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FOH Mixing: EQ it till it sounds good

By Nathan Lively

sound-design-live-FOH-mixing-eq-it-till-it-sounds-good-scott-adamson-featured

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In this episode of Sound Design Live, I speak with FOH mixer Scott Adamson who has toured with some of my favorite bands including Passion Pit, Haim, Matt Kim, St. Vincent, and Sleater-Kinney. I ask:

  • How do I become the next Scott Adamson and pursue a career touring as a FOH concert sound mixer? What would be your first steps if you had to start all over again?
  • What are some of the biggest mistakes you see people making who are new to FOH mixing?
  • What’s one thing that you wish everyone understood better that would make show set up so much easier?
  • What’s in your work bag?

sound-design-live-FOH-mixing-eq-it-till-it-sounds-good-scott-adamson-headshot2If it doesn’t sound good, EQ it till it does.

Notes

  1. All music in this episode by Daniel Mintseris.
  2. Scott’s free courses: The Top 5 Live Sound Tips for Stage, How to Use a Mixer – the Master Control for Live Sound
  3. The biggest mistakes by people who are new to FOH mixing:
    1. Volume: There’s a big difference between making it sound big, and it being loud.
    2. EQ, especially on outputs (tuning a PA). Tip: Look at your system EQ in the high-mids.
    3. Pushing the outputs of the console super super hot.
  4. Quotes
    1. A lot of sound engineers want to share their information with people that are interested.
    2. The hardest thing to do was to stick with it.
    3. More than anything, what I feel has helped me is to just focus on being nice to people.
    4. If you are on top of your patching, everything goes fine from there.
    5. You always have to use your ear and do what sounds good and not what looks good on the screen.
    6. EQ it till it sounds good.

sound-design-live-FOH-mixing-eq-it-till-it-sounds-good-scott-adamson-concert

The good, the bad, and the ugly of being a Tour Managing FOH Engineer

By Nathan Lively

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Support Sound Design Live on Patreon.

In this episode of Sound Design Live I talk with Brian Adler about good and bad of being a tour managing FOH engineer and how he lost his passion for audio in the recording studio and rediscovered it in concert sound. We discuss:

  • Why getting fired was the best thing that ever happened to his career
  • The benefits of working at smaller concert venues
  • How to control your relationship with an artist (even if you work at a shitty club)
  • One important demand you should make when taking tour managing gigs
  • Staying healthy on tour
  • Brian’s industry secret for optimizing a sound system on tour 😉
  • Brian’s #1 trick for controlling stage volume
  • How to give guitarists and vocalist plenty of volume on stage
  • How to double a vocal channel at FOH for separate monitor control

And we answer these questions:

  • Do the places you work affect your reputation?
  • Should you go after tour managing jobs to get more audio work?
  • What are the responsibilities of a tour manager?
  • What’s it like working at a museum?
  • Where do you get the best burritos in San Francisco?

sound-design-live-tour-managing-foh-engineer-brian-adlerYou can’t control whether someone has a good time or a bad time with a venue. You can control whether someone has a good or bad time with you and your sound system.

Details from the podcast:

  • All music in this episode by eO
  • Fighting sound clip from SoundNimja
  • Sad trumpet from Doctor_Jekyll
  • San Francisco restaurantes: Ebisu sushi,  Taqueria Cancun, La Taqueria
  • Bottom of the Hill, The Independent, Slim’s, The Fillmore, Cafe du Nord, Red Devil Lounge, The Rickshaw, Austin City Limits, The Brava Theatre, The Mercury Lounge, Ace of Spades
  • The California Academy of Sciences
  • Dan Kroll, The Stone Foxes
  • Midas Heritage 3000, D&B rig
  • Quotes
    • You’re never going get to into the big places unless you do the little places.
    • Word gets out if you’re bad.
    • Being a tour manager is just another way to get work.
    • Being a live sound engineer has really opened up a lot of doors for me.
    • That’s my #1 way of Smaarting out a room: Play Tom Petty and talk to the house guy.
    • You can create a listening environment on stage that can be fantastic just by moving the monitors.
    • If you are making too many cuts [in the EQ], it’s because your monitor is too loud.

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