control (yes, really) and therefore cannot be turned down. There are two ways to deal with this: a) turn up the instrument backline to a level that works, or b) ensure that the drummer is sufficiently intuitive and adjusts his playing according to the music and the environment.
“Spillage... it’s a natural part of live music and adds to the overall ambience.” EDGE
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Above: Welcome to Riga Music Bar; the RCF PA system; view from the FOH mix riser. Below: Odgie Aldridge, Dave Cooke & Ian Pearce set up shop.
Fortunately for us, Odgie’s very sensitive drumming was key to the on-stage intelligibility of our sound. I’ve lost count of how many drummers I’ve played with over the years who view every gig as a showcase opportunity, and consequently the rest of the band have to turn their backline up to rise above the clatter. In Five & Dime, we are blessed with someone who truly understands dynamics and is able to ebb and flow with the music. The choice of snare can make a lot of difference. A shallow snare is normally quieter than a deeper model and if you keep the batter head reasonably loose you’ll achieve a deeper sound without the piercing element that can sound offensive in a small room. If the engineer is using noise gates on the rack toms, he should double check that they don’t open when the snare is hit. Cymbals can also play havoc in a small room and drummers who insist upon using China-type models should seriously question whether they are really necessary for the music they are playing, especially on a
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cramped stage. This is not only from the point of view of containing volume levels; it’s also a potential health and safety issue. In my youth, I spent many a gig and rehearsal playing directly to one side of a drummer who frequently bashed hell out of a China crash, and this resulted a reduction of the top end of my hearing in one ear. People often discover these things far too late. Other cymbals can be acoustically ‘tamed’ by applying a small amount of duck tape to the underside, using a rubber cushion instead of a foam version on the top of the cymbal and tightening the cymbal on its stand. At the desk, it may be wise to trim the high frequencies of the overhead mics a little to avoid too much presence in the PA — after all, a great deal of the natural kit sound will be heard from the stage. “I’ve gone to so many gigs where the drums sound nothing like the kit’s natural sound, and that’s a big mistake,” commented Phil Ball. “In most small venues, all you need to do is lift the level of the kit up a moder-
Above: Monitors from the stage; Phil Ball’s effects and set list; vocal mic choice. Below: Drum mic positioning.
ate amount into the PA because it will often be naturally loud. One trick is to listen to what you’ve done to the kit through the PA, then mute it and hear what’s coming off stage, and compare the two sounds. Does the amplified version resemble the bare kit? If not, do whatever you can to bridge the gap, and that shouldn’t mean overuse of EQ if you’ve miked the kit properly.” The overhead mics will tell a very different story to those that are placed more locally around the kit. They are picking up the composite sound of the kit although it will obviously be biased towards the cymbals. We used one centrally-positioned overhead mic which is fairly normal at this size of venue. The biggest problem with having two overheads, panned left and right, is that you can give the audience a false stereo image compared with the physical make-up of the kit. In addition, there is a risk of phasing that comes from the contrast of information supplied by the overheads and the individual localised mics.
