Going to start this from my perspective as the front of house engineer, therefor hearing what the audience hears. I did two events over the weekend the first a club gig with one band, then a multi band event. On the first gig I also supplied backline for a four piece band drums lead guitar acoustic guitar and bass playing covers. For this band I gave the guitarist a Bluguitar amp 1 with an 8”200 watt cab into which he plugged his guitar and pedal board. There was 1500 watts of monitors on a 3k front of house. The result was a near as dammit perfect controllable guitar sound ( to my ears ) where I was capable of lifting the guitar where needed and burying it when it wasn’t. The tone of it again to my ears sounded great. The gig went very well and the audience of about 150 people were very happy as were the band but at the end of the gig I spoke to the guitarist who said he would have preferred a bigger cabinet for “his sound”. Had I done this then I know, from experience, all we would have heard was guitar!
On the second gig, there were a lot of metal bands with a selection of 4x12’s and heads from all the usual suspects including Kempers and none of them gave me sound which was anything but mid/bass mush. None of them complained about their sound and the audience were happy but I found it very hated to pick out anything distinctive to boost to the audience.
So the point of this is how much attention do you lot pay to your guitar sound relating it to how it sits in a mix as opposed to what you think it should sound. And I suppose how many would take advice from a FOH engineer on what you could do to make it sound better to an audience or do you just insist on “your sound”
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I've done gigs where we've done our own sound and I thought I sounded terrible but recordings have shown the opposite.
But it can sometimes be hard to know if they're right... at the last gig I did (on bass) the soundman commented that he was getting a spike at 2KHz - I like to boost this because it makes the bass more 'present' in the mix, but obviously I'd overdone it slightly, so I pulled the slider down a bit and all was well... directly in front of the stage. According to a couple of people at the back of the room the bass was too quiet, and on stage it felt too muddy.
But overall, acceptable for a small bar with poor acoustics and a fairly crappy PA. I'm certainly not going to insist on getting 'my sound' on stage if it ruins the overall mix in the room. It's always worth remembering that the EQ knobs on the desk are far more powerful than anything you can do with your amp's sound on stage, so don't try to fight the sound engineer! Co-operation works better .
"Take these three items, some WD-40, a vise grip, and a roll of duct tape. Any man worth his salt can fix almost any problem with this stuff alone." - Walt Kowalski
"Only two things are infinite - the universe, and human stupidity. And I'm not sure about the universe." - Albert Einstein
I don't really have a sound so I'm not precious about it .... in the last ten years I've gig'ed Tech 21, Marshall, Vox, Blackstar and more recently Fender HRD. What ever the amp I'm using I tend to basically have a generic classic rock type sound and a generic clean compressed tone. I don't need a load of volume as I use IEM's and I am happy enough to turn down if asked to a point .......But
There are issues with less experienced sound engineers who think they can mic everything up on a small stage, have the backline whisper quiet and control the whole mix of everything through the PA ..... now in their heads and on paper that might seem a good idea but in reality stage mics ..... especially mics like the good o'l 57 pick up the cab in front of them and the drums to the side. On a small stage you need the guitar level going down the mic much higher in amplitude than the level of drum spill ..... lets say 80% guitar and 20% drum spill is workable but make the guitar player play too quiet and your guitar signal is then more like 60 % guitar and 40% drums . Any attempt to raise the guitar in the PA will just raise the drums as well. Especially cymbal bleed. The effect of this in IEM's is your guitar mic is basically acting as a drum ambient mic, it's a very noticeable and unpleasant effect.
Things that annoy me when I'm doing FOH sound are big jumps in volume from channel \ patch changing .... guitarist not muting the guitar between songs, and having too muddy a sound .... you can reduce top end from the desk but you can't amplify what's not there to begin with
That being said, I often ask the soundman’s opinion on my tone, since I can’t really tell what it sounds like to the audience. If there’s something noticeably amiss then I do appreciate the feedback
Then I like some reinforcement of that amp in a wedge in front of me so I can hear it properly while facing forwards. It also means I can get a bit of feedback from that wedge rather than walking over to the amp (single note compressed sustained type feedback, not full on Pete Townshend).
