The Essential Mindset for Massive Success in Live Sound: Exploding the MYTH of the "thankless job"!
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- Опубликовано: 18 сен 2024
- Episode #2. If you're one of those engineers that believes live-sound is a "thankless job" then you desperately need a fresh perspective plus a new approach, because nothing could be further from the truth. After 10+ years mixing at one of America's most beloved and well respected live music venues I'm now sharing what I've learned about establishing rapport and strengthening relationships with performers. Because mixing skills and having a good ear can only take you so far if you neglect the personal side of the engineer/performer relationship. So that's what this video is about; all those little details and small actions that instill confidence and convey your professionalism in a way that will turn musicians (and your peers) into your biggest, most vocal fans. This is a step by step guide of what to consider from the moment you arrive at the gig right up to the start of the sound-check.
A huge thank you to the awesome Bob Dossa for all of his hard work shooting and editing around all of my mistakes and awkward nervousness while in front of the camera. You can find him and much more of his work at www.rainydayrun...
Please share with engineers, musicians and/or anyone that performs on a stage. Thank you for your support!
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You can also connect with me at:
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You are 110% correct, especially on how to treat your performers. I have done gigs where I have received a steady stream of compliments, even though I KNOW the sound system was shit, the mics were crap, and the monitor situation was deplorable. And it's just like you said. It was all because I treated them in an honest and respectful business-like way. The performer is your customer. If you sell it to them, they will go to bat for you, make sure you get paid, and recommend you for more jobs. The other side of the same coin is that you are immediately rewarded for your efforts. Getting you and the artist on the same page makes for a much smoother night. Any new problems or issues that come up unexpectedly are transformed from a potential flashpoint for a shitshow to just one more little thing to work around when the band feels like you are on their team. The cycle of positive reinforcement feeds off of itself.
Anton, you just distilled down into a few sentences what takes me 20 minutes of a rambling mess to barely articulate. 😁 My next video should just be a screenshot of your quote as a reminder to everyone. haha. Thank you so much for the comment cuz viewers need to see this customer-serviced oriented attitude from other pro engineers (and musicians) to really drive home the point. Keep up the great work, Anton! 🤟👏
As a former sound engineer, when I'm an audience member, I always walk up to the sound guy to thank them after the show.
I get thanked by bands all the time after our shows. I take the time to really talk to the band about how they want their sound. It's their art not mine. They have to trust that I can shape the sound to how they want it, within the limits of the room and equipment. I can't always give them what they want, but I sure make the effort to try.
Bands have even tipped me at the end of the night. I'm still pretty new to sound engineering, and I already had a preconceived notion that this was a 'thankless job', as I've heard this from people before I started doing sound myself. I think it's really only thankless if you are not 100% invested into the bands sound and not having a good dialogue with the band. If I ever become uninterested and do not care anymore, that's the day I'll quit. No sound engineer should be doing sound if they don't care anymore. Just my opinion on the subject.
Thank You... for the share of experience and knowledge... Awesome work brother... Chur
Thank you for taking the time to watch and comment!
Incredible video that I should re watch before every live sound gig to get myself in the best mindset. Thank you for making this.
this series makes me look at live in a new way
Thank you! I'm glad the videos are providing a new perspective. More coming soon!
You sir, have produced what is easily my favorite Live Sound educational series! You've relayed such practical, applicable, concise wisdom that is a huge benefit to anyone who follows. Fantastic stuff! The reverse soundcheck technique has been a massive help since I've begun applying it, so thank you for that. I must also say, your commentary on the interpersonal skills involved in the job are incredibly refreshing. So great to see an outspokenly firm proponent for a positive outlook on the job. You're doing great work here, man!
I'm sure I'm not alone in saying that I'd love to see some content regarding EQ'ing a room (especially helpful for touring sound guys like myself), EQ techniques for the band, and generally any techniques that you've found help in making the band sound their best. Just a few shameless requests!
Thank you so much for all of your fantastic content! You rock!
A clean stage is a must and save you money in the long run. I do not have to replace mic cables like I have done so in the past. Old used carpets work great and help prevent tripping hazards.
Yes! A clean stage prevents so many problems (and costs)!
I certainly have met many sound men with poor people skills. Attitude makes a huge difference in how things will go. I think many get jaded and are tired of dealing with performers. I like venues where there is clear consise communication and organization during setup and sound check.
