Big Mick Hughes, the renowned front of house (FOH) audio engineer, recognized for his work on over 1,500 Metallica shows spanning three decades, was a featured guest speaker on the Meyer Sound Mixing Workshop webinar series. Joining program host and experienced mixer Buford Jones, Big Mick shares his expertise and insights with participants.
“Big Mick” Hughes (Metallica FOH) Webinar
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I have a very special guest today I we have had great fun this is a continuation of several programs that we’ve done here in the last couple of days and uh very informative information I have learned an incredible amount and I am so happy to welcome a very good friend of mine uh from the UK that’s here with us today uh Mr Big Mick Hughes welcome Mick hello guys how you doing all good I hope all right there’s uh so much we could talk about and also I want to encourage the listening audience to go to the question and answer box there and go ahead start right now and put in some questions uh I’ll look at those from time to time as we go through this uh this discussion and uh and I will bring up some of those questions and uh get a big mixed view on a lot of those topics so just go ahead and start to filling that out and I’ll I’ll monitor that and bring those in so I think one we always kind of curious to uh you know is uh
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Mickey and I both have been in this business a long time it’s very interesting to see how people get involved with it that become successful and whatever started in the first place to introduce you to the business of live Sound Engineering and mixing and I was wondering yeah just exactly in your case where where did you get introduced and what uh what is your desire to go forward with this sort of business well let me keep in those days I mean we’re talking quite a while ago we all sort of fell into this job we didn’t know the job existed as such um it wasn’t as prevalent as it is now there was definitely nowhere to actually go and learn this thing um whatever you learned was through trial and error I mean I pretty much messed around at school you know doing the plays and whatever there was a little desk that they had um all knobs no faders of course at that
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point and I just was the guy who stepped up and was willing to turn the knobs and risk the scales when it fed back um which you kind of learn how what happens pretty quickly so it was kind of a at the beginning it was a very soft start for me but I was very fortunate I had a a relative a cousin that was a guy called Bruno stapenhill who was the first bass player in Judas Priest uh the very early Judas Priest and I used to call in and visit Bruno on the way home from school and I used to do a lot of Photography in the early days and he said to me would I be willing to take pictures of the band for promo posters and whatever I went yeah sure okay well that involved going to a few gigs with them take some live shots and I was kind of intrigued by the way the whole live concert thing worked uh and yeah it was kind of I gravitated always to audio I mean in those days audio consisted of a
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six channel hlh mixer amp with Jack sockets on the front and a volume knob and I think a tone knob and then it came out a couple of hundred watts to a couple of Elgin columns or a couple of web audio Master columns and not audio messages the web columns Festival stacks and stuff um and that was it it wasn’t really really comprehensive no monitor system as such um so as messed around with that went to concerts with them emptied the van loaded the van did all the bits slept in the van did all the horrible bits uh and then when I left school I completed a five-year apprenticeship of British Steel Corporation in electrical engineering so I was going along the Electrical Technical aspect the entire time though I continued to do gigs with the band while I was doing that and eventually I worked for another local band uh called a band called quartz and they happened to have their own PA system and I put the proposal to them
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that whilst I wasn’t doing gigs with them and using the PA for them why didn’t we rent it out to other bands and and I’ll go out and mix it and we’ll all earn a bit of money and they agreed and we did that for a while whilst I was doing these small shows uh with their pa I met a guy called Kevin Wilkins who he’s now the guy who runs Coachella uh production and has them for many years in the US and Kevin owned the lighting company at the time and uh because he wasn’t very electrical and I was I ended up wiring at his Mains all his power and fixing his lighting rig normally because I didn’t want him to get electrocuted and we confirmed friends he eventually said to me you know do you want to start a lighting company join me and we’ll go from there well I couldn’t afford a PA system so this seemed like the best move and we went into doing lights but I never lost my interest in audio I had the passion for it so owning my own lighting company uh introduced me to a lot of local sound companies
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one of which was a company called max volume they had a Cerwin Vega system and I work for those guys off and on for a while but the whole time there was another company operating in Birmingham which also was a Cerwin Vega company and it was a company called Tech serve and techserve was owned by a guy called Bob Doyle uh Bob Doyle after Tech serve went on to become managing director of Midas and then when he left Midas he started digico and was the original owner of digico with a couple of other guys and I believe he’s retired now from did you go I think he still has a vested interest but uh he’s sort of just about Bob great geezer and so I started doing casual work for Bob off and on did a couple of Tours UB40 and a few other short tours for him well eventually he came to me and said would you go and do this show at Birmingham University for this bank called The Armory show and I’m
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like a hundred show what’s that you know guns cannons whatever he goes no no no no it’s a band he says but they are managed by a guy called Peter mench and Peter Menchie’s part of a a management company called Q Prime and uh he manages Def Leppard as well and Def Leppard at the time were huge and so he’s a bit nice to the guy because he’s an important manager I’m like yeah okay cool well offer me motorbike well in did the gig had a good time uh and at the end of the night Peter Manny said to me uh are you ready and I’m like ready for one because well you’re on tour now I’m like oh no I’m not um you know this was a one-off I was Bob says to come let me do 70 abandoned that’s it uh and I have a motorbike outside and I don’t have any clothes or anything and this is at like 11 o’clock at night after the show and he goes well you better go and get rid of your motorbike and get some clothes and come back and go to Glasgow tonight which was probably about an eight hour drive or whatever now that actually was
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a a really important Crossroads in my life at that point and it only became apparent later because at the time it was just I was 23 uh probably 23 24 somewhere there and I had a choice really I either went and got rid of my motorbike got some clothes and carried on touring with the Army show or I just went no I’m here for one show and I’m going home now well at that age I was keen and mad for it I don’t know if it would have been the same answer now but um I went home got the bike lost the bike and some clothes went back and I worked off and on then for the Armory show for about 18 months and then eventually Peter says look you know they’re not doing any business um we’re gonna let them go because we’re in business and we have to turn over cash and this just isn’t but we have just we don’t want to lose you we like what you’ve done with them and we’ve just signed this new brand called Metallica And I’m like oh okay so
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what’s Metallica and they went well Metallica’s metallic reach heavy metal and I’m like what’s heavy metal and they’re like well you’ll find it if you do it so that was November 1984 and I was 25 I suppose 26. and here we are uh and I’m 57 and it’s uh 2015. so it was kind of um there was a serious teacher actually in my life and I and I I obviously turned the right way because I don’t think I’d have um I wouldn’t change what I’ve done for a living for all this summer I’ve thoroughly enjoyed it until it’s ups and downs but life does but uh what a fantastic career it’s been a roller coaster but wow impressive I think for myself I see so many things that I’ve been involved in so many things it sometimes I’m just totally in order of it all so it’s been a lot of fun basically a roller coaster of a job description
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for sure but that’s the thrill of it all you know they vary so much day to day I think that challenge of dealing with one a venue to another and the gigs just uh you know if it’s not a routine it’s not your nine to five job don’t you agree no absolutely I mean if that’s what you want if you want nine till five then you are totally in the wrong World here you know you’ve got to be willing to leave it God knows what type people tell you and be there as long as they want you there you know if it’s 24 hours it’s 24 hours there’s no unions as such you’re not going to complain to anybody and you better just be willing to get on with it but the rewards on the other side of it for all that are fantastic it’s it’s such a a unique thing to do in life um a little bit strange I think it’s a bit of a strange choice of career but Indescribable yeah incredible moments uh tell us about uh you know I’ve been a couple of concerts and I’ll
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tell you a a complete respect uh for the job that you do of a Clarity of the system the power the uh the show is so entertaining overall uh the the show I think start to finish is amazing and I think you have an act that many people we have a hard time finding to be able to operate under a fairly loud SPL and not have it being abrasive and fatiguing uh you have a great a great way of controlling that can you share that with us how you do that and able to mix it uh at higher sound levels and and not make it’s fatiguing yeah I mean I think you probably think it’s a little louder than what it actually is um but it’s you it’s like I said in the little movie that’s about uh the little clip or whatever you want to call it uh it’s it’s down to using all the bandwidth and using all the frequencies it’s like it’s nothing worse than hearing a sound that sounds incomplete
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you know because it’s either got a big hole in it something missing oh there’s a big lump somewhere else the other thing that we definitely learned early on with um Metallica was you’ve got to be very careful with the high mid frequencies I’m talking 1.6 2K 2.5 315 even a little bit of four even though as we all get older we all lose a bit of four I know I’ve lost a bit of four I’ve seen the chart um but that’s just age onset as you get older that’s yeah we all do you know it’s it’s what happens when you get old so but fortunately we have machine read that displays that on a screen so we can double check how much of that’s about the place if it’s too much or enough or whatever but it definitely it’s controlling your inputs and controlling that high mid banding guitars predominantly now you don’t really want to take them out take those frequencies out the PA altogether because so many other inputs actually need them I mean
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snare Toms vocals for intelligibility definitely need the high mid frequencies to be in correct proportion so if you take it out the system you’re going to have none of it in any of it and it’ll be quite a soft sounding system but it’d be very mushy I think so I tend to sacrifice um a little bit of high mid in both guitars because I have two uh maybe if you heard each one individually you might think each one could stand a little more um but when you hear them collectively uh of course it’s enough of those frequencies and only just enough of those I tend to replace a little bit lost in those frequencies with a little something higher because it’s far more sustainable uh less punishing on the ears two and a half K is definitely a killer frequency in most inputs especially constant sounding inputs not particularly percussive because it’s such a short duration but for those long tones in Guitar two and a half K 2K wow
