Guy, I am fairly happy with the EQ of this comprehensive monitor system. All for what is it I haven't addressed the EQ of the drum sub yet. One of the reasons for this is that I he is not used to us vocally. So there's not really much point in doing anything with a 58. So, when we come to talk about the band a little bit later on, we're going to go through each one of the positions. And I'm going to try and arrange some appropriate sort of playback.

I've got some samples of stuff on my computer, some bass, drums, bits of piano, all that kind of thing, which, because I have the time Because my mythical band haven't shown up yet, I'm going to just approximate a couple of inputs to check a couple of things. But in the meantime, in anticipation of all of the musicians in the band singing, I have set up a bunch of vocal microphones. And I just like to talk about a few little things here. What I've done is I've spun each mic into its own local wedge, but not into any of the others except the lead vocal mic, which is all over all of them. I'm going to use data as a starting point. So each one of the singers can hear themselves.

I'm sure that one or other of them will want to hear each other. It's usually the case with backing singers. Usually there's some mutual pitch exchange going on. But I don't want to second guess that I'm going to wait for the instructions, providing at least they can hear themselves, certainly as far as their confidence is concerned, you know, they know that somebody's done something about it. Now, musicians tend to be on the impatient side as far as monitors are concerned, they will very often issue you instructions, sometimes two or three of them all at the same time. And all of them expect to hear immediate results.

And even the two or three seconds it can take you to move between screens and between fader modes on a digital desk can be long enough so you got to do it, you look. So as a result of this, what I like to do is I like to concentrate on getting the home stage sound sorted out before I pay any real attention to Front of House. Now Front of House does obviously affect the whole monitor system because it's making a an acoustic contribution. To the whole environment. So do sound check with from details on. But I tried to make the band thinking about it a little bit by pointing out that what I'm going to do is run the pie at 60% of show level, not at full show level.

This does two things. It gives me an idea of what the room and stage sound like together. But at the same time, it doesn't swamp the stage with reflections from all the hard surfaces in an empty room. This room for example, having a small pipe system on the floor, not very much more than head height, I would expect the front of house to be absolutely inaudible on the stage. When this room is full of people when they accept Of course of the sub frequencies, which are non directional. And even though these are cardioid subs, they will stick still be some sub.

And I tend to try and use that to help me as a monitor engineer. because it saves me having to try and make much smaller cabinets produce similar sub, it's very difficult to get 80 hertz and below out of a monitor wedge even though some of the paperwork says that their frequency response goes well down that way. And yeah, you can get a nice good deep solid kick drum out of a proper pair of wedges. But if you can stay a little help from the PA, then so much the batter rarely talk about a few things. microphones, microphone stands. I've already talked about the misbehavior that we can expect from people who will do that sort of thing.

It only takes one good piece of cooking feedback, to cure them forever have the tendency to grab them. modified, my personal view is let them hang themselves. Because otherwise you're just standing there watching all the time anticipating somebody grabbing your microphone, which is what somebody shouldn't do anyway. I'm a good believer in allowing people to teach themselves a few silent lessons in handling of microphones. There are some people who will continually refuse to not hold the microphone like this because it's a fashion statement. And making them hold the microphone properly is like making them go on stage.

In unfashionable clothes, they're not going to do it. So I have got some emergency procedures, mostly somebody who's going to do this. Then I take a center frequency around about one K, three octaves wide and cuts six dB of it. And when the The performer says no mid range in my voice when I go up to the microphone and go well there is in mind. There you go quad era to demonstrate them as they say. I feel other things when you've done your soundcheck, I like to keep the microphone stands for my vocals because they've been set to the correct height by the musicians who were saying check them.

And so I was spike. Everything on the stage I will label on Spike all the wedges and I will spike the positions of the three mortifying feet and I will write the artist name or stage position on a piece of tape which I stick to a leg of the stand on tight the vocal microphones away and hide them somewhere. Nobody else uses them. So I can guarantee my vocal mics are at the correct height. This is particularly important for people who sing and play guitar because you can't do anything other than just you Have a quick grab if you play any guitar and if the microphone stand is significantly wrong. Although there are some people who consider this to be enormously humorous, isn't funny for long.

