Turning Up The Suck - the Soundcheck and Sound Engineer Nightmare Thread

But I hate getting to a gig where it says "load in at 4, soundchecks start at 5, yours is at 5.30" and you get there when it says and you sit there for TWO HOURS waiting for the sound engineer to turn up.

It just seems like such a self perpetuating cycle. Why are bands late? Because they've learned that schedules are wrong. Pisses me off no end.

When we set up the PA company, we both agreed on one rule - NO CLUB BANDS. They pay well, but you wind up wanting to kill yourself.

The boss books a gig in Ashington with a club band. "What the fuck are you doing" I say, "They're paying good money" sez the boss. OK, we'll try it once.

We set up the PA in a big lavish working men's club in Ashington. The band are called "Sex". They have 2 female singers, one blonde, one dark haired. Their USP is, I guess "raunchy". They open with one of their own numbers, the chorus of which goes "whip me, baby, whip me", the rest of the set is Tina Turner, Heart, MOR female vox, "raunchy". The band are proficient, but what the hell. The one odd thing is the keyboard player, a pretty goth boi, who looks totally out of place.

During the interval, when the bingo is being called, the boss comes up to me. "What do you think?" he says. "This is terrible", I reply, "it's not worth it". "But they want to book us 'till christmas!" (it is June)

I go back to the mixing desk. A enormous woman taps me on the shoulder "are you with the band?" "No", I reply, "I'm just the soundman". She goes off into this enormous tirade "they're fucking rubbish! Call themselves sex? I like sex, me, and this lot give sex a bad name" etc etc. Really, they aren't that bad.

We pack up and go home. somehow, I have agreed to do this again next week in Gateshead.

I don't have that many sound engineer nightmares to relate. We're fairly undemanding, we're not Steely Dan you know, it doesn't have to be perfect. I think you have to get the basics right - be able to hear everyone else on stage etc, but that you have some tolerance for different rooms, PAs and the like. The biggest problem is bands who have some idea in their head of what they sound like that they are trying to reproduce *perfectly*.

Also, be nice to the Sound Engineer! Buy them a pint! Smile!

The band turn up, and help us unload. they are, I should say, really nice people. The guitarist is great, a genuine "salt of the earth" type. He amazes us by picking up the enormously heavy amp rack single-handed. During the interval, I'm sitting at the side of the stage, watching the bingo being called. A woman shouts "house!" a voice from the clientele "go 'ome and make tea, woman!!" I go backstage. I can still remember the scene on the stairwell. The boss is looking down the stairs, looking dejected. "it's fucking shit, this, isn't it" he says. No more working men's club gigs then.

However... the amount of crap I've put up with from sound engineers who assume that because I'm female, I don't know how to set up my amp, plug into a direct box, levelcheck my pedals... Once we even had a soundman GET ONSTAGE and start fucking about with our amps - without being asked. Do you think he'd ever do that to a male band? He wouldn't dare!

(OK, the guy who got onstage and started f*cking with the amps was a story in and of himself, he was the Worst. Soundman. Ever. on so many levels.)

The boss was in the habit of working out exactly how many mics we'd need for a particular gig, and leaving that many w/the pa. IIRC he was doing another pa somewhere else that night, so he dropped me off w/system 1, and fucked off.

I miced up the drum kit, set up the vocal mics etc, and realised with horror that the mic he'd left me to do the piano with was an sm57, totally unsuitable.

so, for the duration of the gig, I try and try to make the guy's piano playing audible over the kickass backing band the r&r society have put together. It's hopeless, and all night long, people are complaining "I can't hear the piano!" The gig is an ordeal. If he'd left me one more mic, an sm58 even, it would have been a pleasure.

After the gig, the band are backstage blathering with the piano guy. one fo the guitarist's girlfriend is there, unfortunately for him, his wife also turns up. Neither woman knew of the other woman's existence, so there's this massive fight, w/the 2 women going at each other, and the guy, and the guy ineffectively trying to lay down the law to the pair of them. Occasionally, things come flying out of the dressing room door. One of the women reveals that she is pregnant. I am standing on the stage, coiling cables up, unable to not hear any of this. This is awful, just unbeliveably horrible. Just as I finish packing up, the boss turns up, all cheerful, "how did it go?"

