Tech Feature

Miking Unamplified Instruments Onstage

Larry Cumings is hardly a newcomer to the art of mixing and miking acoustical instruments. This Grammy Award-winning engineer spent nearly a quarter of a century on the road doing FOH with the David Grisman Quintet and has been the audio producer and FOH engineer for the acclaimed Strawberry Music Festival for 30 seasons. Held in a large campground at 4,600 feet, high in California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains just outside of Yosemite National Park, the event takes place during the Memorial Day and Labor Day weekends each year, with the three-day festival offering a non-stop lineup of bluegrass, folk and other styles of acoustic music.

It’s always best to have a separate monitor mix system and a dedicated monitor engineer. But let’s face it — what you want and what you get are often two completely different things, and in many smaller venue/smaller budget gigs, those two jobs will be handled by the same person… namely you.

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