Really if you're singing this all is another thing I do from regularly working with an artist who doesn't come to soundcheck is I carry a piece of string around with me with a loop that just fits around the ball of a 58. And I measure the distance using the string and a piece of colored tape on which I write the label of the name of the musician. So one bit of string can do all my mic stands on stage. I know every day, they're at the correct height. I could put my hand on my heart and say, truthfully, yes, I measured it. Boom stands Generally I give to all musicians a standard, because even with singers, you never know if they're going to play an instrument, and the whole deal with a boom stand is that you can get the microphone into the correct presentation and still allow the musician room enough to play a high bodied instrument like a jumbo acoustic guitar, for example.

Similarly, with keyboard players, you'll need a boom stand to do the stand from the side or from in front of the keyboard. If you do do that, you may find you need to extend the boom to its full length. If you do that, make sure that it's parallel with the mic foot underneath it. Otherwise, the mic stand has a tendency to fall over maybe I can demonstrate this to see extend this boom to its full length and be noticed your microphone stands. Undo the clutch before you'd And maybe don't just grab it and try and force it, because it will move. But it will also eventually break.

So here we can now see a kind of an over the top sort of keyboard microphone arrangement, that of a piano a singie. I turn it this way, that's why it's nice and stable, or to overturn it so as to is no longer the boom is no longer parallel with the foot that's extending under it and as you can see, has a tendency to fall over much more easily. Think about the presentation ready. There are all sorts of other ways in which, particularly people singing into microphones can cause you problems. A few of the classics are the man who Sam checks and then comes out on stage, wearing mirror shades and a Stetson. These are reflective surfaces.

They will reflect sound from the wedges back into the microphone, that's reducing your threshold of feedback, making feedback control much more difficult because the whole thing is a lot less predictable. So I try and do a whole bunch of stuff to microphones that simulate any of the surprises that I want yet, I do the beach canceling glasses, again can make quite a substantial difference. The state of how much moisture you have on your skin, particularly if you get sweaty, your forehead becomes all shiny it becomes a really reflective surface. And there are a whole bunch of other things to consider here ready as far as musicians are concerned, harmonicas, melodic is all that sort of stuff, which involve people actually playing on the microphone again, this is an old harmonica position. So Monique is particularly the old school chromatic tonight are really loud And if you've got a decent vocal level, and your singer is neither a nor the familiar, or a user of proximity effectively did singing about this distance and the mic, then you're going to have quite a lot of gain on it.

So when they launch into the harmonica solo, you may well see a very considerably surprised expression on the face of all the other musicians, as the harmonica comes out of the wedge welding level, and makes it impossible for them to do anything else. So do keep your eye on people who look like they might count for monikers in their pockets. You never can tell. They're a bunch of other things. I really like to make musician centric all the instruments they're going to use. So, for example, particularly hollow bodied instruments, violins cellos Viola's mandolin acoustic guitars, cellos all of these need to have considerable attention paid to them, you need to set about finding the appropriate resonant frequency of the body of the instrument.

This I do using the parametric equalizer on the desk. With a very narrow q and a boost of about 60 billion I sweep the filter up and down. And that usually serves when the feedback starts to illustrate where the problem frequencies it's a good idea to warn your musician that you're going to do this before you do. Because some musicians, particularly musicians, and the classical School of things, tend not to like amplified music anyway. Or intelligent activities like unplugging wedges and hiding microphones and all that kind of stuff is really quite common with orchestras. So yes, it's easy to rotate them early.

So I try not to do this. In fact, I try really hard not to be irritating at all. There are a few other little tips that I would give you as a monitor engineer at soundcheck time. I was make sure that I am relatively clean and presentable. Don't have snot thing in there to me nose or grave each danger or hard boiled egg in the bed and I'm not wearing my breakfast in front of me shirt if I can possibly avoid it. I also have breath mints and chewing gum all the time on the monitor desk.

