Bad PA Jobs

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BrettB

BrettB

Well-known member
Hi all,

I keep posting Live mixing threads in here because we haven't got a seperate forum.

I had to play as an opener on a local festival this weekend. On stage you haven't really got a clue, but afterwards people came to me to complain about the bad PA job. So I stayed and listened to the following two bands. And I don't want to sound like the complaining musician, but the people were right: The PA sucked.

Maybe we can use this thread to give the biggest PA problems and some solutions. The problems I heared:

- The mix was way to loud (a problem Roel allready discussed). A loud mix can muddy things up quit a bit. And for the record: I'm not a woosy that is upset the least that the volume is up, but that moment you really had to scream right in eachoters ear to say something, and the high frequencies of the guitars were cutting in your ears like hell.

- There was feedback in several songs!! On a gig like that (with 1000 visitors) and a hughe, expensive PA organisation I think that is inacceptable. Feedback is caused in 90% of cases in the monitorlines. The first reflex is to check feedback during soundcheck: ok there wasn't much time to soundcheck. but otherwise: when feedback occurs you gotta put the monitor levels down immediately. A well trained technician can even point out the frequencies that caused that feedback and pull them down with a graphic EQ, or you can even try to use the behringer feedback destroyer thingy (I still haven't used it though). Ok even then, you have a chance of feedback, but when I hear loud feedback over 4 songs in a row there is something wrong with the mixing job!

- The biggest fault is definetely a bad balance, and the balance I heared sucked ass. Why? The company gets paid big bucks to come do the show, so they set up their material and make a main mix and don't really touch the mix during the gig. They are getting paid anyway and it seems they think ppl won't notice the difference. But a PA man has to be a fellow musician on that moment! He has to concentrate on the performance, ride the faders, help setting the focus during solo moments,... Or is it because many PA men have no musical experience. a guy told me saturday the comparisation with the cameramen of rockfestivals: In Germany you got f.e. the Rockaplast thingy, where you still see the cameraman focussing on the bassplayer while the guitarist begins his solo, because he obviously can't tell who's giving the solo.


These were just a few uprising thoughts..; Any comments someone?
 
yes, there is a terrible lack of good engineers - worldwide.

I have done live sound for many years, starting in the mid 60's (now I hardly do any live stuff at all).
During this time I was fortunate to work with some of the biggest (and best) artist.
The ones who really kicked ass live all had one thing in common, a brilliant crue. ...... we cared ..... we could get any gear we needed to do a good job ....... and we worked TOGETHER with the bands.
Now many bands don't even know who is running sound for them.
BIG difference.

Also, if bands / promotors / clubs would consider paying engineers decent wages, perhaps you'd get better engineers staying and developing in the industry.

I will hardly ever go to any gigs now, because in the majority of cases the sound is diabolical.
 
Yup. I agree with all the other points above. Here are some more that I've run into in the past, primarily in small-club situations where you're using the room PA (rather than a hired rig). These are hardware/maintenance issues- and they are a *major* headache to the traveling knobtwister.

Blown drivers. I have very seldom gone into a rock club situation where all the drivers were actually alive and usable! Horn drivers are the worst, but even 15" bass-bin drivers get smoked _all the time_ in rock rooms. If you have a chance before your band's set, put in your best earplugs, cover that up with shooters' muffs, and go listen for the dead/dying ones- and then either surreptitiously disconnect them or kill the amp channel driving them. Do *something*, rather than letting them just rattle and buzz and destroy your sound...

Speakers connected out of phase: same thing. This is harder to test for unless you have a phase checker and some time in the room, but there are few things that can make a system sound worse than having half of it out of phase with the other half- usually in the same stack.... Depending on the system, the suck-out that causes can just _demolish_ the intelligibility of the vocals. I carry an old, beat-up Gold Line phase checker rig in my toolbox, and I check the rig whereever I go if I have the time. Which happens a lot more often these days than it used to- but then, I've also gotten out of doing live rock and roll over the last few years!

