Hi guys, this is just a little rant to boil off , I’m really upset with a venue sound engineer …
Saturday we have a gig in a beautiful venue nearby, first time we play here, very good backline and PA , live music oriented …. When I told the sound guy that we process all instrument audio real-time on pc with VST live and we would give him separate line output for each instrument … he began a half hour rant , fearing audio spikes on his 40k€ PA if system crash, fear of not being able to finish the gig, too unstable, too much risks…. Grrrr !! So he prohibited us to work as we usually did in even bigger stages without problems… he wants audio signals from the source, unprocessed.
So we will have to give up live processing and iem monitoring via VST live …. A shame given how much work we’ve put in the project ….
The audio processing is part of your “sound”. Why would you let anybody mess with it? Would you give him a clean guitar and trust him to find the correct FX and turn it on/off at the right time? Sounds like a case of the 3 B’s.
Surely the counter argument is that the spikes he’s worried about may occur whether or not you process the audio (but you’re better than that cos you know your sound and you carefully curated it). Either way he should know enough to be able to protect his “baby” with limiters, compressors and gates.
Maybe an overinflated sense of self importance, maybe he’s worried he’ll lose his job if there’s nothing for him to do. Either way his attitude needs a lesson in customer relations.
If it was a premixed backing track he’d have no argument - give him the LR only as @fkalmus said - not sure I’d trust him with stems. Be friendly but firm - it’s your show.
Well I usually give the venues a main LR when no resident sound engineer/service is present. Or single channels to give foh ability to balance levels when sound engineer is available … yeah, I need to find a gentle and polite way to tell him that we are on stage and we have to perform…and we would prefer to do it as we are used to and confident …. I’ll propose to give him a main LR limited @ -12dB so he can eventually mute only 2 channels on the flight should any crash and buffer struck anomaly happens …. And that it’s more than 1 year that we do gigs and rehearsals fully on pc and VST live without ever any crash on stage … or during rehearsals…
.. He told us … yeah if this was at leas a Mac … way better … or if you were at leas using an UAD Apollo with hardware DSP …. So …. He don’t thrust Win pc and don’t trust my competence … and that is what makes me angry … leave me alone and let me do it as I am used and confident to do …. If it crashes, not your fault not your responsibility ….!!!
Hey @ciro1983811 ! you’re doing your best, but sometimes you need to stick how your gig runs. If the resident sound engineer would be the best in the world, a soundchek is far not enough to build a sophisticated signal processing chain on any gear (incl. the best ones).
This is your gig and local service needs to accept your tech rider. If they argue, try to convince them e.g. your IEM system is also internally connected within your RACK… no tech service will force you to screw your rack apart and repatch all equips.
He wants us to go with venue’s wedges on stage, so no iem because our iem is not done with a hardware stage mixer but also processed inside VST live …. Pure madness …
Find a local sound engineer who is more used to working with the type of modern system you’re using and employ them. It’s totally common for bands to use their own engineer. We have a good relationship with our guy and pay £100 plus food/drinks/travel.
Regardless of going with own engineer, my experience is (I think the same with @ciro1983811 ) the local equip is supervised by the local staff and it’s not an option not to involve them. Of I rent the venue, local stuff needs to contracted (and payed) too, regardless I dont’t give them more then a L&R XLR
And the fact is: currently we can do better sound using VST Live then it was ever possible to us and done all by a fragment of equipment then before. And that is the revolution here.
The issue here is that regardless of what I say, from the moment he understood that we run all thru a PC, that fact scared the sh*t out of him… he is terrorized that a sudden crash would stop all the show (and he is paid by the venue, not by us, so he don’t want any trouble).
So he said all live signals direct to foh, pc only run backing tracks and video that are not show vital.
In the end, we will do as he wants because we don’t wanna risk that he made the venue cancel the show. But to run iem’s we agreed that he will give us 3 sends (instruments, voice1, voice2…. I will put them in global stacks and send them to iems … at least we can have click, cues, and sort of iem of everybody … and a bit of foh mix also in the wedges for “safety” ….
This way we loose compressors eq delay reverb automations that I programmed mainly on voices and some bass effects automations … also autotunes (was there to fine tune harmonies of voices and subtle correction, not that we really need autotune for the show … luckily guitars sound are made off board on an helix stomp, and keyboards also wasn’t via VST instrument but audio from keys..
I learned that … I can tell the venues before taking gigs that we run via pc … or I don’t tell anything until the day of the show when … too late to argue
I’m a sound engineer (running on 20+ years now), and here’s my 10 cents.
The sound engineer your talking about has obviously misunderstood his job. A sound engineers job is first and foremost to serve the artist and the audience - i.e. to convey to the audience the artists intention (I could write at length about this).
The sound engineer may very well suggest to the artist, what he/she may feel be the best approach/techincal solution. If the artist insists on a particular approach (like you did), then the sound engineer should certainly try to acommodate the artists wishes.
I don’t see why what you wanted to do should be a problem.
If the sound engineer insists on being a moron, there’s not much you can do (unless you’re a name artist - then talk to the arranger).
I would suggest, however, that the individual signals you send to FOH should only contain special processing - e.q. autotune, filter effects, special delays etc. - and NOT compressor/eq processing. Even better if delay/reverb effects could be in a seperate L/R signal. Then the sound engineer can actually make a difference, while you still get any special effects across.
Thanks Congaz, i agree with you on everything … but we have no name yet so no strenght to force anybody to stick to our needs … (yet!)
Regarding signal processing and giving a bus with special effects , yes I agree, but we have 2 kind of situations to accomodate, one is all by ourselfs with no audio/video/light service, the other like this time, with service. And we are limited to 18 outputs and actually we use all … so effects at the moment are on inserts and balanced with wet/dry Knob … I’ll have to redo the project to accomodate a group for special fx returns…
Just for the records, this is our actual setup and what we wanted to do and have been denied by the sound engineer..
Given that he’s probably done a hundred gigs with crappy DJs playing gritty MP3s through their laptop’s mini-jack out (with apologies to crappy DJs but you really have no excuse for not having an SSD drive with WAVs and a decent audio interface) I’d say he’s living in the past.
I regularly gig festivals using my TC Helicon VoiceLive 3 for acoustic guitar, ukulele and voice. I tell the sound person NOT to add any effects, they’re all on a song by song patch list. I compress only a tiny bit, and no EQ. They can fit that to their rig with EQ and compression - I’ve never had anyone complain about that so why they don’t want to help you get the sound you want to present is anybody’s guess. Put it in the rider, famous or not.
Laptops these days are no less stable than a Marshall Amp - or a floor full of pedals and cable spaghetti powered by a poxy 9 volt transformer.
…
(as I do, even my IEM is within the rack). All they get is a an L/R and I personally DO THE MAIN OUT DYNEQ at soundchech (VSTL).
finally went with your VST Live equipment? Or this is an another gig?