Ugh.

brilliant.

This bloke in Birmingham... bah.

OK, after a couple of bad experiences, Ver L0ll1es just started taking our own soundman along on tour. Someone who was used to us and our sound - usually he'd work with the sound engineer to do the setting up, and then mix us himself. Worked fine every single time, and everybody was happy.

In Birmingham... when the bloke said, no, we couldn't use our own soundman, he would do everything himself, I thought that was a bad sign, and honestly, I might have cancelled the gig then and there if our record company guy hadn't set the whole thing up.

The gig was a disaster, soundwise. He soundchecked for AGES, and still couldn't get anything to sound good - couldn't hear the vocals or anything. We decided to just grin and bear it, and try to put on a good show. Disaster. Not only did he not bother to write down his settings or something between the bands, but as we were playing, he was making MASSIVE movements on the mixing board. I'm not talking about minor tweaks and stuff, I'm talking about totally changing the sound on the fly, in the middle of songs.

When that doesn't do the trick, he actually gets up onstage and goes for our bassist's amp, and twiddles a bit before Jane cottons on what's going on. he goes for my amps, but I snarl at him to GET THE FUCK AWAY. Jane ends up having to put her setting back the way they were before the next song cause this guy has mucked them up. Luckily, she's been touring with the same amp for two or three years by this point and can sort it out quite quickly.

God, it was a nightmarish gig. Didn't hear any of my vocals. Didn't get paid either. It would have been a total loss had it not been for one of the best Indian meals of my life on our record company boss. And finding a rare Sonic Boom album in the local second hand record shop!

The band turn up, and they're incredibly fucking arrogant. Really, really horrible. I notice that the keyboard player is the guy from "Sex" haha. They go on about hiow this is a "really important gig for them", as they're setting up, I can't help but notice that the guitarist has an enormous marshall stack with 2 4x12 cabs. Of course, he cranks it up all the way. He refuses to turn down - "my 'tone'", "I need the 'weight of sound'". Even the rest of the band are pissed off at him, but he's adamant.

Of course, it's impossible to get a good, or even listenable sound for the band. We have a decent sized rig for pub gigs, with a proper mixer, and monitor wedges, but it's all useless. The joke is that they're a jangle-era REM knockoff band, so they're trying to do all these harmony vocals, and the guitar is so loud, in this tiny pub room, that you can sometimes barely hear the drum kit.

On top of this, between soundchecking and the gig itself, the guitarist gets so wrecked that he can barely stand up, so his timing is pretty sloppy. It is also obvious pretty soon that the band is in the difficult place where their mates have stopped coming to see them, but they haven't developed a following yet. So, not many people have turned up. So they're not too happy.

After the gig, the drummer confronts me, and accuses me of fucking up their sound out of spite. I come close to hitting him, but decide that I don't want to get a police record over this bunch of cunts.

They refused to pay me.

the pub manager heard & saw all this, and the next day phoned all of the small local venues, and warned them off this band, so I guess they fucked themselves over in the long run. The boss also phoned all the other local pa suppliers, and warned them that this band were non-payers.

I handed in my notice after this gig, it was the final straw.

Before the gig, I asked the keyboard guy about his other band, and he looked me st8 in the eye and told me he didn't know what i was talking about. Ha ha ha fucking ha.

About 2 months after I quit, the (ex) boss phones me up - the poor sod who replaced me has got sick, so he's a man short. It's an "easy one" (haha "easy one") - a bunch of MCs/DJ from the then still fairly fresh uk dance scene. This was, like, a few months after that whole megad0g thing was big. These were nothing to do with them though. The lineup was some big name DJ at the top of the bill, pop fluff in the middle - some guy w/2 female backing singers, and this german woman with a saxophone at the bottom. German woman with saxophone was nice, pop fluff guy was arrogant, big name DJ wasn't there yet. The venue was a big hall in one of the unis in Newcastle. One of the staff was this great & very likeable young woman, who always used to amaze us w/her feats of strength at load out time when we put pa systems in there.