However not all sound people are competent. Some of the ones that are want an easy life. Some sound people complain of the my sound situation when they want the same thing themselves i.e. their sound.
So why do we get the best gear and band mates to leave the sound to the cheapest quote or a house person weve never heard before?
I have found this to be the best arrangement for me - I can hear my sound and my volume boosts really well, but because I’m off to the side and the V30 is quite beamy the rest of the band can’t hear too much of me, and in both situations the mic doesn’t pick up too much stage spill.
Supportact said: [my style is] probably more an accumulation of limitations and bad habits than a 'style'.
Slightly longer version...we spend a lot of time making sure that the bass and guitars sit together well to produce our overall sound. As with many, from a personal perspective I have my own "sound", but I always try to talk to the sound guy at soundcheck to make sure I'm giving him what he needs, along with an offer to tweak as necessary.
On top of that, I always do a set list specifically for the sound engineer, pointing out where the solos are coming from in each song and whether there's a big dynamic range (we go from really quiet and clean to massively heavy and distorted in a few songs, which usually catches them out). Most completely ignore it, but the ones who pay attention say it helped, so...yeah.
Trouble is, there's a fine line between trying to be helpful and coming across as a diva.
I've often been told my "tone" is really stupidly trebly when people hear it in isolation. But in a band mix with bass and another guitar or keys it works much better than a really fat bassy thing that a lot of internet critics would call "good tone"
- Sounds great noodling at home
- Sounds great on a YouTube demo
- Sounds great in a recorded mix
- Sounds great in a live mix
In my opinion, particularly for distorted stuff, none of them use the same settings.
I monitor via IEM's and set my IEM mix post fader, the mixer is a Behringer XR18 so I can mix from an Android tablet which is attached via a clamp on my Mic stand. With my IEM's being post fader I can hear the exact FOH mix and I can also hear if anything needs adjusting level wise.
- I use a Palmer PDI-09 Di box instead of a guitar amp mic. This plugs into the extension speaker socket of my combo amp (it only takes a tiny current so doesn't affect the amp's speaker). It's permanently velcro'd into the back of my amp so for set-up all I need to do is plug in an XLR cable and I'm sorted.
This fixes the issue of drums bleeding into the guitar "channel".
- For monitoring I use a Behringer B205D "Ultra-Compact 150-Watt PA/Monitor Speaker". This is a tiny yet powerful 2-Channel 8" powered speaker (150W) that perches on a mic stand just to my left. I use it to monitor both my vocal and my guitar.
Crucially, I don't take my monitor feed from the desk. Instead I take my feeds locally, using a passive XLR splitter box (IMG Stage Line 25.1680 2-Channel 3-Way Line Splitter) that sits on the floor at my feet. My vocal mic plugs straight into one channel of this little box, with the "transformer isolated" output of that channel going to one of the Behringer's channels, and the "direct" output going off to the desk. The output from the Palmer similarly feeds into the second channel of the IMG splitter box so my guitar sound gets to the Behringer's second channel and also direct to the desk. I don't bother putting a general FoH monitor mix into the Behringer as I can hear the others in the band well enough from the stage.
This is working well for me at the moment. It's very simple to tweak the Behringer to turn my monitored vocal up or down. I can hear it very clearly even when the band is loud. For guitar, wherever possible I just listen to my amp on stage and turn the guitar channel on the Behringer right down - it only gets turned up when the sound man needs me to turn my guitar amp down, or reEQ it, to the extent that I can't hear myself. But when I do need guitar through the Behringer, it sounds surprisingly good. And the Palmer DI box gives a very nice FoH sound as well in my experience.
I guess this all might sound a bit complicated, but it's quite simple really. I use twin cables to simplify set up: 1 x twin XLR (shortish) from IMG box to Behringer; 1 x twin XLR (longish) from IMG box to desk; 1 x short XLR lead from vocal mic to IMG box; 1 x combo XLR/ guitar lead (longish) between my amp (amp input and Palmer output at one end; my pedalboard output and IMG box input at the other).
Bottom line is that I don't need to fight with the sound man. I set my amp amp to whatever level he wants, and I still have complete control over what I hear on the stage (both guitar and vocal). And the other band members can still have some of my guitar in their own desk-fed monitors if they want (they usually don’t need it).