If you really want to make a club owner's day, check out the gain structure in all the hardware on the mains while you're at it. So many club PAs are just a hodgepodge of _shit_... a board that ought to be outputting +4dBm is run into a hack connector to adapt it to an RCA input on a -10dBV graphic eq (or some other crime against nature), which is then trying to crank out enough make-up gain to drive a monster rack of paralleled amps that all want +4dBm. And the system sounds like _shit_ well before you reach usable levels, let alone get near what should be the natural headroom... Wonder why? (;-)

One of the best things I ever did for one club (which shall remain nameless, other than to say that it was in Boston in the early 80s) was to patch around the cheeseball graphic eq on the mains. I left it bridged across the board's output, so the blinkylights would still blink, but its output didn't drive anything any more. Next time I was in the room, the eq had a big label on it that said "DO NOT TOUCH THIS: WE FINALLY GOT IT SET RIGHT!". It still wasn't driving anything... Stayed that way for years.

Sjoko has it right, though- there are just very few really good engineers out there. Combined with the number of really _bad_ venues you have out there, it amazes me that anyone will go see live rock any more... If you are in a new room, the first thing you have to do is listent to the rig, and then fix (or work around) what you hear. But first you have to listen!
 
Clubs are tough because unless the owner is really into good sound they are usually going to have crap for the PA. It's hard for some owners to equate good sound to more dollars so they don't want to make the investment.

There isn't a lot of money in small live shows so you usually get the old burnouts. The corporate AV companies pay the best and seem to attract the engineers that have their shit together. With small rock n roll gigs it's usually a crapshoot.
 
IF - and that's a very big if - I do a live gig somewhere in a place with a "house system", I always arrive early, with all my testing gear, a bunch of M-F out-of-phase cables to reverse phase on the usual fuck-ups.
First job - unpatch EVERYTHING. and mainly the F^$(&^$ graphic EQ's - I never use them. In fact, I refuse to use them.
After that, unless there is good gear available (in other words - never), I patch in my own small rack consisting of 2 Klark Tecnic DN9848's, one DN504, one Eventide Orville and 2 Symetrix 528E.
That's all I need to run anything smaller than a stadium gig.
(I also normally bring my own mics).

First job is running tones - measuring output and adjusting power amps, first l, then R, then both to measure for phase problems.

Its really funny, because no matter what console or amps a place has (speakers are an other matter), the sound is always an immediate, gigantic improvement.
When I leave I always give who ever is in charge a complete list of everything wrong with their system, and I re-patch everything back to exactly how I found it in the first place, something they invariably insist on before I start pulling crap out.
99.9% of time you can go back to such a place a week / month later, and you'll still find everything exactly the same - like Skippy already stated, phase reversed and generally f'd up.
And most of these places have HOUSE ENGINEERS - not only that, house engineers now in the posession of complete list of what needs to be fixed on the systems they have to work with.

No matter the size of the place, from a 200 seater to the H of B, it never takes me more than 2 hours maximum to set a system up right. Then, when the system IS right, surprise, surprise, with the presets in the rack pre-programmed with what I think is needed, it takes me less then 20 minutes to do a complete soundcheck / set-up for a 4 to 6 piece band.

Again, like Skippy stated, graphic EQ's sould be banned - period.
If you know how these things work - a look at the "picture" of the little faders will always make you laugh, or cry. When will people learn?
Just think - if you have a system (console - crossovers - amps - speakers) set up properly with a good overall balance between the frequency bands, you should have decent sound within the limitations of the gear. Say you are using a board with 4 band EQ. Take one band as an example, and look at the fader settings of the graphic EQ. Assume that on the graphic there is a big cut in the low mid band - now grab your low mid EQ on the board and boost it - nothing happens, apart from loads of extra noise. However, say there is a peak on the graphic in that band - and now you're getting bad distortion.
Anyway - could carry on for hours one that one :((((
 
I completely agree with all the previous comments. But even in the best of situations where everything is setup and working properly, and experts are at the controls – I still think most live equipment sounds like shit. If you come from a recording or hi-fi perspective the quality of live sound can be sadly disappointing.