As a live sound engineer I couldn’t agree more! This is the attitude for success, primarily for the success of the whole show you’re doing TOGETHER with the people on stage. It only works if the relationship is a win-win :)
Please post more content, your channel is great!
Thank you for watching! There was a very long hiatus until I finally published a new video a few days ago. I've scheduled time over the next 6 weeks to keep shooting more so please subscribe and stay tuned. :)
Your videos are much appreciated! Thank you for sharing your knowledge and helpful insight!
As a musician, when playing at clubs, I have always tipped my engineer before sound check to set him up to perform his best for the band. I can tell right away if whether or not the engineer is good at what he does. Most of the time these guys are burnt out and really don't give a shit about you band and or sound.
I always get a warm welcome when I return to venues because they remember that I tip them and show them respect. I never return to a club where the engineer sucks! It's not worth the compromise.
Wow! Tipping in advance is an interesting strategy because you're basically re-writing your social contract with the engineer in a way that compels them to give back. Brilliant! Tipping engineers is another topic I'm going to address soon in a Black Lightning episode. Thank you for watching, Ronson, and my apologies for the long overdue replies!
Hi mate. I just binge watched all of your videos and am amazed at just how closely our stories match. I’m based in Australia (hence the ‘hi mate’ opener), and I’ve been doing live sound for around 7 - 8 years now. No formal education in the field either. I have been a guitarist since I was 9 but I didn’t start considering full time live sound until I was 35ish after spending the best part of 15 years in the security industry. I learned everything I know from a select bunch of my best mates - also high end musos and live engineers - on the job and can proudly say that I now own and run one of the best portable, privately owned, high end pa’s in south east Queensland. I 100% agree with everything you’ve said. Definitely looking forward to your future videos. Live the dream.
Great video mate…. I’m a recently retired sound man in the UK and have a mountain of PA to sell off. In my experience I adopted the reverse engineering a number of years ago with much improved soundcheck success. I totally agree with you about building a rapport with the performers/band. Here’s my two penny worth to budding sound engineers to manage your stress levels:
Know your equipment (inside and out)
Test your equipment at home
Don’t bring new kit unless you have thoroughly tested at home
Allow yourself as much time as possible to setup your PA. Get in the venue as early as possible
Have backup equipment, spare desk is essential
Get your pre band soundcheck done, ideally well before the band arrives. Find a few tracks that you know so well and make sure it sounds great
Get yourself a cable tester and a DB meter to monitor levels
Solid advice...thanks bud!
Excellent information all the way around. You have brought every point to the forefront that I have been using for the last 17 years on all the various stages I've worked. I was hoping to garner a couple extra tips to further hone my own skills, but the truth is being a successful live engineer is most about your people skills first, then about your mix. Otherwise, you're just the grizzled, old sound guy. Right on, brother.
Absolutely appreciating these videos and you are exactly what I have been searching for in terms of a respectable and informative mentor in live sound. I'll be utilizing the tips from all of your videos for a record store pop up show next week and I greatly appreciate being able to walk in to the gig with even more confidence thanks to your experienced guidance. Looking forward to more videos, soon hopefully! Would be great to hear more about the pricing of live engineers, doubling as a "stage manager", and just doing DIY sound gigs in general sending love and respect from the LBC!
Thank you for watching and writing such a kind and encouraging note! I'm really happy that you've found this information helpful and feel that it will give you more strategies and build your confidence going into your upcoming gigs. We live engineers often find ourselves wearing lots of hats at the same time and how to manage those roles plus knowing what to charge for them is a good topic I'll try to address in a future video. Thanks again, Neil!
Great vídeo!
well said, needing that encouragement every now & again
Thanks for checking it out, Shawn! I hope you're doing great things up in Vancouver!
I've never thought of it as a thankless job. People thank me all the time. Though I do attribute that to the area of the country I live in mostly. I've mixed sound in other states and the musicians around here are just soooooo much nicer.
I like your approach to live sound. Everything you say is true and is often overlooked. In your next video will you please tell, and explain to us some fundamental/training that you have learned over the years? So a beginner can have an idea of what to study and better understand. I personally would like to see if is anything I may need to go over so I can get better.
The only video on the internet without a "thumbs down".
With 9,888 views and no thumbs down (as of 1-14-2019) the trolls are definitely sleeping on the job! :D
Haha, yeah. Well, it's like there is zero bile from you, so there's nothing to troll. Untrollable :-)
For all that is good and holy, upload more of these.
