Q – You talked earlier of soundchecks being stressful for you. Is it due to a limit on time to get the right sound. You usually travel with a sound engineer? Is this always the case? What is your usual technique for mixing your live sound with the acoustic gig?
A – Well, firstly – no two rooms are the same and the same guitar and microphone can sound quite different from day to day, place to place, so we have to be ready for problems…
Sometimes i travel with an engineer, sometimes not. If I know that the in-house folk are good then I’m fine, if we speak the same language, that is. On longer tours it makes sense to bring someone, but I’m travelling more and more on my own, or just with a driver/merchandise seller, because my system is so simple these days, I rarely run into problems.
The system is as follows – The Front of House (FOH) sound is my vocal mic, guitar mic and one of my DI boxes, depending on which guitar I’m playing (the sound engineer just mutes the one I’m not playing). The guitar sound is a mix of mic and DI (usually more mic). On stage I just use the DIs for monitoring so we don’t run into any feedback problems, and to keep it simple. I carry splitter cables so that if the sound engineer doesn’t have the ability to have separate channels for FOH and monitors the cables can split the signal – I don’t always want the vocal in the monitors treated the same way as it is for FOH… I also carry spare mics, spare cables and none of my equipment uses a power supply any more – all use phantom power which comes from the mixing board – so no more DI boxes blowing up.
That’s about it – when I soundcheck I listen to the monitors – try to get them sounding good, or at least OK – by EQing the actual monitor system, and the individual signals. Then I play until the FOH engineer is happy. Then I fine tune the monitors. This whole thing should take an hour or less, if the FOH engineer has already ‘tuned’ the PA, that is. After sound I talk to the lighting person and check what it looks like (I forgot to do this in Sheffield recently which is one of the reasons I was so flustered). I often just say i want to look like Marlene Deitrich circa 1935. I have no ‘light show’, only a basic look – which is cabaret, I suppose.
One can never be sure exactly how the room will change when people turn up, so there is always a chance of something unexpected coming up. Occasionally a soundcheck will sound great on stage but the show sound is completely different thanks to the change in room acoustics, but at least this no longer surprises me…