Live Sound Question

[seti]

I've heard lots of live music with all sorts of music in smaller clubs. After seeing a show last night I was reminded of something. Instead of placing the emphasis on higher spl to acheive the live sound could you instead focus on a wider dynamic rangic but with lower spls? Then I remembered I once saw a show where everything was carefully mic'd and played at lower volume. It was loud enough. The detail was incredible from fingers on frets to highly detailed female vocals. It remains in my memory one of the most hi-fi live shows I've ever heard. I've encountered this only a couple times. Is there a name for this style or method of live sound?

[Arkytype]

Seti,

I'd call it micing and mixing for sound reinforcement as opposed to the unfortunately more common practice of micing and mixing for a "public address" system.

My first experiences with both occured in the mid '60s at the Arkansas State Fair. We had a 70-volt P.A. system in the swine and sheep barns and a sound reinforcement system at Barton Colosseum where the headliners performed during the week-long rodeo. The barn's public address system had to be loud but intelligible for announcements but the colosseum sound had to be mixed with a deft ear because the venue was itself a huge barn acoustic-wise.

As an aside, in the colosseum, they had recently installed a huge (for the time) loudspeaker cluster built with a welded aluminum framework that was 10-12 feet on a side. It was hung with a stranded cable running several hundred feet thru several pulleys to a hand-cranked winch. There was also a thick safety cable attached to I-beams overhead. Problem was, if the winch failed or the main cable broke, the safety cable would do its duty and stop the cluster about three feet from the concrete floor. Of course if there was a performer on a stage standing beneath the 500+ pound cluster, he or she would be diced like a zucchini under a Slap Chop!

Worst duty for an audio grip at a rodeo? Wiping the cow sh*t off the audio cables and cleaning the XLR connectors. Best duty? Getting to meet Roy Rogers!

OK, one more story. In '65 or '66 after he was introduced, Roy rode around the arena, dismounted from Trigger, ran up on the stage, pulled out both six-shooters from their holsters and fired a dozen blanks on either side of a brand new Shure SM33 ribbon mike! The audio guy 'bout had a heart attack! Fortunately, the mike survived and in the processed dispelled the notion that ribbon mikes (at least that one) were fragile. BTW, the SM33 was the mike of choice for Johnny Carson.

Lee

Lee

[Chris A]

Instead of placing the emphasis on higher spl to achieve the live sound could you instead focus on a wider dynamic range but with lower spls?

seti: I think that there are ways to achieve this, but it takes more experience and better acoustics to do it. I'd hazard a guess that the room itself has the most to do with it, and slightly less reverberant medium and small-sized rooms (but reverberant large auditoriums, e.g., Carnegie Hall) are, in my experience, much easier to achieve the effect that you describe. However most public venues today seem to trend towards higher RT60 at most frequencies.

Here is a reference to microphoning techniques that illustrates for me that many sound engineers are not really trying to achieve the effects that you describe, probably because it's much easier to just blast the whole audience with gobs of SPL.

I think that there are some sound engineering techniques have sprung up over time that are trying to achieve less ambient noise and higher amplification levels. The first technique has taken the life out of the music for me (i.e., too close miking of vocals and other instruments), and the second has led to a whole raft of poor sound reinforcement practice where "feedback destroyers", etc. are used to allow for higher SPLs, but are not actually dealing with the source of the problem, i.e., poor room acoustics.

I remember a venue in college where the entire back wall was corrugated steel and the band played into a steel and concrete horseshoe-shaped auditorium. The visiting bands' floor mixers could never do anything to fix it - either you could hear the vocals and the rest of the sound was thin, or there was a wall of sound, and your couldn't understand a word that was being spoken into the mikes (I remember BTO and Journey in particular). It was painful - and that is what I remember even to this day.

Also note that most studio recording engineers today are using multi-track recording techniques to first disassemble the sound, then later to reassemble it synthetically. These same engineers haven't been trained to do sound reinforcement in live venues with all the musicians on stage at once. Additionally, you see a lot of "stage monitors" (speakers) in use today. This means to me that the room or hall acoustics are really quite poor.

Think of it this way - if the performance was "unplugged" would you have any sound reinforcement, and would the musicians be able to hear themselves enough to balance their sound without the need for a "floor man"?

I don't think it has a lot to do with using a lot of electronics and signal processors/non-linear amps.

Chris

[Don Richard]

You mentioned wider dynamic range but everything else you described indicates that compression was used, properly. Using the right mics, properly, also seems to have been done. When these two aspects are done well, everything seems to sit well within the mix, nothing is jumping around SPL-wise, and everything can be clearly heard.

Proper use of compression in a live setting means compressing whatever instrument needs compressing, not slapping a comp across a stereo bus. If a singer has poor mic technique a comp will even out the varying SPL. Same for an instrument not being struck, or plucked with the same force every time. Compression can match the dynamic ranges of various instruments and cause each instrument to be clearly heard. If the musicians are having a "loudness war" on stage comping can help control this. Of course the compressors' attack and release times, and the comp ratio have to be adjusted properly to get good results.

It all starts with proper micing, ie using the right mic for each application and deploying them correctly. If this isn't done correctly results cannot be good.

