ROBB ALLAN ON MIXING THE SOUND FOR LIVE BANDS
Medd, James. The Word (Dec 2011): 40-41.
Abstract (summary)
Sound engineer Robb Allan offers his seven rules for mixing sound for live bands.
Full text
SOUND ENGINEERS ARE guitarists who didn't practise hard enough," says Robb Allan, "that's the classic line."And indeed, back in the '80s you could have seen him playing guitar on The Tube with Camp Fabulous or on its offshoot show TX45 with Alfresco's Picnic, but by his late twenties this supremely amiable Scotsman was spending more time mixing sound for friends' bands. He then worked as in-house soundman at the Mean Fiddler in north London, easing its transition from country & western club to indie venue, and at The Underworld in Camden for grunge, Pearl Jam included. His big break came in 1989 with a four-band bill for Heavenly Records, when he asked the Welsh punk band on the bottom of the bill if their amps went any louder. As he was the first person to ask them that, they invited him on tour with them. He worked for the Manic Street Preachers for 17 years, moving from sound engineer, tour manager and Richey's co-driver for gigs where "there'd be 30 or 40 people but about 20 of them would be journalists" to mixing sound for 80,000 at Cardiff Millennium Stadium on 31 December 1999, where the band came on stage and the crowd's roar was "a warm, beery wind that swept past me".
In between be sound-engineered for Massive Attack, Coldplay and Lisa Stansfield, for the Brits, the MTV Music Awards and the 2010 World Cup opening ceremony. At 48 he's just taken his "first proper job", for Avid, the company who made the mixing desks he used. Now that he can look back fondly on touring America with Gay Dad or The Thrills, he agreed to share what he'd learned.
1 THERE'S NO EXCUSE ANY MORE
In a pub venue there's only so much you can do as a sound engineer. You're just reinforcing the ambient sound. The authence is so close to the band that most of what they're going to hear is coming off the amps on the stage, so you just make sure they can hear the vocals and maybe a little bit of the drums in the PA and that's it. But in a theatre or arena, it's different. At that professional level, sound engineering is way more technical than it was. It's no longer so spontaneous - before, every day was a fresh canvas, another desk, a different occasion - and that's much better. I think that's had a vast amount to do with the increasing popularity of live music. People pay £40, £50 to see a band and they don't want it to be just OK for the first three songs while you get settled in. There's absolutely no excuse for bad sound any more. If you go to a gig with bad sound, ask for your money back.
2 YOU HAVE TO TAKE YOURTURNDRIVING
When I started, there was no career structure in sound. You can go on courses now, but back in the day it was: can you do the job competently, do you remain sober until the gig is finished and are you the kind of person four blokes can sit in a minibus with for three months? That hasn't changed. There's a lot of sitting around watching movies, but [the band] don't want to be d rivi ng around America with someone who hasn't got a sense of humour.
3 A GOOD GIG SOUNDS LIKE THE RECORD
When people leave a gig and the sound was good, they'll say, "It sounded like the record." And that's right: if a band has spent a year making a record and they made it sound a certain way, then you've got to respect their choice, their taste. That's the statement they want to make. There's a theme and a sound for an album and it's just the same for a live performance: with Massive Attack it's all about dub and movement; Coldplay is about precision and making it sound like one of those shiny Eno records; the Manies is about raw energy. My job is to make sure I can get the sound from the stage to the authence and then to make sure that, even though it's not going to be exactly the same, I give it that tone or feel.
Nowadays, with the technology that's emerged over the last six years or so, I'd use a console that works with ProTools. During production rehearsals for the tour, which might last six weeks, the band would come in and play the song once, it's recorded and then we can play it back through the desk and keep working on it, produce the live concert as you would produce an album. You can then have, say, Daddy G and 3D from Massive Attack and Neil Davidge their producer sitting there with you and you can ask them how they got a snare sound and then work out how to reproduce that live. Before, they could only know what the manager or their girlfriend told them it sounded like. Now Chris Martin can sit next to you and say, "I think we need more backing vocals at this point."
4 THE BAND NEED A GOOD NIGHT EVERY NIGHT
At production tour level, when you start bringing your own audio equipment and speakers, there's the front-of-house engineer who mixes the sound that the authence hears and there's the monitor engineer who mixes the sound that the band hear. They're two very different disciplines. Front of house, it's more about pulling the mix together: the musicians on the stage are playing as a team but they're making audio individually and your job is to make that fit together. It's more creative, perhaps - the striker, while the monitor engineer is more defence. Monitor is a lot to do with man-management skills: you need to be a calm, focused reassuring presence. Part ofthe job is to make sure the band are comfortable. They've got to know that you'll make sure they have a good night every night. U2 even have one guy who mixes for The Edge and another who mixes for the rest ofthe band.
