Enter Soundman

Band pics: Marty Philbey

MERRY GO IN-THE-ROUND

The World Magnetic tour has been in progress on and off for some two years now. Like many enormo-tours, Metallica’s is a 360° in-the-round experience. Traditionally this creates challenges for the PA, with plenty of holes to plug to ensure adequate coverage of every seat.

Big Mick: This show is designed to be 360° – and it’s very rare that we’re not in-the-round. We can’t go in-the-round in Christchurch – we can’t get the whole system in. Is that anything to do with the earthquake? No. Although when our advance guys went there to look at the venue apparently they experienced a 6.1 aftershock. It seems like something we’re good at – running into disaster zones.

The swine flu all kicked off in Mexico City and we did three stadium shows there two weeks after the World Health Organisation pronounced it “all bad, run away”! We ran into it.

When we landed, there were thermal imaging machines looking at how warm we were, seeing if we had swine flu. Shouldn’t those cameras be switched to those trying to leave the country?!

CH: In-the-round concerts are spectacular but they’re a challenge I assume?

BM: Miserable for audio – always have been. It’s just so hard to get even coverage for all the seats. And we’ve done a lot of these with many systems.

We used an EV MT4 system in the early days. Wow, the weight of that system. It wasn’t flexible to array and being a passive PA you needed to put a pile of amps somewhere. In some cases we had speaker leads that were 450 feet long – hmm, is the impedance going to be a bit weird at the end of that? But we got away with it.

We did an in-the-round tour with the Nexo Alpha system. That was more flexible in the arraying, but because of the nature of the beast you end up with sections of the audience that were patchy – with more or less high-end – because you’re splaying the boxes so much to get the coverage.

Here in Australia we’re in-the-round again with a Meyer Milo rig. This line array is more consistent in its coverage but you still can’t get it perfect. It infuriates me. You think you should be able to point speakers everywhere, but it’s next to impossible.

CH: Are we mainly talking about consistency in the high-frequency coverage or the low-end as well?

BM: It’s the low end as well. We have three different ways we array the subs on this tour, depending on the restrictions on where we can put the hang points.

CH: So you don’t consider ground-stacking subs any more?

BM: The subs won’t work on the floor because the stage is less than a metre high – the band want to be close to the kids – so there’s no room under the stage. Flying the subs isn’t the perfect answer either. You get lobing and patchiness because of the phase relationship. And, as I said, you don’t always get to choose exactly where you array the subs. In one of our three array configurations the subs are slightly proud of the Milo on the corners, slightly obstructing the high frequency pattern off the horns because it’s firing off the side of the subs a little. So there are areas where it’s slightly dull. But it’s not an occasion where you can put your hand up and say, ‘Oh, let’s just take down those 40 subs and do something different’ – I’d be Mr Unpopular trying to do that.

The best sub setup we have is the TM array, named after Thomas Mundorf from Meyer who came up with the idea.

CH: It’s the best, why?

BM: Again, you go back to the problems of being in-the-round. It’s not like doing a show from one end of a room where you can stack your subs up on the left and right – maybe you have a few in the middle – and you have all that coupling: coupling with the floor and each other, and you have this very powerful, united sub package. When you’re in-the-round, it’s all in the air so you’ve got no coupling with the floor, and worse than that the subs are all over the place. And anyone who knows even a little about sound knows that when sub frequencies arrive at different times you get a lot more or a lot less – adding or cancelling depending on where you’re standing.

So I thought: there’s gotta a be a better way of doing this.

Then Thomas Mundorf designed an array with four columns of 10 subs [Meyer 700-HPs] to produce a low-frequency point source. Because they’re 10 deep we’ll get pattern control [a string of subs will naturally have a more controlled dispersion pattern in the vertical]. In fact, we had to delay the bottom of the array to steer the sound down to the floor because the array was beaming like a wagon wheel around the centre section of the arena – it was missing the floor altogether.

CH: Which presumably means the stage isn’t getting pounded by sub frequencies?

BM: That’s right. It sits right above the drummer in the middle of the stage – seven tons of sub bass right on top of Lars’s head – and he gets none of it. Very bizarre.

But when we steer it down a bit to cover the floor, it means that James [Hetfield, on vocals] cops some sub when he’s right out at the corner of the stage. He’s not mad keen about that. He doesn’t like sub bass particularly. How bizarre is that, eh? A band like Metallica… a band where I’ve spent my career trying to produce the absolute maximum amount of sub bass I can generate – and the singer doesn’t actually like it! When we were using the EV MT4 PA there was so much low end in some venues you could actually hear it modulate James’s voice [Big Mick does a rendition of James singing like Tarzan]. He hated it. All I got was an intercom call – “James says turn the low end down!” Then when I see him, it’s like: “look, it’s for the kids; they want it to get going and they want a bit of crush about it.”