And before I go and talk to the popstar, I will consume some of same because it doesn't matter how good a monitor engineer you are, if you have severe halitosis. She will not be asked back. Because we have to get close in close proximity to musicians to talk to them in loud environments. It's important that you are presentable. I also like to have a towel and a bottle of water as well as these the two items that are most commonly requested during the course of soundcheck very often the one to wipe up the spillage of the other. But yeah, so it's always a good idea to have a couple of little hand towels and a couple of bottles of water stashed somewhere behind the monitor desk.

So if the need arises, you can appear immediately with a smiling confident face going, there you go. Right I'm going to talk about musical instruments as opposed to vocals at a little bit greater length in a few minutes. I think before I go back to the monitor desk and start demonstrating this time, should say a little thing about the human voice. I think as a monitor engineer, because my brief is to present my client with a flat sounding system that evenly responds throughout the frequency spectrum that so I try to make as many and varied a range of sounds when I'm EQ queuing, as I can, and I like to use my own voice to EQ. I would never use any kind of music program to try and EQ monitors. Because the essential thing about monitors is it's all about getting the vocal clarity.

Pretty much all the other instruments are secondary. Unless of course, you have a band with no singing. And there are some about not very many. The only one I can think of that I've ever worked with, there's a bunch of hippies called I was Rick denticles, who had the extreme fine good taste and decorum not to sing. So yeah, now you Go. I mumble all sorts of nonsense into microphones any old crap that comes into my head.

But musicians never go to microphones and go 12123. So I just tried to talk reasonably Normally, I do do a bit of counting, but only in foreign languages and just very for a bit of a giggle. It is however important to make sure that you introduce a variety of sounds into the process, particularly peas, Q's, T's and SS. Or she can add a P and a Q, I've got this little pressure pockets that can make him white pop and distort and s particularly can identify problems with the high frequency drivers that ordinary speech won't drive Measure. I don't try to vary myself in it once I've calibrated the system in amplitude and distance from the microphone. There are some musicians who will stand here and saying no, I can't hear it.

And when you say well, could you please get close to the microphone? by sight? No, this is how I like to sing. So they can be some difficulties in getting gain before feedback in difficult situations. Particularly if the drum kit is loud as a function of the total sound pressure level input, the diaphragm of the microphone, the instruments are greater proportion of that than the vocal. So that can be an issue.

But yes, as I say, I like to get right on and pull right off the microphone. And I have a little challenges for myself whereby I start calibrating myself every morning by using a spectrum analyzer Which I thought was most done to case. And my challenge every day is without having heard a musical instrument to whistle one k 1000 cycles try it on a daily basis if you don't have perfect pitch, it's harder than you think. I'm awake otherwise about a total of half flat. And after all these years I still think I've got a cracked and I'm wrong every time. It's really interesting psychology.

So yeah, I tend to try and do a bit of messing about you know, and generally behave like I imagine a singer might in order to identify any possible difficulties and hey, if you need such a go for us dodge dodge Cox economy Hey, oh, Leeds Kona noises How about I also use mouth shapes to throw and identify potentially problematic feedback fuse. I do this in order to simio in order to try and make the microphone have a resonantly sensitive surface in me in immediate proximity to it. So maybe I can demonstrate Actually, this again, increasingly tendency towards feedback. If I did the classic Second thing, get right on the microphone and then open my mouth or a cow you could hear so already beginning to become unstable. And if I go any more down that road, uh huh, Hey, uh huh, oh, this is more extreme behavior than what is likely to expect from a singer.

And that's what I tried to do is to cover all eventualities that I think I might be encountering. So there are no unpleasant surprises, right? Oh, I think this stage is Pretty much band ready, so I'm going to wait for them to mythically arrive. And in the meantime, I am going to go and do some setup at Front of House. One of the last things I am going to do though However, before I leave the stage to the band is that I'm going to open all the vocals in the front of house layer, I'm going to send them to some reverbs and put them on in the house. I'm going to come up here and I will listen to each one of the microphones.