Each band member has a different mix, relayed to them via IEMs - in-ear monitors, moulded specifically to their ear. The bass player will want to hear the drums, the singer wants to hear their own voice, guitar maybe doesn't want to hear the singer and certainly doesn't want to hear the backing vocals. They each expect perfect, studio-standard stereo in their head, with different things appearing in their mix on each track - more ofthe hi-hat or a click track, a cue from somewhere else. It's like playing four games of chess at the same time.
5 BRING A LOT OF CURTAINS
There are plenty of venues that aren't suitable for music: Wembley Arena has a tiled swimming pool underneath it, which is basically a huge reverb chamber. But even there it's possible to get a sound that's not terrible, if you fill it up with soft material. I used to tour with lots of drapes, because sound distortion is all to do with reflections off hard surfaces. IfI saw a hard surface in the back ofthe room and I knew that my speakers were going to hit that and bounce back and make the sound reverby and mushy, then I'd put a curtain up to offset that.
Technology can help you deal with it too. Back in the day, speakers just bled sound in every direction, but now they're very controlled. You can model sound on a computer using architectural drawings to arrange the speakers - the distance between them, the volume, the crossover settings, delay and phase - so that you're not firing all your energy on to hard surfaces. Then you can even have a read-in of how much you'll hear at any position in the authence, before you've even set foot in the venue.
6 YOU CAN STILL SURVIVE ON RELATIVELY LITTLE EQUIPMENT... JUST
My worst night ever was in Glasgow, my home country, at the SECC, with Manic Street Preachers. The band came onstage, pints were flying and I could see one in my peripheral vision coming in from the right, with a perfect head on it like in a cartoon. It hit my desk, an analogue, full on. We did everything - towels, hairdriers - but we knew it was going to go, it was just a question of when. The master control went to the default position, which was the end stop, meaning the whole mix quadrupled in volume. It was the loudest thing you've ever heard, like the end ofthe world. Nicky Wire said he thought someone had let offa bomb. While 50 of my countrymen attempted to sort the situation out by physically assaulting me, we took a very complex mix of 80 channels and stuck it down to about 10, just the essentials - kick drum, snare drum, bass, guitars, piano, one voice. I'd like to say that everybody noticed the difference, but ten channels, that's a concert.
7 YOU'RE AS MUCH IN THE AUDIENCE AS YOU ARE IN THE BAND
As a guitarist, the difference between Lisa Stansfield and the Manic Street Preachers is pretty intense but as a sound engineer it's fine. The principles are the same: play me the album and I can reproduce the sound. But it's also about understanding the authence: a Lisa Stansfield authence doesn't want the kind of volume a Manies authence wants, and they don't want the sub-bass you get with Massive Attack.
One ofthe great things about working at the Mean Fiddler was that you did six bands a night. I learned all ofthe different sounds that musicians make, and how to deal with the sounds and the musicians. You have to get straight to the meat ofthe matter: "What's the essential thing about this band that I need to amplify for the authence?" Because if you're doing you're job correctly, all you're doing is taking what's happening on that stage and making sure that the authence feels a part of it.
For the hour and a half of a concert I can't imagine anything more exciting or satisfying or fun than being the sound engineer. If you produce an album, you have no control over how people listen to it - they could listen to it on a iPod or a cheap speakers - but when you mix a live concert the 5,000 or 50,000 people in that authence hear it exactly how you think it should be heard, at the volume and weight and distribution you think is right for it. It's not so much power, it's a feeling of community, pride that you're the link between the band and the authence.
INTERVIEW BY JAMES MEDD
Indexing (details)
Cite
Narrow subject
Live Recordings, Sound Engineers, Mixing (Recording), Recording Techniques
Broad subject
Sound Recording/Processing/Systems
People
Allan, Robb (sound engineer)
Title
ROBB ALLAN ON MIXING THE SOUND FOR LIVE BANDS
Author
Medd, James
Publication title
The Word
Source details
106
Pages
40-41
Publication year
2011
Publication date
Dec 2011
Year
2011
Publisher
Development Hell Ltd
Place of publication
London, Eng.
Country of publication
United Kingdom
Journal subject
Popular Music, Music, Britain, Pop Culture
ISSN
1479-1498
Source type
Magazines
Language of publication
English
Document type
Commentary
Document feature
Photographs
ProQuest document ID
918014656
Document URL
http://search.proquest.com/docview/918014656?accountid=144516
Last updated
2012-09-17
Database
International Index to Music Periodicals Full Text
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