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In this episode of Sound Design Live I talk with the president of Rat Sound Systems, Dave Rat. We discuss artistic solutions to technical problems, the best mindset for a finding work and a long fulfilling career, and the time Flea shouted in his face for missing an entrance.

I ask:

• What are some of the biggest mistakes you see people making who are new to FOH mixing?
• What is the biggest mistake you’ve made on the job and how you recovered.
• From FaceBook
  • Roshan Malim: Ask him about his sub woofers configurations and which is his favorite and why? And what is his most common sub woofer configurations for gigs? His ideas between flown subs and ground stack subs.
  • Christian Michael Martinez: As an owner of one of the largest production companies, how did you cope with the possibility of failure in the beginning as a small shop? How do you cope with risk now that the company is a success?
  • Maurizio M. D’Errico: Ask him about his technique of tuning a pa using headphones as a reference and if he still feels the same way about it since he made the YouTube video: How to EQ a Live Sound Reinforcement System.
  • Craig Gordon: Balancing touring and family/health.
  • Stephen Mink: Since he has some videos on YouTube about sub placement/patterns/alignment, his thoughts on where in a room to align flown and ground subs.
  • Dave Gammon: Does he really see the M-Force driver as the future
  • Garrick Quentin: Has he seen or heard of anyone else not affiliated with Rat sound using the double hung array as he did with the RHCPs and perhaps any comments on the whole concept in terms of its popularity, or otherwise, within the industry.
  • Davide Bonetti: does he need an assistant? 😇
  • Steve Knots: What’s the worst setup disaster he ever recovered from to pull off a successful show in the end?
  • Marty America: How’s your dog doing?
  • Micah Muth: How’s the Tesla?

The way to be successful is to sell self confidence. Confidence that when you’re there it’s going to be as good as it can possibly be.

Dave Rat

Notes

1. All music in this episode by The Funk Lives.
2. See my deconstruction of Dave’s custom end-fire subwoofer array.
3. Hardware: DBX 12xds Subharmonic Synthesizer
4. Books: Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!
5. Quotes
   1. We didn’t borrow money, take any loans or take on any debt until 1997. So, 17 years of business.
   2. We had no idea. Well, we kind of had an idea. Everyone told us we’d fail. “There’s no way you’ll ever survive doing this.”
   3. If I’m 100% behind it and I’m going to make it happen; it’s not whether it will succeed. It’s how long it’s going to take. So if you just don’t even let failure be an option then it’s just a matter of work.
   4. Avoid silver bullets. They don’t come.
   5. Avoid being giant. You want to be happy, stable, and profitable. Being giant is precarious, stressful, and makes you a target for people to come after you.
   6. Probably one of the most common things for green engineers; the kick drum is so loud! It’s distracting from the core purpose, which is to connect the artist with the audience.
   7. If you act like you have a problem, then you have a problem. If you don’t act like you have a problem, then no one knows you have a problem.
   8. The way to be successful is to sell self confidence. Confidence that when you’re there it’s going to be as good as it can possibly be.
   9. We don’t have any problems here today. We just have a big pile of solutions we haven’t found, yet. It’s Ok, because the ones we can’t fix, can’t be fixed. But if it can be fixed, we’re gonna do it.
   10. It’s that unphasability. Combine that with, “Gimme the tools I need to do the job and everything will be fine,” and you can write your own paycheck.
   11. The sub configuration I prefer is the one that covers the venue as best as possible.
   12. The worst thing you can possible do is run your subs mono.
   13. Having a separate L/R sub aux, I find to be extremely useful.
   14. No where in nature do you have two things that are perfectly in time and phase.
   15. No where in nature do multiple unrelated sounds radiate out of a single point in space.
   16. By trying to make it sound the same everywhere, you loose the ability to make it sound great everywhere.
   17. A world-class sound engineer has the ability to recreate a quality sound consistently throughout a variety of environments and challenges.
   18. One of the ways I kept myself happy and sane was to start an external project. One tour it was blogging. It kept me busy. One tour I decided to learn to weld.
   19. By spreading (the mix) out, you can beat the crap out of the bass guitar into the fifteens of one rig, but the low end of the vocals and the low end of the guitar would stay clean. And the guitar could beat the crap out of the sixes in that one rig, but the vocals would be perfectly clean.
   20. If you desire to learn everything you can.