“Yeah I get it, it’s for the kids,” he says.

VOCALS: OLD 55

Being in-the-round means the band has to cover quite a bit of turf to involve all sides of the audience. Lead vocalist/guitarist James Hetfield has eight vocal mics dotted around the perimeter of the rectangular stage. The band combines in-ear monitoring with wedges (24 x Meyer MJF-212As).

CH: I notice James is using the retro Shure 55SH mics. Are they the new Super version with the condenser capsule?

BM: The new capsule? No, but we tried fitting our own condenser capsule – didn’t work. You’re too close to the capsule when you sing and it bumps, pops and farts. The day before the first Melbourne show I saw James listening to our vocal mic sound check. “So you’ve sorted them out then?” “I have James, but they still sound like crap compared to what we had with the Audio-Technica 5400.” The 5400 is a fantastic mic – you could hear an in-rush of breath, everything. But James prefers the retro look of the Shure 55. Also the 5400 pattern is pretty wide. When you brought it up in the ears you could hear a lot of ambience and he didn’t like it.

CH: And the comparative lack of sensitivity of the 55 is an advantage?

BM: That’s right. When you turn up the 55 it doesn’t create a problem with the in-ear monitors. James likes the isolation. He much prefers the 55s and I’m dealing with them.

CH: How so?

BM: I’m using an awful lot of EQ. The 55 doesn’t have much high-end but an ungodly amount of low mid – 250Hz is off the dial. I pull all the low mids out of it, roll it off at 150Hz – which is getting up there – leaving the residual high ends, which accentuates that frequency band. From there I turn it up and it works. There’s some moodiness around 500 and 630Hz and 2.5k is a bit weird. There’s also a 4k thing, but that depends on where you sing into it. If you’re not singing square into the mic it starts to get a bit strange.

They look fantastic and I get it. I understand why he wanted the retro design rather than just the black Audio-Technica look. We tried to retrofit a 5400 capsule but that went a bit pear-shaped.

The other thing with the 55s is they lose high end – really lose it. We go through mics every day. We have a big box, and at around $200 each, Bob the monitor guy and I are like: “that one’s gone a bit dull” and we turf it. They’ve become expendable.

It’s a slightly different situation with the 5400 at $600 a pop. But they’re indestructible. We’ve had those fall over, land nose down onto the stage and not miss a beat.

CH: Sounds like you’ve made your case to James?

BM: He eventually gave me the choice. He came down and said “do you want me to stick with what we’ve got?” and I looked at him and I couldn’t do it – he was so excited about switching to the retro 55s.

TOUCH OF MIDAS

Big Mick was involved in the design of Midas’s breakthrough digital console, the XL8, while it was still a bunch of electronics on a bench. Prior to that Mick has been quoted at various times as saying you’d have to prise the XL4 from his dying clutches before he moved to digital. Finally, Big Mick was seduced by the XL8’s attention to detail, with every control and attribute of his beloved XL4 being modelled. Well, maybe not absolutely everything:

BM: One of the hardest things to get used to was not having the natural bus compression you get from hitting the XL4’s input channels hard. Every XL4 engineer knows you get the orange LED lighting up and you get that great XL4 sound. So with the XL8 I had to learn to add compression rather than just using the console. And it took a while.

I’m not a big one for compression. Hit the XL4 hard and it scrunched the sound a little, it didn’t flatten it. Fortunately, the XL8 has four different compressors on each input. Also, I have the added benefit of being able to phone the guy who designed it: “Alex what’s the one to use for drums? The blue one? Okay, I’m good with the blue one!”

There’s been a lot of learning and re-learning of the muscle memory. I didn’t have to look at my XL4; it was part of me. The position of the knobs are embossed on my memory. If I had to walk in and dial-in an XL4 tonight I could.

CH: But you saw the writing on the wall for the XL4?

BM: I had to make the switch. I was going around the world and unless we shipped my own XL4, which was immaculate, they were failing. And Midas can’t make any more, they’re not RoHS compliant. What with the cadmium chassis, and the solder that melts at a lower temperature and poisons the whole world – the XL4 was going to kill us all!