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AVOID PAPERING OVER CRACKS It is always a good idea to consider what the microphone is actually picking up. As Phil said: “You can hit a rack tom in a room and it may well sound wonderful but you have to realise that the microphone that’s being placed above it is only looking at a small area of that drum head. Suddenly, what that mic is picking up is nothing like the overall sound you hear acoustically. It may also pick up a ring and gaffer tape is not the answer.” Unfortunately, applying tape to a drum head to deaden resonance is often the default measure taken by the engineer or the drummer, but this seriously compromises the natural dynamics of the drum. The result can sometimes sound like someone hitting an amplified cardboard box. You then wonder why the drummer spent £5,000 on his kit, when rummaging around the skip behind the local Sainsbury’s might have been an equally good option. “A good drummer will have learned how to tune his drums correctly and make subtle adjustments according
DON’T DO THAT... DO THIS! BE HELPFUL (AND DON’T LOSE THE PLOT) Prepare a standard stage plot for your band that includes a diagram of the drum kit and its microphone requirements, positions of amplifiers and vocal mics. This is a key tool for any band playing regular gigs where they rely on good communication with resident sound engineers at venues. Make sure you send the plot to the engineer well in advance of your gig along with any other specifications that may be unique about your live set-up. You should also bring your plot to the gig in case the engineer has lost the copy you sent to him, which is entirely possible. BACKLINE LEVELS The worst mistake any band can make is to walk into a small venue, look at what is a reasonably large PA system, and think they can whack up their backline to match. That’s the role of the PA system, not the backline. The minute you start cranking it up to 11 you’re heading for trouble, because the FOH engineer no longer has any control over what the audience hears. He may as well sit at the bar all night and cry in his beer. When you’re in soundcheck mode, remember that the louder your backline is, the louder your monitors will have to be. Listen to each other as much as yourself and co-operate. Imagine you are a human mixing desk on stage and tailor your backline levels in such a way that you create the perfect sound before anything goes through the PA. GUITAR/INSTRUMENT TUNER Be independent! Why should your band colleagues have to fork out? INSTRUMENT CABLE Never rely on the venue engineer to have a spare cable for your use because they more than often won’t have one, and if they do, there’s every chance they won’t let you use it. BE REALISTIC If your band needs 10 DI boxes, don’t expect for one minute that the venue can supply them. If you are a high maintenance band then you should also be self-sufficient. GUITAR/INSTRUMENT STAND If you’ve spent a small fortune on a Les Paul, why would you lean it against your amp and risk disaster when the stage crew are running around? For the sake of an extra £25, you could protect it as well as making it and yourself look so much more professional. GETTING PICKY “Have you got a spare guitar pick?” has to be the most frequently asked question amongst bands. Get your own.
STRUNG OUT Are your strings getting tired? A fresh set of strings that have been ‘tamed’ by a decent amount of stretching before the gig will sound fabulous. Old strings are prone to breaking and there’s nothing quite as soul-destroying as snapping your G-string in the middle of your solo, knowing that you have another 30 minutes of the set to go with only five strings to your name... although this never bothered Keith Richards. KEY TO SUCCESS Always make sure you have a drum key on your person at all times along with spare sticks and a replacement snare head, especially if you like to emulate John Bonham. Is your kick drum pedal working correctly? Does it require a drop of oil? Your engineer won’t be happy if he is hearing a squeak every two bars. GAFFER TAPE If you use a long instrument cable that is likely to trip you up on stage, minimise risk by taping down the slack with some good old gaffer tape. It’s a fix-all solution for tidiness although be aware that you may attract looks of disdain from the resident crew if you leave sticky patches on their precious stage. So perhaps a bottle of Mr. Muscle and a cloth would be a sensible purchase. EXTENSION CABLE Always assume that the nearest power socket on stage will be further than your measly length of mains cable and keep a long extension lead in your tool box at all times. A four-way plug board is also a worthwhile addition. TEST YOUR GEAR Don’t leave things to chance. It only takes 10 minutes to check that your amp and effects pedals are all in good working order — with fresh batteries where appropriate — before you set off for the gig. Any crackles coming from your amplifier will be reinforced through the PA and the sound engineer will strike you off his Christmas card list. Remember, the local music shop will be closed in the evening and if you’re miles from home, you’ll be stuck for a Plan B. Unless, of course, you have perfected time travel. AND DON’T FORGET... Assume that the venue won’t have any spare backline. So wise up, invest some time and money, and be the professional you aspire to be. Finally, show your engineer the same level of respect that you have for your fellow band members and NEVER be late for your allocated soundcheck time. You’ll hardly ever be given as long as you want or need, and if you miss your slot you have no reason to complain if your sound isn’t good.