The gig was sponsored by some beer co. and was free. It was quite widely advertised. About 10 people turned up. The DJ turned up halfway through saxophone woman's set, and basically said "fuck this" and buggered off. One of the 10 people in the audience wound up DJing for the rest of the evening.

Saxophone woman had this one song, the lyrics of which went "i met you in a pub/beside a soho club" over and over and over and over.

pop fluff man's songs were all ultra-tacky drug/sex references, the only example of which I can remember is the female backing singers going "when you put your love in me/baby it's like exctasy" FOR FUCK'S SAKE.

Here is the punchline. I had to leave just as pop fluff man was going on stage, because I had to get the last bus home! I had discussed this with the ex-boss, and he was fine about it, or perhaps he was so desperate he had no other choice, or perhaps he thought I'd actually stay (I couldn't!) so, I showed the strong woman (whos name I forget) the basics of operating the desk before I went. I later found out from some of the other staff there that unfortunately she hashed it up in some way, which is obviously not her fault, I mean she'd never used a mixer before. After his set though, pop fluff man went up to her and started haranguing her, eventually he called her a stupid cunt, and she hit him once, and he went down like a sack of shit.

I think one of pop fluff man's singles got to like no35 or something.

This was just over 10 years ago. I've never operated a pa systemn since, I'm glad to say, and for all I had a lot of fun & good times (none of which of course make for interesting reading) I would not recommend it as a career.

I've seen some doozys - a band playing the prestigious Skelmersdale Labour Club that took EIGHT HOURS to soundcheck, a guy from Morning Runner during a tight soundcheck for 4 bands in 2 hours take half an hour getting the amount of treble right in one monitor, one of those "I need my tone" bands, not just guys, who got in a 1k rig for a tiny pub gig (the crowd stood outside).

By far the most heart wrenching incident I saw was with a band whose drummer had quit that very day, so they used a minidisc player with a drum machine backing. After a couple of attempts at songs in soundcheck they realised to their horror there was no way to stop that minidisc stop/play "BEEP" coming through the PA a lot louder than the drums (which seemed to be recorded pretty quiet and with a lot of hiss). Deafening. BEEP!. I saw the singer on the stairwell after the gig, staring into space. He looked like he'd been there some time.

At a club gig, there is NEVER any reason to have drums in the monitor. If you can't hear the drums onstage, then TURN SOMETHING DOWN.

I mean, even playing freaking cattlesheds like the Shepherds Bush Empire and the Manchester Academy, we never had more than a bit of snare in the monitors.

My particular soundcheck bugbear is soundmen bypassing your £1500 Ampeg bass stack and d.i.-ing you straight into the PA, to "get a good clear signal". They just can't seem to get it into their heads that some bands aren't four-to-the-floor rock, and don't want the kick drum blasting and the bass plodding away at the bottom of the mix. Fuckers.

Anyone else ever had the pleasure of dealing with the sound people Upstairs at the Garage in London?

DI-ing the bass is crap.

Best sound engineer in the London toilet circuit was/is a woman in her late 40's called IIRC Rhona, total star, I used to love doing gigs with her. Married to an ex member of Thin Lizzy too.

DI-ing the bass is crap
Yup. Matt #2, how did you let them get away with this?

Someone has taped over the "Soundcraft" on the board and replaced it with "Soundcrap" which is pretty accurate.

When we used to do a club there, got talking to the staff, and apparently it's not been updated or overhauled in decades - they take loads of money at that venue, but never ever reinvest it in decent equipment. Gah.

No seriously I think my keybds will have to go on the floor on the left, or maybe on a temporary extension made of beer crates. I am on guitar as well tonight so I need to squeeze in my Marshall as well.

