what should musicians know about gear and "The Great Divide"

[pounce]

a critical question, really. the great divide. what should musicians know about sound gear and audio technology? also, the related question is how much about music should a soundguy know?

it seems the best people of both catagories each know at least a little about both categories. one is more steeped in the right brain and creative pursuits while the other is more of a left brained thing. when a person is actively engaged in either of those activities, music making or engineering, they are possibly at their best when focusing themselves in that pursuit. maybe it's too difficult to switch between those two halves of the brain to work on projects from both angles.

on one hand, musicians should know something about sound theory and gear. certainly enough to know how to deal with a mic, or to not bring a mic in front of a speaker, or things like that. also, they should know a fair amount about the workings of their own instrument. musicians who know a LOT about tech stuff can be a dream to work with, but they can also be a PITA. i don't want to musician always up my ass trying to tell me what to do. nor do i want to have every move i make questioned. but a little knowledge is a really good thing. musicians that don't seem to know anything about sound gear are a breed i don't totally understand. i suppose i couldn't imagine not being at least curious about all the gear around me.

engineers, whether live or studio, should certainly know something about music. all the engineers i can think of have some sort of music background - i cannot think of a single one who doesn't at least play an instrument. for producers, i'd expect the ability to play instruments, arrange a piece, and generally discuss music is even more critical than for an engineer. engineers should understand enough about music and instruments to discuss tone and arrangements with a band, and help assure that instruments used in a session or show are getting the best tone.

so while i'm sure members of each camp - musos and the techs - should know at least a little about the other side, they are often in the right camp for themselves. many engineers are passable musicians but don't aspire to be rockstars, and numerous musicians do things like record themselves at home, but without the abilities to accomplish what a good engineer can. i know that techies with stronger musical backgrounds seem to be better able to get things done and converse with musicians, which is a good thing. likewise, musicians with at least a cursory knowledge of gear and technology are a lot easier to work with.

any comments on what musicians should know about gear or what engineers should know about music?

[Mixerpuppet]

I think that breaking the musician category into the different types might be helpful in trying to get an accurate picture. Not all musicians are performers. Some musicians are Composers, some are writers, some are showmen/show-woman etc... some are teachers..

Each of these type will actually cross into performing to a certain degree but the nuances of each category help explain why we can't lump all musicians into a single category. IMO



2 Examples...

My mother-in-law is a professional violinist and knows alot about music but does not care to know about the technology because in her brain as a classical musician you pay attention to your own part. Very dogmatic and segmented. You cannot teach her about what an engineer does or the equipment used by them.

My friend "Joe" used to play in alot of punk bands and doesn't care about anything as long as he's playing. He's very in tune with tone and even if I have compressor inserted on bypass he knows. He's also a human beat detective which bothers me but you can point to him technical things and he'll figure out how to use it better than you in a short amount of time. He knows nothing about music theory or the names of chords but he has memorized what fingerings on what fret position makes what sound on the synth keyboards and visa versa. He can transcribe most piano works mentally. No he's not a blind musician... :)

I think the main issue (for me at least) is not really how much one knows about the other, but how teachable are they about things they don't know about. Communicating across the divide has nothing really to do with gear or technical things.

Sometimes geniuses know nothing and Know it alls don't know anything....

[bunnerabb]

My best guess is that each artist will bring his own skillsets and focus to a performance. It is not their job to understand the technology that translates it to a broad audience, accurately, but I think if they are going to use electronic devices and instruments that there is some degree of responsibility thrust up on them to understand the yin and yang of their gear.

Singers: Know mic technique or deal with some degree of channel compression on your vocal.

Keyboard players: Know how to use MIDI if you are using MIDI keyboards and know how to set the volume maps for volume and aftertouch so that your patches have some degree of even level on your outputs. If you go into a submixer that feeds me, know some degree of gain staging on the desk. If your organ feeds me at about -6 and your horn patch is clipping me and your piano is in the middle, you are handing me a nightmare that I can't sort out from a two buss feed.

Guitarists: If you're running a tube amp, wonderful. Know how to work in different sized venues with it, level wise and to get the tone you need with whatever your front end is, at a variety of master levels. No, you really can't run on 10 in a bar or small hall venue. It's just not going to work FOH. Buy and own a tuner. Use it. be able to tell if your tubes are starting to fail, or go into runaway or generally have come to a state of near failure and know how to field service your amps and axe. If not, hire roadies.