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to the response of the PA system. Having another band member who can play drums is an asset because this will free the drummer to go out into the room and listen, and discuss the sound with the engineer. Likewise, a good engineer will know how to tune any unwanted resonance out of the PA with EQ modifications. It’s a partnership.” AXES TO GRIND Guitars can be problematic to mix if you have two or more guitarists who aren’t co-operating with each other. They generate a fairly narrow bandwidth of mid frequencies and if the guitarists are using a lot of distortion you can end up with a very confusing sound. Separation is the key and it’s often advisable to position the guitarists’ backline as far apart from each other possible. Phil Ball used a Fender valve amp at the Riga gig and, as he pointed out, it has an optimum level. “The volume works up to 4, beyond which it doesn’t seem to get much louder but does become a horrible mess. As a guitar player, you become familiar with how these things work and it’s wise to stay within those boundaries, but you do see so many people go onstage and try to break those boundaries and the results are sometimes hideous. The basic rule is: whether you’re in a rehearsal studio or at the gig, keep your levels consistent.” Acoustic guitars can be feedback monsters if not EQ’d sensitively. Claire Furley plays acoustic on five or six songs on the Five & Dime set, mainly as a supportive
instrument to add a percussive effect rather than melodic. For her situation, the mid frequencies were scooped out to achieve brightness without risking a ‘howl-around’ or a confused bottom end. Claire played a slim-bodied Fender Strat electro-acoustic which is designed to reject feedback. If it had been a larger bodied guitar, a feedback buster plug for the sound hole would have been needed. I used two basses on the night: a 1986 Fender Performer and a new electric stand-up bass. All were played through my afore-mentioned Trace Elliot amp with a DI output to the PA. A Boss Chorus pedal was used very sparingly as a spot effect. Simplicity itself. As for keyboards, we ran Dave Cooke’s Kurzweil over two channels although that was a luxury that didn’t really gain us anything that a single channel couldn’t have provided for our purposes. POST-MORTEM For a first gig, we were very pleased with our performance and especially the reaction from the audience. All of the steps we took to preserve the integrity of the sound we had worked hard to achieve in rehearsal paid off in dividends, and although there were a few feedback issues that came as a result of ‘engineer experimentation’, the live sound was clear, punchy and, well, very live! It was all the encouragement we needed to book a return appearance at Riga a few months later. •
“THE BASIC RULE... KEEP YOUR LEVELS CONSISTENT.” 52
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ENGINEER BASICS MINIMISE FEEDBACK RISK It’s important to ring out the room in advance of the band’s arrival in order to minimise the risk of feedback. Remember, feedback only occurs when an audio signal hears itself on a nearby speaker and there are ways to prevent this. A very fundamental technique involves setting a microphone up on the stage, returning to the FOH desk and increasing the gain until feedback appears. At this point, you will need to isolate the feedback’s frequency and adjust the EQ accordingly so that you achieve maximum gain from the mic without any embarrassing howl. Typically, monitors will feed back in the 1.2, 3.5-5kHz range at the high end, and around 630Hz on the mid-low end. Unless you carry out this simple operation, you’ll be unlikely to raise the level of the vocals above the band. THINK MUSICALLY Approach the gig with a sensitive ‘musical head’ and structure your mix as if you are producing a recording session. If you want to make something brighter, don’t increase the top end but instead decrease areas of the frequency spectrum that you don’t want to hear. MICROPHONE STANDS If you are bringing your own PA to a gig, there are some issues you will need to be prepared for. For example, one can never have enough mic stands and this is a basic truth that I learned early on in my musician life when I was compelled to use two broomsticks, a paint pot, a beer crate and almost an entire roll of gaffer tape to conjure a device that occasionally held my microphone in place. It wasn’t pretty. Invest in an appropriate range of boom and straight stands, then add spares for comfort. Mic stands go missing so always check your inventory before setting out on the road. CABLE UP Plentiful supplies of mic cables are also advised along with a cable tester to ease the inevitable stress that comes with wondering why a particular cable doesn’t appear to be passing audio.