Now it's in the PA as well, to find out the order of magnitude of change that I'm likely to expect the poi being off to being on because it certainly will have a an effect on what I hear on stage. And it is mostly not a positive one. Certainly in terms of definition of speech intelligibility of bet how to pick out the frequencies that you want to pitch to Mostly, the PA system, which is you're hearing live frequencies and room reflections is a detriment rather than a help. So that's what I'm going to do. I'm just going to pop out to the front of his desk, I'm going to put the front house layer on, and I'm going to send all the vocals to a reverb to turn them up nice and loud in the house. Come back and have another listen and see what damage has been done to my lovely work.

Okay, the PA system is now on and I'll put a generous helping of reverb on all these microphones. Just having a listen to the whole thing to see how badly the front of house masks what I can hear on the stage. And surprisingly, I can actually still hear the monitors loud and clear which had very little effect as a courtesy thing as a monitor engineer. If there are any effect In the monitors, I will always meet them for speaking between songs. Some people don't like this, but if they want me to not do it, then I need to have positive instruction in advance. Otherwise I will do it.

Because I just think it's ready enough. Somebody speaking in between tunes from a club stage, it sounds like it's in St. Paul's Cathedral. Very much like I'm doing now. In fact. There we go. We're all quite happy about this.

I'm just gonna test the other microphones. Stage right down here, hey. And stage left over here, hey, and the microphone of the drummer. Just, hey, and that all sounds pretty good to me. Let's just do a tiny little bit of feedback for this microphone might be a bit loud. But again, I won't know till the I'm against Sarah and I talk to him.

When musicians do first appear up on stage. What I like to do is I go to visit them, I introduce myself, I write their names down on the little notepad that I'm carrying with me. And I do a quick little monitor mix interview for each one of them. Because I like to start soundcheck with monitors, I get a very approximate gain for front of a listener and I'll leave the PA system off until the band have built monitor system mixes that they like I then once everybody's reasonably happy playing together, oh that introduced the front of house slowly to see how much collateral damage it does to the musicians ability to perceive their monitor mixes. And then I make the according the appropriate according adjustments if you start out with the front of house on and no monitors The bank can make a whole series of assumptions that are not necessarily correct.

Like they're gonna be able to hear themselves in the show. So in order to build that confidence in themselves, it may as a monitor engineer, and as the kit, I spend most of my time working on monitors until everybody in the stage tells me they're happy. There are a few other things to watch out for feedback wise, ambient resonance, the bass drum and the drum has got hasn't got his foot on the pedal. Very often, if there's a lot of bass drum in the drum fill, a smaller movement will start off a symbiotic vibration which becomes feedback or what I call a howl around and that it's not the squeak that you get when you stick a mic in a wedge, but rather a slow building low frequency rumble that can be really irritating in the ballad, particularly if during the course of the ballad, the drum is nipped off.

Repeat in those no one at To put their foot on the beta to bring it into contact with the batter head of the drum, just to stop its resonance. This is one reason why I like to run the drum sub separately to the wedge is that that kind of sub based feedback, I can make it stop without turning the drummer's monitor mix off and him becoming concerned about his ability to himself during the show or annoyed that it keeps going on and off. Yeah, I really like musicians to be relaxed, chilled out so possibly can at Sam jack, because nobody wants to be there for How's everyone wants to be on after dinner. And I certainly don't want to be the bloke that makes them stand on stage doing not very much for an hour while I solve one particular problem. So I like to try and get as ahead of the game as I can.

I'm always ready with me spike type and make pens so as soon as the band walk off, I can start the labeling process. sighs so I think that's as much as I really need to tell you about the preparation for the stage the rest is now band dependent. So there it is. The last bit of prepping for my soundcheck is to play a few Sims again through the poi as well as through the monitor system if I can. That's what I'm going to do next.