I'm a musician first, and I'm moving into doing mobile sound as well since I'm not playing as much at the moment. - But I have to wholeheartedly agree with this video. I have worked with sooo many *ssh*le sound guys over the years that are just like you described in the beginning. When I do sound myself I always try to work together with the band, knowing what it's like. - I know a few sound guys I'd love to anonymously email a link to this video, lol.
I feel ya. That guy is in practically every venue in every city.
I'm a musician first also, and my band does our own live sound, and we have my mom actually man the FOH board and mix the show, but I do almost all the pre-work from dialing in sounds and doing sound checks and making PA changes. I'm sort of the crew-chief and she's the driver, if that makes sense lol. But I've done sound for other bands a handful of times, and I think being in a band myself helped me endlessly because I've dealt with dickhead sound guys who think they're King Ding-Dong at some skuzzy rock club, so I know and have really good experiences of what NOT to do or be like lol. Every time I've done it they say about how great the sound is on stage and how easy I am to work with and all this, and I chalk all of that up to being a musician first, so I think of things through their perspective by default.
Thank you so much for this valuable tips about Live Sound Engineering. wish me luck with my sound engineer interview next week.
This is off topic but this question has never been resolved or understood between my son and I. We went to see the Rush R 40 tour in Houston at the Toyota Center and it was way too loud. I've been to see Rush two times before that. Once at the Cynthia Mitchell Woodlands Pavillion, and back in the 90's at what was then The Summit.(Now Lakewood Church). 😮 Anyway, having seen and heard Rush twice before and them being very well mixed, i was surprised that it was so obnoxiously loud! Painfully loud! It wasn't till halfway through the show, once my hearing had been sufficiently damaged did the sound border on bearable. My son has his associates degree in audio engineering and he says that it was the bad acoustics at Toyota Center, which is probably true but there's no mistaking (too loud.) Im gen X so it's almost a sacrilege to say that a concert is too loud. This is the first professional concert I've ever been to that seemed too loud. My son said that there's always a difference between an empty arena and one full of people. I get that totally but this concert left me wondering, do pro bands have people in the audience, at different positions of the venue to monitor levels and other aspects of the sound? How did the band not know it was so loud? I mean, I get it, this was RUSH and nearing the end of their touring career, at least maybe for Neil Peart, who had developed arthritis. We were up in the nose bleed section, high above the crowd, but looking down with binoculars, I could see that the crowd was plastered, arms down enveloped by a wall of thunder. So much different from the times I'd seen them before where fans were jumping up and down, arms raised, having a great time. How could the band not know this was too loud? I know they all had ear monitors in and from what we could see through binoculars, they were in perfect form. The bass guitar was way too loud and Neils bass drum was way too loud. I've never understood this. I would think that their sound crew and themselves would want this to be perfect. It was just painful thr whole concert. I wish id have brought ear plugs. Then maybe i could have heard more of what was going on.
happened to stumble across your channel love the professionalism perspective you bring adding depth and ease to the live sound process. Keep it up!
These videos are the best. Thank you.
Today I learned that a grumpy sound guy's habitat is all around the world 😄
I think people say it's a thankless job because 90% of the audience don't understand what it entails, or appreciate how important it is for their enjoyment of the show. They complain when it's sounds bad but don't notice when it sounds good. In my experience most bands are generally very appreciative. I'd say its generally only the lesser experienced musicians who lack understanding of the engineer/musician dynamic that aren't very appreciative.
I just discovered your channel today and love what you are saying, thank you for doing it.
Hey man it's been a year, I do live sound at a few venues in Seattle and this stuff is gold! Looking forward to some more videos!
Hello! I'm currently a relatively new college student coming into this field and writing this after watching a few of your vids and I keep thinking of one of my teachers that recently became a teacher after working at the college and working in his field for a little while now. He plays drums, edits/records, and is a sound engineer for live shows as well, large and small; although he doesn't do so many shows now that he's teaching.
I lucked out with choosing to go to this college and finding out 2 of the faculty members (including him) in the music department really care about staying up to date with equipment that students will encounter once they graduate. When I get back to school for this coming semester, I definitely want to get some feedback and ask more about his experiences regarding some of the topics you've discussed and see if he's come across the same issues. He mainly talks about the importance of signal path in his class because it's something that he sees a lot of students struggle with.
