Best Seat In The House

Text: Graeme Hague

FOLBACK ENGINEERING

First and foremost, the foldback engineer has to project confidence and professionalism. This means becoming one with the signal paths on your mixing console, outboard processors, the output buses and where they go with respect to the wedges on stage. Label everything clearly. It doesn’t matter if you’ve done this a million times or not – always make Send 1 the centre pair, for example. It doesn’t especially matter what order you choose to put things in, just so long as these elements become second nature to you. In the heat of the moment you’ll need to instantly grab the correct fader or knob and believe me, when the chips are down you don’t want to suffer even an instant of hesitation in front of your employers. Musicians get nervous easily, so the idea is to build up an intimate knowledge of the console until you can literally operate it in the dark – which you’ll probably have to do at some point.

Next, establishing the real-world limits for each section of foldback is very important – and I mean standing on stage yourself with a microphone and finding the maximum physical volume that should ever be fed through those wedges, then identifying where that level is on your mixing desk. Remember, on a good system with plenty of headroom this isn’t necessarily going into the red. In fact, forget meters for a moment. With a flat EQ, determine with your own ears what you’d consider bloody loud and mark it on the desk even though (hopefully) you’ll never be pushing things that far.

WORKING ON STAGE

The problem is that foldback engineers generally don’t have the benefit of listening to their mix as they work – which is kind of crazy, but a fact of the foldback engineer’s life. It’s like a pilot flying on instruments on a pitch-black night. What we’re trying to do here is set safety benchmarks. Sure, the goal posts can shift a little with compressor tweaking and different performers, but not much. The concept is that, if things go pear-shaped and you’re asked to push the on-stage sound harder and harder to a level where you figure things are getting ridiculous – yet the performer is still insisting there’s not enough volume – you have a finite point where you know it’s got to be near-deafening and therefore the problem, if it exists at all, must lie elsewhere. Hey, these things happen. Speakers and cables fail without warning sometimes and the vocalist for example might be right – there isn’t any sound coming out. However, what usually occurs is that the band gets progressively louder and the singer more deafened. In this situation you must not let yourself be pressured into running signal levels beyond what you’ve determined to be maxing out – bloody loud, remember? It’s a recipe for feedback disaster.

Back-tracking a little and repeating myself, never hesitate to jump up on stage during the setup and listen to what the performers are hearing. In emergencies, even do it during the gig. Don’t get entrenched behind your mixing desk thinking you have all the answers and information at your fingertips. Headphones are useful, and having your own powered wedge running from the phones output is even better, but nothing beats hearing the foldback mix from the band’s perspective. Get out there and listen!

SINS OF THE PAST

The latest foldback monitors are pretty well designed pieces of gear and shouldn’t need much EQ’ing (stage monitors produced in the 1980s and ’90s were nightmarish to work with and the perception that foldback needs extensive EQ’ing still lingers). Some of the modern, dual-purpose, self-powered speakers like JBL Eons can maybe benefit from a little tweaking to help them adapt to the foldback role, but not in a bad way. Positioning issues can cause feedback problems such as a wedge that has to be placed side-on to a keyboard vocalist. Low ceilings over a stage can be difficult, too.

Whatever is causing the hassle, if you still find that EQ’ing is necessary, don’t ever, ever ‘squeak test’ the system. This is the old method of putting a live microphone on stage and pushing up the gain until things start feeding back, which supposedly reveals any troublesome frequencies. There’s about, oh, a hundred reasons not to do this, but I’ll give you three. First, you can damage your equipment and your hearing. With the latter I’m not being alarmist and suggesting you’ll be rendered stone deaf, but one decent feedback squeal can kill off your top-end hearing for half an hour or so and any adjustments you make during that time will be worthless. Secondly, it’s a pointless exercise anyway. An open microphone on an otherwise quiet stage running at high gain levels doesn’t remotely emulate the true performance conditions, so why bother? Thirdly, and most importantly, it’s really bloody annoying. Really annoying. Nothing will make you more unpopular with everyone faster than a sudden 8kHz screech from the wedges. Do it repeatedly and you’ll get lynched. It’s unnecessary and aggravating. If you have a tricky problem and it’s unavoidable that feedback will occur while you’re working on it, warn everybody. Better still, clear the stage area if you can. Mind you, creating extreme EQ settings to kill off feedback should be your last resort anyway, and a wedge that’s made to sound like crap to avoid feedback is next to useless. If you’re in this situation, try a different monitor or another microphone if you can. Also, move the wedge around and get it away from the offending microphone. Try everything else, before mashing the sound to a pulp with EQ.

THREE GOOD TRAITS

Technical skills are plainly vital and good equipment makes a huge difference, but the most invaluable assets a foldback operator can have are patience, tolerance and a sense of humour. In other words, ‘people skills’. We all know a stage can be rife with egos; the real trick is not to trample on them. Treat every member of the band is if they’re the most important. Give them equal time and equal consideration. Create an atmosphere of co-operation and often problem areas like too-loud guitars will be seen by the band for what they are, rather than a guitarist stubbornly insisting on a particular ‘sound’ because he or she feels like they’re playing second fiddle to someone else. A seasoned foldback engineer is part mixer, part psychiatrist and part expert in conflict resolution. Never hesitate to politely communicate your problems with the band. If a singer has a soft voice, tell them. If a guitarist is too loud, tell them. I can guarantee that 99% of the time they’ll be well aware of these things, but often nobody’s had the courage to say them out loud. If you’re being honest and professional no-one can complain.

Finally, check out the real logistics about the band early and maybe save yourself a lot of hassle. Countless times I’ve been asked for a vocal microphone for every member only to be told later that someone only sings once in a single song and it’s not so important – they don’t really want it. Also make sure that vocalists won’t be bringing their own microphone and, if they are, get hold of it for your setup time. Another tip is that sometimes you’ll need to mic up something twice: separately for FOH and foldback. Grand pianos are a good example of this. The kind of delicate, condenser microphones that can produce excellent FOH tones are occasionally too sensitive for feeding a foldback wedge. Dedicating a separate mic – perhaps something that’s much more tolerant, like an SM57 – specifically to the task of driving the foldback wedges can be the best and least time consuming solution. A word of warning if you use this technique: make sure you explain to the pianist that the foldback they’ll be hearing isn’t representative of the FOH quality. You might have to repeat this four or five times if they’re a particularly obnoxious jazz pianist (okay, I must let that one go…).

Good foldback is all about building a good sound on stage, not some technically complex yet strangled, over-EQ’d and compromised mix to accommodate a combination of problems. Take your time, work on it and try and create an immersive on-stage sound that’s the best seat in the house. The band will love you for it…

PHANTOM MENACE

But hang on, what was the deep secret I was going to divulge?

Well, sometimes it’s useful to have a “phantom” channel that isn’t actually patched into anything. When a particularly demanding performer rushes over during a show to ask for more “this” and less of “that” try giving them a big, cheerful thumbs-up and let them see you making an adjustment on the phantom channel. You’ll be surprised how often this can have beneficial results. They’ll nod that it’s made a difference – they’re happy.

Are you tricking them? No. Are you being dishonest? Not really. Are you being a wanker? No, but by then at least the astute foldback engineer will have established that someone is…