Horn players: Mic technique, mic technique, mic technique.

Fiddles, Dobros, acoustic instruments without pickups: See "Horn Players".

To my mind, if the musician has a rudimentary or better idea of how their kit works and focuses on the performance, any knowledgeable AE an translate that into the venue if he knows his kit and does his homework.

The band and the mixer find each other over the course of the first few songs, sometimes, but a good soundcheck can shave that down.

That being said, play like you play during the show at sound check. It's not to try and trick the AE into thinking you play at half of the volume that you really play at.

Slap it in the ass. Give us something to work with so that the opening number is as good as the encores.

[eagan]

This is an interesting one. We might go on about this one for a while.

I was kind of fortunate in that I started learning to play guitar as a teenaged lad during the time I was also in the process of getting an education in electronics, so my learning about both sides of this have run pretty much a parallel or intertwined course. I think this is a good thing, and from my perspective, I would not want to do it any other way. To me it's all an integrated thing.

Of course, part of this is just how much you know, how far along you are in any of it, but generally, I'm in the philosophical camp that says that you should have at least a general broad comprehension of anything that's involved in what you do. If nothing else, at least enough general comprehension and understanding of a subject that you can at least communicate reasonably well with other people who understand that stuff in depth.

Also, going further on that point, there is a certain value in at least knowing enough about something to have a decent grasp of what stuff you don't know. There is a definite value in being able to have enough sense of what's going on to be able to sense when you can hack your way through yourself, and when you're nearing a threshold where you're about to run out of brains and need to turn to another human who knows the terrain you're heading into.

There's also tricky territory when you start to get into the value of knowing a little. Sometimes a little knowledge can be a good thing, sometimes it can be real trouble. Depends on the person. There are biped critters who will try to bullshit and guess their way through anything, no matter what, rather than just simply say "I don't know".

Personally, I think one of the all time worst things is electric guitar players who will rattle on and on about all kinds of little details of assorted stuff about gear and setups, even get into raging arguments about it, and they clearly don't have the vaguest fucking clue about the most basic electronics. The worst examples are when you get guys armed with what I call "old wives' tales from guys hanging around the music store" ideas passing as knowledge, which these days also includes "a guy told me stuff on a web message board".

[we could spend days on this alone]


JLE

[dnafe]

In my case I was doing FOH and lighting for a local bands touring the shit-holes of Canada and first thing I did was make sure everyone in the band knew how to set up the PA from the microphones on to the speakers and wire up the lighting system. This made sure that everyone had something to do and everthing got done in a timely fashion once load in was done.

And believe it or not after a couple of gigs I didn't have to check their work...smart boys...also ment less work for me. We also had a couple of guys in the band who knew how to solder cables and the basics of wiring up the board and outboard so in a pinch I could miss load-in and setup and just have to dial in the band.

Trust me that came in handy on one or two occasions.


DOn

[rockdart]

My bass player can barely change his strings. He won't buy a tuner and insists on tuning to me... just prior to show time.

Like 30 seconds prior.

He doesn't understand his gear at all. He IS a bass PLAYER - not a bassist. Gene Simmons and Nikki Sixx are his idols.

Jaco who?

"Close Enough", I suspect, is his personal moto.

My singer loves the gossip and sound bites and they are his dogma.

My drummer knows his gear and is pretty good about intellectual curiosity beyond the skins.

I grew up in clubs, bars and ballrooms - almost literally. I started doing sound and lights at the ripe age of 14. I learned things from that perspective but always wanted to be on stage. I'm still more comfortable behind the soundboard and all the gear that goes with it than I am choosing gear for my guitar rig... of course some of that has to do with the loft price tags. Still, how to put a lot of it together has been a frustrating journey for the most part... and most of it has to do with not being too sure what I'm going for. You can listen to different guitarist's tone and say "I want THAT"... but what did the engineer do to it between the mic and the master?

But how does one get around that? Listen to other people and try things out a lot. At the same time - who the eff are these people and how's THEIR tone?

The great search continues. The learning continues. The frustration grows.

