I’ve linked to Jason Pritchard’s great site, Bright and Loud, in the blogroll for a long time, but I realized I’ve never actually linked to any of his articles before. I just came across this article browsing around his site, and wanted to call attention to it. A huge amount of this business, especially sound (althought truly all disciplines) comes down to people skills and psychology, and not technical skills. Jason provides some great examples, including a detailed examination of something I’ve run into many times, in translating actor-speak to sound-guy-speak*.
–Andy
*-I’m specifically referring to the fact that on musicals, we don’t put actors’ mics in monitors, as Jason details in his article. So, as a result, we need to understand that from an actor-centric point of view, if they can’t hear themselves singing comfortably onstage, they’re going to ask for “more of myself in the monitors”. It’s the sound designer/engineer’s responsibility, however, to know that in almost all cases, they don’t actually mean that they want more of themselves in the monitors, just that they want to be able to hear themselves more clearly. In other words, they’re actually asking for “less of everything else in the monitors”. Turn down the band a little, and they’ll be happy, and probably won’t even know they’re not going through the monitors at all.
On the flipside, I’ve seen the bad that comes with not understanding this. I’ve subbed a bit on a show I used to mix fulltime, and found that the GBF had significantly dropped since I’d last been on the show, and when I would instinctively hit the peak levels I used to be able to hit, things would begin to hit feedback. A little investigating revealed that the current engineer, when the cast complained that they couldn’t hear themselves, turned them up in the monitors, instead of just turning the monitors down. Now, not only is the entire GBF of the system (at least as far as vocals go) compromised, but there’s no easy way for anybody else to ever fix the problem, unless there’s a complete cast change. You can do it, but it’s got to be a very, very gradual process of rolling back the overall monitor level and the vocal level in tandem, while listening to yourself through mics onstage. Not easy, and not quick. And not my job on that gig, so I’m just making the observation :-)