I had a wonderful experience recently. I flew to Las Vegas for a day, and mixed monitors for Berlin, featuring the amazingly powerful voice of Terri Nunn. She is one of the two women I have worked with in my life who can actually gain volume as the set goes along, to the point where you sometimes have to back the gain down. I set up Terri’s in-ears mix at the soundcheck, which she did not attend, and then later, during the show, she never asked for a single readjustment.
And, in addition to that, the backup vocalist, Linda Dalziel, whom I had never met before that day, came over to monitor world halfway through the set, and told me that it was the best monitor mix she ever had in the 20 years she had been singing professionally. We had talked in the dressing room earlier, and Linda explained a few hand signals she would use, to ask for more of certain inputs.
Their FOH mixer and tour manager for that show, Tom Bennett, had previously compiled a list of each musician’s monitor requests. It was the most intelligently organized and readable such sheet I have ever been given. Most of them floating around out there are not worth the computer paper they are printed on. But the one that Tom put together really helped me to set up the mixes for Terri and Linda’s ears without them needing to be there.
Terri told me later that this was the first time she had ever heard bass in her ears. If I had to guess, I would say that was because of two things. First, I worked on EQ-ing the vocal mic for her ears, to take out the frequencies in the wireless du jour that I felt were too strong, which usually translates to somewhere right around 1.6K. Secondly, the principle of summing must be kept in mind while mixing for in-ears, the same as with wedges.
How many times have you seen some knucklehead walk a row of mics on behalf of a band, and officiously demand for each one to be pumped up until it is using 95% of that particular monitor rig’s available electrical energy? And then start freaking out when all the mics combine into an undifferentiated pile of poo-poo, feeding back and creating chaos?
When I added drums, guitars, playback, and the other vocals into Linda and Terri’s ears, while a systems guy drove the desk, and I walked around the stage at the soundcheck, I did not ask for tons of each instrument. Once I heard it clearly, I said stop. It did not have to be a piercingly three-dimensional version of that input, it just needed to be present and heard.
If it does not sound too touchy-feely, when I have a set of ears in, I am “seeing” a hemispherical space, kind of like a planetarium. I place the instrumental sounds around that, in such a way that they are not fighting with each other, and then the vocal gets set in the center of the virtual space: big, strong and beautiful. When I work to reduce the painful frequencies, the human ear will accept more level, because the signal has been warmed up.
If I can resort to an extremely overused phrase of the last few years, I am a “good fit” for Terri and Linda. But I have been on gigs where the approach I described just did not work for other artists, at all. They wanted blistering levels of everything, maxing out the transmitter. When they wanted more during the set, they wanted me to fiercely grab the knob and send them a ton more, right that instant!
I was used to being more careful, since everyone I had talked to, when I first started running ear mixes for people, told me over and over again to only make small adjustments — you could really hurt someone by railing the knob at them like a maniac. I thought competence meant making gradual moves, but to a high-strung bandleader, competence might mean aggressive increases. So we have a clash of belief systems, but he can fire me, and I can’t fire him!
There can also be complicated situations with musicians who are unhappy on the gig, because they don’t like the bus, or the tour manager wasted what would have been their profits from the last leg, or one of their bandmates is a lush. It can be any number of things, but because they know they can only take out so much on their wives or their managers, they look around and find: guess who?
Yep, the monitor guy. It can make you a little crazy. I have had times, in comparatively recent memory, where I really doubted myself. That may be hard to believe for people who have never met me and just read my carefully edited descriptions of jobs I do. I don’t go out of my way to tell the world about the rockier gigs. I like the impressionable young reader to instead visualize me always waltzing into sold-out shows in Vancouver, Rio de Janeiro, and Switzerland: C.K., International Mixer of Mystery!
It is much more glamorous to be out at that FOH desk, fixing one’s hair, and partying on the EFX. But most shows in venues that are 600 or more seats, have that person sitting behind a monitor console. I don’t care how tiny the desk gets someday, or how many recallable scenes it will be able to offer, and I don’t care if you can run the mixes off something the size of an Etch-A-Sketch tablet. The psychological interaction will still exist between the mixing person—no matter if they have antennas and special control beams surgically implanted in their skull—and the artist—even if they have an antigravity skateboard, and an invisible keyboard that they play in midair.
So, this is a shout out to the people who are behind the monitor desk, even though the name of this magazine isn’t MON. And it is a statement that even after doing countless shows controlling many mixes, there are going to be brick walls that you run into, made up of people with poor communications skills, dubious equipment, unhappiness in their personal lives, or all of the above.
Being a performer is not a natural role for the male and female mammals known as homo sapiens. What is natural is a bunch of people sitting around a campfire beating on some logs. But, eventually, the cave people noticed that a couple of their neighbors were more charismatic than others, and built these things called spotlights, that focus all the campfire’s light on one individual, while the rest of us lurk in the shadows and eat our charred meat products, and drink our fermented cactus, corn, and potato beverages, while we stare avidly at the chosen ones.
It is literally only within the past few years that I have reached a point where I can separate my center from whatever emotional pyrotechnics another person, particularly a performer, is displaying. I remember getting stressed out last year because a bass player was making very peculiar faces at me during concerts. Did that scowl mean “Tone of kick and snare bad, ugh, you no good monitor caveman!” Or did it mean, “Damn, I forgot to pay my cell phone bill while we were at home for two days!”