You may not pay much attention to them, but sound men are the hidden key to a good show.
by Joe Tarr
Listen to the stage manager and get on stage when they tell you to. No one has time for the rock star bullshit. None of the techs backstage care if you're David Bowie or the milkman. When you act like a jerk, they are completely unimpressed with the infantile display that you might think comes with your dubious status. They were there hours before you building the stage, and they will be there hours after you leave tearing it down. They should get your salary, and you should get theirs.
—Henry Rollins
"Hey, Hey, one-two, two-two. Hawww. Hawww. Hawww. That sounds scary."
Tony Furtado is squawking into the microphone at Blue Cats, and he hears a slight hum floating through the system that's annoying him. Off to the side of the stage, Robert Plumley is tinkering over a confusing maze of knobs and dials, trying to tweak the monitor to the band's satisfaction. When he's done adjusting the monitor sound—what the band hears on stage—he moves to a larger board in the center of the bar, where he begins setting the sound levels for what the audience will hear in a couple of hours. After each musician takes a solo turn for Plumley, they break into Woody Guthrie's "I Ain't Got No Home in This World Anymore." A lit cigarette dangling out from his bushy dark brown beard, Plumley makes more adjustments.
As Blue Cat's sound guy, Plumley will spend the better part of the show jogging back and forth between these two boards, trying to get the sound just right for both crowd and band. But, as most sound technicians will tell you, that's not the hardest part of the job.
Rather, it's "egos," Plumley says. "It's good to know the electronics, but the psychology of dealing with musicians is just as important. With these guys, it's a breeze. Usually there's one musician in every band that's ultra picky about what he wants."
In many ways, the sound technicians have a thankless job—blamed for anything that may go wrong, they get little attention when things go right. What exactly their job entails is often misunderstood. Without them the show might still go on, but it would sound awful.
If you've been to a concert in Knoxville, chances are M&L Sound had a hand in what you heard. M&L handles most of the sound systems for shows here, including the Tennessee and Bijou theaters, Market Square's Sundown in the City series, as well as shows at the World's Fair Park and Civic Auditorium.
But before you start writing that angry letter bitching about the sound at a Merle Haggard or Green Day show, you should know just what it is that M&L does. For most of the shows, M&L merely supplies sound equipment, and doesn't actually mix the boards. Or, they may only mix the monitor sound or mix for the opening bands. The big touring acts usually supply their own engineers.
"We'll mix for free. The mixing is the icing on the cake," says Tony Johns, systems engineer for M&L. "But nine times out of 10, it's out of our hands—we just supply the equipment."
"My job is to make sure the system is adequate, it fits the budget, and it's what the band wants," he adds.
Johns has been a sound engineer for 23 years. He started in high school, working as a lighting technician, but got bored with it and switched to sound. "The business is definitely changing. When I started out, all you had to have was a strong back and a weak mind," he says. Today, much of his job is consumed by computers, equipment maintenance and paperwork.
There's a lot that can go wrong with a show. The band's "engineer" may be the guitar player's brother and mainly clueless as to how to mix. Or, there could be miscommunication between the manager as to what is needed.
At a Ray Charles concert in the World's Fair Park a few years ago, the manager asked for eight inputs—i.e., microphone and instrument lines—despite having an 18-piece orchestra and three backup singers. An orchestra show typically has 40 to 60 inputs; even rock club shows have around 24 inputs. "We're looking at him going, 'You're nuts.' They said, 'That's what Mr. Charles wants. If he doesn't get what he wants, he walks.'
"It was completely out of our control. There were quite a few unhappy customers," he says. "You can have 100 good shows and one bad one, and everyone remembers the bad one."
Each venue can create its own problems as well. For instance, although the Tennessee Theatre sounds pretty good, "the big dome in the ceiling tends to roll sound around."
"The Bijou is by far the best sounding room in Knoxville. It can handle everything from Mel Torme to Danzig. The room is very forgiving with no real problems," Johns says. "They got rid of the worst sounding room in Knoxville, the Alumni Gym."
For the most part, no type of music is more difficult than others, but some have their quirks. Bluegrass can be difficult because of obnoxious fans. Hip hop can be hard because of the MC posturing: "They think it's cool to cup the mike with their hands—they don't realize that kills the sound." Symphony shows can be tricky because there are so many inputs, and because "symphony musicians don't care about amplification at all and will often move the mike."
Like Plumley, Johns blames egos for most of the problems. "Egos and girlfriends are the big killers," he says. "It's really hard to deal with drunk or stoned musicians. If you have a regular job, you don't drink and go to work. Why would they want to do that?"
Plumley has been mixing about five years. He started at Bird's Eye, moved onto Moose's, and then Blue Cats. The mixing board is the same one used at Moose's, but the sound at Blue Cats is much better. "The room is only about 15 feet wider, but it's a big difference in sound," he says.
It's a sound that gets better the more people there are. "That low end hum [Tony Furtado] was talking about, it'll totally disappear when there's people here. This room sounds so good when it's packed; people just suck up the bad sound."
Plumley mixes about half of the acts that perform here; the others bring their own engineers. Jazz shows are the more difficult, he says. "With jazz it's harder to get the instruments to sound right." But there's less distortion because they don't pump out as much volume, he adds. Most difficult are multi-band shows that require different configurations for each act.
Plumley doesn't mind some constructive criticism from the audience. But he does appreciate a little patience. "I don't mind people doing that because they're going to have a different perspective standing out in the middle of the audience than I am. But give me at least two songs to do it, then critique me."
"It's not usually a matter of just turning up the vocals. It's figuring out what's covering it up," he says.
Interestingly (and maybe not all that surprisingly), neither Plumley nor Johns listens to music away from work. Plumley enjoys many of the shows that come through Blue Cats, but says, "I stopped listening to music a long time ago."
"I don't own a stereo," Johns says. "Music anymore is just background noise."
Still, there are many shows Johns loves to work. "To me, it's more of an attitude. If the musicians are nice to me, I'll be nice to them, and we'll have a great day."
January 24, 2002 * Vol. 12, No. 4
© 2002 Metro Pulse
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