It seems to me that the better musicians sound good no matter what equipment they use. Less electronic intervention will be needed with true artists and the sound guy's job becomes a lot easier.

[Islander]

It seems to me that the better musicians sound good no matter what equipment they use. Less electronic intervention will be needed with true artists and the sound guy's job becomes a lot easier.

I've experienced that very thing a few times, where the opening act sounds horrible, then the headliners come on, using the same PA gear, and sound excellent. One instance was The Tubes, playing at Tony's Rock and Roll West, a small club in Toronto.

I've also seen it go the other way. In 2008, Band of Horses opened for Beck at the Royal Theatre in Victoria. It's a classic-style concert hall with balcony and boxes that seats about 2000. Band of Horses sounded pretty good, even though I'd never heard of them at that time. Then Beck came on. It seemed like the volume then went from about 8 to 11 or 12, with massive amounts of distortion.

It got the audience on their feet and dancing, but the vocals were completely unintelligible and the music was totally muddled. The performance was fun to see, but I go to a concert to hear the music, not just see the performer.

[seti]

Thanks for all the feeback.

I may have used the phrase wider dynamic range wrong. By that I meant there seemed to be a lot more detail. The vocals more breathy and the sounds from the stage made you feel like you were right on stage with them. The sound stage was incredible. Very hifi sounding. I've been reading about live sound setup and methods used but there is so much material out there.

[garyrc]

"In the swine and sheep barns" ... this is exactly where some mixes belong.[]

Seriously, though, I like wide dynamic range, done properly, particularly in orchestral music. When our orchestra played The Great Gate of Kiev, we thought the paint would peel off the walls. Rite of Spring ranged from barely audible to overwhelming. We are talking brief peaks of 120 or 125 db, with the complexity of the climaxes and the large number of instruments playing causing a greater cortical arousal than less complex climaxes would produce at the same measured SPL (see Berlyne, Aesthetics and Psychobiology). The best rock concerts I ever heard were outside, in Golden Gate Park, or at the end of Haight street, or in Provo Park in Berkeley, all with top bands, and all free! I believe that one reason they sounded so good was that the mixers didn't have to contend with room acoustics. The dynamic range was generally uncompressed (I think), but the SPL had the potential to go very high, because they had speakers stacked on speakers, maybe three tall boxes high and the width of the entire outdoor stage. Once on Haight street, the dirt was leaping off the sidewalk in time with the bass line. The earth moved for us. JBL had an ad back then depicting such an outdoor speaker set-up .. the system was turned on, and (so the ad read) a passing griffin happened by, coughed into a microphone, and there was nothing left but a crater. Ah, the '60s!

Country Joe (I think it was) would swing his microphone on the end of a long cord, and crash it into the stage .."Sock it to me.'

Yet, this high SPL had a different feel than in some of the venues today. There was a lot of dynamic bass, for one thing. You could "feel the music," as Klipsch says. Now, the high SPL seems a little more concentrated into the midrange and lower treble, where the ear is most sensitive. Then it was earth moving -- now it often seems like a knife in the ear.

[colterphoto1]

turning it down helps. That way you don't have so much power compression happening in the loudspeakers, the amps have more headroom, and the mixer isn't relying on compressors or limiters so much to keep a handle on things.

Good quality microphones and very careful placement help considerably. Getting the performers to keep stage volume as low as possible also relates to a good overall mix as well as artist comfort on stage and less bleed-through of stage instruments to open adjacent mics onstage. Mix-wise, just like in recorded sound, allowing each melody instrument it's own portion of the frequency spectrum and panning instruments lightly helps a lot.

A couple weeks ago we mixed a Klezmer band and I panned a string quartet wide across the sound field, separated melody instruments clarinet, accordion, and violin slightly and did the same with the horn section. Was able to turn all compressors off except on lead vocal. It sounded 'hi-fi'. I have a board recording and it's very good for a live mix.

[greg928gts]

When I mixed live sound, the only way to mic up the performers amplifiers and drums was with close-micing. With the performers amplifiers turned up so high, and the drummer wailing on the drums for all he's worth, the sound always had a very direct, in your face, over-drvien kind of sound. If I could have gotten them to turn down on stage, the input into the mics would have been much less, and I might have been able to back the mics away from the sources a bit without bleeding, and then I think there would have been much more dynamic range. On the other hand, I would guess some of the intensity of the performance would have been lost many times, depending on the band. The performers really depend on that on-stage sound to bring the music together.

I suspect the performance that you remember as being more "hi-fi", "detailed" and just plain nice sounding, probably all started on stage with a band playing at a lower level and letting the PA gear do the work out front and back to them through a monitor system. That's my guess anyway.

Greg

[colterphoto1]

Other items that affect the sound at live venues include the tuning of the system (peq'd very tightly using computer technology), the dispersion of the loudspeakers in relation to the shape of the room (keeping early reflections off the side walls helps intelligibility), and overall room acoustics (lack of bass nodes and excessive reverberant fields).

A badly eq'd system with too wide of horns is a live room is a nightmare. Proper eq, dispersion and acoustics can make a system sound immensely better. Some of it is art, some science, some luck.