I remember a particular desk in Japan that helped me make my mind up. All the VCAs were stuck. The motors were bollocks and I was fighting with the faders. It made me realise that it wasn’t going to get any better. For one-offs in another country where you have to rent the gear in, the writing was on the wall. Okay, I could have soldiered on with the XL4 for a couple more years, but you’d have to find the ‘good one’ and it’d be a struggle. You’d have to ask to the rental companies: ‘it’s a good one isn’t it? I’m not going to get one that’s got problems?’

You’d end up spending more on hiring an old XL4 than you would on an XL8.

CH: Were your EQ positions largely the same when you moved from the XL4 to the XL8?

BM: Yep. And I have to be honest I have set up the XL8 like an XL4 – the XL8 is a digital XL4. You’ve even got the same sort of EQ. You can switch through the mode of the high and low shelving EQ – Soft, Hard and then there’s an ‘XL4’ shelf. With the XL4, every time you set the shelf frequency there was a slight dip before it ramped up – it was just an XL4 quirk. Alex, the XL8 designer, sat with the XL4, measured the plot, and added that feature. So most of my EQ settings are switched to sound like the XL4 – that’s what I know and love.

CH: You must appreciate some of the advantages of digital?

BM: Oh yeah, I do. Even with the filters, the Soft Shelf is better than the XL4 EQ for warming up cymbals. And I love the fact I can insert a 31-band graphic EQ on every aux bus and sub group. So when you’ve got six mics making up a guitar sound, if you think ‘Oh there’s a little too much 2k in the lead guitar’, instead of trawling through all six mics to find out which one is causing the problem – and it might not be like that the next day – just go to the graphic and pull down a little 2k. If you tried to do that with the XL4 you’d need the graphic in your rack, you’d have to have the graphic inserted on that group and you’d end up with eight racks behind you.

With the XL4, the most lines I’d plugged in was 64 – and that was with a load of stereo modules in a 48-channel frame. With the XL8 you’ve got 96 channels out of the box and you can have them configured however you want. What’s more, I can walk in with a USB key, tap a few buttons and, presto, it’s exactly the same as the one I used on the other side of the world – exactly the same.

CH: So outboard is a thing of the past?

BM: I’ve shied away from using outboard gear as much as I can. I have an old Korg unit that gets used for Master of Puppets. It’s a DRV3000 and I use it for a harmonised pitched-down effect. It’s the only machine I’ve found that can do it and I’ve tried everything. It’s an old beast with a TV remote – the unit hasn’t got any knobs on it. If we ever lost the remote we’d be sunk, or if anyone had one in the crowd they could really mess with us!

CH: I’m not sure I’d be telling people that.

BM: Oh, they’d never get one of these. Saying that, the last one I bought was $100 on eBay and it was immaculate – wow!

CH: Presumably they didn’t know it was Big Mick buying it for Metallica?

BM: No, we were a bit more shrewd than that!

CH: Anything else lurking in the slimline rack?

BM: I’ve also got a TC Electronic D2 delay. I hate the Midas delay. The XL8 delay has all the parameters a guitarist would want, but I’m not a guitarist, I’m a sound engineer. I just need to know the timing in milliseconds or I’ll tap it. Finally, I have a BBE exciter for the toms. I’ve always had it, probably don’t need it – the desk could probably do it – but it’s there.

PULLING A METALLICA KICK DRUM

Big Mick has spent most of his career doing his best to pin audiences to the wall with thunderous bass. And it’s never too late for this old dog to learn a new trick – this parallel compression technique borrowed from the studio.

BM: My mate Tom Abraham [See ‘Garbage Live’ in Issue 43], great guy, put me onto this one.

Send the kick drum to another channel or subgroup and put a compressor over that new channel. Set the compressor to infinity-to-one – the greatest amount of compression you can get – the fastest possible attack, and the slowest possible release – not a fast release, slow as you can. Finally, boost the make-up gain on the compressor right up – to +24dB or as high as it’ll go – adjust the threshold even though the compressor is slamming, so the level on the channel is the same whether the compressor is bypassed or not. Don’t forget to insert a gate before or after the compressor or the 24dB of makeup gain will feed back. Now just bring up your super-compressed channel in parallel with the kick drum. What does it sound like? You won’t get your breath back, that’s all I can say.

CH: How much are you dialling in?

BM: A lot. I started off gingerly – “oo that’s nice” – then more and more. I do the same for snare drum and bass guitar.

So try this guys… it works – you’ll be shocked. Particularly on kick drum. If you want some more kick in the mix but the system is working quite hard, the super-compressed version doesn’t tax the system any more but it really adds to the apparent volume of the kick drum. Because it’s so compressed there’s not a big voltage swing.

