Which brings me back to the thing about guitarists and the PA. This may seem like a contradiction, but really, performing and mixing are two different worlds. The audience is focused on the artist, while the house system exists to deliver what they expect to hear.
FOH engineers and the artists they work with often have different purposes. This is likely the heart of the issue, for several reasons. But are the techs and FOH, and maybe even FOH and monitors communicating? For that matter, how about the artists and FOH? Instrumentalists and their techs are probably communicating effectively. Sure, artists and monitor engineers are most likely talking and getting things sorted out. What I’ve observed over the years is that in many ways, these four parties don’t necessarily communicate as well as possible. Perhaps the system tech can have an influence as well, but generally will plan for a flat PA and correct gain structure, with perhaps a touch of “flavor” per the FOH engineer’s taste. In my view, this chain contains the most important parts of the equation. The four types that I can ID in this scenario include the artist (musician), his/her tech, the monitor engineer, and the front of house engineer. It got me to thinking about how difficult communication can be between different types of people on and around the stage. Several of them explained that with a proper PA, the right microphone and a decent bloke behind the desk, the player’s tone should be amplified just as he or she desired it to be. Some players are known for their particular tone, with one of the most famous being the “brown sound” of Eddie Van Halen, epitomized on the band’s first album.īut what do these folks mean when they say their tone is lost in the PA? Further, the thread included a second group pointing out that this doesn’t have to be the case. However, the sonic signature coming from a guitar rig is very personal and can indeed make a big difference in a song. In a way, this quest can never be fully satisfying, because there really is no “perfect” tone. This particular discussion, on a music forum, was a thread about “the great tone we’ve spent years perfecting that is destroyed when it goes through a PA.” (You guessed it – I’m talking about guitar players here.) These guys and gals do indeed often spend an inordinate amount of time fiddling with strings, pickups, pedals, guitar cables, tubes and the like, all in an effort to realize the holy grail: the perfect guitar tone for a particular song or passage. It happened just a while ago, and the context is relevant to what we do in our business of live sound. Being the online forum lurker that I sometimes am, there are times when I’m struck by a pattern or trend that was never clear before (for whatever reason).
0 kommentar(er)