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that will weld you it’s horrible but it has to be there in a certain quantity just not too much but what I do is I’ll soften the High mids and I’ll Brighton five to six K and that puts the uh keeps the attitude in the Distortion it still has to be Metallica uh you know you can’t soften it so much that all of a sudden it sounds like a I don’t know deep purple or something because they’re kind of soft tones you know this the attitudes are heavy metal guitars is definitely different to what I would consider a rock band like when I did Def Leppard and I did Ozzy Osbourne I would not have gone for the same tone of guitar for those guys uh because it just wouldn’t work um it has to be you have to bring something to the table you have to help the band create what needs to be created to make them who they are you know every band has its signature sound if they are successful that is yeah and you have to help them to maintain that
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and to put it over to the audience so is it actually you know it is them so I think number one thing is controlling the high mids absolutely another thing I’ve always tried to do uh is I like to try and feature I guess things that in the beginning it’s less prevalent now technology has moved on but in the early days with the old pas of course they predominantly did a lot of these high mid frequencies because that’s how they created like a false volume you know if you took the Harvard the old Harwell system or even um you know the JBL horns on a Martin system could get going a little higher than two and a half K normally for those but they all had this High mid attitude which gave a PA the impression of being quite loud when really it wasn’t if you sacrificed those frequencies out of the ba what was actually left wasn’t really that powerful not the case now though uh
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you know modern apas are powerfully within linear Pas now it’s it’s not a problem if you if you lose two and a half k out of an input with a guitar then of course it gives you the opportunity to turn it up a little bit which brings up all the other frequencies of the system and that all present in the system so all of a sudden you have this scratchy uh guitar thing going and which could cause a scratchy sounding mix overall you lose that you turn the guitar up and the attitude changes that the thing suddenly becomes much fatter and much more full because you’ve actually brought up these lower frequencies it’s a bit of a no-brainer really but making the call on these amount of high mid fragrancies is really important uh I always liked I was going to say what I like to do was to feature with the old Pas what I used to do is I used to force them to do overheads and stuff because
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you never really in the old days you never really heard many symbols it was very difficult to get things of High Fidelity over through these old Pas and more often than not Tom Toms would be sacrificed in the mix you wouldn’t be able to hear them so when I came when I started doing this I was determined to to Champion the cause if you like of inputs that had never been heard very well in I’m predominantly talking about heavy rock metal music not really talking about any other genre but of course in rock and metal everybody was afraid to have the overheads too late because of the stage volume um you know Tom Toms used to be sort of overlooked a little bit because they were there but they were always a bit dollar the bit boxy sounded so I decided I weren’t going to have that I wanted to do the um I wanted to hear each symbol I wanted to definitely hear the tomtoms which is why I have six overhead mics because each symbol has its own microphone so I
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was determined to have these symbols heard and positioned them in the mix so now I use six DPA microphones and each one of them is I spread them in a stereo image not very wide because of the environments I work in because obviously if I pan something in one side of the PA I have half the audience isn’t going to be able to hear it because they’re all over there and the other half’s over here so you might only have two symbols over there or three symbols and three over there I can’t do that you know things like China’s and ride symbols are down the middle with the snare Hyatt’s down the middle okay I’ll pan some of the crashes um but not anything drastically because I want everybody to be able to hear them it’s the same as panning guitars you can’t go too far because if you go too far people are just only getting half the half the show so to speak so stereo panning has to be very carefully done um we were talking about systems too which
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is uh definitely uh the next subject we’re going to uh cover in depth but as we were talking about uh you know you’ve already shown a honing in on your listening skills when you listen to these various elements to either tune your system or to do your mix there’s a good question that we haven’t seen this one before I think it’s really good how do you improve that ability uh to hear uh listening sounds or just improve your hearing ability have you you have a thought on that yeah no no good question no good question I think um the longer I’ve been doing this um I think I’ve sort of honed my ability for for listening for paying attention um for honing in on things it’s like you know I’ve taught a lot of people to engineer um and one thing that became really apparent to me when you teach somebody you can kind of observe what happens to
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them why they’re engineered it without having to listen to The Mix yourself you’re watching them uh listen and it became quite apparent in the early days with me that if you are touching uh the console and you’re touching one of the knobs on the desk then you are predominantly honed into listening to just that input you know I mean I can the whole band can be playing but I could be just listening to the stand room or the hi-hat all the time whatever just one channel I can completely zone out everything else and just listen to this one input so but what I also have found is that I needed to step back and listen to the overall mix because that’s what we’re all there for so I found that stopping what I’m doing and taking my hands off the knobs and faders and just looking at the stage and listening means I I move into being one of the audience I try to become one of those and go well you know would I be enjoying this if I
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was just in the crowd right now would I can I hear what I want to hear you know he’s playing this can I hear it is it right can I understand what the vocal what he’s saying and what he’s singing and you know you do these million scans all the time but eventually you have to stop doing the intricate scan of everything oh look that one hi-hat hit was like this or that one snare he didn’t Rim shot it or whatever you’ve got to stop doing that you have to start looking at the overall picture uh and start mixing the show for the overall thing um how can you improve your listening I think it’s a thinking thing that I think you I kind of reason it into uh a thought process I think frequencies I still think numbers even though I definitely Advocate stepping away from the numbers and listening and mixing sound I do think numbers if I hear
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something I can think 250 1K you know blah 2K whatever I I do think like that and then I tend to do that then translate it to touching the knobs and and seeing how those frequencies affect and I will go for a bit of boost just to make sure just to reconfirm in my mind that it is that frequency I’m I do think it is what it is what I’m thinking it is uh not always right sometimes I can be way off it shocks me sometimes how can that be actually 500 when I actually thought it it was 250 it’s almost like I hear the octave sometimes on you know I don’t know maybe it’s a harmonic thing but um since these new Pas and they’re so clean and Lydia it’s it’s pretty apparent and any frequency shifts that you do any EQ or whatever wow I mean we used to make things move you know three or four DB EQ we use yeah tick three or four DB you know straight away graphical order a
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parametric now I mean I’m talking about One DB half a DB you can hear it it’s right there it’s not like the old days where you have to grab a fistful oh no no no no no it’s all very softly softly now with all the stuff it’s a bit like driving a Ferrari with some of these uh PA systems now I mean yeah the male ones are deadline here I mean you can literally just crack the knob and hear the difference where you were speaking of that now how did you uh get involved we understand you use the Leo family of products quite a bit and and the 1100s as well so you use any sound systems as you were just describing uh when did that occur and and how’s that work for you yeah um some I ever used uh Maya was we were uh going between uh Europe and America on a tour I can’t remember which dude it was but we had a gig come up in
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uh Iceland Reykjavik Iceland and I’m like whoa is there any Priya in Reykjavik Iceland I mean do they have Pas and uh they did and it was a mayor PA now I’d never really considered mail as a contender in my world I knew they did a lot of Hi-Fi sounding gigs but I didn’t consider a heavy rock music as requiring anything that got remotely hi-fi and I uh well I just said yeah why not you know let’s give it a go um turned up Luke Jenks was there from Maison to make sure the system was all single and dancing and uh I was really impressed but I was really surprised in all fairness because uh this gig we had one-sixth of the population of Iceland apparently whatever that is I think it was one sixth and it was in this big aircraft Hangar kind of thing and it was a very long tubular shape thing and it it was very cold outside so everybody
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turned up wearing lots of uh snow gear they were all dead wrapped up and they heated the place later on in the day unbelievably so it was very very warm in there and during the show um I noticed that you know the high end was going up a little bit and it’s like whoa hmm okay symbols have started to go off the boil a bit snare top ends going off vocals doesn’t quite have the diction that I like so I grabbed the tablet ready to shelf it was only an atmospheric change that would cause this to go on you know the humidity and the temperature had gone up so I grabbed the the tablet ready to shelf in Lucas what are you doing and I’m like well I might be able to shelf the system um because it’s not um it’s not bright and if I’m starting to lose things now and he’s like wow Nano don’t do that let me do it and I’m like well what are you going to do and he goes well we have a I’m going to press an execute button I’m going to dial in the temperature and the humidity and the price of the unit was
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an ld3 at the time because then I’m going to press the execute button and I’m like oh okay so we’re going to trust this button then you’re going to just press this and hopefully the whole mix isn’t going to go berserk it’s not going to start feeding back or it’s not suddenly get going to get really weird immediately and he’s like no no it’ll be fine well the only thing we’d ever seen up until that point that would have done something like that was a probe that you used to plug into a BSS omnidrive and it was the the seaweed probe apparently it had seaweed inside it so I was told at the time anyway somebody might come back and say that’s but we understood it was a piece of seaweed that obviously changed its resistance as per temperature and um humidity and and that hence would control the crossover well of course there was no way we were going to allow a piece of seaweed to get involved in controlling the crossover so I was a little apprehensive of this oh
