Jazz T-Bone: The homepage for Joe Jackson

Lay off the Sound Guys

"The problem is this. When you are the performer in a large venue, all you hear of your sound is what's coming at you from your monitor. You can sound great in the monitor but suck in the mains.

I think that the uneducated soundmen who work with major sound companies are at fault. Most of them have no idea what acoustic instruments sound like. And they think all music has to be ear-splitting like a Metallica concert. Even after I told the soundman at a major theatre in Florida that I wanted the whole mix to be acoustic-sounding, I hear this thud, thud, thud of the bass drum bouncing around the theater with no acoustic timbre to it. And I can't tell you how many times soundmen has thinned and pinched my trombone sound. You work so hard for so long getting a warm, creamy sound, and one guy turns a knob the wrong way, and it's all over. That's life in America."

Actually, my experience in large venues is the opposite, that the sound reaching featured performers is always going to be at least 1/2 mains.

So it's a big challenge because you have people that want to soundcheck the monitors WITHOUT the mains on and WITHOUT the band playing.

The main problem is not sound men. In terms of mixing horns sound men have steadily improved over the years since the 70s. The problem is mixing electric and acoustical instruments together playing modern repertoire in big indoor venues.

Big indoor venues are all about surviving. That's really all one can hope for. The nature of big halls is that featured acoustical instruments occupy a band of frequency that the stage wash ALONE tends to wipe out, even when you crank the soloist on the mains, and even when you EQ the soloist so their sound cuts (which some don't even want you to do AHEM Bill Watrous and Slide Hampton).

So in jazz what you do is EQ the sound of the bass/chords as flat as possible and place them and the drums at the lowest level you can and still hear them. You basically have the trumpets and trombones barely on, along with saxes but you ride them for woodwinds. And even then in most large indoor halls the sounds going to be mediocre at best because you have a big room that amplifies the precise frequencies that you have the most instruments on stage playing. One big giant 280 Hz wash.

And so do all the ignorant trombone tooters blame the real culprit, physics? No they blame the poor sound guys, who only have AMPLIFICATION under their control when the opposite of amplification is usually the real problem.

Back in the day all you needed were microphones for piano/soloists/singers. The mix didn't need any bottom. You didn't have to hear the bass, bass players didn't even use amps. Everything balanced because that's how music was written.

Well no more. Modern arrangers write things for the bass that have to be heard. They write bass driven grooves that you'd never hear with Blanton pulling gut strings. AND they have to switch to electric for a few tunes. Doing an all-Lunceford/Ellington/Jimmy Dorsey concert? By all means set up a VOX mic, mic the piano, turn the stage amps down and go. Easy peasy.

Those days are over. But there's still a lot you can do to make a jazz mix work in a big indoor hall.

But here's the rub: it all goes out the door if it's an electric mix. I know the horn players in the audience want to hear full-bodied horn sounds. But that's not what the customers want. They want big bass, big massed electric sound, with some thin horns occasionally cutting through. There's only a certain amount of bandwidth between 200 & 20K.

So I think part of the problem is that a lot of horn players are naive to acoustics and to the acoustical expectations of the concert attendees and don't understand that horns are possibly the least important factor in a large-venue rock mix.

Sorry, that's just the way I see it as a guy who produces bands and featured artists for a living. And I guess I've had enough of hearing guys that live on stage whining, so sorry about the rant.

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