Also, if your drummer is having an off day and not hitting as hard as usual, the compressed version fills in the gaps.

LIVE VS RECORDED SOUND

CH: The band’s most recent album is regarded as the loudest, most slammed album ever produced…

BM: …to the point where the mastering engineer washed his hands of it! I thought that was very odd… I love the sound of the album.

CH: But does that change the way you mix live?

BM: I’ve never used the albums as a guide. The way I engineer Metallica, it’s more of a feeling than a frequency plot. Mixing heavy metal isn’t like mixing a rock band, it’s about capturing an energy. You can keep tidying and smoothing heavy metal until it sounds like Bryan Adams, but the fans wouldn’t like that, they want it to be a bit raucous. When Lars pounds the snare drum you see them all playing air drums – you want that war to go on. I try to deliver what they want and the band leaves me to get on with it. It’s been 26 years – we’ve not talked about sound for the last 20.

CH: So the delays and reverb settings are simply about what you think works?

BM: Sure. Take the vocal effects. I’ve never really had a conversation about vocal effects with James but I do a lot of them. Some I’ve taken direct from the albums – you have to because they’re part of the song – others I just do. And when James hears a big delay going off in the house he goes with it. He’s really good at tailing it off, being very careful not to be too abrupt so you don’t get a short, sharp echo bouncing around. He ramps his vocal delivery into it and it sounds great. We’ve been doing it for so long it just happens.

SOUND CHECK TIPS

After working with excessive volumes – on and off stage – for nigh-on 30 years, Big Mick understands how to get the most out of a sound check. I started by asking him about drums:

BM: Sound check the ambience mics first because they’re going to be on later. What I used to do – and what most people do because it’s the way the console’s normally laid out – is to start the sound check with the kick drum. Normally the kick drum is gated and once it’s done, that’s it – it’s locked off. But let’s say the drummer has an awful lot of kick drum click in the drum fill. After you’ve done the snare (also gated), the toms (all gated) and the hi-hat you get to the overheads. The guy’s got his drumfill bollocking with clicking kick drum and all of a sudden the kick drum you did 10 minutes ago no longer works because there’s too much click. So would it not be better to do it the other way round? Get the ambience on. He’s already got the kick in his drumfill at this point – the monitor guy always has it before you’ve got it – and it’s going ‘click click’ so you don’t have to add so much high-end because it’s coming through the overheads.

CH: And the same applies to your vocal mics? Don’t wait until the end?

BM: Right, because your vocal mics are the worst at tipping the balance of your sound. Especially at a small gig where the stage is really shallow. The vocal mic is probably only six or seven feet from your guitar stack, right on line with the vocal mic.

Do the vocal mics first and make them sound good, otherwise you’re going to sacrifice the tone of your vocals if you’re not careful. Otherwise you’ll have this crushing band going – kick, snare, guitars, bass all really happening – then you’ve gotta get the vocals over the top. You’ll have to jack the vocals up to the point that the vocal mic is picking up the whole band and your mix doesn’t sound anywhere near as good.

Or the guy sings and it might sound a bit dull. So you might want to put some high end into that vocal mic – tease a bit of high frequency in there. The vocal is intelligible now, but then he steps away from the mic and the guitars part your hair. Why not work the other way around? Make the vocal mic bright enough so it sounds good and then work with the backline to fit with that.

Then you’ve got a drummer that sings… a f**king drummer that sings!… and he’s got a vocal mic there among half a dozen cymbals. Now wouldn’t it make sense to get that mic sorted before you even do overheads, never mind the snare drum? A f**king drummer that sings… I hate drummers that sing… but you try and add a vocal after everything else and it’s next to impossible.

CH: You’ve got eight vocal mics for James. I’m guessing they’re not open all night waiting for him to use one.

BM: We use gated vocals and Jay – my assistant – makes sure they’re all open when they need to be. I’m actually working on a new auto-switcher for this purpose. I’ve tried others that use an infra-red beam that switches the mic on/off as you approach it. But they’re so unreliable. I’m working on a new type, in fact my patent is almost granted in America. It uses RF ID. It’s like if you try to walk out of shop without paying for something, the tag will set off the alarm. In this case the singer has a tag and when he approaches the mic it activates it. You can retro-fit it to any mic and it’ll be a little box on the floor with an antenna on it – the mic plugs into it and talks to a card in your pocket. So I’ll be selling those soon. I’ll be onto everyone I know saying “plug my product please,” so I can retire!