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yes it’ll sort it out but he and I’m like but go on then him for a penny in for a pound and he pressed the button and the system just left back into life it was wow it was like there was nobody in there again he was like in the you know early on and I’m like whoa this is pretty clever and it was the first time I’d ever been exposed to a company that seemed knowledgeable enough or willing to uh acknowledge the fact that atmospheric pressures and temperatures and human and humidities made a difference to the audio up until that point you just sort of turn the PA on and you eq’d away and when that these people were like going no no we understand that things change and we’ve now Incorporated this to help you and it’s like wow so I said to Paul Owen uh who was the monitor engineer from Metallica Thomas said Paul need to pay attention with these people because this they’re smart I hadn’t seen this level
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of smartness before um and well eventually obviously Paul went out and bought 200 odd boxes and we proceeded to use the Milo system on our in the round future tours and it made perfect sense to go for the Milo for that because when we did in the round two as previously with that with mt4 uh alpha nexo alpha we had to run incredibly long speaker leads and normally capture like a quarter of the Arena floor for all the Amtrak world I mean literally built like a fortress out of amracks and ran um speaker leads like I think the longest room we ever had was about 400 feet which even using oxygen-free Van Damme cable still affected the impedance to the amplifier and also slight tonal changes to the Box itself and volume changes so it’s like this doesn’t
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really work and we’re taking up Prime real estate with the amracks if we were going to move The Amp Max to out of the Arena the speaker leads would have been 650 feet long we’d have been a bit lucky if it would have got more than a Transit of radio at the far hangs so we had to do this thing so when we when I went into really thinking about it a powered box bead heavier than an unpowered box the other benefits were immense the other problem with speaker leads of course is when you have that many of them they have to get to the ground to get to the am racks so you end up with these huge swages of cable that would sight line issues just a complete pain in the ass and you know it was just horrible so when we did the power and box thing with the Milo it was very easy to put a power feed a power up to the grid and we used Optical for the for the signal feed and to distribute it all up top on the mother Grid at the top and perfect absolutely bang on way to do it
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um and then of course the other issue within the round shows is um in the nature of what they are you’re firing boxes in it every which way have direction and you create your own Ambience so you’re at one end in one corner mixing the show you’re listening to probably one maybe two hangs in like a steadier thing you’re in in the triangle and then you’ve got another 10 hangs or something all generating the ambience in the room now if the room’s really reflective you get more you’re trying to mix the show with more Reflections than than you could ever imagine and with you can hardly hear the two hangs that are pointing right at you because the ambience is so high um we took to just turning up my actually hangs that I listen to just a couple of the EB to try and help me get above the ambience in a few of the gigs um and then of course you get into the problem of multiple sub sources you know you’re flying subclusters Here There and Everywhere
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and it’s patchy and it’s really difficult to get it to be nice and even and smooth so um Along Came Thomas mundorf and came up with the tmra which was fantastic idea because point source and because we hungry 10 Deep uh four Columns of ten it the pattern control was phenomenal I mean you could there was no sub underneath it it definitely controlled the pattern to fire out in line with its array size and in fact it got so controlled that to get any sub on the floor because the stage was so low we couldn’t actually put Subs around the perimeter of the stage because it was too low because it doesn’t want to be close to the people so we had to get low end from the TM array on the ground now it became such a beam around that sense of portion like an antenna radiator now that we had to split the array up into three sections
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And Delay the bottom section to steer some some down onto the floor and that’s what we did uh as well as having to we couldn’t really do much infill around the edge of the stage because it was low kind of pointless blasting somebody’s face off when they’re the only person that can hear it um so it’s like wow so then we have to bend the Milo unbelievably um and put 120 degree boxes on the bottom to fill right up to the edge of the stage if any difficult situation in the round um I prefer 180 I prefer 188 doors in flat fields of course because the system working in free ad is just in its it’s in its element it’s like when you come to talking about EQ systems you know um I normally walk into these festivals and I’m like okay um let’s have a look at your system EQ and it’s it’s if it’s got more than you know if it’s got eight points on the go
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there’s somewhat wrong the boxes don’t sound that bad any of the manufacturers in today’s modern PA World none of the arrays sound that bad so why the need to do eight EQ points on the system EQ is just beyond me to be honest with you I I normally switch them all off it normally Jay day my assistant normally does this in the day before I get there but more often than not I’ll come in and put even more of them in um back into the system because you know you create these holes and you effectively damaging every input that you put through the PA it’s it’s just going to be tailored because they felt there was too much of this and they took it out and now all of a sudden everything you put through the system as as a little piece missing which gives you some very weird and horrible artifacts from that point um I mean pH don’t sound that bad out the box you know straight away as soon as you
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buy them you plug them in even in the native configuration with Maya products you know going no systemic gear is such a going live and direct to the boxes they sound really good it’s definitely usable so the need to hack and chop okay we get it you know the longer a line array gets there are some interactions between the boxes but they’re well documented and well well sortable I mean then certainly not off the dial and depending on the angles between the boxes is the frequency you have to mess with so no keep it simple basically um keeps you your head room there keeps everything running very nicely with a linear Viewpoint and the native setup that you just mentioned it seemingly I mean tour is getting more and more uh semis more and more trucks coming in uh the system just goes up faster and I think gives the engineer more time to do work that he uh needs to
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do really from the console standpoint and not so much tweaking all afternoon so do you agree to that that’s obviously an advantage to the engineer absolutely absolutely um I mean you don’t want to be chasing you behind around you know it’s like you’re constantly having to boost something on this on the desk then the system’s lacking in it it’s a bit like the same thing if you’re having to take out a frequency on every channel then it’s pretty obvious the system may be a little hot at those frequencies so you can definitely calibrate things to make it easier but of course you know things are going to change when the people come in you’re gonna have to make some mods um with you know as you go along um when I was using the Milo system I said to John which is where the Leo sort of came from I said John I’m you know I I ghost the VHF and for people who don’t know what ghosting means it means I just flicker the the limit lights on the the
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VHF drivers uh and I said you know it’s it’s the kick drum attack you know I have maximum attack everywhere on all the percussive stuff and it’s ghost in the VHF and he’s like okay so he sort of went away and came back with the uh the Leo system and he’s like see if you can ghost that well I’ve never ghosted that it’s not really possible I don’t think the FBA I’d say it should come with a public health warning because to be that clean and to get that loud you know most Pas you couldn’t even begin to think of running them at the level you could run a Leo system just through the pure Distortion that’s inherent in the system that makes it sound more aggressive and more you know that Leo system is like it’s so clean that it’s like it’s dangerous yeah I mean I you have to you have to watch the volume you have to you have to keep an eye on it I mean I run a 10 easy system now so I can watch
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the volume um because I think that we’re gonna be into a problem with all this in a minute it’s because becoming quite apparent uh that around Europe that the 98 or 100 DB noise limit is becoming more and more prevalent everywhere you go now it’s like this is the noise limit this is the noise limit and I think we’ve been given a choice as engineers at the moment to to uh agree to do these numbers with them um without being forced horribly um because they don’t really have any power over you they can ask you to do it they can’t really do anything to you so they ask you and tell you it’s the law in the area but they don’t say you’re going to be fined a hundred thousand dollars or whatever you know they don’t give you any of that it’s just please don’t do it now we are being given a chance to self moderate I think you know we either
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comply now or these people are going to go away and they’re going to put this into some kind of legislation and then we’re going to be forced and it’s going to be um it’s not going to be very nice it’s nice to be asked and not to be told I mean the only time I can remember where I felt like I was really told was uh when I did Wembley Stadium um the Freddie Mercury’s dead gig and uh I go up to the desk and there was a a letter on the desk with my name and address on it and I opened it up and and it was just sitting between the knobs so I just came along with oh what’s this I opened it up and as I pulled the letter out the envelope it had a the city of London Crest at the top or city of Westminster it might have been something like that but they pulled it out I should have kept you actually I think I’ll probably have it somewhere but it pulled it out and it was a direct threat that they would uh be coming for me not the band
0:38:01.1 –>
normally that kind of stuff’s aimed at the band and they can kind of Leave It to the management to do with no no this had my name on it saying I personally would be held responsible for this needless to say I behaved incredibly well that day even was very good uh yes it was kind of fortunate because the PA wouldn’t actually go that loud um it wouldn’t I don’t think the PA would have got into infringement to be honest with you because it just didn’t it was to describe the PA it was a a 2b18 4b10 two two inch horns and was in a very thin narrow box that Stacks across trucks in an equal measure quite well it’s about four foot square black you probably know what it is but um yeah so I think we’ve got a choice here we either start to work with them now or will we be forced to do what they tell us later so I’m starting to uh monitor
0:39:00.5 –>