(Also we didn't get a soundcheck, despite being promised one, yet the local darlings got half a fucking hour)

Anyway, we end up doing sound for "The B@dlees", who are generic crapola frat rock via Pearl Jam or something, sort of a proto-Creed, I guess. However, they have decided that in order to look ultra-cool, they're going to use wireless in-ear monitors for the lead singer, and have brought a pair with them. The idea is that the band will go in the right ear, his voice in the left. Of course, none of the local yokels on my crew could possibly be skilled enough to run monitors, so they've brought their monitor guy with them to run our board. Everything is going fine, the wedge monitors are working well, but for some reason, neither in-ear is working. Traveling monitor dolt, who I am now sure has no idea of what he's doing starts plugging and replugging everything in sight - which does absolutely nothing.

I offer my help, am sort of roughly dismissed and blocked away from the board in some sort of indignant "I've got this" response. Now it's time to turn up EVERYTHING, masters, sends, effect sends, etc. The main wedges start to approach some sort of critical mass, little whispers of feedback having become constant, band is glaring at him, lead singer now earnestly freaking out and saying he's getting nothing over and over again. I try to help, and am again dismissed, this time with a comment about how our gear is "a bunch of fucked up broken shit." I let it pass and step back again. Suddenly, in a moment of triumph, he gives me a look of triumph and reaches over and UNMUTES BOTH IN-EAR SENDS.

Lead singer hits the ground as if he has had a piano dropped on him, and starts clawing at his ears attempting to remove the monitors. It should be noted that I am able to hear his in-ears unmute from about 20 FEET AWAY. 250 dumbfounded radio execs stare on, confused, as he regains his footing, band grinding to a halt, and attacks the monitor guy by diving over the console at him.

The B@dlees never really "made it" in Minneapolis, IIRC. How odd.

actually, hurting, do you remember the show you did at tr1t0ne with l0w sk13s where the doorman nearly got in a fistifght with that band's drummer? yeeesh.

i have plenty of club management nightmare stories, but i guess thats for another thread, right?

Really? I've never come across this phenomenon...

OK, one to offer the floor... in 20 years of playing guitar, this is only the second time that this has happened to me. (The other was an utterly terrible soundman who was clearly on drugs at the time.)

We had a soundcheck. It wasn't great, but we did the best we could. The guy had no idea how to handle the laptop. The sound was really bad during our set, this weird booming foldback from the room. I had to stick my finger in my hear to hear myself on most of the harmonies.

However, halfway through our set, I suddenly hear my guitar cut out. I turn around, and the soundman is ONSTAGE, fucking about with the settings of my amp.

No prior requests to turn up or down. No line-check problems during soundcheck. The guy just hops up onstage and helps himself to my equipment in the middle of a guitar solo.

Has this EVER happened to any of you?

As far as I'm concerned, this is just the rudest and most patronising - not to mention thoroughly unprofessional - thing that a soundman could possibly do.

I stopped the song then and there. Pulled the plug and walked off the stage. I didn't know any other way to express how angry I was and how unacceptible this was.

(The venue was shite in a hundred other ways, too - bizarrely, they had the bands soundcheck in the same order they were to play, rather the usual and more sensible reverse order. No one had any idea what time things were supposed to happen - our stage time when we got there was 15 minutes earlier than we'd been told in our confirmation email. Plus, they tried to make us go on half an hour early because they didn't book an opening band, even though none of our friends had got there yet.)

Has this ever happened to you? What would you have done? I mean, I know it was unprofessional to walk off, but I just couldn't continue under those conditions.

Good for you! You could have punched or kicked the guy, ala Pete Townshend. He did that to someone who got on his stage in the States. But no need to Monday-morning quarterback it.

Right freaking on! I'm all for publically embarrassing the guy

It's never happened to me -it's insanely and stupendously wrong in every respect. I hope it never does because, in the heat of the moment, I honestly think I'd have punched him out.....or worse. I can be a bit, er...intense at gigs, especially if there are technical problems or someone is being an arse, and I don't know that I would have held myself back.

