Friday, December 07, 2018
Winning Together: “The One Thing I Wish Live Mix Engineers Would Do Is…”
ProSoundWeb: One recent day I got to thinking, “Wouldn’t it be great to come up with an idea for an article that would write itself?” It led me to pose the following question to friends on Facebook: “Musicians – what’s the one thing you would like to ask sound engineers/technicians to do differently?”
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2 comments:
I feel like the takeaway from this article isn’t any one piece of advice that was given. Some of the respondents said they wanted the mixer to listen to the musicians more. Some said they wanted the mixer to take an active role in molding the sound. Some said they wanted the engineer to be making tweaks and adjusting to adapt to the conditions onstage throughout the performance, others said that they wanted tweaks to be made during soundcheck, and after that the engineer should be watching the musicians and trying to meet their needs. I think the right path is to talk to an artist beforehand and ask what they’re looking for from you. If they’ve been in the business for a while and they know what they want and they don’t want you messing with it, do what they ask. If they’re pretty new or they say they don’t know or they ask you to do what you think is best, then it’s up to you to make them sound the best you can.
This is an interesting article. Many of these things are precautions I saw the engineers take at my old work. Reading this, I can see even more so how important it was. Sound engineering is not an arrogant man's job. This just is reminding us all again, that the job is to reinforce the sound. There’s so much to get caught up in, with so many places you can tweak the sound. However having the end goal in mind, as well as checking up with the talent frequently can also ease their nerves about what it will sound like live. Communicating is very important, even if it serves its purpose just to better the relationship between the engineer and the artist, so they feel more comfortable to say something when they need it. A great deal of this article however, is towards pompous engineers who aren’t doing the prep work they need.
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