My overall volume with the 1080 which is a fantastic little programmer you know gives you the laq over a period of time and uh trying to behave I’m kind of surprised actually I mean he when I first turned it on with my old show file I was actually only doing 101 DB I waited and for people who don’t know the difference between a and C a weighted is being measured through a filter that rolls off below 500 Hertz progressively and C weight it is flat so you always want to be measured a weighty because it’s a lower number uh and uh if they ever say sea weight you know it’s all bad that’s what will probably happen if we don’t behave they’re gonna go okay it’s 100 DB and it’s C weighted oh my God that would just kill me I couldn’t even I wouldn’t want to be a sound engineer then because the way I get around the 100 or 98 DB uh limit is I lean On The Low End progressively because that’s not being
0:40:01.4 –>
mated as much as the high end if you have a PA that’s a little bit scratchy and a little bit High midi you’re going to tip the noise limit immediately but if you’re a little bit chunky and you’ve got balls in the low end that’s not being meated quite as much as as it is in the highs so it’s the way to go is to is to beef everything up and don’t have it quite as brush sounding uh and you can get away with murder with the noise police on that front well at the beginning of discussion on uh which we think is very interesting on compression and noise Gates signal processors and such uh one question is is do you use compression on the uh complete mix or the the left right next bus you can either bring that in or just or start a discussion watch you and how you use compression okay let’s let’s just let’s just talk compressors I can honestly say that in my career I have tried to compress absolutely everything that’s ever made a noise and that goes
0:41:01.9 –>
from all the inputs to the l r bus compression now Ella left and right bus compression I’ve tried SSL knee I’ve tried them all and the real pieces I’m not talking plugins here I’m talking the actual thing and I never liked it I have to be honest I don’t want to go for a big part in a song uh big kick and snare big delay on the vocal big whatever just you want to go there huge guitar solo because that’s how you feel and that’s exciting and that’s the song I don’t need something sitting in a rack that fights all the movements that I do you know I rock something up it turns it down now I don’t like that on System bus compression I am in fact I no just wrong just wrong I just it’s we’re not mixing an album we’re not having to fit within
0:42:00.1 –>
a certain volume guideline other than the system going red of course but I’m not looking to broadcast this on the radio and being afraid that it’s gonna go over or on TV no no I can I’m not going to narrow the Dynamics of the band by putting a bus compressor on there why would I want to do that I’m not trying to fit in any window other than the one that you could actually hear happening there and then now when you start talking about Channel compression uh I do use compression obviously I do I do think that predominantly in live music we do use uh limiters as opposed to compression I think it’s very difficult to fit uh what I would consider real compression into a live situation um because of lifting the noise floor you know you’re in a studio you’ve got isolation you can lift the noise floor as much as you want it’s the ambience that you’re after to give it the size we
0:43:01. –>
don’t need to do that we’re already playing into a huge Ambiance most the time and the last thing I want to do is to be creating more ambience um so for I do use parallel uh kick and snare compression and that just sits there on a subgroup i grouped to two subgroups were actually rooted more than two but the the parallel kick and snare compression occupies a subgroup and I just compress that group and add it back to the mix bus and that’s there predominantly for if he doesn’t play as hard for a certain part because it’s a double kick button and it needs it starts to dive a little bit on the kick volumes then as he plays softer the compression lifts on the makeup and the makeup game comes into play and replaces the few DB that is um backed off on I mean I use quite
0:44:00.8 –>
heavy compression on that and there’s quite a lot of makeup gain available to it and relatively fast um not massively fast attack a little bit up on the attack to allow some of the transient through a little bit of a transient designer plot and then the release accordingly of course if you have a kick drum that releases too soon then you are going to start to expand The Rumble in the kick drum the shell noise because obviously the compressor envelope finishes starts releasing the compression which effectively starts to put the makeup gain back in So if the noise the mic’s making at that point is just the shell rumbling inside then you are going to lift that and your Kick Drum is going to have not so much as a Duff it’s going to be a doom it’s going to drag the tail out if you have a sustain uh sorry a release time that is
0:45:00.9 –>
longer than the kick drum sound itself then of course the kick drum will stay at the same level it won’t be lift it’ll only uh release after the kick drum sound has happened and won’t be bringing up all the shell noise now I use that kind of thing uh in a different way for the snare drum the snare bottom I like a good spring sound and anybody’s ever heard my mixes I I’d be surprised if you came to me and said I couldn’t hear the the snare uh bottom because I like the sand of the Springs it’s a snare drum after all so what I tend to do with that is I can press the bottom snare mic a little half more heavily I allow the attack to come through so I don’t lose the transient then I’d go into about a three to one compression so it pulls back the middle bit and then I set the release time so is it it
0:46:00.7 –>
actually starts allowing the envelope to Decay so to speak so I did the makeup game back in now before the snare entire Sam sound as finished so it starts to lift the tail end of the Springs rattling I hope I’m explaining this well enough but um so you once again it comes down to the the release time as long as it’s shorter than the length of the snare it means that the compressor will have released and added the makeup game back in before the sound of the snap is still happening and adds the Springs back in which gives you a nice uh spring sand on the bottom of the snare a bit of the reverse plot to the kick drum because I don’t want the kick drum giving it the mmm I want the kick drum just to go so I want to make sure that the release time is longer than the kick drum is um so that’s a little thing with compression vocal compression um I tend to go for the limiter I’m not
0:47:01.8 –>
looking to bring the breath out you know if if you’re doing something in a studio and you you know you hold the vocal in hard compression all the time so as when they stop singing while they’re taking a breath all of a sudden the release happens it adds all this makeup game back in and all of a sudden you can hear them breathe in you know we’ve all heard it it sounds lovely on recording and if you’ve got a fantastic singer to be able to accentuate that breath is really nice but unfortunately when you suddenly add possibly 10 DB of makeup gain to a compressor that suddenly releases that 10 DB in the PA will probably feed back at worst case scenario at best case scenario I would guess it just makes the stage sound really ambient so you’ve got to be really careful so with vocals I have uh uh many vocal mics do I have I have 14 uh vocal mics all
0:48:02. –>
distributed around the stage for I could not bring up the noise floor that much so predominantly my vocal compression is Set uh as a limiter it’s probably six to one five to six to one uh moderately quick attack not immediate but moderately quick and a relatively quick release so as to allow it to grab the peak if he shouts or somebody else shouts or somebody at the audience jumps up in sheds because I’ve had that happen where the band’s been playing along and also and somebody’s singing along with them and you can’t see them because I’ve got all these vocal mics and some are right out in front of the PA on the Winger there’s been some guy over there singing along with the band it’s pretty funny actually so um though the compression thing careful very careful I mean symbols I might have to try this again you know and see if I can get it to work because I used to love to to compress symbols because when you compress overheads wow I mean
0:49:02. –>
there’s a there’s a whole wealth of stuff in there um you know you it’s the same plot again as the doing the stair bottom you know you can set up allow the attack through grab the middle bit three to four to one I would say quite heavy on symbol because it’s a big transient and then make sure the release time times out before the symbol sends stops decaying and as the makeup gain adds back into the compressor it turns up the decay of the symbols so all of a sudden a symbol that would normally go and fade aways it’s longer because it drags the symbol up to be louder from the quiet bits so to speak as it’s as it’s decayed but of course like I said you know his flaws always ignores and of course doing that with overheads would would actually drag up the rest of your drum setting within it you’d have Tom’s snare drum and everything else going with that now that
0:50:02.6 –>
can be desirable that amount of nice if it’s good Ambience and it works your problem is is if your phasing starts to go a bit tits up with your snare drum can start to get a bit thin you know if the snare is reaching the overheads in a weird phase angle to the real thing what I tend to do is uh when I’m in those sort of situations is I will use a recorder you know Pro Tools or 96 96 for the Midas or other recording something I could see the waveform hit the snare drum and then have a look at how long it takes before it arrives on all the overhead mics now when I did Led Zeppelin I did this and it was three milliseconds because it’s about three feet from the overheads and from I had an XY pair on that so of course it was all they were the snare was all over that as well but it’s three milliseconds out so it made
0:51:00.9 –>
the snare go a bit thin so what I did is I delayed the snare drum back three milliseconds so it had time to get on the ambience and then it became in Phase again and it made the snare nice and fat um you’re only messing with small milliseconds I would never suggest going to huge numbers on these you can two or three milliseconds is pretty indistinguishable really uh I think you’re kind of safe on that but of course with the digital consoles it gives you the latitude to do that so that’s compression uh are you seeing any more questions about compression Buford yeah there was a couple in fact I think uh one here or two about uh sub base uh well not so much compression but latency and how do you deal with uh the subs you know we talked about the moondaw parade yeah but how do you work with that and do you
0:52:00.5 –>
compress yourself then when we talk about the system okay now I don’t like to come but we’ll go we’ll stay compression just a nanosecond then I don’t like to come remember we’re going to talk about Gates Buford all right but we’ll finish this way um well I don’t compress Subs more often than not the system is protected if it’s a Maya product then obviously there is a a as a final protection that will happen if you get way way out of control so no I don’t compress the sub feed uh if I want Dynamics to come at me that I don’t want the sublow being pulled back out of proportion with the main flown system so no I would not uh compress Subs latency okay this is one of the reasons why I never turn up at a gig and they go well what are you going to give us left right and sub I go no I’m going to give you left and right because I want your
0:53:00.3 –>
speaker management system to be the one uh that keeps everything in alignment I don’t need to be sending you left right and then an AUX with sub on that I don’t know what the path length’s gonna be if I had an EQ just on that sub that could change the path length hitting the system now they’ve gonna have done their uh smart or Sim Trace they’re going to mind up the subs with the system and then I’m going to presume to come along and give them an independent sub feed that none of us know what time frame it’s in okay we could probably get around it by um timing through my console but of course if you think about timing substitute to a system you time it the crossover point now Subs are not a square blob it’s this isn’t like a square wave Subs are sloping sides now if you take the blob of sub and you turn
0:54:00.5 –>
