Skip to content

Making the Leap from FOH "Boy" to FOH "Man"

Making the Leap from FOH "Boy" to FOH "Man"

Balance is a tough thing. At FOH we are constantly being bombarded with requests/ideas/suggestions for sound guys to interview. Lots of good guys out there and who gets in is as much an issue of timing as anything else. But sometimes we will have to choose between a couple of interesting candidates. Like this month. On the one hand, we've got a young guy by the name of Kyle Chirnside who has gone with Fall Out Boy from clubs to arenas in a year. On the other, Brian Ruggles–who has been at the desk with Billy Joel for 35 years and who is one of the really great live engineers still working–was going to be in town. What to do? How about both? Call it a generational thing or a passing of the torch or just a cop-out on our part but we decided to talk to both of them. And, age and experience notwithstanding, they both had some interesting thoughts on the current state of live event audio.

Read More »

Unearthing A Performance Gem

As I was making my way to North Las Vegas to check out this room I have to admit that I was a bit torn. On one hand, I had recently met the technical director and A-1, and they were the kind of production guys I like to hang with–dedicated, down-to-earth and without any "don't you know who I am?" BS. Other production folks in town that I had talked to described The Club at the Cannery as an "A" room in a local casino in the "C" part of town. The important part, they stressed, was that it really was an A-level room.

Read More »

No Backline, No Truck, No Problem

It was a January rap show in a club on the East side of Buffalo. Load in was at 1 a.m., the band was scheduled to arrive around 3 p.m., show at 9 p.m. The FOH engineer Brandon and I set up the rig and waited patiently next to mammoth propane heaters for the band to arrive. 3 p.m. came and went, and then 4, 5 and 6 p.m. respectively. Finally, at 10 p.m., two hours after doors, and one hour after the show was to have started, the band shows up, takes one look at the stage and asks where all their backline is. A few frantic phone calls later, we discover that there was a miscommunication at the shop and the backline was never advanced. "No problem" we say, "we'll just go get it."

Read More »

No Soundcheck, No Headroom, No Problem

Live music is already a challenge in the modern world of multimedia concerts. Dealing with a new venue every night, multiple crews, gear issues and the requirements of different artists is certainly not easy. Now imagine you're on a tour with the Black Eyed Peas, a hot hip-hop crossover group that in concert features four singers, four live musicians, backing tracks, samples and a variety of instruments. Then imagine that there are almost no soundchecks ever.

Read More »

Dynacord Xa System

Dynacord Xa System

When I first reviewed the Dynacord Cobra Speaker System, the product literally fit the definition of the European over-designed "Uber-system" with a price tag to match. While many Cobra systems were sold, a number of potential customers could not make the investment, even with its plug and play abilities. So the Dynacord Xa Speaker now comes along to address the market's desire for a cost-sensitive, plug and play speaker system at home with corporate gigs, DJ-work, and live music performances.

Read More »

The Wedge Between Us

The Pastor wants them, the choir wants them, every musician in the worship band wants them (drummers like two), and the FOH person frequently wishes they didn't exist at all. We are talking, of course, about stage monitors or wedges. They are on my "Three Evils of Church Audio" list for several reasons, and unfortunately in this case evil is many times tangible and audible. Let's take a brief look and listen…

Read More »

The Tacklebox

Back in the early 1980s, when I was still in college chasing my electrical engineering degree, I volunteered to be a stage hand for a 24-hour charity dancea- thon at the college field house. Being a reasonably good musician and a novice sound person, I did not vie for the coveted Front of House mix position, as every wannabe techhead was already competing to "hang-out" at Front of House and hoping that the hourly change in bands was not accompanied by band engineers. But I had a blast practicing change-overs onstage, calling out new patches on a new-fangled wireless intercom and keeping the less-than-reliable racks and stacks working around the clock.

Read More »

Broadway Bites

Moody backdrops. Exotic locales. Brooding characters. Vicious vampires. They're all part of the dark drama that is Lestat, the musical inspired by the novels of Anne Rice and set to music by Elton John and Bernie Taupin. Despite its epic story, the production finds a balance between over-the-top showmanship and intimate performances. FOH engineer Simon Matthews juggles a lot of audio for Lestat, and he has been with the production since its preview run in San Francisco prior to its Broadway debut. Here he talks about the transformation of this horror tale, which includes classic Broadway numbers, a gothic showstopper ("To Kill Your Kind"), and even a New Orleans dance number.

Read More »

Who's Driving?

Think of recent history as divided into two archeological time periods: the craft-driven epoch and the market driven era. The former goes back many, many, many eons–at least to 1970–and was characterized by technology-based connections between parties in the live sound continuum: artists, sound companies and mixers chose each other almost solely on the basis of how good the technical fit was between them (with allowances, of course, for economics). The market-driven era, which we're in now, still has a technological dimension to it, but it also takes other factors into consideration. For instance, the kind of musical instruments used on a tour or in a music video is a function not only of what the musicians and technologists on the project want but also of what kinds of cross-marketing deals might have been made at levels above the trenches. The kinds of microphones in a venue might depend on which company has paid to banner that place. Those sorts of considerations only increase in importance and pervasiveness in a market-driven environment. That's why I thought that a new company, Guesthouse Projects, which launched earlier this year, fits the zeitgeist so well. Founded by Greg McVeigh, former vice president of touring sound at Meyer Sound, Guesthouse Projects takes the conventional relationship between touring artist and touring sound company and creates a multidimensional object by bringing a tour sound equipment manufacturer into the picture in the earliest stages of the relationship. Instead of a deal being struck between the first two parties, and then the manufacturers of the equipment leveraging their presence on the tour by following up with press releases, Guesthouse Projects proposes to have the equipment manufacturer become a dynamic rather than reactive participant in the process of putting sound systems together for artists and tours.

Read More »

UNICEF Parties For Charity At The Hague

THE HAGUE, NETHERLANDS–At the star-studded UNICEF gala in The Hague on March 25, AVEQ Rental & Sales supplied the equipment and expertise for the entire production using systems from Electro-Voice. Celebrities from the cultural, sporting and political worlds thronged the atrium of the town hall to have a good time and donate money to a worthy cause. UNICEF made a net profit of 143,500 euros — money that will be used for charitable purposes.

Read More »