I've worked places where people are simply rude to the sound engineer and take him for granted and i've worked places where people are overly appreciative that you took the time to show up. Its not always you. But good point that maybe you need to be assertive and change your approach if you're not appreciated.
Thanks for watching and commenting, Mike! My experience has been just like you said as how we are approached and treated can vary A LOT from gig to gig. But when some engineers _consistently_ find they're lacking satisfaction and mutual respect from performers then it's likely they need to take responsibility, look inward and shift gears.
From engineering for BBC Introducing for over a decade, those artists who I initially thought were up themselves or arogant or just plain knarly were as it turned out just nervous and mellowed out after the first number.
Fantastic stuff. Many thanks.
I've always thought the "thankless job" thing was a bit weird anyway, it's nice but I don't expect it, and find it a bit uncomfortable when they thank you during the gig. My thanks comes in the form of money :-D
I used to help my dad's construction business, which specialized in weatherization, which is insulation and stuff like that. A good sound-guy is a lot like that was, in that if you do your job right, nobody notices your work. It's when it's done badly that everyone looks at you like wtf. If you're doing everything right you sort of disappear into the background, at least to the audience.
Yes
i am happy that i came across this, and this videos are helpful too. in a case where by the musicians are rude, how can i deal with it, in many times this has happened to me, i need help
Please make more videos!
My body said I'm finished but I resemble you man. Good talk. You might need a friend to walk a camera around for demos here and there, I won't bother explaining why I never did it myself. Question: Straight-coils or union-coils for microphone-cables? I used to use union-coiling methods onstage, and recoil them on every strike, but the Idea of shooting a connector across the stage to get a straight line without getting spaghetti in my hand isn't happening after the cable spent a night in a box. Do you make looms?
Thank you for taking the time to watch and leave a comment. I'm actually not familiar with the terms "straight coil" or "union coil" but I've always rolled my cables with the method I've heard referred to as over/under. I do find that different types of cable become trained to roll a certain way and it seems to depend on the internal wiring twist, type of shielding (foil wrap vs braided), outer jacket material, etc. and some cables just can't be trained at all or once they become slightly bent or kinked they're stuck that way. I have made looms for tours where getting on and off stage quickly is very important but whenever possible I prefer being able to run all of the seperate XLRs to a stage box. That way if a cable poses a problem that needs diagnosing I can easily remove and replace it without removing all the zip-ties or electrical tape from a loom.
Union wrap is a nickname for over-under. I used to do looms in house-gigs I had for the simple reason that I needed to patch certain things repeatedly, while visiting "techs" on different days would leave my kits in disarray when I returned to patch everything together again for my shows. I had a lighting-gig which put me on a second-level with a hand-truck piled with kit, and I needed to maximize a limited supply of cables to run DMX and power between standard locations. It made sense to me to make a drop-loom to the snake-head with numbered ends so I wouldn't waste time tracing too many things.
Morley Challenged I love that nickname, “Union wraps!” Never heard it called that but makes total sense.
Bottom line is that, as a sound engineer, you are ultimately "part of the band" and have a mutual stake in the overall success of the mix and show.
So you live in a world where 5 bands show up in your club and none of them bring their own grumpy sound engineer ? Wow
hahaha, thankfully, Bottom of the Hill rarely books shows with more than 3 acts and most visiting engineers are touring folks that know the drill when working in small venues. It's exceptionally rare that I have to deal with pain in the ass engineers coming into The B.o.t.H. and mostly happens when I'm the guest engineer dealing with the burnouts in other places.
Are you straight edge
I was when I got that tattoo in 1989! Eventually as that scene changed a lot (and became VERY violent in the mid-to-late 90s) I stopped identifying with it. I have consumed alcohol here and there since the early 2000s but I don't think of myself as a drinker. I might have a drink with a friend once every couple years.
It's definitely not a thankless job. I only do sound for a small local band but, I love listening to good music, I love making people sound good, and I HATE when the sound tech drops the ball and makes a great band sound like shit.
This happened to my friends band. I knew the sound tech too he is really good when he wants to be but he just didn't seem to care about them. Maybe it just wasn't his style of music. I've heard them plenty of times be for at Dockside, Gin Mill and The Troc. And they always sounded amazing. I know it wasn't them.
Also I went to see ZZ Top and you couldn't even hear the vocals when they were talking whothout the band playing. They were so faint.