it up and down the crossover points changing where it meets the main system the rest of the system is changing because of the slopy sides depending on the roll-off of course that the actual DB productive um and the filter you know Butterworth linguish Riley whatever it is as you turn this thing up and down the crossover point is sliding up and down so you’re supposed to re-time the sub package every time you change the volume so if I’ve got this thing on the console and I’ve got a fader on it I’d be too tempting nothing to keep moving this thing around so I like the fact that it’s on the system it’s in perfect perfect latency it’s all time managed it’s in alignment with the feed that they’re receiving it should be perfect because it’s it’ll be the factory program uh that’s running it all so no I don’t like interfering with uh the
0:55:00.8 –>
alignment of the sub versus system thing okay all right that’s a good explanation now back to Gage actually I got what one other thing one other thing we did sure with the tmra with the TM array Subs in the middle we obviously with all the hangs running around the perimeter of the stage we could not delay all that back to the center because you’re talking 40 50 milliseconds of delay and you can’t really do that that’s just a bit too far so uh what we ended up doing was lining up the waveform which basically means that you’re not lining up the Leading Edge of the waveform because that would mean that you’d have to delay the all the other arrays back you’re just making sure that stuff’s in Phase it could have meant that stuff was slightly accelerated um
0:56:00.5 –>
it was such an ambiguous thing we had so many discussions about how to time in the round system but fundamentally work that we lined up the waveform so the sub where it met the array was in phase nothing interesting okay so just does that work with everybody on that plot and we’ll move on to Gates then yeah I believe so and if there is further questions just go ahead and type those in and then I will refer back to that but let’s do step back to to noise Gates a very interesting topic there in your viewpoints yes absolutely I mean noise gates for heavy Rock heavy metal music is an important thing I mean you know you have to it’s all about cleaning up the signal signal management and let’s be honest the noise great is a gate is a great thing to to make something tidy and make it Standalone you know but there are a few things that I’ve observed over the
0:57:00.2 –>
years that people seem to not quite grasp with noise Gates that you can make them your enemy so far as having to do too much EQ because of them and what I’ve witnessed pretty much is attack it’s pretty obvious that on a percussive input you want the fastest possible attack as that stick hits that drum you want that gate to be open to capture all of that because the first sound that’s obviously made is when the stick hits the plastic head the first sound is a high frequency which adds the attack to the drum now what I’ve seen people tend to do is if normally they’ll turn the attack knob to fastest it can possibly be which is obviously where it needs to be assuming you do want an attack set I mean although I suppose there are bands of it that want a soft Tom Tom saying which means you may take the edge off the Leading Edge off the drum to make it sound soft but predominantly in the
0:58:02.2 –>
music I do it’s got to be a fast attack to get that initial thing happening so it’s right up front but what people don’t quite fully grasp is that the key filter can also slow down your attack because if let’s say we’re doing a floor time a big floor tom and you’re like okay where am I going to set the key filter for this big floor top and you’re like well it’s going to make a lot of bass so let’s set it low the problem is the very first noise that it makes like we said before was when the plastic tip of the stick hits the plastic head and makes a click if your key filter’s set down at 50 100 Hertz it’s not even gonna see that so it’s not going to activate the gate until the swell of the floor time happens and there’s enough low end to make the key filter operate the gate at 50 100 Hertz so you’ll effectively a change in the attack time of the gate just with the
0:59:00.1 –>
key filter being too low now I get it you know you start sliding your key filter up to two three four K or whatever so it gets this big click and you straight away into the overhead portion where you know that ride symbols right next to the floor tom so tap tap tap tap on the on the right also new hear the floor tom go ping ping things you get all these noises and I get it it’s a bit difficult but there is a there is a point there a split point where you can fetch it back on the key filter I mean even 500 would be far better than something much lower to keep the attack in the gate but be aware that as you move the key filter you will hear an acoustic J as much as I say or which nothing to do with the the uh actual tonal side of the gate well it isn’t it is over it is only part of the control circuit but it’s part of the attack circuits as well so it will make a tonal difference
1:00:00.1 –>
um obviously switching to key listen and and doing it that way is a nice thing to be able to see where you’re at um so that’s that what else was I going to say um do you have to use any sort of gating on the the vocals at times do you like gain writing talking about the stage levels coming back into your vocal mics um what do you do there the ambient level okay your vocal mics yeah okay well that’s a little prompt off Beaufort thank you Buford for that kind of got stuck there for a second uh yeah the gate thing I think that pretty much covers that doesn’t it um key filter careful oh yeah Holden Decay I found that using shorter hold times and longer decays gives me a more natural Tom sound um because when I used to set them up years ago it used to be just hold a very little Decay so he just went but that’s not really a natural TomTom sound um you have to definitely allow some mmm
1:01:03.2 –>
portion to make it sound real so because and I found that if you can have longer decays then you have to have a shorter hold so just think about the envelope that you creating with Holden Decay it’s the same thing you have to do when doing compression you have to I picture the um ADSL or the filter the actual envelope in my mind that I’m creating when I turn the knobs and that kind of helps me to set up Gates and compression now um moving on to off Gates and compression let’s move on to actual uh mic pre and line check and stuff um I’ve taken to drive in prayer Mike Breeze really hard lately I’m really into bringing them into helping create the sound as opposed to it just putting the mixed fader at zero and basically mixing on the games this set has been a
1:02:01.3 –>
a trait that we’ve done for a very long time um we’ve all lined the faders up to zero and we bring enough gaining to make it work now I we started doing that many many years ago because when you were on tour it was very easy to reset your mix every day you know the desk’s been in the case all the faders are all day and all they’re all pushed full on so you came up to it and just learned your all your fade is all up at zero and there was your base mix it was you know there it’s that’s the fundamentals but it’s not really shaping the sound using the mic pres it’s just it’s like a line mixer he’s bringing it in and busting it straight back out now we have digital consoles there that actually remember the position of the faders which means the mix is gonna be there regardless of whether you’ve got the faders all that injured off off the stops or they’re flat at the top of the fader bag you know it’s all going to be there so I’ve taken to
1:03:02.2 –>
uh driving stuff a little bit more to work the might pre so kick drums snare drums tomtoms and stuff I’m actually kind of driving them in uh even if I start seeing ghost in red I’m fine with that I’m because I mean okay I use nice equipment so I I’m I have the luxury of safe Headroom above that uh I appreciate this possibly other things you would consoles you wouldn’t want to do that with um but I still Advocate running them kind of hot to give you the attack sound like the year after and then I actually run my faders at like minus five I’m like minus five on me kicks minus five on the snare I’ve got three snares I have two top one bottom I have a condenser side fire and a dynamic uh 80 M23 Audio Technica on the top and I have a side fire condenser on the bottom
1:04:00.2 –>
um they’ll run a minus five Toms are a little higher because I found I like a little bit more drive on them uh and then everything else is sort of minus five and all around there so I move along guitars tend to run at zero because the gain is kind of I’m not looking to create uh any kind of artifacts with the my pre with guitars because they’re kind of sorted as they come at me they’re not looking for me to create any of that angle with them all my vcas I use kicks I have a VCA for kick drums VCA for snare VCA for Toms overheads bass guitar left guitar right guitar some of guitars which is all of them and then I have a VCA for guitar Reverb which I use to place the lead so solos in their own Dimension without having to turn the volume up it just sort of moves them to their own place without you having to go oh there’s another three or four DB on
1:05:01.6 –>
the guitar solo to get it on your face no I played for a lot of the solos sometimes I just turn it up but the solos that Kirk does that I want to have them in their own environment so I have a VCA fader for that I have a VCA fader for vocal delays because I use them a lot and I have a Grandmaster vocal fader VCA and I have a grand master band VCA which I can then balance vocal against the band vice versa so you know if the vocal if James is struggling a little bit if he’s got a cold or something’s going on um at least I can pull the button back evenly in order to feature the vocal a little more uh so that’s the VCA they do run at zero sort of okay kick zero snare drum I’ll run at minus five because I need the drive because when last plays double kick drums it has to play very fast snare the gain drops considerably and
1:06:03.3 –>
the parallel compressed snare as much as it’s probably got plus 15 DB of makeup gain on there and is compressing very heavily it it’s still not quite enough to lift it against the the pressure he’s eating out so I keep I have minus five on the VCA so I could give it a good plus 10 if I need to I’m the VCA uh the base I wrote at minus five for a similar reason sometimes I need to really add some heat to the bass guitar for parts so I want to keep that window available to me so I set that up to run at minus five so I can lean on that plus five if I need to to give it a big bit uh so I’ve got it all structured on the vcas but the channel income uh as I said I’m excited to drive things in a much different way than I used to and kind of finding it exciting because when you
1:07:00.2 –>
drive a kick drum kind of hard on the inputs you’re hitting the my pre when you move do move the channel fader even a couple of DB on the channel fader is a massive shift in the in the way it sounds in the mix it gives you so much more pressure very quickly it’s very the attack’s Fantastic okay you corralling it a little bit by having the mix faders down but it’s explosive it’s very very good it works ever so well so this is a bit of a new plot I’m not advocating so much as putting the the faders at zero anymore um pull them back a little bit but line check um sequence of events it kind of it to me the way I do it is I started all the vocals because I want to deal with all the open mics first because they’re going to be open during the show so why wouldn’t I get them out the way so I do all vocals first and then I do all overheads and then I do all the hi-hats
1:08:00.3 –>
I say all the hats I do the hi-hat um because I don’t want to go let’s start at the kick drum because that’s channel number one on the desk and then do kick drum and add a bit of brightness snare drum had a bit of brightness hi-hat maybe brightness Tom’s bit of brightness and then go overheads put the overheads on they need a bit of brightness I brighten the overheads up and all of a sudden there’s too much brightness in the kick the snare the eye out and all the tubs if I’d have done the overheads first then I wouldn’t have had a mess so much with all the other stuff so and it’s pretty I mean you the guys who who work mixing in small clubs with small stages I mean I’m doing this on Stadium stages where there’s 20 feet between people who have like a elite vocal mic three foot in front of the drum kit wow I mean I do Club gigs as well I know how