But the one hr set rejuvenates the batteries to go on.

This place and all of you guys - the new ones and all y'all who I've been learning from since the RecPit - have really been a godsend. Now if I could just tell if that's at 4, 8 or 16 ohms.

[burnsy]

My best guess is that each artist will bring his own skillsets and focus to a performance. It is not their job to understand the technology that translates it to a broad audience, accurately, but I think if they are going to use electronic devices and instruments that there is some degree of responsibility thrust up on them to understand the yin and yang of their gear.

Singers: Know mic technique or deal with some degree of channel compression on your vocal.

Keyboard players: Know how to use MIDI if you are using MIDI keyboards and know how to set the volume maps for volume and aftertouch so that your patches have some degree of even level on your outputs. If you go into a submixer that feeds me, know some degree of gain staging on the desk. If your organ feeds me at about -6 and your horn patch is clipping me and your piano is in the middle, you are handing me a nightmare that I can't sort out from a two buss feed.

Guitarists: If you're running a tube amp, wonderful. Know how to work in different sized venues with it, level wise and to get the tone you need with whatever your front end is, at a variety of master levels. No, you really can't run on 10 in a bar or small hall venue. It's just not going to work FOH. Buy and own a tuner. Use it. be able to tell if your tubes are starting to fail, or go into runaway or generally have come to a state of near failure and know how to field service your amps and axe. If not, hire roadies.

Horn players: Mic technique, mic technique, mic technique.

Fiddles, Dobros, acoustic instruments without pickups: See "Horn Players".

To my mind, if the musician has a rudimentary or better idea of how their kit works and focuses on the performance, any knowledgeable AE an translate that into the venue if he knows his kit and does his homework.

The band and the mixer find each other over the course of the first few songs, sometimes, but a good soundcheck can shave that down.

That being said, play like you play during the show at sound check. It's not to try and trick the AE into thinking you play at half of the volume that you really play at.

Slap it in the ass. Give us something to work with so that the opening number is as good as the encores.

Bascially what was said there really , Also musicians should have a big attatched notice saying your monitor mix is not what the fans are hearing nor is it ment to sound good its to cut through your noise and let your hear if your in time , in tune and such like. I suffer a lot from the noisy gutiar people in the small venue I engineer and it really does effect my mix even if they slightly increase anything from bass to gutiar especially when the room is sparse of people.

Musicians in my opinion should know the gear there using and hows its getting to us then should just leave us to do our job maybe asking for a different type of sound on certain stuff but thats about it.

[Statick]

i sit professionally on both sides of the divide - i do live and studio sound for a living, and i also have paid gigs as a drummer. i find its a very natural thing to know both aspects, and it helps somewhat on both sides of the fence.

the band consists of one female singer/songwriter type, and her backing band (gigs are listed purely as her name) being drums bass and another guitar. myself and the bassist are both engineers, and the other guitarist also helps out at a small local studio (although he wouldn't describe himself as an engineer, and cannot do live gigs).

we are quite fussy with our onstage setup. as we are all playing to one persons tune, it's important we can all hear her properly, myself especially as there are times when she leads the tempo and i have to follow. so we are quite insistant that monitors are clear and upfront, and have been known to spend over an hour soundchecking purely because the engineer cannot get the monitors loud enough. the thing is, we all know it's possible because we spend enough time doing just this for other people - so there's no reason we should settle for shoddy work by others.

most of the time i try not to get involved with the engineering. i'll mention some useful tips to the guy when we're setting up - our setup isn't the most obvious (for example, the singer uses 2 mics, one of which goes through an effects loop, and which simply loves to feed back) - and this usually saves some time in the soundcheck. also if he has any questions, i can answer them in a language he understands !

however, i do try to just let him get on and do his job - as an enigneer it gets frustrating when some jumped up little squirt who studied music tech at college keeps telling you how to do your job, and besides i've got enough things to worry about at my end without worrying about the tech !

likewise, when i'm engineering, i'm very aware of what it's like for a band to be trusting an engineer they've not dealt with before, so i generally ask them lots of questions about how they like things to be done, and try not to be insistent about anything...

[jacvenza]

I think that a little knowledge about the others work is for good. But when the band thinks that they know better than the AE what gear should be used, it can be hard to do a good job. Have some experience of that. Leave the responsibility for the sound to the AE and focus on making the music....

