ahjteam
Anssi Tenhunen
I was mixing my friends band tonight, which plays progressive doom metal with female vocals, or something like that, but heavy metal with keyboards and double bassdrums anyways. I was mixing at my old workplace, the place is owned by the county and they hire unemployed persons to work there for like 6-14 months and then they are let go no matter the conditions, so the crew had almost completely changed since I worked there.
The venue has pretty top notch equipment for a club, even nationwidely. They just got like brand new 20000 lightconsole, 48ch Yamaha M7 as monitor console and 48ch Soundcraft MH3 in the FOH etc, but the place is pretty fucking awful and disgusting soundwise. When the venue is empty and you are doing a soundcheck and you put a kick in the PA, it will still ring for about 2 seconds in the room if you listen closely. There is a huge, I think 8 x 8 x 2m dome in the roof that reflects everything everywhere making the sound pretty mushy in a bad way and the the mixing spot is below a balcony that has a huge bass sum there.
The funniest part was that the house engineer (which I think was only barely legal, looked like 18-20 anyways) said to watch my levels after I had only done the drumcheck (was one of the best sounding drumsounds I've ever done there btw, "Concert hall" preset on Yamaha SPX990 used for toms rules!). I was thinking like "OK, the discipline must've been tightened up a lot since I was here, the limit was 100 dB then", so I dropped the master fader from 0 to -10 or something like that. Then I finished up my soundcheck, took pictures of my settings and I let the houseguys mix the other two bands... The funniest part was that during both of the gigs I looked at the SPL meter... both sets that they mixed peaked at 103 dB and 106 dB, constantly. And the sound was blurry sounding as hell even with earplugs on, you couldn't really tell the bass drum from the guitar, all just huge wall of pink noise. When our set came, the levels peaked between 96-98 dB... Then the guy asked "DAMN, how did you even MANAGE to get the band so quiet?"...
I can tell you that it is really more simple than you would think. Use the highpass, because the most energy comes from there. I also just looked wtf he was even thinking with the EQ on the bass guitar... huge boost at 120hz and +6 dB on the low shelf and no highpass filter activated. The guy must've never heard that if you only put the kick in the subs, you can actually get something intelligible from it and the kick usually even sounds more louder and better that way. So I highpassed EVERYTHING, even the kick at 40hz to save some energy in the compressor. I highpassed almost everything else atleast at 80hz, mostly 100-150hz except the kick trigger and overheads at 400hz and I didn't get pretty much anything else to the subs except the kick (...if the crossfader filter still is at 88hz like it was "back in the days")
I also noticed that the bass amp came already from the stage so effin loud that I just highpassed it at ~90-100hz, cut the mud near 300hz and boosted somewhere near 800hz for some definition, got myself a little more gain so I could put the compressor a little tighter (the compressor was cutting like 12dB all the time, so the bass was pretty "constant"). The hall just went almost bare quiet from the "hummmm" after that highpass and mud cut alone and you could actually listen to the set without earplugs so you could clearly hear what the band played...
Too bad there only was like 50 people watching, the capacity of the venue is 600... Would've been a good show otherwise.
The venue has pretty top notch equipment for a club, even nationwidely. They just got like brand new 20000 lightconsole, 48ch Yamaha M7 as monitor console and 48ch Soundcraft MH3 in the FOH etc, but the place is pretty fucking awful and disgusting soundwise. When the venue is empty and you are doing a soundcheck and you put a kick in the PA, it will still ring for about 2 seconds in the room if you listen closely. There is a huge, I think 8 x 8 x 2m dome in the roof that reflects everything everywhere making the sound pretty mushy in a bad way and the the mixing spot is below a balcony that has a huge bass sum there.
The funniest part was that the house engineer (which I think was only barely legal, looked like 18-20 anyways) said to watch my levels after I had only done the drumcheck (was one of the best sounding drumsounds I've ever done there btw, "Concert hall" preset on Yamaha SPX990 used for toms rules!). I was thinking like "OK, the discipline must've been tightened up a lot since I was here, the limit was 100 dB then", so I dropped the master fader from 0 to -10 or something like that. Then I finished up my soundcheck, took pictures of my settings and I let the houseguys mix the other two bands... The funniest part was that during both of the gigs I looked at the SPL meter... both sets that they mixed peaked at 103 dB and 106 dB, constantly. And the sound was blurry sounding as hell even with earplugs on, you couldn't really tell the bass drum from the guitar, all just huge wall of pink noise. When our set came, the levels peaked between 96-98 dB... Then the guy asked "DAMN, how did you even MANAGE to get the band so quiet?"...
I can tell you that it is really more simple than you would think. Use the highpass, because the most energy comes from there. I also just looked wtf he was even thinking with the EQ on the bass guitar... huge boost at 120hz and +6 dB on the low shelf and no highpass filter activated. The guy must've never heard that if you only put the kick in the subs, you can actually get something intelligible from it and the kick usually even sounds more louder and better that way. So I highpassed EVERYTHING, even the kick at 40hz to save some energy in the compressor. I highpassed almost everything else atleast at 80hz, mostly 100-150hz except the kick trigger and overheads at 400hz and I didn't get pretty much anything else to the subs except the kick (...if the crossfader filter still is at 88hz like it was "back in the days")
I also noticed that the bass amp came already from the stage so effin loud that I just highpassed it at ~90-100hz, cut the mud near 300hz and boosted somewhere near 800hz for some definition, got myself a little more gain so I could put the compressor a little tighter (the compressor was cutting like 12dB all the time, so the bass was pretty "constant"). The hall just went almost bare quiet from the "hummmm" after that highpass and mud cut alone and you could actually listen to the set without earplugs so you could clearly hear what the band played...
Too bad there only was like 50 people watching, the capacity of the venue is 600... Would've been a good show otherwise.