1:09:00.1 –>
hard it can be but I also I always want to have the correct diction on vocal mics it just how can you have a singer that’s standing there talking to the audience and you can’t understand what he’s saying now that’s inevitably what happens really when you started the kick drum because you did a kick drum you do all these things all these inputs and then you try to add the vocal at the end and when you start to add brightness to the vocal to make it intelligible it makes everything else on stage far too bright so then you’re like ah can I really ask them to go back to the beginning and start again and then I’ll make the vocal brighter and then try and start again well no inevitably what happens is you don’t and then you struggle all night with trying to make the vocal brighter but you can’t because everything else is too bright and because of the residual high end that’s around off all the other inputs it’s in danger to feed him back all the time
1:10:00.1 –>
so would it not laterally work out that you should just get a great vocal sound to start with and then make things fit around that you probably won’t need overheads in clubs when you’ve made the vocals so the diction’s clear and it’s it’s and it’s a nice breathy vocal you probably won’t even need over it you might even blow the hi-hat off if the guy’s a layout hi-hat player so this is a case of thinking engineering as opposed to just grabbing the knobs and turning them you have to think about what you’re doing I have sat and thought about every sound I’ve ever engineered over the years and I can remember EQ off stuff you know I’ve done bagpipes I remember what I did to make them sound good you build up a repertoire of all this stuff you know Beaufort you have a repertoire of things you do to certain inputs to just because you know that’s what it always needs you just do yeah there’s some stuff you know High Pass filters High Pass filters we never talk
1:11:00.4 –>
about that and we should really because very important you know you start allowing stuff to go too low then of course you’re going to create your own problems but there are things that I’ve seen people do where you know they go oh it’s over it’s let’s um let’s hide past them how high okay 450 Hertz a high pass on the average no okay they go and they sound like over it sort of but there’s a lot of nice energy a little lower than that but there is a danger of that then because now you’re into allowing the overheads to do more of the same frequency as you snare on your Toms so now you you could be into the phasing issues sometimes it’s easier to just high pass overheads to a point where there will not be the frequencies in them that will interfere with all the rest of the kit it’s a trade-off uh
1:12:01. –>
me personally I’d rather sort the timing and the phasing it and allow that I I normally allow the overheads down to about 250 maybe even just about 300 depending on the thickness of the PA down there because I want the I don’t just want this I want it all you know what I mean so that’s uh this is all down to your iPass filter a little trick I did do a very long time ago and I only really use it it was probably more of a Hail Mary pass actually I put a gate on the feed to the subs and then I use the range control or the attenuation control of the gate uh to set the volume of the subs for when the gate wasn’t open so think about it you got and then I keyed the gate off the kick drum Channel so what you’ve got is you might end up with
1:13:00 –>
play the bass guitar plays the bass guitar I bring the high pass filter down to say 50 hertz it plays the guitar there’s too much sub in the PA because it’s 50 hertz on the base or it might not even have a high pass on there and then I bring the range control I bring it down from zero you know down to possibly minus six so now the gate is turning down the sub 6 DV well you’d say okay that’s great you’re making the bass sound good and I do I used I did that because when it was keyed off the kick drum when the kick drum fires it puts the subs to full volume you know you lose that six DB of reduction and all of a sudden and you set up the hold and release time to be a kick drum pattern uh and so hit the kick drum Subs go to full volume you get a burst of all that extra uh bass guitar that you wasn’t hearing when
1:14:02.2 –>
the the gate was out was uh open and the reduction was in uh but hit the kick drum and all of a sudden you get that burst of bass guitar you get the kick drum and the subs go to full volume wow it’s a it’s an interesting concept to do it’s uh it worked ever so well but you better line check with somebody playing the bass guitar and somebody eating the kick drum because I got to buy surprise a couple of times it was quite amazing the difference of the sub the amount of power that was available because you hear the kicked Romani tone and you heard the bass guitar on its own and you thought no more of it but when you heard them both together wow and of course uh the low end in the guitars as well you didn’t have to high past them so much for the simple reason as you bring in the range down on the gate if he got too much it it was just something I tried and if people out there want to give it a go but it sort of it was nice it did work I
1:15:02.8 –>
think it would work in a club situation where you want to get a good solid low end and not have any residual hanging around I think you could get something if you were a house engineer I think you could get a nice little finger in there with a gate on your subs and not have to use so much energy on the channel strip yeah you also mentioned yesterday using a coin on the beater uh for more high-end I thought that was very interesting and and someone has asked do you use a combination of mics on the kick drum when you were talking about your low end connection there in the mix yes absolutely yeah I mean you’re talking about a long time ago with a coin thing um we always needed more attack on the kick drum because uh Lars liked to play with the felt beta and didn’t want to use a wooden beater I mean obviously a wooden beat is going to give you the massive attack on a plastic head but um what we found worked was a couple of
1:16:00.7 –>
quarters I think we had I think we had two and We Gather tape where the beta hit so as you hit them the the quarters clacked together and it added the click uh of course this now is a dumber click pad I mean you go and buy these things there that are more robust than the thing we made but uh it definitely did work uh because we just use proper clickbuds there as to the microphones absolutely I use a D6 audix D6 and an sm91 for the high end another thing I do I high pass the um the the what do I pass get this right a low passed the D6 I always get this a long way around I low past the D6 and I high past the 91. so as they don’t do the same overlap on the same frequency because then you start getting into another phase issue
1:17:00.6 –>
there you know what’s the point of the 91 trying to do the same thing as the D6 so I slide up the high pass on that so I make crossover in effect of the kick drum the the D6 does the thump and the 91 does the high end and I try not to overlap them so as there is no interaction phasing between the two does that make sense yes it does when you’re introducing those houses go ahead yeah no it really does it’s definitely the way to go when you have two microphones on One Source attempting to do the same frequencies you better make sure that they are really in Phase otherwise they’re just working against you you know as you bring up you want to put some more high end in the 90s when you want to turn it up a little bit of the kick drum has more attack then the problem is the low end changes because there is a phase discrepancy in the low end between them so so you can dive
1:18:02.2 –>
you can delay one to the other to get them to to work when you’ve done the high and low pass you can do that you can do the delay thing um but I don’t normally I just make sure that the one doesn’t do the same frequency as the other I see uh I just High Pass one low pass the other and that’s the crossover really and then you know I haven’t got the 91 doing all the trying to do the low end that the D6 is doing and I don’t have the D6 trying to do the high end the 90 ones doing and then you just meld them together and pick the proportions of each did we talk about the triggers I use for the gating I don’t believe so let’s let’s go over that again well let’s go over it now yeah just back I I remember that’s why I thought we hadn’t finished gating okay I use um like pintech or fisherman triggers and they’re just taped to the side of
1:19:01.7 –>
the shell they run through the infrastructure and go in the key input of the gate so as even just tapping the shell lightly with a stick that vibration with the Piezo crystal is enough to open the gate but you can blast the biggest noise atom you want and they’ll never open acoustically because they work on a vibration there uh and what else I did because I have uh those triggers in real time you know you hit the drum there is a pulse from that trigger what I did is I delayed every channel on the console by two and a half milliseconds and I only did two and a half because it it seemed to sound right I think that’s not a particular value it was just like okay two and a half and what I do is because I’ve delayed the old audio two and a half coming through the channel and the triggers in real time I’ve actually created look ahead gating because the gate will open when
1:20:00.1 –>
it sees the trigger coming the audio actually is coming in two and a half milliseconds time so the gate is open in anticipation of the audio coming through which means I don’t clip off any of the Leading Edge which is all back to the attack thing I mean okay I’m being a bit anal it’s going a bit to the nth degree I’m going too far but I’ve created the look ahead gating by using triggers basically and it does mean that you get the entire envelope of the toms and the kick drums can’t do it on the snare because they change the snare so often that the drum Tech the first time I tried to do it on the snare he grabbed the snare forgot about the trigger and then he ended up dragging the entire my loom off the drum Riser during the show with after mics because he just grabbed the snare and ran off with it and it was still connected with the trigger so I decided that we better abandon the trigger on the snare drum because it gets changed so often but Toms and kick drums Works
1:21:01.8 –>
fantastically for so that’s the uh trigger gated it’s not triggering sounds I don’t do that I don’t like I like real sounds with microphones um except for the fact I use fractals there but we won’t talk about that okay well with all the advancement technology uh and the changes as well that’s happened over the recent years and especially computer technology and plugins referring a lot to but um do you see this as a uh a challenge as well and um sometimes we get distracted you know and using all these tools are they absolutely beneficial for us yeah yeah yeah yeah I think you know um these plugins I mean I I think some of them are good you know I mean okay fine but you know I’m a firm believer in a good source sound a well-tuned system
1:22:01.1 –>
and a good source sound I don’t need punches trackers followers whatever the these things do yeah uh you know I mean I’ll if I if it needs to be volume controlled I’ll compress it a little bit or I’ll limit it um uh if he wants to have extra more mids in it with some kind of a plug-in I’ll EQ that in uh if a source is in so dire need of being bailed out then I’ll tend to go and address it right at the very beginning because it’s making me job hard it needs to obviously be sorted out um so no I’m not a big firm believer I mean okay the Midas doesn’t actually have plugins as such it has its own I guess but it doesn’t have extra activity plugins I I could use a sound uh grid is it or say what they call those things the waves the
1:23:00.8 –>