Good live sound has incredible impact, but detail and accuracy always seem to be missing. Meyers does a pretty good job, though, even their systems don’t approach the sound quality of a nice set of main monitors. I know the technical difficulties are enormous with live sound, and I’m probably asking for world, but oh, only if it were so – to walk into to a club and hear a hugh, truly hi fidelity sound. We’re allowed to dream aren’t we.:)

barefoot
 
sjoko2 said:

First job - unpatch EVERYTHING. and mainly the F^$(&^$ graphic EQ's - I never use them.



Again, like Skippy stated, graphic EQ's sould be banned - period.
Click to expand...

Why, if I may ask? I mean, isn't a graphic EQ handy to correct the acoustic faults a room has. Isn't a graphic EQ a way to cut feedback frequencies in your monitorlines? :confused:
 
BrettB said:


Why, if I may ask? I mean, isn't a graphic EQ handy to correct the acoustic faults a room has. Isn't a graphic EQ a way to cut feedback frequencies in your monitorlines? :confused:
Click to expand...

For a main system:
Most decent systems operate in at least three frequency bands, governed by good crossovers. It is the right choice of amps & speakers for a room, with proper setup of the crossovers, that SHOULD provide accurate control of the frequency spectrum.
Graphic EQ should therefore not be neccissary.
In most systems all outputs run through graphic EQ boxes. Cheap boxes, which, with very few (expensive) exceptions, sound really bad and counteract the effect of EQ on a board.

For monitors,
Slightly different story - but a monitoring system should be flat and where a graphic EQ is used this should always be accompanied by a proper frequency spectrum analyser.
In the vast majority of clubs the monitoring system sucks and, by bleeding bad sounding crap in the mics, effect the F.o.H sound badly.
 
For stage monitors, graphics can be useful sometimes- if used very, very carefully, and as cut-only devices. I'd still prefer a few bands of parametric, myself: usually, all you really need is a good mix, good mic choice and placement, and two or three deep/narrow/high-Q notches according to any nasty reflective modes on the stage. Otherwise, the monitors ought to be pretty much flat: never fix with EQ what should be fixed with the mix itself. Not enough bass, or kick? Then turn them up in the mix- don't just grab the 60Hz band on the graphic and reef it up to +12dB!

Graphics can be used to sort-of mimic the behavior of a parametric for notching out feedback modes, but a cheeseo 1/3octave graphic has filter sections with far too low a Q (the notches are very, very wide). Think, "collateral damage"... Adaptive DSP notch filters like the Sabine FBX are much, much better and cleaner than any graphic will *ever* be.

Too many people just grab the sliders on the nearest graphic and shove them around until the feedback stops, never thinking of what it _sounds_ like on the stage- and the mud that pours in from the stage bleed just kills everything. I wish I had a buck for every time I've seen a graphic with adjacent bands set up for 12dB cut, then 12dB boost, then 12dB cut... Just think of the phase anomalies that causes!

The stage monitors should sound _good_, not just "good enough to keep the vocalist from bitching". Otherwise, that crud goes right out in the mains as bleed. And if your monitor mix sounds _good_, you'll find that you'll be running with about 6-10dB lower stage levels, to boot (unless you have a guitarist with 4 Marshalls and a deathwish- but that's another story!)
 
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sjoko2 said:
Also, if bands / promotors / clubs would consider paying engineers decent wages, perhaps you'd get better engineers staying and developing in the industry.

I will hardly ever go to any gigs now, because in the majority of cases the sound is diabolical.[/qoute]

The last time I saw Tower of Power at a mid sized venue, It sounded -well, clipped. Besides paying good money for the show, I was looking forward to some sweet sounds. I went back to the desk, it was all in the reds'. Later I asked the guy why. His response: The promoter asks (the sound contractor) what and how much will be needed for the sound, then says here's 60% of that. Make do.
Click to expand...
 
and that was what? The engineer's excuse for over-driving the system????
 
I'm afraid that the worst piece of equipment at many Live Gigs is the Fuc*ed up brain that must reside inside the Sound Engineers head.

It is a good job that Mr & Mrs average bloke usually do not give a shit about the sound.
 
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