[eagan]

I think this could get off the track a little bit, here.


I believe the most essential point in looking at this stuff is not quite so much about knowing about what's going on in other people's territory about their job and the gear they use, as much as just simply having a workable understanding of their own gear and setup and how to use it.

As bunner pointed out, even if you're a singer or a player on an acoustic instrument, your world involves a microphone and the need to understand how you interact with it. That doesn't necessarily mean suddenly getting involved in every bit of the chain all the way to the speakers.

As I already pointed out, the biggest issue I've encountered is electric guitarists who use a whole pile of electronic stuff, and don't have a clue about any of it and how it works other than the vaguest half baked "expert advice" from their brothers hanging around the music store.

The place to start is for people to get their own world together and working properly. Then, how your world interacts with everything else.

I think another item that should not be overlooked is that while this seems to be focused on interaction between musicians and FOH and monitor engineers, there is another important little fact of reality.

For many musicians at the small club gig level, the reality of life is that they can find themselves doing a lot of humble small little gigs where there isn't some massive system complete with FOH and monitor engineers and six separate monitor mixes and so on. It will be just them and some humble system with nobody to take care of any of it except them, including trying to mix themselves from onstage. They need to understand some fundamental stuff.

JLE

[pounce]

yeah, i don't think musicians should have to know how to really run a PA. otoh, knowing how to use a mic, and perhaps knowing where to place it on their instrument is good. knowing if you need a DI or not and how to plug in to it. knowing a little about mic technique, and knowing not to bring mics in front of speakers or drop them on the floor. that would be good. that's as much as i need from musicians i am working with. maybe a fundamental general kind of understanding of how a sound system works would be good. just a basic big picture sense of things. also, this is how i am wired. i am just too curious about things to be around something all the time and not know a little about it. likewise, soundguys should have a good idea where to place a mic, which mic to choose, etc. based on some knowledge of the instrument.

[floodstage]

Musicians need to know the signals: point at the source, then up or down, and OK when it's right.

Sounds simple. right?

I drill every band (and get glazed looks every time) before the show on: point at source, then up or down, and then OK when it's right.

And still, maybe 2% of them (or less) give me the "OK" signal when things are right.

This is your monitor mix. If you said turn it up, I'm going to turn whatever it is you told me to turn up, a little at a time, until I see the OK sign (or a smile/nod/something). If it gets just perfect, then a little too loud, then a lot too loud, and finally feeds back a bit, don't cuss at me through the P.A. just because you expected me to read your mind and know it was right 45 seconds ago!

[bunnerabb]

I'm pretty well lucky there.

Most of the bands I do go something like this:

"Singer?" "A little more" "Cool?" "Cool." "Keys?" "Gimmie more of the guitar.. ok, ok.. cool." "Drums?" "I'm good." "Bass?" "More of the singer and more me." "There." "Perfect." "Gimmie one for the house, everybody sing"


*Song*

"Cool. See you in an hour."

[floodstage]

I'm pretty well lucky there.

Most of the bands I do go something like this:

"Singer?" "A little more" "Cool?" "Cool." "Keys?" "Gimmie more of the guitar.. ok, ok.. cool." "Drums?" "I'm good." "Bass?" "More of the singer and more me." "There." "Perfect." "Gimmie one for the house, everybody sing"


*Song*

"Cool. See you in an hour."



You're probably working with bands on a different talent/experience level than I am.

I'm hoping things will change as I get clients with more experience/talent.

[ggunn]

You're probably working with bands on a different talent/experience level than I am.

I'm hoping things will change as I get clients with more experience/talent.

WHAT NOT TO DO:
Way back in the dim and distant past, I was in a band where the lead singer and lead guitarist nearly came to blows on stage in a loud and ugly argument over which song to play for sound check.

[omikl]

When the sound guy asks you to use your mic so's he can get a level. Do not speak into it unless you're going to be reciting poetry. You're going to sing, right. So sing into the bloody thing, at your "gig volume".

Mind you, when setting up for a little festival last September where we hauled our own PA I had to do the "sing into the mic" pantomime for three mics, acapella, while the afternoon drinking crowd was rolling in. I think they thought it was performance art :D