Summit rack isn’t it I don’t know I have looked at them I now I’m not mad Keen I only use uh for effects and stuff you know I have um for the snare drum I run two reverbs one of them is a non-linear that used to be like the rmx 16 AMS that we used to use years ago which is like a a reverse non-linear snare and the effect that has with the snare drum is it makes the snare sound longer uh because when you’re outdoors and in some very sort of big vast expanses a snare drum with no Reverb on actually sounds like very nothing just nothing like very little um just a solo input that’s very short in duration this non-linear Reverb actually makes the scenariolet sound a little longer and just it still sounds just like a snare not like Reverb it’s kind of an interesting program uh non-linear it’s called Automax 16 AMS was the
1:24:01.5 –>
original ones who did it this is on the dn780 I use it on the Midas it was a copy really the rmx 16. I use a then a whole order plate depending on the environment I mean normally a hall with very little pre-delay if any because I don’t need to be putting the snare drum in another world when it’s actually going into a really ambient World normally I don’t need to be compounding the problem with a a 30 millisecond pre-delay to make it sound like you know because the room’s going straight away so I don’t want it to be going Caprica in the blood so no I don’t do that uh tomtom’s same like a hall uh none of it more than 1.6 milliseconds because I have to have the Reverb done and Dusty before the next hit comes along and the songs are quite quick so the last thing I need is a big long
1:25:00.1 –>
snare verb just trailing to the next snide and becoming a constant noise so I keep those all kind of tight and tidy uh vocals uh I have a plate order hole that I use I have a couple that I play with depending on the the venue and what I feels work in that day for me I do tend to do that a little bit I don’t have any hard and fast rules in that respect I’ll move things a little bit there because I I like to mix it up a little bit um what else do I have I have a a D2 because I don’t like the Midas delay in the console so I have a tcd2 which I’ve used for a very long time and just love the sound of that piece so I stuck with it I have a BBE 862 that sits on inserted across the subgroups uh and gives me like a an overall tone control if you like it gives it I think it’s 100 Hertz and 10K
1:26:00.8 –>
it works out allows me to give the a little bit of excitement to the high end of the of the toms and also give them a bit of Drive uh I have a dbx120x which I run on the floor toms which is the big floor tom that you always hear if you come um and then I could obviously use that to taste single fader mono and that’s about it I have a cork yeah the Korg drv3000 which is I keep grabbing them on eBay whenever I see a hundred dollars here and whatever because it’s uh it’s actually the piece that does the master effect for a song called Master of Puppets uh which is a pitch down a peggiated thing and it’s the only machine I’ve ever got it out of I tried the h3000 even tied and the four thousand and the 4500 none of them did it like the Korg drv3000 so I just have to they’ve been out of production for about 20 years so I have to just grab all the ones that I could see we’ve got
1:27:02. –>
a whole plethora of them that everywhere called drv3000 and it does all my interesting different effects that I need flanges and and stuff for um for the songs that need it but so far as any other outboard gear no not at all I have a dn6000 analyzer that I really like that I is my go-to sort of stare at guy uh instead of going for all the more far complicated looking displays that we we have available to us the D you know the the dn6000 is just that Spectrum analyzer it’s like okay that’s the picture yeah and when I’m using that I vary the uh averaging time so as I can see if there’s a build up in the PA to for example I’ll leave it averaging for like five seconds or something and see if there’s one Peak or then I’ll switch to some faster you know your 1.25 250
1:28:00.3 –>
milliseconds and have a look at the faster transients to see if there’s anything that I think might be leaping a bit there um but so far as any other audio gear that’s able gear that’s about it really well one ask also do you ever use uh expanders in place of noise Gates I’ve tried this it’s tough because when I really tried this I think the only uh expander if you like that was available was the BSS Nino one was it I mean do you remember that Buford I think I do and it was an expander among them fresh and gate yeah yes yes I’m um no not really you can I mean I’ve seen it done um Doug Hall the guy who used to mix Iron Maiden Doug was a big guy into his expanders uh he had some
1:29:02.3 –>
really weird esoteric piece that I used to use this blue thing with yellow knobs and I always think wow that’s an interesting thing it looked a bit of a pisser to set up though uh I think you know making its turn the mic on and off as opposed to expanding the frequencies and docking the frequencies um I think the gates an easier option I like I like to keep it simple that is it the an analogy k-i-s-s kiss keep it simple stupid I I I’m a firm believer in that to be honest with you I agree absolutely agree uh someone else is asking about roughly where do you said High Pass filters and I don’t know if they’re speaking of a particular instrument that didn’t sound the question and obviously that that depends on the instrument but you use high pass filter filters pretty much all through the input Spectrum I think you mentioned that that most channels you you you you
1:30:00.6 –>
yeah pretty I would I would say that every channel has a high pass filter on it even the kick drums um because there’s no real for me there’s no I mean I like I love low frequencies you know everybody out there whoever knows me or has listened to me knows that I am a a bit of a sub monster um but even so I still high past the kick drums at 30. which should probably really be 35 but I can’t bring myself to go up there uh so their hype that yeah I just can’t it’s just denied that is um so no kick drums 30. I would say snare drum depending on the snare itself I think I with Metallica I think I’m actually kind of low I think I’m at like 100 Hertz on the snare hi-hat uh he bumps quite a bit on the hi-hat because Lars is quite a violent hire player I have the mic position so it avoids the wind gusts between the hi-hats which can
1:31:01.6 –>
obviously make a high up my bump quite considerably if you’re miking the very edge in line with the the where the two symbols break apart obviously as the Hayak closes it tends to push out a gust of air which can cause your high up mode to go you get like a hump with it you know um you can’t really hide past that that’s put in the capsule so moving the hi-hat mic to a less wind gust position uh will help with that situation but I still high pass it probably 250 I would think 300 on the hi-hat I don’t really want it going down there and you know if the risers started taking a bit of a bump mechanically you can get some noises uh moving on to Tom Tom’s smallest Tom uh I think that’s about 100 Hertz maybe even just a little lower maybe 80 and then the next one goes a little lower again and then the floor times I allowed to go all the way down to probably I
1:32:01.6 –>
think it’s 50. but I’m keeping them kind of cleanish because the subharmonic synthesizers obviously taking care of any 30 and 40 that’s going on I just don’t want the sauce Sim to get any wool going on because obviously that will translate into the dbx 120 and make that get a bit Surety so I keep the the actual Source sound tightish actually the floor tubs might even be doing uh 60 I can’t remember what I’ve got them at because it’s obviously I’ll listen to them as much as I’m talking numbers uh I’m trying to remember those numbers right there because I’ve tweaked those listening overheads we talked about they can be anything 250 300 uh into bass guitar bass guitar tends to be depending on how well the subs are working that day uh you know are they something are they really Hefty that could go I mean I’m normally about 50 hertz
1:33:02.3 –>
50 to 80 Hertz on the base maybe even a little higher some days not normally though because I like the base to do some serious weight guitars when I was using wires I said I’m using fractals now which is the sampled mic guitar which I was anti at first rest assured I fought the cause for four by twelves and microphones but when you look at the at the benefits of the fractal it was fantastic the South Pole gig is what sealed the gig for the uh the ice Chambers and the amp racks because when when the set of pogi happened all the gear had to go ashore on zodiac speed boats now you’re not going to lift a 4×12 in an isolation chamber onto a zodiac speed boat and take it ashore uh the same as you’re not going to put an amp a huge amp rack on one of those and
1:34:01.1 –>
take that ashore but you are taking the 2u 19 inch rack mount piece with the guitar sound sampled into it very easily and it worked they worked fantastic um so we adopted the fractals we use fractals for absolutely everything now uh all the guitars even the acoustic guitar uh bass guitar is all these fractal pieces and my first time I tried them when they came along and gate and set it up to the factory heavy metal program if you like I’m like absolutely no way that can just right off that cut because we’d spend 30 years getting the guitar sound together I’ve had every microphone known to man inside that ISO chamber and moved around move forward move back forget everything and we finally got to a point where I was really happy with the guitar sounds and as with the band
1:35:00. –>
and now all of a sudden I’m just gonna go okay let’s just throw that all away and get that to you piece of gear out but the difference is we didn’t lose what we already had because the guy from fractal turned up to the studio with the band they set up the system and played our sound into it and it learned what we’d actually created over the last 30 years and as stunned as I am it really is it really really is the difference is the fractal doesn’t have a bad day like sometimes the you know the Mesa Boogie amps is fantastic they can have bad days they are valve after all uh or tube as you guys would probably say um so you know temperature burnt valves strip anodes and cathodes inside the valves causing extra Distortion preamp tubes all the various that can go on with them with a valve amp
1:36:00.3 –>
we don’t have any of that anymore microphones getting knocked inside the iso Chambers I’ve had people actually backstage sitting on the iso Chambers tapping the foot to the Buns music and they’re actually banging the side of the iso chamber you can hear it through the PA just because somebody’s sitting on one of them so it’s like you know because sometimes we used to leave them in the truck and just run mic leads and speaker leader to them you know it’s like is it just you wouldn’t even know what they were doing it was the all the guitar sounds for the whole show sitting on the loading dock but it was it was literally half a semi full of gear and when you’re doing fast moves around the world as well and you chartering airplanes to fly your equipment the difference between uh the amplifier and the fractal setup is probably half a million dollars in a bigger airplane so and there was no benefit to keeping
1:37:00.8 –>
the amplifiers and the um or a plethora of iso boxes and I mean the iso Chambers with the 4×12 in each one of them was probably five feet long and a four just bigger than a four by twelve square and we had six of those I mean you’re talking about some pretty big bunches of flight cases plus all the amp racks to run them the fractals replaced all that and wow I mean the parameters in those things are scary that’s my worst fear is the back line guys when they get the laptops there and they’re plugged into the fractals I’m like oh no they’re in there because you know it’s their back line guys it’s it’s not really in their remit to be messing with that kind of stuff in my eyes anyway I’ll see another interesting finish up so so yeah with the high pass filter situation with the fractals they don’t do quite as much uh of the super lows
1:38:03.4 –>
because of no mic proximity effect or anything like that going on they are a Pure Clean in so I could high pass those kind of lower so I think they’re probably down at 60 hertz uh for the guitar when normally when it was microphone I could be up to anything up to like 140 you know I mean really I mean you know you’d be high passing very very high for guitar because the microphones just gave you all that extra low end that you didn’t really want um the fractals give you the low end it’s already sorted you just have to let it through you know and they it well I can’t say any more about them really they’ll it’s it just works for me so high pass on that absolutely kind of low but only because it’s fractal if it was microphone would probably be 140 150 vocals
