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The church volunteer doesn't understand dynamics, so he loves to ride the effing gain whenever he can get to the soundboard. That's right, the gain settings, which is prefader so when our keyboardist or vocalist decides to be very soft and delicate on a certain passage, all of a sudden the levels of the monitor would go crazy and the mood of the song suddenly goes to ****.


Luckily we've been able to keep the soundboard next to the drummer so nobody can fiddle around with it, but said volunteer still likes to give us his input....

I hate amateur sound guys/enthusiasts.

pulseczar wrote:The church volunteer doesn't understand dynamics, ....Luckily we've been able to keep the soundboard next to the drummer

A drummer who understands dynamics? Send us one!

A recording engineer I worked with last summer was GREAT.

I've come across a couple good ones here in KC, unfortunately one moved on, another no longer does the regular gigs he and I had been on for 4-5 years.

pulseczar wrote:I hate amateur sound guys/enthusiasts.

Not every amateur sound guy rides the gain. Only the ones who don't know what music is supposed to sound like.

Unfortunately, the type of person attracted to that job is more of a gearhead than a musician, so the influences are usually in the wrong direction from the start.

I learned sound principles from a guy who is both a musician and a pro sound guy, and his philosophy was that a sound system should only be conspicuous by its absence. If you can actually hear the effect of the sound system, there's too much of it. I helped him install a number of sound reinforcement systems, and we felt best about the results when the church committee would complain that it wasn't on. "Could you hear everything clearly?" "Oh,yes, it was clear as a bell." "Then the system was working just fine." We often had to turn it off to demonstrate to them what it was doing.

We also hid the sliders behind plastic panels to prevent fiddling. They could turn a channel on or off, but not adjust things beyond a limited range. And we often hid the equalizer in the back of the cabinet so that they didn't even know it was there. We used the EQ to damp feedback resonances, not to make Whiny William sound like Booming Bill.

Then, of course there's the opposite. Not all musicians have the skill to manipulate the complexities of a sound system to produce a musical result.

It's sorta like photography. The true photographer can do great work with a cheap camera, while the guy with the zillions invested in Hasselblad often does no better than if he had a point-n-shoot.

And it's sorta like me playing a Holton.

Rick "who has heard some truly excremental sound systems put together by musicians" Denney

This is exactly why and how I got into sound work. We used to have a gospel quartet that wne around singing at other churches and events and got tired of inadequate sound systems and operators so I bought a small system, read everything I could get my hands on, and worked with anybody that would teach me. From there I started getting calls to help train church volunteers and start working youth retreats, camps, and concerts. Now I have a sound system that handles fairly large events. Not saying I'm the best sound guy cause I know I still have a lot of stuff to learn, but I do my best to listen to what's coming through the sound system and be aware of the audience reactions to help adjust everything.

We also began to do sound work after acquiring a large sound system and three smaller ones.
I'm glad it was us who miked the Mobile Youth Symphony last spring. We have always wanted an opportunity to do a group this large at an outside street venue. They were happy and so were we because they sounded great. You better believe the tubas were getting out.
The smaller systems with a small Mac computer open up all the D.J. work we can stand. One man can earn $250 - $700 a night as a d.j. for a bar or a wedding.
The fact that this work pays better than live music performances around here is not fully explained by the fact that some local musicians may have brought this on themselves by lackluster/too loud performances.