my first FOH experience

[Fragle]

just came home from doing FOH sound for the first time - and it went absolutely great!
at first it was kinda intimidating to deal with all the outboard stuff, but i quickly noticed that it's basically the same thing as in the digital domain. actually it gave me a somewhat better understanding of how and why things work a certain way in the digital realm.

anyways, the show was awesome, and actually i got a lot of comments about the sound being the best they've heard so far in that particular venue. and to be honest, i agree
it was a rather small setup, only a 16 track mixer, only 4 channels of dbx gate/comp, and a reverb unit. it's amazing what you can do with only 4 bands of desk EQ if you have to. when doing studio work your often tend to add a lot of processing and many bands of eq etc, so having limited resources was a real eye opener for me. the only thing i wish i had were more gates!

i'll certainly try and do live sound more often in the future, it was a LOT of fun!

this is dedicated to all you guys doing live sound aside from studio work. let's share some tips and tricks, and talk about your first experiences in live sound!

 

[joelplagues]

iIremember that feeling.

first thing was thankfully something at where im studying but with bands and audience from outside of the college. pretty much thrown straight into it without much understanding and had our head lecturer not complain once until after the show about me half missing some kid talking into the mic.

recently did my first semi-major gig. Where I did everything from setup(most of it was patched anyway) to mixing 2 of the bands on the recent Carpathian australian tour.

also got offered to do Hate Eternal when they played with Nile but knocked that back due to having little live experience.

hope you stick with it dude. I'ts a great feeling everytime you walk away at the end of the night.

 

[arv_foh]

hope you stick with it dude. I'ts a great feeling everytime you walk away at the end of the night.

Give it a couple of years and mixing a couple hundred shitty bands then come talk to me hahaha

 

[Harry Hughes]

Can't offer any advice really, but congrats on the first gig you did FOH for going great

 

[robfromthedeep]

Give it a couple of years and mixing a couple hundred shitty bands then come talk to me hahaha

Haha i love your twitter updates while you're doing a show

 

[ahjteam]

Give it a couple of years and mixing a couple hundred shitty bands then come talk to me hahaha

It's actually amazing that even after mixing about 600 bands live in the past 10 years, the vast majority of them just vanishes from memory to the great gray mediocrity. I remember like maybe the 1% of the gigs that were pretty awesome or the 2% that were totally hideous.

 

[fade_2_black]

also got offered to do Hate Eternal when they played with Nile but knocked that back due to having little live experience..

Cool bro, I was originally booked to do Hate Eternal over here but Punchy (Nile's FOH/TM) said they had arranged for him to do it for the tour. Didn't mind though, after hearing guitar and bass tones I'm not sure I would have wanted to mix it.

Do you do any of the other shows coming through Brisbane? I've only been to Brisbane for work twice, once with Krisiun in some small bar and another time for Cannibal Corpse in the Hifi (I think it was?).. Heading back in September and again in October, should have a beer bro

 

[ze kink]

I did FOH on friday too, I think the previous time I did was a couple months ago. It was a pretty weird gig; two pretty acoustic bands playing old dance music. The first band had an accordion, a clarinet, vocals, drums and an acoustic guitar. The next one was violin, drums, acoustic guitar and vocals/kazoo. I went with the gear the place had, which was pretty clearly a mistake... the vocalist brought a mic there, and it turned out to be REALLY old (not even a dynamic microphone or one that'd use a magnet, I believe it was a carbon mic) and it was really hard to get the vocals audible without having it feed back. It had a really weird tone to it too un-eq'd. I also had to mic the accordion with some shitty speech mic which had an on/off switch, plus the accordionist would constantly bump the mic accidentally. Also, the monitors were some pretty bad Carlsbro ones and the desk was a passive Alto with really awful internal reverb and a really bad eq.

But it was fun and I did pretty well IMO considering what I had to work with.