1:39:00.7 –>
for James it’s about 125 can sometimes slide up to 160 depending on the PA for predominantly 125s I am having to use the Shure es55 microphones which is you know like that big Square thing um super 55s actually I think it’s a harmonica microphone originally uh James really likes the look of those um yeah I don’t know if I want to say any more about them if you saw what I actually had to do to those to make them actually sell sound like a microphone you’d probably be quite shocked what the vocal EQ looks like I mean I have a parametric I have a a 27 band graphic I have everything uh acting on those just to make them work basically hmm so they’re a little quirky but they need
1:40:00.8 –>
High passing as I said you know 125 160. and I do that high pass uh globally on the global vocal EQ because I have say 14 vocals I think it is and they are all eq’d with one EQ because I’m not going to go around each one going you know do number 10 blah blah blah do number 12 blah blah blah oh go back to number 10 because 12’s like this and and then you can’t remember what each of them sounds like it’s one guy signaling to all of them so I have a parametric and a graphic EQ strapped across all the vocal mics on the subgroup so I can globally cue all of them so when I’ve done one of them I’ve done them all all I’ve got to do is make sure that they all set that the gains are all the same there’s no problem with the capsule so it’s saying one of them’s completely out of character so we change it um I think we actually have 150 of those
1:41:02. –>
microphones believe it or not I mean really have a lot of them yeah we have an incredible amount because they get wet they get banged they get Savaged and I think that an sm50 eight capsule in a square box that doesn’t breathe very well so you know a little normal I used to use Audio Technica 5400s which sounded so nice so crisp and nice but they didn’t look as cool as the big square ones yeah I wonder if that element you know could be modified to be put into the 55 to where you’d have the look that he wants but yet another element did you ever try that I’m just curious well oh absolutely we did beautiful we went there mate I mean I wanted Audio Technica to modify the shoes they wasn’t too impressed with that statement to be honest with you obviously you know yeah let’s just make those sure 55 sound like an Audio Technica after they’ve had
1:42:01.9 –>
all the luxury of avid Audio Technica pictures of James singing it was fantastic for them they were quite pissed off when he went to the sure I think so uh they were trying to be helpful but it could only ever go so far um and because we go through Sue through so many of those microphones actually having a specially made modified one would have been a complete to get together I don’t think it would have ever happened and I managed to bail them out basically so we stuck with the bailout understood well as we’re coming to an end uh to this this has been a wow great fun uh it’s such useful information uh that you have conveyed over to us and um any things that I think all of us get eager to go out and try now uh would you sum it up by saying things to the young people that are just getting started or want to get started in some advice for them that they should uh maybe seek and
1:43:01.8 –>
our directions in education or anything of the sort to get involved yeah absolutely absolutely absolutely I mean it’s probably the the most genetic question that we get asked really how do I get a job doing what you do you know I want to be an engineer and absolutely and it’s probably a great time because there is more education around now than there has ever been for people to learn to be sound engineers beat it makes it probably a bit on the internet in as much as you know there’s so much more of it now and probably makes it harder to get in there but there is no there is no second thing to actually listening to an input actually understanding what it needs to sound like regardless of all the numbers and all the bells and whistles and plugins and whatever learn to listen learn to listen and and to manipulate the inputs to do what you
1:44:01.7 –>
need them to do to further the band you’re trying to mix or the band you are mixing I should say um bring something to the table don’t just be that sound reinforcement engineer we all know you can just go through put the faders up to zero turn the gains up a little bit and go through every channel and as long as there’s nothing particularly that louder than anything else you’ll you’ll have a mix Going it won’t it won’t be very Dynamic it’ll be quite lifeless and it’ll be quite boring you’ll probably be even bored doing that kind of mix don’t be afraid to turn the knobs and find out what they do get daring I mean you know how many people have never added 250 Hertz or 500 to an input because they think that that’s a frequency you wouldn’t normally mess with you know there’s a lot of frequencies that people never touch and I’m I I’ve been there almost guilty you
1:45:01.1 –>
assume that it’s that sort of works okay and everything’s fine but you’ve got to be willing to go there find out what happens when you turn the knob you know because sometimes you turn it and it’s a pleasure and you’re like whoa okay I’ll remember that one and and you do and you bring up you build a repertoire of all those little tweaks and fixes you remember tone you remember the sound you know what happens when I I add this to us now if you add two 250 Hertz to us there um that’s where the meat into veggies really in a snare snacked up it really that’s gonna put some energy into it you know things like that people wouldn’t normally trade but be willing to trade but I can’t stress any more than listening you have to learn some numbers There Ain’t No Way Around It you do have to appreciate some numbers it’s nice
1:46:01.1 –>
when you can put a number to a sound that you can hear a you know a frequency in a particular input if you could put a number to the to that particular sound you know and we call it Hertz and whatever then it sticks with you better it’s it’s and it’s for talking and conversing with other people it’s easier if you go oh did you hear that each other I mean like kick drums you know we all take out that low mid thing now 160 140 130 you know when I talk to my mate Dave Nichols sure to mix his slip knot um you know we go I’ll talk a bit of that low mid am I kid drumming oh it was down at 120 you know I mean it’s like you have to be able to converse with people so we put a number on these frequencies and get to appreciate what they are even if it means playing with a graphic and pushing faders up and down on things just so you know where this stuff sits you won’t always be right when you’re
1:47:00.8 –>
calling the frequencies and don’t think the professionals are either I’m not always right I’m shocked sometimes when I go oh that’s got to be about 250 in that there and then you mess with 250 and it ends up being 500 you can be that far out you know you’re like wow I did it fool me so it’s something you constantly learn you constantly refresh if I’m off the road for a long period of time when I go back to work I have to sort of have a quick refresher on it I have to learn what those things sound like again because I’ve not spent time honing in on them um we’re mixing the show for your band uh occasionally take your hands off the knobs and off the faders and look at the band and listen to it like a member of the audience because that’s ever so revealing because as soon as you put your hand on the console you go deaf to most the inputs other than the one you’re touching so sit back enjoy your own show and you’ll become a better
1:48:01.8 –>
mixer by doing that so so far is actually getting the work itself that’s a really tough one that is because you know people have help uh to get out get along but your local Service Company your local PA companies is probably the place to go really but get some proficiency going first you know make sure you know what an XLR is makes you area wise up do you know why to balance XLR you know do you know the console flips one leg out of phase with the other then adds and flips them back over adds them together so it puts the noise that’s been induced in the cable out of phase with each other and it cancels it that’s how balance line works if sorry how yeah balancing works if you don’t know that properly then read about it it’s all over the Internet you’ve got no excuse not to know some very basic things so educate yourself as best you
1:49:00. –>
can I mean you look at Maya what a fantastic company I have massive respect which is why I do these things for this company they’re the only manufacturer speaker manufacturer in the world that actually cares about the outcome of people’s shows at the end of the day they don’t just sell you a box they’re trying to educate people and help to make them better Engineers there’s a plethora of information online on the mayor sites you know you can learn a lot from people um support them colleges you can go to colleges and learn you know same courses or whatever it’s all very good there’s a lot of information out there you are not going to walk into a local PA company and go well can I just come and load your truck and unload your truck for you doesn’t happen anymore that’s how we did it 30 odd years ago because nobody knew any better we were literally glorified humpers and then we had to learn and
1:50:03.4 –>
yeah well it was you blanked it for as long as you could until you actually could do it that’s not going to be allowed now you you can’t blag it until you’ve learned it anymore you’ve got to learn it so you can do it so go and learn it it’s a it’s a great career and it’s a lot of fun trust me and it’s it’s fantastic and I’m sure Beaufort will agree oh absolutely the Thrills are just Indescribable I think through years it those moments just like that picture that’s up there for you it’s it’s hard to describe what that feeling is like sitting in the middle of that and we wish all of you who have been able to tune in that you have those moments and you will you keep up the passion and desire and and these opportunities can certainly come to all of you that was great closing words Mick we uh thank you once again for your time uh to to come here and join us on the mixed workshop on the my education program and and I I just want to say thanks again I hope we
1:51:00.9 –>
cross paths soon and uh again and uh be able to to see each other but just thank you so much for joining us today and sharing your opinions absolutely fantastic and thank you very much guys for being willing to listen to my wafflings and I hope to see some of you of my future concerts please don’t be afraid to come and say hello I don’t bite I know I look like I might but I don’t uh and I love to speak to people it’s one of my passions in life this job has afforded me that I’ve gone everywhere in the world and I’ve met people for more walks of life and that is truly wisdom and texture in my for my personal life and I thank you all and good luck guys enjoy your careers and I’ll see all you guys soon well done that’s a beautiful invite I’m sure many will take you up on that and it’s it’s great well we can share that especially on the moment so uh thanks again I want to say thanks to Gavin Kanan our
1:52:00.2 –>
director of the education department at Meyer sound who uh puts this whole department together and keeps it intact and Jason mccarrick the event coordinator today and of all of our seminars and webinars we really appreciate that and a very special thanks to John and Helen Meyer of myersound who for years in operating this uh and and supporting this education program to help all of you out there I use your equipment more wisely and intelligently and to be able to get the best results you can no matter where you’re at and what your field is so we really appreciate that support from John and Helen Myron thank you very much so uh all to all of you great careers keep up the great work keep up the passion wishing you all the best that you have a very successful career we really thank you for your time and then joining us here today so we’ll see you on the next go round come join us again goodbye
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