Uh, I would have finished the song.

Jordan, has it ever actually happened to you?

Does it matter?

I would have finished the song.

Context clues.

Yes, it does matter.

It's easy to say "Uh, I would do this..." but until you've been in that situation, you can't actually say how you would react. It was probably a stupid question to ask, in that case, I guess.

(I mean, I can say, "If a guy punched me in the face, I would sit down and meditate and try to think of non-violent solutions until someone called the cops" but chances are, if a guy *actually* walked up and punched me in the face I would hit him back.)

Maybe someone else could finish a song once their guitar had been turned off, but I generally need to be able to hear myself to play.

Also, since we're being all literal here, is your name Jordan? I was under the impression you were called Nick. Context clues, you know?

I think I would have finished the song too - when you walk off the stage you tend to just make yourself look bad to the audience, most of which just wouldn't understand that you're pissed at the engineer for tweedling your knobs.

Also walking off stage is itself kind of unprofessional, and two unprofessionalisms don't make a right.

Has this ever happened to you? What would you have done? I mean, I know it was unprofessional to walk off, but I just couldn't continue under those conditions.

-- Masonic Boom, Wednesday, July 18, 2007 11:12 AM (2 days ago) Bookmark Link

It was probably a stupid question to ask, in that case, I guess.

It was a good question to ask. The stupid part was getting a bee up your ass when someone deviated from just validating your actions.

Uh, well, I'm a drummer, but people have done some pretty fucked up shit when I've been playing and I've never thrown a tantrum in the middle of a performance.

Maybe it's different for guitar players though.

I would have finished the song and unenthusiastically and then after the show I would've gotten really drunk and surly and complained a lot to people standing around and also people on the internet. Yes it has happened to me.

er, finished the song unenthusiastically

But I might also look for a way to insert subtle jabs at the sound guy/venue/audience/God in my between-song banter.

Yeah, if I was really on the ball I'd probably call out the engineer over the microphone and embarrass him. But it's always hard to think of those things in the moment.

As someone who's often on the other side of the board, calling out the engineer, although satisfying, will make matters much, much worse. Like "How do I shot unbearable monitor feedback" worse.

Here's what I realistically imagine my response would be: stare at the back of the engineer's head for a while while he fucks with my amp, turn to the audience and give them a look like "WTF?" wait until he leaves the stage, return my settings to where they had been, make a mocking comment over the microphone. This of course would lead to shit from the engineer, as John notes. After the show I would act like it was no big deal but secretly I would sulk about it for awhile. Then I would post about it on this thread. Thus concludes this installment of "What If?" theater.

You're supposed to stand to attention and salute while the engineer does his fucking around, then encourage the audience to give him a big round of applause for all his hard work. Optional: launch into "For He's A Jolly Good Fellow".

just remembered the French soundman for headlining touring band at the B&G in Kentish Town putting massive mid scoops on absolutely everything. When asked why he would reply 'it iz ze french way'. Think he Frenched his way into that job by appropriating a stereotype. I could see the band had mid cranked up on all their amps too. Sigh.

I had a guy argue & ultimately win re ditching my amp and running me direct- control freak. It sucked, the overall sound sucked, his control freakery sucked... and it all went down before I could fulfill any stereotypes by playing loud as fook.

that gig was forgettable, except for the part where the sprinklers went off later that night and wet up everything except for our gear. oh, and a rat bit this girl on the foot during the sprinkler melee. and an old lady took a vicious sprinkler spray to the face, exclaiming 'ohOhOHOHOH', like sprinkler bukkake.

actually, that gig was pretty memorable

scooped mids suck

my car stereo basically has no mids, i can't take it anymore

car stereos mid is scooped ridiculously. They seem to be in collusion with the radio stations on the loudness war.

bands are way more annoying / useless than sound engineers ime

so true.

STOP TURNING IT UP.

might patent some sort of amp knob lock.