maddnotez":70ks3qqk said:
rlord1974":70ks3qqk said:
More info is required.
Does it sound like crap through your cabinet? Through the monitors? Through the front of house? Is it a house gig (i.e., same soundman every time) or are they different gigs?
This time, same sound guy as always when we play this specific club.
Hard to hear just my cab during soundcheck but I guess monitors.
Cant hear the front of the hous while on stage...
But the one really weird thing was the soundguy told me to turn up. I was at a higher volume than at practice and i could barely hear myself with the amp right behind me.
Several HUGE factors that often get overlooked (or ignored because 'there's nothing I can do about it'
Mic - bring your own. The club may have a good name mic, but how many times has it been dropped? I wait for the sound guy to mic up my cab, and then I switch mics. I use a Sennheiser 421, so I can actually adjust the bass boost right on the mic, if needed.
As a corollary to the mic issue, is mic placement and angle. If you haven't done much recording, it will be a HUGE revelation when you start moving the mic around even a little bit. Conventional wisdom has us mic the speaker off axis, about 1 to 1.5" from the doping on the cone. What if you can't see the cone through your grill cloth? Deal with it. Find a way. Use a flashlight, take out a speaker and note its position. Either way you figure it out, mark it with some tape on your grill cloth. Then move it toward the center a little. Big change. Then angle it 30 or 45 degrees to the grill cloth. Again, big changes. This right here can solve almost ALL live tone issues.
Try all this mic placement stuff at home first, so you'll know what kind of adjustments you need to make to the mic, depending on the change you want at a particular gig.
Speaking of that, make sure you are micing up the speaker you want. If you have a mix of speakers in your cab, you'll just have to, choose the one you want. If one speaker doesn't sound great, especially after you move the mic around a bit, then try another speaker. Don't try some mid-field mix of the two, because that just won't work live.
You should be able to take care of MOST tone issues by swapping/adjusting the mic. Really learn this, and you'll never need to talk to the sound man.
Board - all boards seem to sound different. It all gets down to the mic pre. Get your Line 6 Relay wireless, and wander out to the board during sound check. Now, this is the touchy part, because most sound men are simultaneously 1) arrogant know-it-alls; 2) clueless on how to get great guitar tone from the speaker out the mains; and 3) extremely territorial about their 'sound kingdom'. The truth is, you may not get him to make any changes to the board. I've run into many sound guys like this. You just have to take it. If you try to push a soundman who has dug his heels in, it usually means he will get pissed and tube your sound even worse, or he will completely cut you out of the mix.
But if you talk with him and ask him to make basic changes, you might get some cooperation. How you ask it is very important. "Can you give me some more low end?" is MUCH better than, "Turn the bass EQ knob up." It might seem like a small difference, but the first one is asking the sound man to use his skill and equipment to make an improvement. The second one is simply you ordering him to turn a knob on a piece of equipment.
You might have a cooperative sound guy that means well, so he'll respond with, "That will sound mushy," or "you don't want to drown out the bass." Even if you think it's BS, just ask the same question another way. "Ok, man. Can you drop my highs a little?"
Good luck with it. I've fought it for years, and in the end, you just have to realize that your live sound will usually not be great. But you can make it pretty good by learning the mic adjustments.