RECORDING FIVE & DIME LIVE Jon Webber on multitracking the gig
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started recording when my children were much younger and having classical music lessons. It seemed a shame that the only places available to them for recording were rock-orientated studios that didn’t seem very welcoming to young people, so I thought there could be a market for a studio facility designed specifically for children and classical musicians. “After I did a BTec course in Music Technology at the City of London Polytechnic, I bought some kit and began to contact local orchestras and choirs, and the music teachers I knew through my daughter’s lessons, offering to come along and record concerts for them. “Very soon, I was being asked to record choirs for Music For Youth competitions and recording Music GSCE and A Level exam work. The amount of work I was getting encouraged me to build a self-contained mobile recording rack that I could easily load into my car and set up quickly and discreetly. “At the very start of all this, it wasn’t economical to record with a laptop so I chose to spend £1,000 on an Alesis hard disk recorder that gave me 24 channels and another £2,000 went on an Allen & Heath mixer with pre-amps, cables, monitors and some fairly cheap microphones that were upgraded as more business came in. This is still the basis of the mobile system I carry around with me.
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“You tailor your system around the application. For classical concerts where there is very little background noise, you need very high quality microphones and this is where the major costs lie. If you want to record bands and you’re able to plug directly into the FOH mixing desk, the only thing you need to take with you is the HD recorder and a pair of ambient mics. “About three years ago, I realised that I’d accumulated enough equipment and microphones to cope with the demands of bands, and I began to make the transition from being purely classical and choir-based to being able to engineer full-on, 24-track live concert recordings. “I’ve gigged at Riga for about 15 years [as bassist with soul band Jackie Wilson Says, also featuring Odgie Aldridge] so I’m very familiar with the venue’s nuances and had discussed the Five & Dime gig in advance with Steve Cattermole, the venue manager and chief sound engineer. Steve was happy for me to patch my Samson mic transformer splitters into his multicore and I took the 16 feeds from the stage. One cable went to him at FOH and the split cable went to my Allen & Heath 20:8:2 MixWizard mixer which I used solely for monitoring purposes. For the purposes of recording I put a second mic on Phil Ball’s guitar amp and suspended a single Rode NT5 ambient mic above the front of the stage, giving me a total of 18 channels to work with. THE RACK “I set up my rack at the side of the stage and while Steve was soundchecking, I was linechecking with ACS in-ear monitors, soloing each channel and listening for any buzzes. We had a ground loop issue with the bass during set-up which was quickly identified and solved. In a situation like this, you’re at the mercy of what the FOH engineer sets up and although it was possible in this case, I can’t assume that the engineer will agree to me swapping or moving certain mics in order for me to gain a better result. “To test the system, I recorded two numbers during soundcheck and listened closely. Then when it was time for the band’s performance, I just hit record and moni-
tored the show on Beyer DT770M headphones, constantly soloing the musicians and watching the meters just in case any problems appeared. When bands play for real in front of an audience, everything is 6dB louder because of the adrenaline. However good the isolation of your headphones may be, you still can’t prevent the on-stage vibrations entering your body so you’re very reliant on what your mixer is telling you. The more you use your equipment, the more you learn to trust the information it provides. “The other thing to watch out for is the differences in levels when people change guitars. It’s important not to make a sudden change to your channel settings if you spot any notable peaks or lows. If a guitarist changes instruments and you’re worried that the signal is too loud, wait until the next number before making an alteration, and do it very gradually, otherwise you may have a problem when it comes to mixing and editing. MIKING UP “I think Steve Cattermole did a very good job of miking up the stage because when I opened up the files at home for mixing, everything sounded very clean through my Dynaudio BM5 and Rokit 5 active monitors. I transferred the recording files via ADAT through an RME HDSP 9632 card to my Mac Pro system which runs Pro Tools 9 with Focusrite Liquid Mix plug-ins and the Wavelab 7 mastering program. “I started off by creating a generic mix of the whole gig using a Mackie Universal Controller and I set-up basic reverbs and delays for vocals, drums and other instruments until I was happy with the general sound. Then I began to fine tune each song, saving them all as individual project files with some audience ‘bleed’ at the start and finish so that when I dropped them all into the overall timeline, they were seamless. The last process was to take the final complete mix of the show into Wavelab and maximise the output to give it punch. “The Five & Dime gig was a really enjoyable one to record. The musical performances were of a very high standard and I was very pleased with the clarity we achieved.” EDGE
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