How to be Heard on Stage - Guitar Edition

Speaking as a proud owner of an all tube amp I can confidently say nothing sounds quite as good as cranking the volume wide open and watching the windows rattle in time with my music. Most every guitarist I know seems to feel the same. It's such a shame, then, that when I put on my mixing hat and started prepping to run sound for a local praise band 6 months ago my first action during rehearsal was abandoning the console and sprinting over to the lead guitarist to discuss turning down his amp.

Why did I do it? If you said because he was terrible, you'd be wrong. I was in fact trying to make him "louder."

Loud is Quiet

 While recording lead guitar in a studio, it's often the only instrument actually getting recorded at that particular moment. The resident shredder overdubs his or her work on top of a partially finished song by playing along to a reference recording. This is a great approach for getting every ounce of tone and nuance out of music but once a PA, audience, and the rest of the band get involved the rules written in the studio start to fall apart.

This church's lead guitarist was so loud that I heard his instrument above the mixed and broadcasted singer, drums, etc. from my booth 200 feet away. I could barely bring up his fader before he became unnaturally present in the room. Had the band used wedges instead of in-ear monitoring feedback would've been a major concern as well.

Since I was both lucky to be working with a good sport and smart enough to not touch his amp without express permission I got what I asked for with hardly a moment's hesitation. Once I returned to my booth we quickly re-balanced the monitor signals for everyone and I built a mix for the audience. At this point the pastor walked in to listen to his kid's band and realized something amazing...

Quiet is Loud

The band had never sounded better. His son's lead work sounded "angelic" and everyone began the service with beaming smiles. The reason being, simply, instead of relying on an 85 watt twin speaker amp to push sound off stage we used 4 speakers running at a total of about 2kW, roughly 20 times the oomph.

Now that's certainly going to be louder, but it also results in a better tone for several reasons. Guitar amps tend to throw the lower frequency "rumble" of a guitar a whole lot further than the higher frequency "body" and "sparkle" that really defines a guitar's tone, so while sonny was certainly loud at first he was mostly slinging mud. To complicate matters the super cranked amp sound was spilling into other mics on stage, all 11 of them. As a result the precious little guitar that actually played out of the PA was comb-filtered into an anemic shadow of its former self. Once the volume dropped to a manageable level all the mangled sound was replaced by the signal from a mic specifically placed to get a great guitar tone.

Lots of tonal problems were fixed that particular Sunday by turning one knob on an amp. If you find yourself at a gig and the individual you are paying to mix asks you to ease up I strongly encourage you to take this kid's example and follow it. I know you don't get the studio sound from backing off the volume but that's a small price to pay to banish all these show-killing gremlins from your gig. 

Ever heard a suggestion that seemed to come out of left field? Send it my way and maybe I'll explain the shenanigans behind it in the next post!